How Writing Taught Me to Listen to the World

By Glen Loveland

When I first arrived in Beijing in the mid-2000s, armed with a press secretary’s résumé and a head full of Capitol Hill talking points, I thought I understood how stories worked. I believed narratives were tools to shape opinions, arguments to be won. But China, in its relentless, humming complexity, had other plans. It was in a cramped, smog-cloaked alleyway near the Bookworm bookstore—a place I’d later immortalize in my memoir Beijing Bound—that I learned the hardest lesson of my writing life: sometimes, the most powerful stories aren’t the ones you tell, but the ones you finally learn to hear.

 This revelation didn’t come easily. Like many Westerners in China at the time, I initially treated my surroundings as a backdrop for my own “adventure.” I scribbled observations about bustling markets and cryptic Communist Party slogans, convinced I was documenting something profound. But my early drafts rang hollow. Editors rejected them with polite variations of “It’s all surface, no soul.” Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project—until a rainy afternoon in Ningbo changed everything.

I’d traveled to the port city for a factory visit. Over endless cups of bitter Longjing tea, Mr. Li, a man whose hands bore the calluses of China’s economic miracle, began recounting his life. Not in the bullet points I’d expected—exports, GDP, supply chains—but in fragments of memory: his father’s starvation during the Great Leap Forward, his daughter’s obsession with Taylor Swift, the way he’d bribed local officials with Kentucky Fried Chicken in the 1990s (“Colonel Sanders opened more doors than Marx,” he joked). As he spoke, I realized I’d been writing about China all wrong. My lens had been political, transactional. His story was about hunger—not just for food, but for connection, for a place in a world changing faster than any one life could track.

That night, in a Ningbo hotel room overlooking the river, I deleted 30,000 words of manuscript. The act felt less like destruction than excavation. I started anew, this time not as a narrator but as a listener—a parent finally quiet enough to hear their child’s unspoken fears, or an entrepreneur realizing their “disruptive” idea only works if it answers a real human need. The chapter that emerged, "Ningbo: Where the Yangtze Meets the World," became the emotional core of Beijing Bound. It wasn’t about China’s rise. It was about a man who kept his father’s rusted farming tools hanging in his showroom, “to remember where the road began.”

Writing this way demanded vulnerability I hadn’t known I lacked. As a former political operative, I was trained to armor myself with certainty. But memoir requires the opposite—to dwell in questions, to let contradictions breathe. When I wrote about the Bookworm’s literary nights, I didn’t just describe the clinking Tsingtao bottles and heated poetry debates. I confessed how those evenings exposed my own cultural arrogance: my shock at hearing Chinese scholars critique Orwell with more nuance than my UMass professors, my shame when a Chinese novelist asked why Americans only seemed to care about China when it was either “mocking us or fearing us.”

This process mirrored my larger life in those years. Writing taught me that truth isn’t a monologue. It’s a conversation—messy, reciprocal, alive. Rejections still came, but now they felt like collaborations. One editor’s note— “We need more of you here”—pushed me to reveal how China had reshaped my relationships, my politics, even my palate. (Who was I, the kid raised on Hamburger Helper, to judge stinky tofu?)

Today, as U.S.-China relations spiral into what pundits call a “new Cold War,” I’m often asked why I wrote a book emphasizing shared humanity over strategic competition. The answer lies in those Ningbo tea stains on my early drafts and in Mr. Li’s parting words to me: “If you ever write something, write us as we really are.”

Writing Beijing Bound didn’t give me answers. It taught me to wade into the current—to stop fearing the depths of others’ stories and my own. That lesson transcends borders. Whether navigating marital disagreements, mentoring graduate students who (rightly) accuse me of “not getting it,” or negotiating business deals across cultures, I’ve learned that the loudest voice in the room is rarely the wisest. The magic happens in the quiet spaces between words, in the stories we’re brave enough to hear, and humble enough to carry.

 So, to anyone clutching a rejected manuscript, a half-formed dream, or a relationship strained by unspoken truths: Listen. Not just for the plot points but for the whispers under the noise—the hunger, the memory, the rusted tools in the showroom. That’s where the real bridges are built.

Glen Loveland is a global HR executive and memoirist whose time in China bridges multiple pivotal eras. After serving as a press secretary in Congress during the Bush administration, he moved to Beijing in 2007, where he spent 13 years navigating both professional and personal frontiers. His career spans roles at Disney, CGTN, and other major organizations, managing cross-cultural teams and developing expertise in global talent mobility. His memoir, Beijing Bound: A Foreigner Discovers China, offers insights into both corporate China and the city’s evolving LGBTQ+ community. A fluent Mandarin speaker, Loveland currently serves as a Senior Career Coach at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, mentoring international master’s students. Publishers Weekly praised Beijing Bound for capturing Beijing as “a clashing mosaic of old and new, a capital striving to fuse ancient traditions with modern ambition.”