The Excitement And Anxiety Of A New Start

Bill Holdar, a father of two in San Antonio, is starting a new chapter this month—this time for real.

He’s going back to work, after three years as a stay-at-home dad and one ill-fated attempt to return to his job as a teacher right before the pandemic hit. His 2-year-old daughter, Nora, recently wrapped up a year of chemotherapy treatment. She and her brother got vaccinated against Covid-19 this summer. The whole family is heading back into the world: school, daycare, a prekindergarten program.

“It’s all starting to get really different, really fast,” Mr. Holdar told me after watching Nora settle in next to her new classmates during circle time. He felt relief that normal life seemed to have arrived, and trepidation about the possibility of the kids getting sick or having trouble adjusting to an unfamiliar rhythm.

“I’ll definitely miss those other days,” he said of time spent at home doing arts and crafts or catching bugs with the kids on the trails out back. “But it’ll also be freeing.”

After some false starts, this fall is a moment of transition for many Americans. The halting, tenuous shifts of the last couple of years—half-empty offices and halfhearted return plans, kids home again thanks to another mandatory quarantine—are dwindling. We’re returning to our uninhibited lives, whether that means restarting old routines or taking the plunge on big life changes, with all the accompanying excitement and terror.

Lissa Jean Ferrell says she feels like she’s starting a second life. After two years in which school was disrupted for millions of American students, the lawyer and divorced mom finally saw all three of her daughters graduate this spring—the youngest from high school, the middle from college, and the oldest, a law student, belatedly celebrating her 2020 commencement with a rescheduled Georgetown University ceremony. Now Ms. Ferrell is selling her longtime home in New Jersey and moving. Where is up in the air. (Top contenders include Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and California.)

“The world is open to me,” she says. “I feel like I’ve done my job and now I’ve earned the right to sit back and live for myself.”

Our modern lives have been filled with more and more transitions over the years, says Bruce Feiler, the author of a book on the topic. We have more autonomy and options than the generations that came before us, he says. People are seizing on this moment to swap jobs, partners, regions and religions.

“Nobody can cope with this much change,” he notes. Some of us launch into multi-item to-do lists, determined to ace the transformation in a weekend. Others “lie under the covers in a fetal position with their cat and they say, ‘I’m never going to get through it.’ ”

Both paths are wrong, he says. Instead, take time to mark the transition. Commemorate it with a ceremony, a trip, a special meal. Talk about your feelings, instead of blocking them out.

Then try something new. Things were upside down for so long anyway. Now is the moment to embrace your creativity, he says, launching a personal project like woodworking or poetry-writing. Shed things you don’t like about yourself, from extra pounds to your people-pleasing tendencies. Finding a community to go through it with you can help.

Of course, it’s almost never easy. Ms. Ferrell, the new empty-nester, says she wakes in the middle of the night sometimes, heart heavy with the surreal realization that her girls will soon be strewn from Los Angeles to London. Will Pryor, who moved to Raleigh, N.C., last month for his first job as an attending physician, worries about how welcoming his new community will be to his same-sex relationship.

“We go where we have to, where we’re needed,” says the 35-year-old, who finds it thrilling and strange to be done with a decade of medical training.

A few hours away in Charlotte, N.C., Christine Schmid is marking the days until her Sept. 17 wedding with an iPhone countdown and daily love notes from her soon-to-be husband. Forty-five years old, she never thought she’d marry, opting instead to focus on her career in human resources.

She can’t wait to wear the off-white gown that makes her feel like Cinderella and be reunited with extended family coming in for the occasion. But grief is ever-present too. The dear friend who helped set her up with her fiancé passed away from cancer last year, as did Ms. Schmid’s beloved dog. The friend had been set to perform the wedding ceremony; the pup was going to walk down the aisle.

Now both are gone, and Ms. Schmid is reckoning with losing a part of herself, too. She’s changing her name, becoming a stepmother, losing the ability to do what she likes without asking or informing anyone else.

“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t giving up ‘me’ to become ‘us,’ ” she says. Taking some time for herself each workday—an hourlong break, no interruptions allowed—has helped, along with supporting causes she cares about, like animal rights.

Even the happiest of changes can come with some stress, says psychologist Joshua Coleman, as we grapple with the future and all its unknowns. Plus, many of us were promised prior fresh starts that didn’t materialize. We had to reschedule the bat mitzvah again because of a new Covid-19 variant; we had job offers rescinded due to a swinging economy. Holding our breath through the uncertainty, exhausted after so much back and forth, can make transitions even harder, says Dr. Coleman, who is a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families.

Examine your anxieties up close, he recommends. Are they rational? Parse what you’re afraid of and figure out which problems are solvable. Then solve them. Talk back to the worries that are irrational, reminding yourself of past transitions that worked out well.

Emily Hulthen’s transition to parenthood earlier in the pandemic was so trying she considered not having any more children. Working until 1 a.m. while watching her son during the day, she felt exhausted and irrationally angry, she says.

“I thought I would be a natural at this,” the 32-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, remembers thinking.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and found relief with therapy.

She still feels guilt and sadness over her son’s babyhood. But pregnant with a daughter, she told me she was grateful for the chance to try again. Watching her son get vaccinated recently, thinking about the pumpkin picking and tailgating to come this fall as a family of four, she cried.

“It felt like it was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says.

Her daughter, Nora Lynne Birnbrich, was born on Friday.

They call themselves TikTok refugees—and the app they are fleeing to is a lot more Chinese than the video-sharing app whose U.S. fate now hangs in the balance.

After Supreme Court justices Friday seemed inclined to let stand a law that would shut down TikTok in the U.S., the Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu , translated in English as Little Red Book, has received a flood of American TikTok users. They are looking for a sanctuary or a way to protest the potentially imminent TikTok ban—never mind that they don’t speak Chinese.

Charlotte Silverstein, a 32-year-old publicist in Los Angeles, downloaded Xiaohongshu on Sunday night after seeing videos on TikTok about migrating to the app, which Americans dubbed “RedNote.” She described the move as a “last act of defiance” in her frustration about the potential TikTok ban.

“Everyone has been super welcoming and sweet,” said Silverstein, who has made three posts so far. “I love the sense of community that I’m seeing already.”

By Monday, TikTok refugees had pushed Xiaohongshu to the top of the free-app chart on Apple ’s App Store.

“I’m really nervous to be on this app, but I also find it to be really exciting and thrilling that we’re all doing this,” one new Xiaohongshu user said in a video clip on Sunday. “I’m sad that TikTok might actually go, but if this is where we’re gonna be hanging out, welcome to my page!” Within a day, the video had more than 3,000 comments and 6,000 likes. And the user had amassed 24,000 followers.

Neither Xiaohongshu nor TikTok responded to requests for comment.

The flow of refugees, while serving as a symbolic dissent against TikTok’s possible shutdown, doesn’t mean Xiaohongshu can easily serve as a replacement for Americans. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the U.S., and it has drawn many creators who take advantage of the app’s features to advertise and sell their products.

Most of the content on Xiaohongshu is in Chinese and the app doesn’t have a simple way to auto-translate the posts into English.

At a time of a strained U.S.-China relationship, some new Chinese-American friendships are budding on an app that until now has had few international users.

“I like that two countries are coming together,” said Sarah Grathwohl, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Seattle, who made a Xiaohongshu account on Sunday night. “We’re bonding over this experience.”

Granthwohl doesn’t speak Chinese, so she has been using Google Translate for help. She said she isn’t concerned about data privacy and would rather try a new Chinese app than shift her screentime to Instagram Reels.

Another opportunity for bonding was a photo of English practice questions from a Chinese textbook, with the caption, “American please.” American Xiaohongshu users helped answer the questions in the comments, receiving a “thank u Honey,” from the person who posted the questions.

By Monday evening, there have been more than 72,000 posts with the hashtag #tiktokrefugee on Xiaohongshu, racking up some 34 million views.

In an English-language post titled “Welcome TikTok refugees,” posted by a Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu user, an American user responded in Chinese with a cat photo and the words, “Thank you for your warm welcome. Everyone is so cute. My cat says thanks, too.” The user added, “I hope this is the correct translation.”

Some Chinese users are also using the livestreaming function to invite TikTok migrants to chat. One chat room hosted by a Chinese English tutor had more than 179,900 visits with several Americans exchanging cultural views with Chinese users.

ByteDance-owned TikTok isn’t available in China but has a Chinese sister app, Douyin. American users can’t download Douyin, though; unlike Xiaohongshu, it is only accessible from Chinese app stores.

On Xiaohongshu, Chinese users have been sharing tutorials and tips in English for American users on how to use the app. Meanwhile, on TikTok, video clips have also multiplied over the past two days teaching users the correct pronunciation of Xiaohongshu—shau-hong-SHOO—and its culture.

Xiaohongshu may be new to most Americans, but in China, it is one of the most-used social-media apps. Backed by investors like Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group , Xiaohongshu is perhaps best described as a Chinese mix of Instagram and Reddit and its users increasingly treat it as a search engine for practical information.

Despite its Little Red Book name, Xiaohongshu has little in common with the compilation of Mao Zedong ’s political writings and speeches. In fact, the app aspires to be a guidebook about anything but politics.

Conceived as a shopping guide for affluent urbanites in 2013, Xiaohongshu has morphed into a one-stop shop for lifestyle and shopping recommendations. Every day, its more than 300 million users, who skew toward educated young women, create, share and search for posts about anything from makeup tutorials to career-development lessons, game strategies or camping skills.

Over the years, Xiaohongshu users have developed a punchy writing style, with posts accompanied by images and videos for an Instagram feel.

Chinese social-media platforms are required to watch political content closely. Xiaohongshu’s focus on lifestyle content, eschewing anything that might seem political, makes it less of a regulatory target than a site like Weibo , which in 2021 was fined at least $2.2 million by China’s cyberspace watchdog for disseminating “illegal information.”

“I don’t expect to read news or discussion of serious issues on Xiaohongshu,” said Lin Ying, a 26-year-old game designer in Beijing.

The American frenzy over a Chinese app is the reverse of a migration in recent years by Chinese social-media users seeking refuge from censorship on Western platforms , such as X, formerly known as Twitter, or, more recently, BlueSky.

Just like TikTok users who turn to the app for fun, Xiaohongshu users also seek entertainment through livestreams and short video clips as well as photos and text-posts on the platform.

Xiaohongshu had roughly 1.3 million U.S. mobile users in December, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which estimates that U.S. downloads of the app in the week ending Sunday almost tripled compared with the week before.

Sensor Tower data indicates that Xiaohongshu became the top-ranked social-networking and overall free app on Apple’s App Store and the 8th top-ranked social app on the Google Play Store on Monday, “a feat it has never achieved before,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

Run by Shanghai-based Xingin Information Technology, Xiaohongshu makes money primarily from advertising, according to a Xiaohongshu spokeswoman. The company was valued at $17 billion after its latest round of private-equity investment in the summer, according to research firm PitchBook Data.

Not everyone is singing kumbaya. Some Chinese Xiaohongshu users are worried about the language barrier. And some American TikTok users are concerned about data safety on the Chinese app.

But many are hoping to build bridges between the two countries.

“Y’all might think Americans are hateful because of how our politicians are, but I promise you not all of us are like that,” one American woman said on a Sunday video she posted on Xiaohongshu with Chinese subtitles.

She went on to show how to make cheese quesadillas using a waffle maker.

The video collected more than 11,000 likes and 3,000 comments within 24 hours. “It’s so kind of you to use Chinese subtitles,” read one popular comment posted by a user from Sichuan province.

Another Guangdong-based user commented with a bilingual “friendly reminder”: “On Chinese social-media platforms please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”

The Excitement And Anxiety Of A New Start

Transitions can be tough—here’s how to embrace them in this moment of change.

Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban