Hiya! I'm Yuelian Hong. (Or rather: that's my pseudonym.)
I'm a Taiwanese-American ex-pat living in Germany. What an odd combination of cultural influences, right? Sometimes my head spins.
Am I mad?
Not in the "angry" sense!
But I've had some interesting experiences with loss, grief and mental illness. I've been wanting to tell the world about it, but until now I was too afraid that I'd embarrass myself, or worse: my family. Expressing yourself freely in traditional Asian cultures is not particularly encouraged - whether that be "madness" in the angry sense, or the crazy one.
About a year ago I got fed up with my job as a middle IT manager at a Very Large Company. So I decided to scale back my role, switch to working part-time, and finally commit to writing my thoughts down under a pseudonym. Now I'm writing both fiction (short stories) and essays during my two days off per week. [UPDATE] Part-time didn't work out as well as I'd expected, so I left my job at the end of May 2022! Now I'm writing short stories and essays (mostly short stories though :)) almost everyday.
All of this - having my own website, writing consistently, publishing my private thoughts in public - is pretty new to me, so please bear with me as I get adjusted. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my writing!
Why Yuelian?
I prioritized a couple of considerations while deciding on my pseudonym:
- I wanted the name to reflect the "Taiwanese-ness" of my real-life identity, i.e. the fact that I do not have an American sounding name but rather one that was romanized from Chinese characters.
- I wanted the Chinese characters themselves to convey a particular imagery. In this case, 紅月亮 (hóng yuèliàng) means red moon. I dropped the "g" at the end of "yuèliàng" because I thought it would be difficult for native English speakers to pronounce.
Note: Although 月亮 is "yuèliàng" in pinyin, Yuelian should be pronounced just like the English name "Julian", only with a "Y" in place of the "J".