Greetings!  My {first, English} name is Margin, like the margin of a page, or of what’s possible.  My {middle, Mandarin} name is Tianya | 天涯, which translates as “the margins of the heavens.” My {last, family} name is 郑 | Zheng, which is the name of a regional state that existed during the Zhou (周) dynasty of China. My pronouns are they/them/theirs. I do not like honorifics, but if you insist on using one for me, I permit Mx. or Mz. I reside in the vicinity of Philadelphia, PA, United States.

I strive to be a fusion of the very old and the very new, drawing from the cultural riches of times past while diving deep into what it means to be a human in the current day, in a world fevering in many layers of crisis. I graduated from Haverford College in May 2023, receiving a BA in music and mathematics, two disciplines which are my tools in the striving for social justice and the nurturing of community.  I join together reason and emotion, driven at the core by not just a delight for sound and symbol, but a deep love of human.

I am a keyboardist and composer, 
a mathematician and poet, 
a curious forever-learner,
an abolitionist and youth liberationist in becoming, 
a child of immigrants from China,
an ethically-questioning vegan, 
a Quaker-interested Seeker, 
a genderfluid, madly queer creature
a spirited dancer, 
an interdisciplinary creator,
a novice plant-grower,
a Leo on the cusp of Cancer, 
an Educator still in the process of deschooling myself, 
a person of yin and yang, 
a lover of human,
philosopher, artist, awakener,
a many-faceted soul at once bold and timid and dynamic...

As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are externally inexhaustible.  

(from Hermann Hesse’s The Steppenwolf, translated by Basil Creighton, Joseph Mileck, and Horst Frenz)

I am incomplete, a flawed and fractured being, yet striving for healing, for harmony, for whole.