hi, i’m alan!

I’m a senior at MIT studying writing and computer science, along with plenty of other things. I write poetry, short stories, essays, blog posts, and, of course, code. Nice to meet you!

More to come on this website, of course—see you around!

why the title?

“Actions, not words” is a mantra I adopted from a description of Chinese culture found on the wikipedia page for the Pixar short, Bao. The text is, as of June 2021, no longer there, but I think the sentiment behind it remains strong for me. I chose this title for my personal website (then a blog) in March of 2020, as a reminder to myself that I needed to do things that actually mattered to people, rather than just talk about doing them. Of course, there is a certain irony to telling a writer to focus on “actions, not words,” but I think that is part of the reason the name has stuck.