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Going into the Distance and Encountering a New Self | Body, Shan Shui and the Making of Cross-Cultural Knowledge

A Museum Director, Two French Philosophers and a Ship

I went to Dresden to explore a transport museum. I returned with photographs, questions and an article about its exhibition on travel. I thought the journey had reached a natural conclusion. Then, one Sunday morning, an email arrived from Dr. Michael Vogt, director of the Dresden Transport Museum. He had read my article and noticed something in my approach to travelling: I seemed to place considerable importance on what the body experiences before the mind begins to explain it.

My observations reminded him of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French philosopher associated with perception and embodiment. He also introduced me to François Jullien, whose reflections on Chinese shan shui — mountains and waters — offered another way of thinking about the relationship between people and their surroundings.

There was one small problem. I knew neither philosopher.

I had gone to Dresden to look at transport history, especially ships. Somehow, after writing about a museum exhibition, I had been given two French philosophers to investigate. I began reading about them, wondering how a perfectly ordinary field visit had turned into an unexpected philosophy assignment.

Yet the most interesting part of the director’s message was not the unfamiliar names. It was the fact that he had discovered questions in my article that I had not consciously set out to explore. What I considered a record of travelling had become, in another reader’s eyes, a reflection on the body, perception and cultural understanding.

This made me reconsider my journeys. For years, I had been visiting unfamiliar cities, following rivers towards harbours, boarding vessels and exploring museums. From these encounters in Germany, I often found myself returning to Chinese history, literature and the ancient civilization of Chu. I thought I was learning about distant places. I had rarely asked how those places might be changing me.

When the Body Arrives Before the Questions

Whenever I arrive in an unfamiliar city, I usually begin by looking for water. Where is the river? Can I board a boat? Is there a harbour I can explore on foot? Sometimes I observe the city from a vessel, discovering relationships between its buildings, waterways and industrial areas that were not apparent on a map. At other times, I spend hours walking through harbour districts, photographing working ships and the structures that support them.

I rarely begin with a complete list of research questions. Instead, something catches my attention. I stop, take a photograph and begin wondering why a vessel needs a particular structure or why a harbour developed in a certain location. The questions often appear only after I have entered the place. The physical encounter comes first; the investigation follows.

I once described this way of learning as my modular learning physiology. Rather than following a predetermined curriculum, I often begin with a sensory experience that opens an unexpected field of interest. One observation leads to a question, the question leads to reading, and the reading gradually connects with other experiences.

I still remember taking the helm of a vessel on the Danube and steering it myself for the first time, for three full minutes. Until then, I had mainly seen ship’s wheels in photographs. Suddenly, I was not merely touching a piece of maritime equipment. I was actually taking part in steering a vessel, feeling the wheel turn beneath my hands. I was not thinking about philosophy or developing a theory of maritime learning. I simply found the experience fascinating.

Only much later did I recognise it as one of the encounters that had drawn me towards ships and their technologies. Of course, touching a ship’s wheel did not mean I understood how a vessel worked. Curiosity is not knowledge. I still needed to read, investigate and connect my observations with technical explanations. But that brief physical experience had given me a reason to begin.

This was why Dr. Vogt’s reference to Merleau-Ponty interested me. His philosophical approach offered another way to consider something I had repeatedly experienced in the field: the body is not simply an instrument for collecting information about the world. It is also part of how we encounter that world in the first place.

My eyes often notice something before I know what to ask. My hands sometimes remember an object long before I understand its construction. Knowledge may begin with the body, but it continues through observation, research and reflection.

Why Knowledge Continues After an Article Is Finished

I usually regard the publication of an article as a temporary conclusion. The journey has been documented, the observations organised and the writing completed. Yet Dr. Vogt’s response reminded me that an article can also become the beginning of another journey.

Once an article reaches its readers, its meaning is no longer determined by the author alone. Someone may recognise a connection the writer had not anticipated or introduce a perspective that changes how an earlier experience is understood. Merleau-Ponty brought me back to the role of the body in my fieldwork. Jullien brought me back to Chinese mountains and waters. The journey itself had not changed, but new relationships were beginning to emerge from it.

Something similar often happens with my photographs. An image may remain in my archive for months until I encounter a historical document, a technical explanation or another exhibition. Suddenly, a detail I barely noticed at the time becomes important. The photograph remains the same. What changes is my ability to understand it.

In my reflections on Rhythm Civilization and Synchronicity, I have considered how experiences separated by time may later become connected. Some knowledge emerges from deliberate research; other knowledge begins with an unexpected encounter. What interests me is not the idea that everything is somehow identical, but the possibility that different experiences can generate new relationships without losing their distinctiveness.

Then the story took another unexpected turn.

After reading about the two French philosophers, I found myself thinking less about philosophy books and more about removing rust from a historic ship. I had spent considerable time observing vessels and studying maritime history. Now I wanted to understand something about the physical work required to preserve them. Looking at a ship and helping to maintain one are not the same experience.

I mentioned this to Dr. Vogt. That same evening, he replied with information about Explorer, a historic Scottish research vessel that had become a museum ship and was seeking volunteers to assist with rust removal and maintenance.

I had begun with an exhibition on travel in Dresden. It led to two French philosophers, then to Chinese mountains and waters, and finally to a Scottish ship. None of these connections had been planned. Yet a few emails had brought them together.

I could not help laughing. After travelling through philosophy and ancient Chinese thought, I had somehow arrived back at a ship — this time with the prospect of a rust scraper in my hand.

The Person Who Lives Between Cultures

This unexpected return to Chinese thought raised another question. What exactly happens when we cross cultures?

I sometimes jokingly describe myself as a three-culture mutation. Taiwan forms an important part of my upbringing. Chinese language, history and literature provide much of the cultural material through which I think and write. Germany has shaped my everyday life for more than twenty years. Yet these influences do not exist as three separate compartments that can simply be added together.

Sometimes I find the result rather amusing. After more than two decades in Germany, I have become increasingly interested in the ancient civilization of Chu. While others study how people adapt to another culture, I have found myself studying how my own interests and identity have changed through living between cultures.

Cross-cultural experience is not always a smooth process of adaptation. Different ways of thinking meet, conflict and sometimes rearrange one another. What emerges is not necessarily a balanced mixture of three cultural identities, but something that continues to develop.

For me, crossing cultures is not simply moving from one cultural box into another. It is more like taking the boxes apart and using their wooden boards to build a bridge of my own.

Language has often made this process visible. Goethe once wrote, “Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.” Those who know no foreign languages know nothing of their own. Certain Chinese expressions seem entirely natural until I try to explain them in German. Then I discover relationships and assumptions that cannot be transferred through direct translation. German concepts, in turn, sometimes make me reconsider Chinese words I have used for years.

The two languages do not need to express identical ideas for the encounter to be productive. Sometimes their differences are precisely what allow us to notice something previously overlooked.

This was also what interested me in François Jullien’s distinction between cultural difference and écart, an interval or gap that can open a space for reflection. Difference helps us identify what separates cultural traditions. The interval between them may encourage us to question the categories through which we understand both.

Cross-cultural competence is often described as the ability to adapt to another society. Such adaptation matters, but it does not explain everything. We do not necessarily need to eliminate every difference or abandon our earlier cultural experiences. Sometimes the distance between cultures gives us a new position from which to observe them.

After so many years in Germany, while continuing to return to the history and literature of Chu, I find myself asking where I stand when I speak of “my culture”. Am I looking from one side, the other, or somewhere in the space between them?

Perhaps that space is not merely something to overcome. It may also be where new understanding begins.

Am I Seeing Landschaft or Shan Shui?

Of all the ideas Dr. Vogt introduced, François Jullien’s reflections on shan shui brought me most unexpectedly back to my own language.

In German, Landschaft is a familiar word for landscape. In Chinese, shan shui (山水) literally means mountains and waters. I had known the expression since childhood, yet I had rarely stopped to consider why mountains and waters appear together or how much more they can suggest than scenery observed from a distance.

A German museum director had introduced me to a French philosopher who had studied Chinese thought. Through this unlikely route, I found myself reconsidering words that had always belonged to my mother tongue.

My thoughts returned to the Chu Ci (楚辞, The Poetry of Chu), particularly the Jiu Ge (九歌, Nine Songs).

One of the most memorable lines from Xiang Furen (湘夫人, The Lady of the Xiang River) reads:

“袅袅兮秋风，洞庭波兮木叶下。”
Niǎo niǎo xī qiū fēng, Dòngtíng bō xī mù yè xià.
“The autumn wind blows softly; waves ripple across Dongting Lake as leaves fall from the trees.”

The landscape is not a motionless background. Wind, water and falling leaves become inseparable from the emotional atmosphere of the poem. Throughout the Nine Songs, plants such as orchids, fragrant herbs, lotus and duheng also participate in a world of ritual, longing and imagination. They are more than objects to be identified; they belong to the relationships through which the poems acquire meaning.

Reading these passages again, I began to reconsider what it means to enter a landscape rather than merely observe it. Mountains and waters are not necessarily objects arranged before a detached viewer. They can form an environment in which the body experiences movement, temperature, sound and emotion.

This does not mean that ancient Chu poetry and modern European philosophy express the same ideas. Their intellectual traditions remain different. What interested me was how an unfamiliar philosophical perspective had encouraged me to look again at something I already knew.

For me, shan shui is not simply a landscape hanging on a wall. It is the wind moving across water, the sound of leaves falling and the temperature felt by someone standing within the scene.

There is another part of this story that makes me smile. Before I developed my literary identity as the Lady of the Lingyin — a persona connected with the ancient state of Chu, where the Lingyin was a high-ranking official — someone had already called me Xiang Furen, the Lady of the Xiang River.

It was not a name I had chosen for myself. Someone had read my writing and felt that the words carried a sense of water, moisture and continuous movement. I found the description amusing, but also strangely appropriate. Even when I wrote about subjects far removed from ancient poetry, I repeatedly found myself returning to rivers.

Later, my imaginary world of Chu became rather crowded. Huang Xie appeared, followed by King Kaolie. Before long, the three of us were travelling together through museums and harbours, encountering objects and technologies that neither an ancient king nor his minister could ever have imagined.

My interest in the mountains and waters of the Nine Songs had existed long before I encountered François Jullien. What I had not expected was that a German museum director, through the work of a French philosopher, would lead me back to the familiar waters of the Xiang River.

After travelling such a long way, I discovered that the water in my writing had never stopped flowing.

Going into the Distance and Encountering a New Self

I once thought travelling was primarily about discovering distant places. Over time, I began to realise that distance can also change the person who travels.

On that Sunday morning, the director of the Dresden Transport Museum introduced me to two French philosophers. Their ideas prompted me to reconsider bodily experience, cultural understanding and Chinese mountains and waters. By evening, he had introduced a Scottish museum ship looking for volunteers to help remove rust.

Philosophy had somehow brought me back to ships.

Yet beneath the humour was a question that had become increasingly important to me. Before setting out, we cannot anticipate every encounter, every conversation or every new relationship that may emerge. The person who returns is not necessarily the same person who departed.

Nor is the new self simply an earlier identity hidden somewhere inside us, waiting to be discovered. It may be something that takes shape through encounters and relationships that did not exist before the journey began.

We do not travel into the distance merely to recover the person we once were. Sometimes, through encountering an unfamiliar world, we become someone who could not have existed before we set out.

Coming Next | From Heimat to Zukunft

Is Home Where We Come From, or Where We Are Heading? When I Stopped Looking Back and Saw the Port of Hamburg

From the Body, Family Ties and My Life in Chu to a Home I Have Not Yet Reached

After travelling so far, another question has begun to occupy my thoughts: what does home really mean? Is it the place where we were born, the family ties and memories that connect us to the past, or a destination we have not yet reached?

In the next essay, I will follow this question from Heimat, home and belonging, towards Zukunft, the future. And once again, we will return to Hamburg, its harbour and its historic ships.

Across Civilizations

Who Brought Whom Back This Time?

King Kaolie looked at me. “So this time, a German brought you back to Chu?”
“Not exactly,” I replied.
Huang Xie looked curious. “Then what about those two Frenchmen?”
“They were just passing through.”
“And the Scottish ship?” the king asked. “Where did that come from?”
“Well, it’s a long story.”
The king immediately brightened. “A long story? Excellent. I have plenty of time today.”

Huang Xie laughed. “Your Majesty, writing another article would have been harmless enough. But now she wants to scrape rust off a ship.”
The king stared at him. “Rust? What rust?”
“Rust on a historic ship,” I explained. “The MS Bleichen in Hamburg.”
“Then what happened to the Scottish ship?” the king asked.
“The museum director introduced me to it.”
“So we’re going to Scotland?”
“No. I’d rather go to Hamburg first.”

King Kaolie stroked his chin. “Interesting. After all that travelling, we’ve ended up back on a ship.”
Huang Xie began counting on his fingers. “Your Majesty, consider the route. An exhibition in Dresden leads to two French philosophers. The philosophers lead to the mountains and waters of Chu. Those mountains and waters lead to a Scottish ship. And after all that, she wants to go back to Hamburg and scrape rust!”
The king burst out laughing. “That’s a more complicated journey than any of my tours through Chu!”

“And there’s more,” Huang Xie continued. “She says looking at a ship and helping to repair one are two different things.”
The king turned towards me. “But haven’t you already seen plenty of ships in Hamburg?”
“I have. But seeing something isn’t the same as touching it.”
Huang Xie nodded. “She has a point. We’ve examined so many historical objects on our travels, but rarely had the chance to work with our own hands.”

The king suddenly looked concerned. “Does that mean I’m expected to scrape rust too?”
I smiled. “You can watch.”
He pointed at Huang Xie. “And you?”
“I shall learn alongside My Lady.”
The king waved his hand grandly. “Very well! I’ll stay on shore and prepare the wine. You two can join me when you’ve finished.”

Then he paused and looked at me. “Although I must admit, the rust itself is no longer what interests me most.”
“What is?”
“What you’ll manage to write after you’ve scraped it off.”
Huang Xie smiled. “Your Majesty, at least this time we won’t need to find any more Frenchmen.”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
King Kaolie roared with laughter. “Excellent! Then I’ll look forward to it!”

More than two thousand years ago, the people of Chu travelled along rivers and waterways, carrying their journeys into poetry. More than two thousand years later, the three of us are still on the road. From Dresden, we have found our way back to the mountains and waters of Chu, only to begin thinking about an old ship in Hamburg.

Some journeys begin with a question but do not necessarily end with an answer. Next time, we hope to do more than look at a ship. We want to place our hands on its hull and feel something of the years it has carried.

The river wind passes. The ship is still there.

📜 Further Reading | From Embodied Experience to Cultural Formation

• Body and Civilization

Rhythm Civilization | The Body
How bodily experience, resistance and human capacities contribute to the formation of order.

• Migration and the Self

My Life as a Chu Ju
Rethinking culture and identity through migration and lived experience.

• Culture and Environment

When Ships Drift Off Course, Rice Chooses Its Soil, and Hollyhocks Face the Wind
Exploring how people adapt and grow across cultures through the changing relationships between ships, plants and their environments.

• Chu Civilization and Knowledge Networks

Chu Civilization | Navigation Map
Connecting individual discoveries and years of writing into an evolving knowledge network of Chu civilization.