If someone asked me this question in the past ten years, I would have answered because I love writing, this is my passion, and this is my job too or people pay me to write. But if I’ve been asked today, those answers would become very dry and it is not enough to convey why I keep writing even though I hit so many walls towards it.

I grew up in a poor family. My dad only got a high school degree because his father, my grandfather, who used to be a rich merchant loved gambling so much. My mom, on the other hand, she didn’t like to study, she declined to go to university even though her dad was very rich at that time.

But thank God, my dad was a very hard worker and he was a bloody smart person. He started his business from literary zero so I and my siblings able to taste the higher education. I have known rejections since I was a very little girl. Because everywhere in any part of the world nobody loved to stick with poor ones.

In this past ten years, I’ve been facing so many hardships, life has been beating me so hard to the point that I’ve been thinking maybe I don’t deserve to feel a little bit of happiness. I lost my jobs, I lost friends, I lost my mom because of cancer. And October last year, I lost my dad due to kidney failure and pneumonia. I’ve been my mom and my dad’ caregiver for many years. But though how hard I try, I lost them too. I don’t think there is any word to describe such agony. And I feel like the world leaving me dying in cold. My soul wept and no matter what I did, there was no way to comfort it.

But then I read. I write. It is books that taught me that everybody hurts too. It is books that taught me I’m not alone. People in my surrounding, they can misunderstand me, they can leave me, but books never misunderstood me. Writing is a place that I can speak my voice. Writing is my hiding place. It helps me so I don’t loose myself.

I pondered, in life sometimes everything just wrong, you feel like you had too much, but I know there is still a small piece in your soul that is willing to survive. You can. And you will. Because beautiful people knew pain, they knew lost and they are neither afraid nor ashamed to feel pain. I think Bob Dylan was right “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.”

All of us are going to die and we will turn into dust. But what makes us different it is the legacy we left behind.

So if someone asked me Why I Write? I would answer. Writing saves me. And if one day I turn into dust, I will leave something to this world. So it’s not too cold to leave in.