By Gina Lin

The sound comes first—the young American college student yells at the person sitting across her, in attempt to refute his argument in their “debate.” Their words tumble over each other, sharp, fast, incomprehensible. The sound is loud enough to drown out the meaning. I reach to turn down my volume of the TikTok.

In my apartment, it’s quiet. The sort of quiet that almost has texture, like the air holding its breath. Outside my window, the lights of Shanghai blink in coded Morse—millions of lives moving at once, each operating at their own private volumes. The autumn leaves rustle respectfully, footsteps scurry unassumingly, busy adults bike along with their headphones in—immersed in themselves while all rotating in the same routine.

Online, my generation screams to be heard. Where I live, people speak in hush whispers. As I switch between these two settings, it feels like turning a sound dial. Somewhere between them, I try to find what my own voice sounds like.

As a Taiwanese teen living in Shanghai, my identity is inherently political. Reactions and attitudes toward my seemingly contradictory identity, although not a major issue in my life, has impacted my understanding of my identity and has always seemed to bother me.

On the playground during my first-grade recess time, my friend and I stopped our game of tag to catch a breath. She, as a Chinese, asked me if I was from here as well.

“No—I am actually Taiwanese,” I naturally responded.

She reacted with a slight smirk before suggesting: “Well, that basically means your Chinese.”

At that moment, I felt dismissed and unsettled by her comment, too young to fully grasp what she was asserting. I was also upset that she rejected what I had said outright. In the following years, family discussions, school history classes, and research on my own, allowed me to foster a more nuanced understanding of my identity and possible reactions to it as I grew older. Thus, for me, politics isn’t an abstract debate topic: it’s lived, sensitive, and complicated.

Where I currently live in China, words are treated delicately, and silence comes with safety. I’ve learned how to measure both. At school, I notice how certain maps look different from the ones in my grandparents’ house back in Taoyuan. At dinner tables, people lower their voices when a certain topic surfaces, like sound itself might set something off. I’ve learned to read the air before I speak, to sense when a conversation turns electric.  

As the quiet gets heavy, I turn to open my phone, which immediately rattles with a hot new video. A new iteration of the popular debate format has been released, where strangers circle each other like boxers pretending to be philosophers. They talk fast, hands thrown in the air, their opinions rehearsed, screaming for others to capture. As one young college student races to debate the encircled opponent, their conversation lacks true discussion. Debate has turned into theater.

Still, I keep watching. Maybe because it feels alive. Maybe because chaos is better than silence. The people on my feed say what they think without hesitation, but I feel a growing sense of frustration. Each participant takes little time to process and truly consider what their “opponent” conveys, resulting in an encounter lacking a key aspect of dialogue: listening—listening with patience, not reacting immediately, nor imposing their ideas on others. Some speakers are assertive and ground their arguments in statistics, while others rely on pure emotions. With such clashing intents, no consensus or new understanding is reached.

There’s something hypnotic about it, this endless shouting match disguised as civic duty. Gen Z seems to experience politics as a performance arena—a way to show belonging, passion, or identity through noise rather than nuanced conversation.

When the video ends and my screen goes black, the quiet returns. I am left with my conflicting frustration on whether such dialogue was merely entertaining or purely destructive. A question I am still unsure of how to answer.

As the noise accumulates and reaches me every day, I find myself growing exhausted from such blaring voices. News headlines blur into arguments, arguments dissolve into jokes, and everything sounds like static. The media hums in the background of my life—constant, demanding, endless.

Back home in Taiwan, people ask how I can live “over there,” their voices heavy with warning and slight judgement. I don’t know how to explain that I’m not on any one side of a line—that lines move, and I move with them. 

Yet online, the volume is unbearable. My generation is the loudest it’s ever been—shouting, stitching, dueting, drowning each other out in the name of being heard. I scroll through it all, both drawn in and tired by it.

I don’t have an answer to any of it, yet I live in the contradictions—between belonging and distance, noise and quiet, voice and silence—and that somewhere inside the static, I’m still listening for something true.

Lately I’ve started paying attention to what exists between sounds.

A pause of contemplation before my friend answers my question.

The gap of silence when my playlists shuffles from one song to the next.

A sense of stillness when I shut off my phone.

It feels strange to admit that silence can be both frightening and kind. It reminds me of a reading I have recently done of Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca on Leisure, or De Otio. I found the semantics of this Latin term “Otio” incredibly interesting due to the nuances it captures. It refers not merely to uninterrupted or relaxing time, but essentially to “realization activities,” such as reading during spare time or viewing the scene from a beautiful garden: introspective and truly grounding activities that seem challenging to fit in many of our lives in the pace of our world today.

I highlighted this line in my reading, when Seneca iterates how “It is important that you participate in political life with a balanced frame of mind, or you would always have no peace of mind and never take any time for yourself by which your attention may pass from the human to the divine” (Chandler, 2012). Regardless of how you interpret his advice, I resonated with this line. It encourages a balanced, mindset when interpreting and participating in politics—to maintain “peace of mind” while engaging in discussions. I see this as taking a step back after someone asks you a question, questioning why others disagree with your opinions, or acknowledging differing perspectives without attacking ones who hold them.

I don’t know what the right volume is for the world I live in. But I’ve stopped trying to tune it out completely. Somewhere between the shouting and the hush, between my identity in the different places I call home, there is a small, steady sound that belongs to me. It isn’t loud. It isn’t certain. But for now, it’s enough.

Works Cited

“Seneca, On Leisure.” Colloquy 23 (2012): 214-222