Nonfiction Book

Seeking a Life of Her Own

“Her world extends far beyond the walls of a single home. It is the sum of all that she sees.”

Seeking a Life of Her Own is a non-fiction book weaving through with photography and is the full-length version of Women at Home, the documentary series directed by the author Amos Xianjing Dai in 2022.

Among the many women the author has interviewed, this book focuses on fourteen, ranging in age from 20 to 70, including a single mother, a social media creator, a scholar, an insurance broker, a retired professor, an entrepreneur, and elderly women living on a remote island, and others. It explores the choices behind their lives of living solo, and how they connect with fast-changing Chinese society and a complex world. They shared their thoughts on loneliness, freedom, desire and fear; on love, intimacy, and longing; on the everyday lives close at hand and the distant worlds they imagine.

Living alone is only the narrative way in. The real questions the interviews explore are: In a rapidly developing contemporary China, how can a woman live on her own terms? Where do her certainty and resilience stem from? How does each decision take shape?

In-between, belonging to ourselves.

在东西之间，活出自己的答案。

Now Streaming

We left. We stayed — just somewhere in between. A podcast hosted by Amos Xianjing Dai for Chinese-speaking women living in the U.S. — navigating the space between two worlds, where identity and belonging are still taking shape.

Between East and West. Between who we were expected to be and who we are becoming. Not through grand declarations, but through honest conversations about identity, courage, belonging, solitude, love, freedom, and the daily decisions that add up to one's life.

Made for those who know what it means to live in translation.