get to know our founder matthew lu, beyond maize
About Me
Hi, I’m Matthew Lu (陆马休)—a writer, educator, and cultural bridge-builder based between the U.S. and China.
My journey hasn’t followed a straight line. I studied finance and marketing in college, but after graduation, I turned down conventional career paths and moved to China, searching for discomfort, discovery, and a deeper sense of purpose. That decision, disorienting to others, clarifying for me, set everything in motion.
Over the past seven years, I’ve taught, mentored, and collaborated with students across borders, helping them find clarity in uncertainty and voice in their own stories. I founded Maize Education as a response to what I believe education should be: not a funnel into prestige, but a space for transformation, rigor, and meaning-making. I work at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, creativity, and cultural literacy—guiding others not toward easy answers, but toward deeper questions.
Alongside coaching, I write fiction, essays, and poetry, host a podcast on identity and cultural in-betweenness, and co-lead the C² Collective, a community for globally minded young people. Across all these projects, my mission is to cultivate more thoughtful humans, people capable of navigating ambiguity, bridging difference, and building lives of intention and imagination.
Whether I’m teaching, writing, or simply listening, I’m animated by the same question: how can we live wisely and well, together in a fractured world?
Newsletter and Podcast
I believe in curation as a form of care: selecting, questioning, and connecting ideas not just to inform but to transform.
Curation², my biweekly newsletter, weaves together psychology, culture, creativity, and global trends (China and the world) through sharp commentary and eclectic recommendations. It’s where you’ll find essays, annotated links, and the occasional poetic thought spiral. Subscribe on our main page.
Paired with it is Liminal Space, a podcast spotlighting people whose lives unfold between cultures, disciplines, or personal transitions. Through intimate interviews and unexpected stories, we explore the texture of “in-betweenness” and how it often shapes the most interesting lives.
Together, these two projects form an ongoing exploration of how we learn, grow, and make meaning in a world full of complexity.
C^2 Collective Community
The C² Collective is a multicultural community I founded to bring globally-minded young people together through shared curiosity and collaboration.
We host salons, scavenger hunts, creative dinners, podcast nights, and social impact events across China with a focus on cross-cultural exchange, creative growth, and joyful learning. Our values? Peace, empathy, creativity, and open-mindedness.
There are no membership fees, no resume sorting, just good people building thoughtful, purpose-driven experiences together.
If you’re looking for a space to explore big ideas and small joys with others who “get it,” C² is for you.
Based in China. Open to the world.
My Writing
I write across genres, fiction, poetry, essays, and the occasional vinyl-fueled review, exploring what it means to live, learn, and feel in the in-between. My work often dwells in liminal spaces: between languages, cultures, identities, and emotional states.
Beyond fiction, I write poetry that captures small, elusive emotional shifts; critical essays on creativity, education, and philosophy; and track-by-track vinyl reflections that treat music as both artifact and feeling. I see writing as a form of noticing, a way to resist erasure, reckon with memory, and make beauty out of complexity. Although I post on Substack, you can also read the Chinese and English versions in our blog.
