About the Author
I grew up between worlds: culturally, linguistically, professionally. That position is not something I have tried to resolve. It is the thing I have built a practice around, and the problem at the centre of it: what it costs ideas to cross borders, and what it takes to make them survive the crossing.
The problem takes different forms depending on where I am standing. In the studio, it is a strategic and aesthetic question: how does a brand remain coherent as it moves across cultural contexts? In my essays, it is an intellectual one: what does cultural translation actually cost, and who bears that cost? In the podcast, it is a human one: how do women build authority inside systems that were not designed for them? In the novel, it is a personal one: what happens to a self that has crossed too many borders to belong completely to any of them?
The practice, the writing, the podcast are different approaches to the same question.
Millennial Intellectual: Essays on the ideas, institutions, and cultural logics that shaped our generation, and what it actually costs to think clearly inside them. Power, elegance, meritocracy, state capacity, and the gap between the world we were promised and the one we inherited. A single subscription gives you access to all of them.
Lunation.fm: A podcast about culture, power, and identity. It began with Fem Renaissance, a season of conversations with women navigating identity, power, and choice across cultures. It continues as something broader, though the feminist thread will remain.
Institutional Gravity: A book in submission examining how multilateral institutions reproduce themselves, resist accountability, and shape the people who work inside them. And what it actually costs to leave.
Paper Moon and Ivory Tower: A novel in progress, telling the story of Ho Chiyo, a Chinese woman navigating diaspora, institutional power, and the slow construction of a self across cultures.
I write in Chinese as 李梦亭 on WeChat, Zhihu and Douban. It’s a parallel practice that shares the same questions as the English work, arriving at them through a different language, a different register, and sometimes a different answer.
I am also the founder of Moon Ting Studio, a brand strategy and creative direction practice working with leaders and global institutions. www.moontingstudio.com