Lea’s TEDx Talk - My Odyssey Across Five Continents: From Translating Languages to Translating Civilizations

Gen Z voice from China —— The Humanity Behind Cultural Differences

My Odyssey From a Small Town to Five Continents — From Translating Languages to Translating Civilizations

Excerpted from Lea’s TEDx Talk

Hello. 你好. Bonjour. Hola.

Every day, I do something that many people find difficult to understand:

On Chinese platforms, I talk about France and Western culture.
On global platforms, I talk about China.

And the result is:

Sometimes Chinese viewers ask me,
“What’s your agenda?”

And overseas viewers ask me the exact same thing:
“What’s your agenda?”

Maybe that is the price of standing between two worlds.

But this is also my mission:

To translate the world to China, and to translate China to the world.

And these are questions I have been thinking about for a long time:

Why is China so difficult for the outside world to understand?
How should we talk to the world?

And why is it that even when we speak foreign languages and have traveled to different countries, we can still misunderstand other cultures?

Over the past two months, unusual weather patterns have brought relentless rain to Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta. On the other side of the world, India has been experiencing extreme heat, while Europe has also been scorched by heatwaves.

One day, I was sitting in a café on a street in Shanghai, watching the rain pour down.

And in that moment, I had never felt so strongly that we really do live on the same planet — and that our destinies as human beings are deeply intertwined.

From a Small City to the World: Language Once Opened My World

Over the past two years, I seem to have suddenly acquired many impressive labels. I’ve been interviewed by major media outlets in China and abroad.

And people often ask me, with a kind of curiosity:
“You must come from a very priviledged family?”

 

But I was not born at the center of the stage.

For a long time, the world felt very far away from me.

I come from Fuzhou, Jiangxi, a small inland city in China.

It was once home to great poets and thinkers such as Wang Anshi and Lu Jiuyuan, and it flourished during the Song Dynasty. Today, it is much quieter, known mainly by its old nickname: “the hometown of talented scholars.”

People where I grew up are deeply attached to their hometown and often reluctant to leave.

My family was also very traditional and ordinary. Their expectations for a girl were shaped by very traditional ideas.

My father used to blame me:

“Why must you go so far away as a girl?”

In his world, Jiangxi was already big enough. Even leaving the province felt like a major journey.

So later, when I went abroad, I simply didn’t tell him beforehand.

 

Since childhood, I somehow seemed to be very different from the people around me.

At the dinner table, conversations were always about births and deaths, family matters, everyday problems.

But even when I was very young, I kept asking myself:

Is this really all there is to the world?
What is happening in the bigger world ?

So my first rebellion came when I had to choose my university major.

My family wanted me to stay close to home.

But I was convinced that going far away would be my own epic.

So I chose something that sounded almost absurd to them:

French.

For parents who could barely speak standard Mandarin, telling them that I wanted to study French probably sounded about the same as telling them I wanted to go to Mars.

But I didn’t care.

And that foreign language began opening one door after another into entirely new worlds.

It brought me into diplomatic and business settings. I interpreted for diplomats based in China, CEO of Hermes, and even heads of state.

And from that front-row seat, I witnessed how business, geopolitics and cultural differences come together to shape the world we live in.

I was in my early twenties then.

And I thought:

Interpretation — being a bridge between languages — this must be what I want to do for the rest of my life.

When Language Became a Limitation: Who Am I, Really?

But something still didn’t feel right.

Gradually, I realized something that frightened me:

The foreign languages that had once opened the world for me were beginning to limit me.

I felt objectified by the very thing I treasured most.

As an interpreter, my job was simply to repeat what other people said.

Who I was did not matter.

No one asked what I thought.

I was not supposed to have an opinion.

And over those years, I became increasingly painful.

I kept asking myself:

Can the height of my life really be defined only by the level of my language skills?
Am I just a tool?

For someone who loves thinking, having no real right to speak in your own voice can feel cruel.

 

And I noticed something else.

Even when every sentence in an international exchange was translated correctly, misunderstandings between the two sides still remained.

Because we were translating the language —

but not the culture, context or logic behind it.

And this is also why we can do so much cultural promotion overseas and still find that many international audiences simply do not grasp the logic behind China.

From Translating Others to Being Translated: Becoming a Two-Way Cultural Communicator

So my second rebellion began.

I realized that the label of “interpreter” could no longer carry everything I wanted my life to mean.

I wanted to exist fully as a human being.

A human being is a thinking reed.

I wanted to communicate my own thoughts and have my own voice, instead of constantly repeating the words of others.

Several years ago, I quietly made myself a promise:

One day, someone else will translate my words.

I moved into the field of global communication.

And strangely, in this completely new world, I felt lighter than ever.

For the first time, I could exist as a whole person.

I could be remembered and recognized for my ideas — not simply as “that young woman who speaks French really well.”

A year ago, encouraged by others, I began posting videos on global social media in three languages.

 

I was worried at first.

I thought:

“Am I just going to get attacked online even more?”

But it turned out that international audiences were far kinder than I had imagined.

In less than a year, I built a global audience of more than 500,000 followers, including foreign diplomats and mayors.

Later, I was featured in a major profile by People’s Daily(the top media in China), and interviewed by the BBC and Radio France.

But the most meaningful moment came earlier this year.

I traveled to Argentina and gave my own talk on Chinese culture from the perspective of a young Chinese person.

Representatives from the embassy and the chamber of commerce attended.

And the organizers arranged a simultaneous interpreter specifically for me.

 

Do you remember the promise I made to myself years ago?

One day, someone else will translate my words.

Yes, Lea.

You made it.

But when I look back, I think the reason this journey worked is actually very simple:

I happened to do the right thing at the right moment.

Today, the world is paying more and more attention to China.

But there are still very few windows through which people can understand China in depth.

And then I appeared — a Gen Z Chinese woman who speaks three foreign languages — trying to explain China in a way the world could understand.

And I genuinely believe that my most important identities is simply:

human being.

Very often, I am just speaking from the perspective of an ordinary human being and asking:

Why do Chinese people live this way?

Why has Chinese society developed this particular logic?

Why has this civilization arrived where it is today?

I acknowledge the complexity of this society.

The real China is already fascinating enough.

As an observer, I do not force my own conclusions onto people.

Compared with official messaging, what many people really want is a real, multidimensional human being who can help them make sense of a world that confuses them.

So what kind of China should we show the world?

When we talk about taking Chinese culture global, we often immediately think of traditional cultural symbols:

dragons, phoenixes, hanfu, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, festivals.

But what overseas audiences truly want to understand is often not an abstract symbol.

It is a concrete question:

Why do Chinese people live this way?

We sometimes assume that showing hanfu means we are exporting culture.

But a beautiful symbol like hanfu can only carry so much meaning.

A foreign viewer may admire how beautiful it looks and still understand almost nothing about China.

 

Culture does not exist only in museums.

It exists in everyday life.

The core of international communication is not simply showing people what we have.

It is explaining why.

For a civilization to truly enter the world, it cannot simply be seen.

It also needs the ability to tell its own story.

Across Five Continents: How the World Taught Me to Rethink Myself and Others

Why did I gradually develop this human perspective?

Because the more places I visited, the more I realized how complicated the world is.

Different societies have their own internal logic.

And I increasingly came to believe that what human beings share is far greater than what separates us.

 

We all need love.

Happiness.

Safety.

Dignity.

To be understood.

Different societies have simply developed different answers under different historical conditions.

As Marx once put it, people make their own history — but under historical conditions inherited from the past.

 

And my own life has also been shaped at the intersections of different civilizations.

From a small city to five continents, my journey sometimes feels like my own Odyssey.

Odysseus left his homeland and traveled through unknown worlds on a long journey.

And through every encounter with another civilization, I have also been learning about the world —

and learning who I am.

France — When Another Culture Sees the Real You

France has a very special meaning in my life.

It was where I first realized that someone from a completely different cultural background could genuinely see you.

There is something about my first twenty years of life that I have never spoken about publicly.

I spent much of those years doubting myself and feeling deeply uncertain about who I was.

Because my family was very traditional.

The atmosphere at school was also oppressive

My university professor used to put me down a lot...

I was not particularly happy.

And for a long time, I felt that I simply was not good enough.

Like the chinese mathematician Wang hong who just won the Fields prize described her university time : discouraged

Then two French people gave me some of the first real validation I had ever received.

One recognized my professional ability.

The other recognized me as a person.

One of them was a French school principal I met during my very first interpreting assignment.

After the event, he sent me a message:

“Lea, I’m writing this to you on the train back to Marseille...

......

I believe you are going to become a big person. Please stay the way you are. Don’t change.”

I still remember this message.

The moment I read that message, I completely broke down.

It felt as if a question I had spent twenty years searching for an answer to had finally received a response.

And somehow, that answer came from a French person.

For the first time, I felt seen.

That is why France has always held a special place in my heart.

And I still wanna say "Merci beaucoup", to french people.

So when we think about the outside world, we do not always need to approach it with hostility or a victim mentality.

Cross-cultural encounters do not always produce misunderstanding.

Sometimes the opposite happens.

Sometimes someone from a completely different culture is able to bypass all the labels around you —

and see the real person underneath.

To embrace you.

To recognize you.

Africa — Where I Saw Both the Cracks of the World and Its Resilience

I will never forget traveling as an interpreter to Burkina Faso, a West African country that had recently experienced a coup.

I almost got caught in a bombing there.

It was the first time I had ever come so close to the realities of colonial history and poverty.

Under the burning sun, I watched women and children selling fruit along the road, struggling to make a living.

But what affected me most happened at a military base.

In a guestbook, I saw words handwritten decades earlier by the late former president Thomas Sankara, who fought against colonialism:

“Homeland or death. We will fight to the end.”

Decades earlier, he had tried to change the fate of his country.

And suddenly, all that heavy history traveled across time and stood directly in front of me.

I broke down crying.

For a long time afterwards, I could barely pull myself together.

As a Chinese person, I felt it viscerally.

 

And yet people in Africa also have their own philosophy of life.

No matter how difficult the circumstances, people still sing.

They still dance.

Sometimes happiness can be very simple:

peace in this moment,

and music.

Some of them even look at Chinese people and wonder:

“You work so unbelievably hard. But you don’t seem very happy. What exactly are you working so hard for?”

Latin America — When History Does Not Always Move Forward

Earlier this year, I traveled to the Americas — a part of the world deeply connected to the Age of Exploration, when distant continents began to become part of a single global system.

In Mexico, I witnessed a street protest against the United States’ arrest of a Latin American president.

I listened to a Venezuelan who had fled his country explain his surprisingly open-hearted philosophy of life.

And I listened to an Argentine driver pour out his anger about globalization and society.

Everyone had a different position.

Because everyone had lived a different life.

And for the first time, I truly understood what magical realism meant.

It was no longer just a concept I had once read about in a Chinese textbook.

We often say that Latin Americans are too focused on enjoying life.

But in China, we tend to imagine history as a straight line moving forward.

Today must be better than yesterday.

Tomorrow must be better than today.

But in Latin America, history does not always feel linear.

It can move in circles.

It can even move backwards.

Inflation can destroy the value of your money.

An economy can collapse almost overnight.

You cannot always predict the future.

And so people learn to give themselves to the present.

There is another reason I became so committed to two-way cross-cultural communication:

I dislike unfairness.

Including the unfairness created when we misunderstand other cultures.

Once, in Thailand, I visited a local museum with a friend.

Some Thai Buddhist statues were long, slender and pointed in form — very different from Chinese Buddhist imagery.

My friend judged them entirely through a Chinese aesthetic framework and used some very negative words to judge them.

I felt deeply sad.

I said:

“But surely this form must have a different meaning within Thai culture.”

Yet he kept insisting that his own Chinese framework represented some kind of universal truth.

How could it possibly be wrong?

And in that moment, I thought in desperation:

It feels impossible for human beings to tuely understand one another.

Every day, we do the same thing.

We judge other people through our own cultural filters.

And then we treat other cultures in exactly the ways we hate being treated ourselves.

China & World: We both imsunderstood each other

Why do China and the world misunderstand each other so much?

The truth is:

The world has never fully understood China.

China has long been one of the most distant and mysterious places in the Western imagination.

And in some ways, that is understandable.

Geographically, from a European perspective, China sits on the far edge of the Eurasian continent.

Geography itself creates an information barrier.

Even today, many Europeans still use the term “Far East.”

Historically, China and the West also did not spend centuries interacting face to face at the same intensity as civilizations around the Mediterranean.

And the two civilizations often developed very different ways of organizing the world.

China grew out of an agrarian civilization centered on the Central Plains and has traditionally tended to move from the whole toward the individual.

Western civilization, shaped in part by maritime city-states, has often moved from the individual toward the whole.

 

That's why traditional Chinese medicine emphasizes the condition of the whole body.

Western medicine often looks for a specific cause of a specific disease.

In Chinese, the family name comes before the given name.

We say the year first, then the month, then the day.

In many Western contexts, the order is reversed.

None of this means one civilization is better than another.

They are simply different answers developed under different geographical and historical conditions.

And different regions of the world also see a different China.

People interpret China through their own historical experiences.

In the United States, China’s image tends to be more negative, because the relationship is often framed through competition and geopolitics.

In Europe, I have found more interest in Chinese philosophy and culture — things like Daoism and qigong.

In Latin America, attitudes toward China can be more positive, partly because China’s development offers countries with colonial histories another possible path.

Even Chinese brands going global are changing how people perceive China.

When I traveled in Latin America, local people told me that more people were becoming interested in China because, as trade opened up, they were encountering more Chinese products that were affordable and surprisingly good.

And of course, China itself is difficult even for Chinese people to fully understand.

Because China is not only a modern nation-state.

It is also a civilization with thousands of years of history.

Yet the modern world often tries to interpret this extremely complex civilization through a single political lens.

Repeat one single narrative a thousand times, and naturally people begin to believe that narrative is the whole picture.

But China also misunderstands the world.

Strangely, the more countries I visit, the more I understand my own country.

I increasingly realize that many things we treat as universal in China are actually very specific to China.

Our obsession with efficiency.

Our relationship with price.

Our respect for ancestors.

Our definition of success.

Our desire for stability.

Our unusually high acceptance of technology and AI.

Many of these things are not shared everywhere else.

And that is also why many Chinese companies find it relatively easy to enter an overseas market, but much harder to truly take root there.

We also have a habit of applying our own cultural framework to every country.

We arrive thinking we can simply outperform everyone through speed, efficiency or scale.

That, too, can become a form of arrogance.

The outside world compresses China into a label.

And we compress the rest of the world into a few labels as well.

In Chinese, we often say “Europe and America” as though they were one thing.

We fail to distinguish Europe from the United States — or even the enormous differences among European countries themselves.

If we dislike being judged from above through a Western-centric worldview, then we have no reason to judge other cultures using our own supposedly universal standards.

To truly see the world as equals means remembering an old Chinese principle:

Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.

The Hardest Border Is the One We Cannot See

I first learned foreign languages because I wanted to escape a small world.

Later, language took me across five continents.

But it was not until I began expressing my own ideas that I finally understood:

In this globalized age,

crossing a language barrier is not that difficult.

Crossing an ocean is not that difficult.

The hardest thing to cross is the invisible cognitive distance between one human being and another.

We live in the age of social media.

We have more information than ever before.

And yet somehow, we also create more division.

We have become used to understanding entire countries through crude, simplified labels.

But we forget that behind every label is a real person.

The essence of cross-cultural communication is not really about studying platforms, algorithms or traffic.

It is about understanding people.

And perhaps the deeper form of translation is this:

To see the person behind the label.

To see the context behind the phenomenon.

To understand before we judge.

The purpose of communication is not to force someone else to surrender.

It is to help them understand:

Why can this way of thinking, living or behaving make sense within another culture?

We are all human beings.

We simply happen to have been born in different corners of the world, inheriting different histories, cultures and memories.

We prioritize different values.

But we were not born as different species.

At a time when conflicts are breaking out across the world, perhaps one of the defining questions of globalization is this:

Can we still cross our differences and recognize the shared humanity behind them?

I also believe that my generation in China is standing at a very unusual moment in history.

We are no longer simply being defined by others.

For the first time, we have the opportunity to actively participate in shaping how the world understands China.

When I was defined by others, all I could see was myself through someone else’s eyes.

And when a civilization can only be defined by others, it loses the opportunity to truly speak with the world.

But having your own voice does not mean refusing to hear other voices.

Real confidence does not mean closing yourself off.

It means becoming clearer about who you are and where you are going through your encounters with the world.

Going out into the world did not take me away from my own culture.

It allowed me to return to where I came from with a broader, more mature perspective —

and to become a more complete version of myself.

Maybe this is my Odyssey.

Thanks for reading, my friends.

Feel free to leave your thoughts here, I'd appreciate it a lot!

- With warmth, Lea