About Me

Hi! My name is Izela and I am a creative writer. My writing style is mostly philosophical and stream-of-consciousness based, but I am always open to discovering more and trying new things out when it comes to writing. 

Language has always been where I live. I have spent most of my conscious life translating—not just between Mandarin and English, but also between the versions of myself that each language holds. My writing sits at the intersection of the personal and the philosophical. I am interested numerous seemingly subtle things, whether it is body as a site of institutional pressure, the way cosmology and myth encode cultural memory, or what it means to be in multiple places and circumscriptions simultaneously. 

I write because language is the only system I have ever been able to live inside and argue with at the same time. Growing up between two language environments meant growing up between two entirely different ways of organizing reality—two grammatical structures, two emotional registers, two sets of metaphors for the same grief. Writing was never a choice so much as a consequence: when you inhabit more than one linguistic world, you are always translating, and translation always leaves a remainder, and that remainder is exactly where my writing lives.