Aya explained that 宿醉 grew out of the months after her loss of grandmother and relationships, in the week when she was physically jet-lagged, feeling suspended between places and times.
A similar sense of unsettledness appears in An Uncomfortable Dictionary, her first piece of creative writing in English, but here the disorientation is racial as well as diasporic. “I was going through some sort of existential crises at the time, and my coping way was writing (instead of working).” Aya recalled. “One day, after receiving an uncomfortable gaze from the library security once again, I sat in the library, crying for fifty minutes. Then strong motivation and some sparks struck me. I started to conceptualize a story in a dictionary format, to write about the difficult-to-articulate discomforts, the microaggressions and everyday racism that I and other Asian students frequently encounter on campus.”
Much of Aya’s writing lies in how form itself becomes a means of understanding diasporic unease. 宿醉 uses numbers, time zones, and distance to describe disorientation, while An Uncomfortable Dictionary turns the dictionary format into a tool for identifying subtle racism that often resists explanation and reclaiming meanings in a world from which Aya and other Chinese LGBTQIA+ diasporas are frequently alienated. The workshops provided Aya with opportunities to discuss both pieces with other participants. An Uncomfortable Dictionary was later shortlisted for the 2026 Oxford–BNU Creative Writing Award.
In Yuwei 鱼尾’s Isikídke, the question shifts from where one belongs to what kinds of bodies and minds are expected to belong at all. Yuwei said the piece grew partly out of anger after being diagnosed as neurodivergent and being told that a lack of imagination could be a marker of autism: “So I decided to write something as imaginative, and as far from realism, as the diagnosis standard says I can’t be.”
The result is a cicada waking into a long winter of rime and freezing rain. The first word the world gives it is not live but Survive. A voice sends it in search of summer and three human beings. The cicada does not know how to fly, or even what a human being looks like; its search for others gradually becomes a search for kinship and for something like itself.
For Yuwei, the cicada also carries the discomfort of being queer, Chinese and diasporic: not feeling at home within the gendered world they knew in China, but not simply becoming at home after moving to Britain. “I wanted to use the cicada to express what it feels like to be a creature that does not quite understand what it is,” Yuwei said. “The climate changes, the world is not built for it, and it does not know where it belongs. It is trying to find others like itself — a queer community — and, in a way, to find its own queerness.”
Much of the force of Yuwei’s work lies in its distinctive form, which makes neuroqueer and disabled experience part of the act of reading itself. Through metaphors of cicadas, frost and apocalypse, speculative transformation and fragmented typography, Isikídke explores embodiment and the precarity of queer Chinese diasporic life while disrupting conventional ways of reading. Words are often broken into separate letters, passages flow from right to left, and deleted text remains visible. Yuwei explained, “As a dyslexic queer artist, I try to use these word experiments to help my readers experience what reading feels like for queer and disabled people. You have to pause, go back and figure things out — you can’t read smoothly across the page.”