I believe reading is one of the few experiences that can dissolve self-consciousness. When you enter deep flow with a demanding text, the evaluating mind falls away — the part of you that monitors and edits and second-guesses. And in that quiet, the unconscious begins to speak — through character, through image, through the sudden recognition that something you've been carrying without knowing it has finally found a form.

This is what I mean by bibliotherapy. Not self-help books. Not reading as productivity. The kind of reading where something loosens — where you close the book and you are not quite the same person who opened it, though you can't say exactly why.

I grew up in Beijing's Haidian district, where every hour had to be useful and math competitions were the measure of a serious mind. I found my escape in Children's Literature magazine and the novels of Gu Shu — her "secret-realm fiction," stories about ordinary kids who discover a hidden world beneath the one everyone else accepts. I couldn't have told you then why I loved them so much. I only knew I couldn't stop. That, I now understand, was the detector beeping.

Years later, rereading Night Maschiline, I found this line:

"Where there are people with hollows inside them, there are beasts. Where there are beasts, there are hunters — and a market for the trade." — Gu Shu, Night Maschiline * Original Chinese: "有内心空洞的人，就有兽，有兽的存在，就有捕兽人和交易的市场。" —《夜色玛奇莲》

The beast the mysterious guardian hunts is not a monster. It is the repressed, unintegrated content of the psyche — what Jung would call the Shadow. I didn't know this when I was eight. I only knew I couldn't stop reading. That is, I think, the truest evidence for everything I now study: the unconscious recognized the archetype long before the conscious mind had language for it. The book found me. I didn't find it.

At 16, I came to the United States alone. In English, I lost that space. Chinese I had read in blocks — meaning arriving whole. English came word by word, the evaluating mind always running ahead of the feeling. I read Steppenwolf during those years and something cracked open anyway — not because I understood it, but because Harry Haller's wolf named something I'd been carrying without knowing it. Your soul will not simplify. Hesse had said it better than I could.

After eye surgery, I began using audiobooks. Listening while reading, I found an English flow state for the first time — and realized that what I'd been struggling with might be language-sensitive. The barrier was never my mind. It was the format.

I double-majored in Information Science and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and talked my advisor into letting Python count as my third language requirement. My master's thesis at Stanford became Shh-elf, a book-recommendation app built for second-language readers. Now I work at Zuntold, a bibliotherapy company in London — where I get to do this work properly, grounded in Jung, Hillman, and Landy, and in the books that found me long before I had words for any of this.