the thesis — No.1

Why Be Happy

Writing, art, and research toward a literacy of the inner life — and what gets lost when it crosses a language.

The name borrows from Winterson. A question, not a promise: not be happy, but first — understand, precisely, what you are living through.

Read the writing → The research ↗

The work

Four ways in

Not a mirror of the Chinese side.
The other face of the same magazine.

Everything in my own voice, in English — essays, the Substack, talks and podcasts, and the Chinese writing brought across. The same project the Chinese essays carry: a psychoanalytic literacy, for readers who arrive through thinking, not through a feed. essays · CPS & TAP pieces · podcasts · talks · in translation

Where the work stops being words. Sound, fiction, games, software — pieces that let you meet the inner life sideways. Palimpsest · QPHU · Spotify · games & software

The programme underneath everything — and the papers it produces. What a literacy is, how a group learns one, and what refuses to translate when psychoanalysis meets a Chinese subject. Psychoanalytic Literacy · Group as a Site of Learning · Laplanchian clinical theory · peer-reviewed papers

The programme →

Jo Qiao — analyst, scholar, writer. And the bilingual story of why 何苦开心 and Why Be Happy are the same project, read from two directions. bio · training · the bilingual brand

Currently

What's alive now

A living practice — not an archive.
Recent essays, a new paper, a current piece.

Writing · in translationNew

The parent you wanted never existed

Sometimes the rage is at a fantasy — a figure who was never in the room. The English rewrite of one of the most-read Chinese essays.

By Jo Qiao · doctoral candidate, BGSP

Recent

Published · TAP2025

Translation's refusal and the Chinese subject

Palimpsest — an essay you read by erasing it

Research · PLongoing

What a psychoanalytic literacy could be

The body keeps what the mind let go

Psychoanalysis added a century of knowledge about the inner life — then locked it inside its training.

the premise of the whole project