By Jane Sonnenschein · July 28, 2026

“There are many people like us. We are simply scattered far apart.”
—A reader who wrote on WordPress for sixteen years

Yesterday, I had just finished an essay called July 27: An Ordinary Day That Wasn’t Quite Ordinary.

It was about the first like my independent website had ever received. I officially launched the site on July 1. On July 27, twenty-six days later, someone left a small heart beneath one of my essays for the first time.

On any social media platform, one like is almost nothing. But on an independent website, it felt completely different. It was as though I had opened a little shop deep in the mountains. The light had been on for a long time, and at last, someone had followed a quiet, rarely travelled path and stepped inside.

I thought that was already enough to make the day worth remembering.

Then this morning, I opened my inbox and found another notification from WordPress. The essay I had written yesterday about someone finally arriving had received another like. This time, the reader had also left a thoughtful comment in German.

She wrote:

Ich mag das Bild von dem kleinen Laden in den Bergen. Der schwer zu finden ist. Von unserer Sorte gibt es viele, nur weit verstreut.

“I like the image of the little shop in the mountains, the one that is difficult to find. There are many people like us. We are simply scattered far apart.”

She told me that she had once written on WordPress from 2007 to 2023. In an era before today’s constant likes, recommendations and instant feedback, she had written there for sixteen years.

She said she did not really like this culture of endless evaluation. But perhaps a like had become a kind of currency readers now use to say:

“I read your words. They reached me.”

Then she told me that this was exactly how my essay had made her feel.

I read her comment several times. The line I could not stop thinking about was still this one:

There are many people like us. We are simply scattered far apart.

Perhaps only someone who has truly walked the road of writing could say something like that.

Someone who has never written for a long time may imagine that writing simply means sitting down and turning thoughts into words. Once the piece is finished, you publish it. If someone reads it, fine. If no one does, that is fine too.

But those who have written day after day know what it feels like to keep going without knowing whether anyone is reading, where the words will travel, or whether you are simply speaking into the dark.

I began writing consistently again on December 17 last year, so it has only been a little over seven months. My independent website had been open for just twenty-eight days.

Compared with her sixteen years on WordPress, my journey can hardly be called long.

And yet, when someone who has walked for sixteen years seems to stand far away and say to me, “I know this road. There are many people like us. We are simply too far apart to see one another,” it still feels like a light suddenly appearing in the darkness.

How long is sixteen years?

In a famous wuxia story, Yang Guo waits sixteen years for Xiaolongnü.¹ That long wait has led generations of readers to see their love as something almost carved into the bone.

Sixteen years is also enough for a child to grow into a young adult. For someone already grown, sixteen years may contain several completely different versions of life.

To write on one platform for sixteen years means witnessing its rise, its changes and perhaps its decline. It means living through periods when people respond and periods when no one does. It probably also means wanting to stop more than once, and then somehow beginning again.

That is why her comment felt like more than an ordinary interaction with a reader.

It was more like someone who had travelled a long distance noticing another small light that had only just been lit. She paused and told me:

I see you.

Over the past few days, I have received several tiny signals.

My website received its first like, followed by its second like and its first comment. An English essay that had already been on Medium for a while suddenly received a clap. Threads, which I had only just begun using, gained its first follower and a few likes. Even YouTube, which I had not updated for several days, gained another subscriber.

Every one of these numbers was simply “one.”

In today’s social media world, these ones hardly qualify as data. We are used to seeing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. We are used to seeing likes, saves and comments piling up beneath a video only a few seconds long.

Beside those numbers, my handful of ones is not even a drop in the ocean.

But for someone starting from nothing, moving from zero to one is not the same as moving from ten thousand to ten thousand and one.

That “one” means that a real person has appeared behind the number.

Someone paused in the middle of a feed. Someone opened my profile. Someone left a noisy platform and entered an unfamiliar website. Someone spent time reading an essay that was not particularly short, and perhaps even stayed to leave a few words of her own.

It was not an unconscious swipe.

It was a real arrival.

For years, I have carried a kind of disappointment that is difficult to explain about the environment for writing on Chinese social media.

In earlier years, WeChat Official Accounts² felt more like a relatively stable space built around subscriptions. Readers actively found writers they liked. Once they followed them, they could continue receiving their new work.

That relationship still depended on a platform, of course, but at least it began with an active choice:

I want to keep reading this person.

Later, WeChat Official Accounts changed again and again. Recommendation feeds, short-form content and video gradually entered a space that had once belonged mainly to written work.

From the platform’s point of view, perhaps these changes made sense. The old subscription model favoured accounts that had already gathered large audiences, while new writers struggled to reach anyone outside their existing circles. A recommendation system at least seemed to offer a new way to distribute attention.

But for people who genuinely write long essays, a different problem emerged.

More and more time began to go into studying titles, emotional hooks and attention-grabbing openings. Highly repetitive content—lightly rewritten, imitated or copied from one account to another—could sometimes receive tens or hundreds of thousands of views.

Meanwhile, a writer who had already built a substantial readership might spend days writing a serious long-form essay and end up with little more than a hundred views.

A place once suited to quiet reading began to feel increasingly like a crowded market.

This is not limited to WeChat Official Accounts. Xiaohongshu³, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and most platforms built around recommendation feeds are all competing for the same very limited human attention.

After a long day, people lie in bed and open their phones. Often, they are not looking for a particular essay or trying to answer a clear question. They simply want to let their minds go blank for a while and allow their fingers to keep scrolling.

A comforting image, a piece of music or a short talking-head video may make someone stop for a moment. But a second later, another piece of content has already replaced the feeling.

Many things are seen without being remembered. Many emotions are quickly awakened and just as quickly disappear.

A writer who still wants to write quietly has to face a difficult reality:

This age rarely allows a person to be only a writer.

In the past, authors could devote more of their attention to the work itself. Publishing, distribution and promotion belonged to a separate system.

Today, an independent writer must not only write, but also translate, format, design cover images, maintain a website, study platforms, edit videos, post images and constantly think about how to lead a stranger away from a noisy feed and towards her words.

I once compared my independent website to a small shop hidden deep in the mountains.

It can be beautifully decorated. The lights can stay on. The shelves can be filled with the essays I have written over the years. Once readers enter, they can browse almost everything freely and take their time choosing what they want to read.

The problem is that the shop is in the mountains.

People in the city will not somehow know that a small light is glowing far away.

The writer must first set up a stall in the crowded market. She makes a video, posts an image or takes one sentence from an essay and shows it to people hurrying past:

There is a small shop far from here. Perhaps it contains something that might interest you.

But even when someone sees that image in the market, reaching the independent website is still a winding journey.

First, a sentence must catch her attention. Then she has to open the profile and find the website link. She has to leave the familiar platform and enter an unfamiliar page. Finally, in an age when fewer and fewer people are willing to read long essays, she has to decide to stay and actually read.

It is like someone catching a faint scent while passing through a market.

The shopkeeper then tells her that the real goods cannot all be brought here. To see them, she must leave the busy streets, cross the hills, follow a nearly empty path and eventually reach a little shop hidden far away.

Someone who is not genuinely drawn to it will not make that journey.

That is why every real arrival feels so precious to me.

It also reminds me of a writer I met on Xiaohongshu a few months ago. His online name was Shan Xiaobai.

At the time, I had written several essays about my own way of writing. One of them was titled Returning Fallen Leaves to the Tree: How I Finally Understood the Way I Write.

In that essay, I wrote that there is a subtle dividing line in writing.

Some people write about what happened. Some write about what the event meant to them. Fewer still write about what happened between themselves and the event.

The difference is not only one of writing skill. It lies in how a person forms a relationship with the world.

Sweeping fallen leaves is not only sweeping fallen leaves. It can also contain the repetition of time, the care we give to what is passing away, and the way a person moves between order and disorder in a practice that repeats itself again and again.

Tidying a wardrobe is not only tidying a wardrobe. It may also mean clearing the dust that has gathered inside the mind and allowing oneself to move forward more lightly.

This kind of writing is not a technique that can be copied mechanically. It is closer to a way of perceiving.

When a person is willing to stop, to remain beside an ordinary moment a little longer, associations slowly begin to unfold. Leaves that seemed to have fallen long ago may return to their tree through writing.

After reading that essay, Shan Xiaobai left me a comment. He said my words had given him a sudden moment of clarity.⁴ He felt he had finally found his own tree.

The yellow earth that had raised him was an endless source of material. The contrast between past and present, and the echoes between one story and another, could never be exhausted.

I have never forgotten that comment.

I had only been trying to explain my own way of writing. Yet when the essay reached someone else, it helped him see his own land, the ground that had formed him, and the reason he wanted to write.

Later, we became friends through writing.⁵ Each of us wrote several pieces in response to the other.

He wrote about his childhood on that yellow earth, about his family and about the dog that had accompanied him when he was young. His writing did not try to force emotion, nor did it push too hard. In a gentle, unhurried voice, he brought a vanished life quietly back into view.

When I read those essays, I felt something moving through the words. It was slow and calm, yet it still reached the heart.

I later wrote that an essay does not always end with the author expressing herself. Sometimes it opens a door inside another person.

You may only be trying to say something that has been living in your own mind. But when the words reach someone else, they may help him see his own questions, the ground from which he came, and the tree that belongs to him.

Looking back, that exchange now carries something almost classical.

To become friends through writing is not to meet over a banquet table, nor is it the polite small talk of a social gathering. It means two writers hearing one another through words.

One person writes an essay. Another reads it, understands something new, and answers with his own writing. The essay is no longer an isolated work. It becomes like water, moving slowly between two people’s lived experience.

Sadly, Shan Xiaobai did not continue updating his account for very long.

He once said that he would see someone casually post an unremarkable image and receive far more views than the essays he had written with great care. That gap made him increasingly anxious.

He said he would keep writing. He simply no longer wanted to publish his work on the platform.

Later, his account truly stopped. He never updated it again.

I do not know whether he continued writing somewhere else, or whether the yellow earth he had rediscovered ever grew into more words. I only know that I never again saw his work on a public platform.

When a writer withdraws from a public platform, what disappears is not only an account. A form of communication that might have continued also disappears.

Stories that have not yet been written, and words that might have reached another person, fall silent with it.

We once heard one another through writing. Then one side became quiet, and the water that had moved slowly between two people’s lives stopped flowing.

That is also why the comment from this German writer moved me so deeply.

This time, the person responding was a writer who left a comment in German and had spent sixteen years on WordPress. We did not know one another before. Our lives and languages may be quite different.

Yet in my essay about the little shop in the mountains, she recognised something familiar.

She wrote:

There are many people like us. We are simply scattered far apart.

Perhaps that is why writing is still worth continuing today.

In an age that is so loud, so fast and so determined to make everyone compete for attention, writing can seem increasingly slow and out of place.

It does not always receive an immediate response. It rarely produces large numbers within seconds, the way a short video can. Much of the time, writing is simply one person sitting somewhere quiet, slowly putting into words something she does not yet fully understand.

For a long time, I felt as though I were walking in the dark.

I did not know who would eventually see these essays, or whether continuing to write really meant anything. When one platform remained silent for too long, I easily lost the will to keep updating it. When another suddenly showed a little growth, I moved all my attention there, as though only something that produced an immediate response deserved to continue.

But the few tiny “ones” that appeared over the past two days have helped me realise something:

A lack of immediate response does not mean no one is on the way.

My YouTube channel had only a little over a hundred total views, yet someone still subscribed. I had not updated Medium for several days, yet an old essay was still found by a stranger. My independent website had only been open for twenty-eight days, yet people had already crossed the noisy stream of content, arrived here, read an essay and left their voices behind.

None of this proves that I have succeeded. It does not mean the road will suddenly become easy.

It only tells me that words do not disappear the moment they are published.

They may continue travelling somewhere I cannot yet see, until one day they meet the person who happens to understand them.

Perhaps we are not truly alone. Perhaps we are simply too far apart.

In the darkness, each person protects a small light of her own. Because the distance between us is so great, we often assume there is no one else nearby.

Only when one light answers another do we realise that those people scattered across distant places have been there all along.

Moving from zero to one is never only the addition of a number.

It is someone finally catching the scent, turning away from the crowded market and following a quiet, barely visible path.

It is someone stopping at the door, pushing it open, looking at the words arranged inside, and gently telling me:

I was here.

I read them.

What you wrote reached me.

---

Notes

1. Wǔxiá（武侠）, Yang Guo（杨过）and Xiaolongnü（小龙女）
Wuxia is a Chinese literary and storytelling tradition centred on martial artists, loyalty, love, honour and personal codes of justice. Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü are the central couple in Jin Yong’s famous novel The Return of the Condor Heroes. After they are separated, Yang Guo waits sixteen years for her return. For many Chinese readers, this sixteen-year wait has become a widely recognised symbol of extraordinary devotion and enduring love.

2. Gōngzhònghào（公众号）
The term usually refers to WeChat Official Accounts, a publishing system within WeChat. Writers, media organisations and businesses can publish articles there, while readers subscribe to individual accounts. In its earlier years, it functioned more like a direct subscription channel. In recent years, recommendation feeds, video content and changing distribution rules have altered how articles reach readers.

3. Xiǎohóngshū（小红书）
Xiaohongshu, also known internationally as RedNote, is a Chinese social media platform built around images, short videos, lifestyle posts and recommendation feeds. Although longer written posts exist, the platform’s culture and distribution system generally favour visually immediate, easily consumed content.

4. Tíhú guàndǐng（醍醐灌顶）
This expression originally came through Buddhist language. Literally, it refers to pouring the finest clarified essence over someone’s head. In modern Chinese, it describes a moment when someone’s words suddenly bring complete clarity, as though a confusing idea has become understandable all at once.

5. Yǐ wén huì yǒu（以文会友）
Literally, “to meet friends through writing.” The phrase describes people forming a meaningful connection through essays, poems, letters or other written work rather than through ordinary social contact. It carries a slightly classical tone and suggests mutual recognition through thought and language.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 从零到一：终于有人闻香而来

German version: Von null auf eins: Endlich ist jemand dem Duft gefolgt