Shan X. Liao is a visual designer, agency veteran, image maker, and poet. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

廖玄林，位于纽约布鲁克林区，是一名高级平面设计师、制作总监。

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Mapping

A busy teacher might glance at the mess of intersecting lines in the margins of my notebooks and write them off as the product of an unfocused child, but if you look closely, the lines begin to weave out into a pattern, turning in to sweeping arcs and cloverleaves, stack and trumpet interchanges. As you see, what you don’t know is that I couldn’t bring SimCity with me to the classroom.

Maps are quiet storytellers. They hide secrets, are often faked, sometimes lie, become obsolete, and somehow are still able to show the reader who was in charge.

As for me, give me five minutes with a map and I’ll never have to look at it again.