I’m not trying to stop aging. I’m trying to learn how to age well.
Something changes when you realize you may have already lived half your life.
At that point, the questions become different. Approaching fifty, I began wondering: How many healthy years do I have ahead? What should I eat? How should I move? How do I protect my mind? What does beauty look like after fifty? Could I reach one hundred—and if I did, what kind of one-hundred-year-old would I want to be?
Those questions became conversations. The conversations became research. The research became notebooks. And the notebooks began becoming books. That is how Health Beauty Longevity began.
Where it really started
The year before I emigrated to America, my father had a stroke brought on by high blood pressure. I was twenty-eight. I watched him gradually lose his speech and his movement, and I understood that illness does not only destroy a body—it reshapes a whole family. He died of a second stroke when I was thirty-eight. If I had known more about health then, perhaps I could have done more for him.
For nearly twenty years I ran a Chinese restaurant in the United States. Through its window I watched the lives of countless customers, and I watched their health change: Parkinson’s, the aftermath of strokes, amputations from diabetes. Twelve years ago I took a hard look at my own health, and that look became the turning point of my life. Books became my teachers and companions, and I have been learning ever since.
I came to believe that health is not simply food plus exercise. It is a harmony of the whole person—emotional, psychological, and environmental. That belief became my first book, 《健康由我》 Health By Me, and it runs through everything on this site.
My philosophy fits in four lines
睡得着 · 吃得对 · 走得动 · 想得开
Sleep well. Eat right. Keep moving. Keep an open mind.
What I value most as I approach fifty is not simply a long life, but the possibility of reaching ninety or one hundred while still recognizing myself: mentally clear, independent, mobile, able to care for myself, and still engaged with life.
I am not the expert. I am the fellow traveler.
I do not position myself as someone who has discovered every answer. I am a learner, an observer, a researcher, an experimenter, a writer. I am living this life too. I notice things. I ask questions. I learn. And I share what I discover.
I write from ordinary life: aging, food, family, learning English as an adult, gardening, tea, caring for the generation before me and understanding the one after. I move between Chinese ways of thinking and American ways of living, and I try to bring the best of both to the page.
Nothing here is medical advice. I am not a physician. I distinguish, as carefully as I can, between my personal experience, scientific evidence, expert guidance, and my own observations.
Short bio
Rong Chen (陈蓉) is a writer and lifelong learner exploring how to live the second half of life with health, curiosity, and everyday wisdom. After a career in corporate finance and nearly twenty years running a Chinese restaurant in the United States, she turned her own health transformation into books—《健康由我》 Health By Me (2025) and Mastering Time with Rhythm (2026)—and into Health Beauty Longevity, a publishing brand built around one question: how do we live longer while remaining healthy, capable, and fully engaged with life?