If I take one book to Nantucket, it can only be Moby-Dick. The name of this island was underlined and circled again and again during my student years. These passages were my earliest hook — and the opening of this storyline.

"A man may stand there and put all America behind him."

— Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

"A dozen gulls still follow the white waves tumbling at the stern, now and then plunging sharply to snatch at food in the water. Pitiable little ballerinas — yellow-beaked, white-feathered, clean and slender — they spread their strong, sinewy wings and, along the lightest and most graceful of curves, skate rhythmically upon the back of the wind. The wind's back is broad, and very cold. The wind's tongue carries the raw, briny smell of salt water. In the black-robed witch's bottle, the night brews thicker and thicker. Over the sea at forty-one degrees north latitude there still lingers a film of frosted, translucent something, resisting the freezing of the dark. Once out on the open sea, there is nothing left to touch or to hold."

— Yu Guangzhong, Nantucket (trans.)

"Note: Nantucket is a small island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, at the northeastern corner of the United States — fourteen miles long, three and a half miles wide, and about thirty miles from the mainland. From the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Nantucket was one of the world's centers of whaling and candle-making. The opening chapters of Herman Melville's immortal masterpiece Moby-Dick are set on this island."

— Yu Guangzhong, Nantucket (trans.)

"One day, someone had a sudden thought: selling piping-hot coffee to Seattleites battered by the cold wind would surely bring them a good deal of warmth. So, from Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, he chose the name Starbuck — the coffee-loving first mate among the crew, a name rich with the flavor of the fishing trade — and named the coffeehouse after him. And so, in 1971, the first Starbucks officially opened at 1912 Pike Place."

— Yu Zixi, Budget Travel (trans.)

A Storyline Threading the Two Coasts

In June 2026, ten years after graduation, I used a stretch of time off to return to Boston — this time to run the B.A.A. 10K, and then to give the rest of the trip to the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, a place I had wanted to see since my student days.

Ten years ago I moved from the Greater Boston Area, MA to the Greater Seattle Area, WA. Coming back to Massachusetts a decade later, the storyline seems to close a loop: just as those quoted passages say, Seattle's Starbucks and Massachusetts's Nantucket are bound together by a line drawn through Moby-Dick — Starbucks takes its name from Starbuck, the coffee-loving first mate, and the place where Moby-Dick weighs anchor is Nantucket.

41°N Seattle WA · PNW Boston Nantucket MA · ISLAND N
Seattle — dashed line — Boston & Nantucket. A whaling route across the continent.

A Worldview: Storyline-Driven Plot Progression and Completion

Unlike most of my peers, I don't travel out of town much. Most of the time it's for a conference, or together with friends; and there's a very personal reason too — I dislike long-distance travel, so I mostly stay tucked away in the PNW.

But I've always held a worldview: storyline-driven plot progression and a pursuit of completion — and that includes storyline-driven travel. For me a trip isn't about checking off a coordinate; it's about pushing a line whose foreshadowing was laid long ago toward the scene it was meant to reach, and adding a note of "completion" to a chapter left hanging for years. Nantucket, to me, was exactly such a plot node waiting to be lit up.

My first time in Seattle was 2014. It was a solo trip — I traveled through several West Coast cities on my own, including SF and LA, and Seattle was the last stop, because a college senior of mine was interning at MSR (Microsoft Research) and hosted me. I never imagined that after graduation I'd work full time in this city, all the way to now.

Looking back, that 2014 West Coast trip was really the opening chapter of this storyline; and this 2026 trip to Massachusetts is the scene where it circles back to its origin and pushes forward again. From the Pacific Northwest to the waters south of Cape Cod, from the first Starbucks at Pike Place to the little island where Moby-Dick weighs anchor — the threads were always there. It just took me ten years to draw them into a single route.

📍 Nantucket, MA — the storyline is complete here. 🏝️