— Why a Writer Whose Mother Tongue Is Chinese Is Building a Trilingual Independent Website Beyond Chinese Platforms

By Jane Sonnenschein · July 2, 2026

Aldous Huxley once said, “Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”

On July 1, 2026, I finally built my own independent website.

Strictly speaking, it was not a complicated thing. I bought a domain, chose a theme, adjusted the homepage, created a few pages, wrote the About page, added Contact, Impressum, and Privacy Policy, and then slowly organized the Chinese, English, and German entrances, along with the article categories. Once I really sat down to do it, the whole process only took a few hours.

But before that, this thing had been turning around in my mind for a long time. I had thought about it, postponed it, worried about it, and because it looked “technical,” “troublesome,” and “unfamiliar,” I kept delaying the moment of actually beginning.

Very often, what consumes us most is not the thing itself, but the fog before we begin. When you stand inside that fog, you think there is a wall in front of you. Only after you start walking do you realize that it is not a wall at all, but a series of steps. Building an independent website is like this. Writing is also like this.

Many theories remain only pieces of knowledge before they enter life. Only when you really use them in your own work do they become experience.

The first time I seriously encountered the idea of an “independent website” was when I was learning SEO. In that course, we learned many things: how to research keywords, how to look at page structure, how to arrange internal links, how to check whether a website has technical errors, how to use tools such as Screaming Frog to analyze pages, what might affect Google indexing, and why the alternative text behind images also matters.

Those theories came layer after layer. Of course they were useful. But for me at that time, they also felt very abstract. The course was intensive. Within one month, excluding weekends and holidays, the content moved forward very quickly. After finishing it, my strongest feeling was not “I have mastered this,” but rather: “I seem to know many terms, but I have not truly done it myself.”

After the exam, I told my teacher that I felt the content was too theoretical. I had no practical experience, and many of the things were taught in a foreign language, not in my mother tongue. So I understood that they were important, but I still did not know how they would finally land on a real website.

My teacher gave me a very simple suggestion: You can buy a website and practice by yourself. A website does not necessarily have to be expensive. Once you build one yourself, many theories will come alive.

At that time, I only nodded. In fact, even before that, an idea had already appeared quietly in my mind: perhaps one day I could create my own blog, a place that would not depend entirely on Chinese platforms. But in the beginning, that idea was still vague, like a seed that had not yet sprouted. I was not sure whether I could do it, nor did I know what it should eventually become.

Only later did I become more and more clearly aware of one thing: for a writer whose mother tongue is Chinese, being able to leave one’s own voice in the open web is actually something very important — and also quite rare.

There is a half-joking saying that there are only two countries in the world: China, and the countries outside China.

Of course, this sentence is not precise, and it is clearly exaggerated. But anyone who has truly lived inside Chinese culture will understand that the Chinese internet is indeed a relatively independent universe.

Chinese people do not use Google as their main search engine. They use their own search engines. Chinese people do not use WhatsApp as their main social communication tool; they use WeChat. China has its own Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Douyin, WeChat public accounts, and a completely different platform ecosystem.

A great deal of content inside China is extremely rich, but it exists within a relatively closed system. For foreigners who do not understand Chinese and do not use these platforms, these voices are almost invisible.

This is especially obvious in my relationship with my husband.

My husband Chris was born in the United States and grew up in Germany. He has lived in Germany for more than forty years. He is deeply shaped by both American and German cultures. He reads widely, thinks seriously, and is willing to encounter different cultures. If he were not a relatively open person, the two of us could never have come this far together.

And I am a Chinese woman who has lived in Germany for more than twenty years. I am also someone with a strong sense of Chinese cultural subjectivity. I come from China. Chinese is my mother tongue. Many of my instincts, emotions, judgments, and sense of values have grown out of Chinese family life, Chinese education, Chinese history, and Chinese cultural experience.

Precisely because of this, we often have very deep differences on many questions.

Education, family, war, international relations, China–U.S. relations, China’s development, media coverage of China, and even some very ordinary everyday matters — we may look at the same issue from completely different angles.

Very often, such differences are not about who is good or bad, who is smarter or more foolish. They come from the fact that two people are standing on different cultural experiences. One person looks at an issue from the humanistic tradition and modern political language of Europe and America. The other begins from Chinese historical experience, family ethics, a holistic way of thinking, and the real conditions Chinese people have lived through.

When the same thing falls into the eyes of these two people, it may no longer be the same thing at all.

Sometimes I would complain that he did not understand China, that he was always trying to understand a country he did not really know through his own cultural experience.

Later, he said something that left a deep impression on me.

He said, “It is not that I am unwilling to understand China. I simply have no entrance.”

That sentence stayed with me for a long time.

He said, “If I search for China on Google, what can I see? Most of what I find is written by Western media, or by people in the English-speaking world looking at China from the outside. But where can I find ordinary Chinese people’s everyday discussions? Where can I find Chinese mothers’ understanding of education, the emotional logic inside Chinese families, or why Chinese people see the world in this way?”

These things may exist in WeChat public accounts, on Xiaohongshu, in Chinese forums, in video comment sections, and in Chinese people’s everyday lives. But he does not know Chinese, and he does not use these Chinese platforms. Even if he wants to understand, he cannot get in.

Later, when I searched myself, I became more and more aware of this problem.

If you use Google to search for Chinese-language content, especially simplified Chinese content with lived experience and a long writing context, there is actually not much. Some content belongs to the traditional Chinese-speaking context, from Taiwan or Hong Kong. Some is news, institutional introduction, or travel-related content. More often, English-language content about China is written by people who did not grow up inside Chinese culture.

This does not mean that they necessarily write badly. Nor does it mean that foreigners cannot understand China. But someone who did not grow up in the Chinese-speaking world and has not been immersed in Chinese culture, even if they try very hard, will easily carry an outside perspective — and sometimes even a kind of arrogance and filter naturally formed by Western education.

Many foreigners do not deliberately misunderstand China. They simply have very few chances to encounter how Chinese people understand themselves.

One of the things that has made me most angry in all these years of living in Germany is the one-sidedness and filters in much of the Western media coverage of China.

Of course China has problems. Any country with more than a billion people cannot possibly have no problems. It cannot possibly have no internal dissatisfaction, contradictions, or complicated realities.

But the issue is this: you may criticize the problems of a country, but you should not invent stories. You may point out the shadows in reality, but you cannot use only one filter to compress a huge and complex country into the narrative you want.

China is not an abstract concept. It is the life of more than a billion people. It is a huge and heavy ship. From a few decades ago, when many people still did not have enough to eat or warm clothes to wear, to today’s country with enormous changes in technology, industry, urbanization, education, and social life — this process itself cannot be explained by a few reports written from a fixed position.

But many foreigners have no other entrance.

They do not understand Chinese. They do not use the Chinese internet. They rarely hear the voices of ordinary Chinese people themselves. So whatever the media says, they hear. Whatever the books write, they imagine.

Sometimes you encounter questions that are almost absurd: Do Chinese people drink milk? Do you have apples in China?

It is already the twenty-first century, yet in some people’s imagination, China is still stuck in old images from the 1980s or 1990s, with bicycles everywhere. They find it hard to imagine that in many areas — technological applications, urban infrastructure, and everyday convenience — China today is no longer the country in their minds.

There is also the problem of language itself.

Chinese is not an easy language to enter. It is not a language where, after learning twenty-something letters, you can begin to read a large number of words by sounding them out. We ourselves learn Chinese from childhood, and we still have to spend years learning characters, writing until our hands hurt, memorizing until our heads ache. Every Chinese character has its own form, sound, and meaning. You remember them character by character, and accumulate them word by word.

For many foreigners, the threshold for entering Chinese is very high. This is not only a problem of pronunciation. It is not only a problem of grammar. It is that the entire writing system, way of thinking, and cultural background are different.

Even more interesting is the way Chinese culture absorbs foreign words.

When many foreign things enter English or German, they often keep their original sound or form, so people can immediately see where they came from. But when they enter Chinese, we often translate them into our own language, rename them in a Chinese way, and absorb them again so that they become part of the Chinese system.

Chinese has a very strong ability to absorb, and it absorbs quite thoroughly. It turns foreign things into its own things.

As a result, the Chinese-speaking world is extremely rich inside. But for people outside it, the entrance becomes even more hidden.

So I increasingly feel that if we want people outside China to truly understand China, we cannot rely only on grand data, official narratives, or retellings by Western media.

GDP, technological development, urban construction, economic growth — of course these things matter. But they are still numbers and phenomena. If someone truly wants to understand China, they eventually need to understand how Chinese people think about family, how they look at education, how they understand relationships, how they face suffering, how they see history, how they live between tradition and modernity, and how they form their own judgments under real-life pressures.

And these things are often hidden precisely in everyday life.

I am not a scholar. I am not a so-called China expert.

I am simply a Chinese mother who has lived in Germany for more than twenty years. My daughter Alicia is growing up in a trilingual environment: Chinese comes from me, English comes from our family life, and German comes from the society she lives in. My husband grew up between American and German cultures, while I came from China to Germany.

Our family itself is a small cross-cultural scene.

The starting point of many of my essays is not theory, but a conversation, an argument, a child’s question, a detail from school, or a disagreement about how China and the West understand the same issue.

I increasingly believe that theories with real vitality often do not grow first from books. They grow from life. People collide, observe, and summarize again and again in real life, and only afterward do they slowly refine those experiences into what we call theory.

Very often, I do not want to begin with a lofty idea and then look for life examples to prove it. I would rather begin with a small scene in life, and slowly write out the cultural logic behind it.

Why does a foreigner see the same thing in one way, while a Chinese person thinks about it in another? Why, on some questions, are East and West not simply a matter of “who is right and who is wrong,” but rather a matter of standing, from the very beginning, inside different philosophical and historical experiences?

This is also why I want to create a trilingual independent website.

If I only wanted to write in Chinese, I could of course continue writing on WeChat public accounts, Xiaohongshu, Toutiao, and other Chinese platforms. In fact, from last year until now, I have already written almost 170 original essays on Chinese platforms. Each one is three or four thousand Chinese characters, sometimes four or five thousand. Added together, that is not a small amount.

During these months of writing, I have experienced anxiety over data, and I have also experienced self-doubt. When the platforms did not recommend my articles, I would wonder: Is it because I did not write well enough? Is it because long-form writing really has no readers anymore? Is this era no longer suitable for serious essays?

But the more I wrote, the more I realized that the problem was not only whether my own traffic was good or bad. The writing environment of the Chinese internet itself is changing.

The development of short videos has shattered many people’s attention. WeChat public accounts, too, are increasingly shifting from a subscription relationship to a recommendation flow. In the past, WeChat public accounts felt more like a long-form writing platform, somewhat like Medium abroad. Readers followed an author because they wanted to read that person’s work over time.

Now, many articles run as single pieces. Titles, emotions, completion rates, and platform recommendations have become more and more important. Many people no longer care what an author has been writing over the long term. They simply read one article when the platform pushes it in front of them.

With the arrival of AI, many people also feel that writing has suddenly become easy.

Everywhere, there is content teaching you how to write WeChat public account articles, how to create viral posts, how to monetize writing, how to restart your life through writing. Many articles are not written to express real experience, but to create an illusion: that ordinary people can reverse their lives through writing.

Writing has become a business. It has also become a trade in anxiety.

Especially for many mothers, women, unemployed people, and people who want to earn money from home, this kind of narrative is very attractive, because they truly need an exit and a kind of hope. But once hope is packaged into courses and templates, it can easily become another form of harvesting.

I do not want to write in that way.

I also do not want to hand over my writing entirely to these platforms.

Not because I do not want to be seen, but because I do not want whether I am seen to be decided completely by recommendation mechanisms. Platforms can be entrances, but they cannot be my home.

My essays need a place where they can remain for the long term, a place where they will not be sentenced to death by the number of likes or recommendations on the day they are published. They need to be placed on a bookshelf like books, not swiped away and disappear like short videos.

For me, an independent website is such a small study.

It is not a busy square. It is not a place that will immediately bring enormous traffic. In the beginning, perhaps only a few people will read it. Perhaps some of the records will even come from system visits, crawlers, or friends clicking in.

But it truly exists.

It has its own domain. It has its own homepage. It has entrances in Chinese, English, and German. It has categories about family, education, marriage, social observation, and writing and self-rebuilding.

It allows me to slowly place my essays there. It also gives me the chance to gradually translate and rewrite the Chinese originals into English and German, so that people who originally had no entrance can at least see, from here, the observations of a Chinese woman herself.

What I want to do is not a grand introduction to China. Nor do I want to prove to anyone that China is perfect and flawless.

Of course China has problems. Every country has problems. Every culture has its shadows.

But between “mindless anti-China” and “mindless self-praise,” I hope to write another kind of voice — one that is finer, more honest, and more textured by real life.

In today’s Chinese-speaking internet, one often sees two extremes. One is the so-called elite overseas Chinese perspective, as if leaving China automatically gives someone the right to look down on China from above. The other is a simple and crude narrative of pride, in which anyone who criticizes China is immediately treated as a traitor.

Both voices are too linear, too rough, and too impatient.

What I want to do more is to take things apart, soften them, break them open, and return to concrete life to look at them again.

Why does a Chinese mother understand education in this way?

Why does a Chinese family look at responsibility and kinship like this?

Why do many Chinese people have such a strong sense of historical continuity?

Why do Chinese people often not understand the individual as completely isolated?

Why do some ideas that feel self-evident to many Westerners not necessarily hold true in the lived experience of Chinese people?

Why does a Chinese woman who has lived in Germany for more than twenty years still keep such a strong sense of cultural subjectivity?

These questions may not have standard answers. But they deserve to be written down seriously.

I have always felt that if a person has no pride at all in their own culture, it is very difficult for them to truly introduce it to others. Pride does not mean blind worship. It does not mean that criticism is forbidden. It means that you know where you come from. You know that within your culture there are things that are complex, weighty, and wise. You also know why they deserve to be understood.

We study history not only to memorize the sequence of dynasties. Nor is it merely to see meaningless repetition in the rise and fall of regimes. A civilization that has gone through several thousand years will certainly contain cycles, collapses, rebuilding, and contradictions. But these are not simply going in circles on the same spot. They are more like a spiral ascent.

Such historical experience deeply shapes how a people understands order, turmoil, family, the state, fate, and the place of the individual.

These things are very hard to truly feel if one has not grown up inside this culture.

So I want to write in my own way.

Not standing on a podium to lecture about China. Not writing a travel guide. Not doing political propaganda.

I simply want to begin from my own life, from the perspective of a Chinese mother who has lived in Germany for more than twenty years, and slowly write about family, education, language, culture, marriage, society, and everyday life.

Many essays will begin from very small places: an argument between my husband and me, a detail from my daughter’s Chinese learning, an observation about the differences between Chinese and German education, a conversation about Chinese and Western media narratives, or a cultural difference that suddenly appears in an ordinary day.

If these words can help one foreign reader understand Chinese people a little more, help one cross-cultural family reduce a little misunderstanding, or help one Chinese person living abroad see that their experience is not lonely, then this website already has meaning.

This is also why I named it A Chinese Way of Seeing.

It is not “the only explanation of China.” It is not “the standard answer of Chinese people.”

It is only one Chinese way of seeing.

A woman who grew up in Chinese culture, has lived in Germany for more than twenty years, and keeps observing and thinking within a cross-cultural marriage and a trilingual family, is trying to write down the world as she sees it.

Last night, when I finally finished building this website step by step, I suddenly felt a very real sense of achievement.

In the past, I thought an independent website was complicated. I thought I could not do it. I thought one had to understand a lot of technology first.

But once I really began, I discovered that many things are not impossible. I simply had not started.

The SEO theories I had learned before, website structure, image alternative text, page categories — suddenly all of these things moved from knowledge in a course into real actions in life.

Theory does not enter life first. It is lit up again inside life.

I finally built a home for my words.

It is still very small now, and there are not many books inside yet. But it has a door, windows, bookshelves, and a light.

From now on, the Chinese originals will be placed here. The English and German versions will also slowly be placed here.

I will continue to use platforms. They can be entrances. They can bring some readers here.

But the writing that truly belongs to me, the long-term thread that truly belongs to me, I want to place in this space.

This step is not large, but it matters deeply to me.

Because from today on, I am no longer only someone standing in the square of platforms, waiting to be recommended.

I have my own small study now.

And I also have a door leading to a larger world.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 我终于为自己的文字盖了一间房子
German version: Ich habe meinen Worten endlich ein Haus gebaut