Jun Ming Chen

Jun Ming Chen grew up between two languages and two ways of seeing. Born into a family of tea merchants, he learned a trade, moved to Europe as a young man, and never fully returned.

He has spent more than twenty years with the old books of the East, not as an academic but as a reader who keeps returning to the same pages the way some people return to the same trail. He writes about them in plain language, for people whose days are already full.

His teachers were not professors. They were his grandmother, who poured tea without speaking, a woodworker who carved for forty years without signing his work, and the books themselves, read slowly, over many years.

He writes in the mornings and lives quietly with his wife in a city he still manages to get lost in.