The dream came true. My life didn’t change.

I did the thing I thought would change my life, and now I don’t know what comes next.

I’ve spent the past three years writing and marketing my memoir. I am so proud of what I wrote and believe in the book more than anything I’ve ever created. But sadly (as I’ve whined to my friends about all year and no one felt sorry for me), it wasn’t a New York Times bestseller that rocketed my career to the next level, changed my life, made me rich and famous overnight, and got optioned for a prestige HBO series.

I’ve spent the past three years writing and marketing my memoir. I’m so proud of what I wrote, and I believe in the book more than anything I’ve ever created. But sadly—as I’ve whined to my friends all year while absolutely no one felt sorry for me—it did not become a New York Times bestseller, rocket my career to the next level, change my life overnight, make me rich and famous, or get optioned as a prestige HBO series.

For the last decade, I’ve been having the best time of my life. Maybe it’s the natural progression of getting older, but I just dgaf much of the time. Since my late teens, I’ve cycled through multiple careers: import model, pin-up model, attempted actress, solo artist, lead singer of a band, travel writer, viral content creator, and finally, published author.

This past year has been rough, though. I’m an accidental author, never intending to write a memoir. But during the pandemic, TikTok inspired me to write about my own experiences with the fetishization of Asian women and the popular media I grew up with that perpetuated the Asian fetish.

The book is also about the strange patchwork of my past career. I make a lot of self-deprecating jokes, and I used to call myself “a jack of all trades, master of none.” In my teens and twenties, I cared desperately what other people thought of me, especially men. That hunger to be chosen and desired drove so many of my choices in the entertainment industry.

After getting sober, I did years of therapy and introspective work and quit the entertainment industry entirely. I haven’t missed it at all. I completely pivoted my life. I tried a bunch of careers before finally landing on luxury travel writing, which is still my dream job. Then, during the pandemic, when my travel career was put on pause and all my dream trips were canceled, I learned TikTok. I posted four to five times a day for an entire year until I grew my following to more than half a million people, mostly around nostalgic 2000s Asian American California content.

What drove me through this uncertain time was what I learned through spiritual work. I’ve learned to ask, “Why is this happening for me?” And it really was because of the pandemic and my TikTok page that I was inspired to write a book and eventually landed a deal with the world’s largest book publisher.

But it didn’t turn out the way I imagined. After I secured my book deal, my dreams became much bigger. I imagined the book would change my life, become a New York Times bestseller, win a Pulitzer and other awards, be adapted into a movie, all the things. My publisher’s team was deeply invested in the book. My agent, my editor, and my two publicists were all Asian women, and they believed in it completely. My agent later told me she had never seen a publisher’s marketing team be so involved with a book. I was excited, but also terrified.

The week before publication, my team told me it was rare for a debut book to be both reviewed by The New York Times Book Review and excerpted in the Opinion section. I had been working with a Times editor for weeks on an excerpt of “Slanted,” the chapter about my vagina, which begins with the terrifying honest sentence, “The first time I saw my vagina was with the rest of the world.”

A couple of days before the piece was supposed to publish, the NYT team sent over a long list of fact-checking questions about a sexual assault detailed in the book. The assault happened more than 25 years ago. I don’t know the man’s name. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I answered everything as accurately as I could. In the end, they pulled the piece, citing a lack of time to complete the necessary fact-checking. I was devastated, and maybe secretly relieved.

The morning of the book launch, August 19th, the book debuted alongside a glowing review in The New York Times book section. That first week was a flurry of exciting press, signings, including at the biggest Barnes & Noble in the world at The Grove, podcast drops, and social media buzz. Margaret Cho had to drop out of moderating the launch event because of filming schedules, but Aly & AJ absolutely killed it.

Then, inevitably, the buzz got quieter as weeks passed. The book sold okay, but it was far from a bestseller and nowhere close to earning out my advance. I do plan to promote my book, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, for the rest of my life, but it’s also time for the next project.

The logical next step would be to write another book, but I’m not sure I have another book in me. I wrote Fetishized because no one had written a memoir on the topic before, and I wished I’d had a book like that growing up.

I still absolutely adore my job as a travel writer. But with the death of the publishing industry, top magazines downsizing, and the looming specter of AI, I don’t know what the future of that career looks like. I’ll hang on as long as I can.

So, for now, Substack is the next step. I miss the days of LiveJournal, Xanga, Asian Avenue, and especially Myspace, when we posted our much less filtered thoughts online in blog form. I stopped writing in a memoir style about a year and a half ago because I felt like I had put it all out there with the book, and I was completely burnt out on writing about myself. But maybe I’m ready to start again.

Maybe you’re fresh from a breakup. Maybe you hate your job and want to start your dream career. Maybe you followed the traditional road to success and happiness, and now you’re standing in the aftermath wondering, “Why am I still empty inside?”

I’ll be starting over alongside you. I’ll also be sharing the many times I’ve started over in my own life, and exactly how I did it, with varying degrees of success.

P.S. I don’t know exactly where this is going yet. That’s kind of the point. If you’re also just figuring it out or stuck in an in-between chapter, this is where I’ll be writing from.