Why Do You Measure Your Voice by the Number of Ears?
The One Who Sees You Does Not Need a Crowd to Make You Real
That day I received a message.
A stranger told me he was going to “steal” something I’d written.
The steal was in quotation marks — he wasn’t taking it quietly. He was telling me publicly, right there in the comments.
My first reaction was immediate: this almost never happens in China.
The thought came so fast it surprised me. But it was real.
Some context. I’m a Chinese writer. I’ve lived and studied in the West for years, but the majority of my life has been in China. At the time that message arrived, I had been on Substack as a writer for about ten days. I had a handful of subscribers.
In the logic I grew up with, a post like that would never be worth borrowing from.
Not because the content isn’t good. Because the numbers are too small. Small numbers mean no growth. No growth means not worth noticing. If someone wants to take something and use it, the natural move is to go find an account with a million followers — that’s where the value is. What someone with a few subscribers says barely registers, in that logic. It almost doesn’t count as having been said.
So the quotation-marked “steal” — that kind of thing wouldn’t even happen.
And even if it did, it wouldn’t happen this way.
In China, the standard approach to borrowing or lifting content is: take it, use it, don’t mention the original author. Because citing a source feels like admitting you’re empty — like saying what I have came from someone else, I don’t have it myself. So the safer move is to erase the origin and let it look like yours.
This happens constantly. It’s become background noise. We’ve long since stopped being surprised by it.
But being used to something doesn’t mean it has no cost.
What’s the cost?
During my years studying in the UK, one thing tormented me.
The academic citation system — every claim, every piece of data, sourced with extreme precision: author, year, publication, nothing left out. My dissertations came back to me multiple times, each time for formatting. At the time I felt only irritation, and a shallow understanding of why it existed — oh, probably something to do with intellectual property. I never saw the deeper logic underneath it.
Until that message arrived.
When a creator’s work gets lifted, when the original author’s name disappears while the reach flows to whoever took it — when this happens repeatedly, the original creator slowly becomes guarded. Like a stray cat that’s been hurt by humans and no longer trusts any hand that reaches toward it. You were once willing to speak without holding anything back. But you find that holding nothing back only benefits others at your expense, and so you start protecting yourself, keeping something in reserve, saying only the things you wouldn’t mind losing.
The whole creative atmosphere closes in, slowly, on itself.
And that citation system that tormented me was doing exactly the opposite. It was saying: ideas have owners. The person who said this deserves to be seen, deserves to be remembered. Sustained attention to that principle spills beyond academia and becomes something wider — a culture in which ideas themselves have value, and the people who create them deserve respect.
In that kind of environment, creators are willing to give everything.
So what actually moved me about that message wasn’t the borrowing itself.
It was that he saw me.
Not as an account. Not as a number. As a person who was saying something. He had read a post I wrote, something happened in his mind, and he came to tell me.
Two minds, honestly meeting.
I find this rare now. We’ve grown so accustomed to logic connecting with logic, numbers exchanging with numbers, growth interfacing with growth — people in this system are instruments, means, pieces on a board. That message carried something different. He treated me as an end, not a means.
I don’t know where moments like this come more easily, and where they don’t. I only know that this one happened.
The stranger probably didn’t think that much about it. He just read a line, liked it, and came to tell me. That’s all.
But that “that’s all” — I’ve been thinking about it ever since.