The road ahead —
I know it will be hard, and long.
Perhaps filled with deception,
or endless storms and lightning,
and all those bitter waves of disappointment.

The road ahead
is shrouded in grey, the path muddy,
thorns everywhere.
They've worn through my toes, cut my legs —
but I am not afraid.
I walk on, more resolute than before.

Again and again, a wish rises.
Again and again, it falls in disappointment.
But I will keep raising wishes without end
and push harder still —
even if only a handful come true in the end.

The road ahead
is full of something sacred and glorious,
of pride and confidence.
I will walk it, step by step,
letting sunlight rest quietly on my face,
a quiet pride glowing through the dark.

The eighteen-year-old walks this road alone.
But I know —
the road ahead
needs a kindred spirit walking beside you.
On the road ahead,
we think deeply together, strive together.

For her, I'll place the most beautiful wreath —
to make her impossibly lovely.
A pull-tab ring will do as a band —
even the ordinary holds extraordinary happiness.

The road ahead
may sometimes find me weeping alone in a corner.
But so what.
The drive forward will not change.
Newspapers, still gathered one page at a time.
The body, still shaped one day at a time.
Brotherhood, only growing stronger.

Treading the road ahead,
there is the joy of unexpected meetings —
drinking deep into the night with old friends long parted.
In the days of football, we all fouled and played dirty.
In the days of studying, we skipped class,
turned in blank papers, and teased our teachers ~~~~~~

At eighteen, I work hard —
but I know I need to work twice as hard.
On that long road still ahead,
my brothers and I
will raise a future together,
stand at the highest point.

What was helpless falls away; what arrives is glory.
The road ahead, though long,
at its far end —
maturity, pride, grace, extraordinary achievement.
Ten thousand rays of light, gold in every direction,
spirit soaring, drawing every eye.

But one thing —
that heart has been hard.

A Note, Years Later

Reading this again, I feel tenderness more than embarrassment. The eighteen-year-old who wrote this had no idea what was coming — the cities, the companies, the roads that turned out to be dead ends, the friends who drifted away, the ones who stayed.

He was excessive. Earnest to the point of naivety. He believed in brotherhood and glory and the girl he would crown with flowers. Some of that came true in ways he wouldn't have recognized. Most of it didn't, the way most things at eighteen don't.

But I'm glad he wrote it down. He had no reason to think anyone would read it — not even his future self.

"All grown-ups were once children, although few of them remember it."
— The Little Prince

1.

In the summer of 2008, at eighteen — after the gaokao, at home on holiday — I bought my first computer. In a second-floor room beside National Highway 316, I wrote a poem called The Road Ahead, casting my eyes toward the future.

The ending I imagined held both dazzling growth and the coldness of the world. In that sense, perhaps I was a little bit oracle — the prophecy came true. I remember not wanting to write the ending too bleakly at eighteen, so I used ** to stand in for the actual words. Seventeen years later, in 2025, "bleak" is not an unfair word for the human heart — I mean the heart, not material progress or technology.

Seventeen is a prime number. Seven is a beautiful prime — the universe speaks without words: a week has seven days, music has seven notes, a rainbow has seven colors. The number seventeen has brought extraordinary luck to a certain brand. Standing at my own freezing point today, I wonder: can fortune turn? Can I be granted just a little luck?

2.

Seventeen years. Lucky ones. This prime number divides neatly into two parts: seven years studying (2008–2015), ten years working (2015–2025).

A few days ago I had a voice call with Teacher Tang in Beijing, talking through my current confusion. At the end, he used one word: lucky. He was right. I am a person who has been looked after — truly lucky. (Evidence: at ten years old, I nearly drowned three times and was saved each time.)

Seven years of school: two master's degrees, one in Beijing and one in Paris. I learned English, French, and Japanese. My major was computer science, and I interned at a gaming company on Huixin East Street in Chaoyang — across from Beijing Union University. My salary was apparently the highest among the student interns, though I had no idea at the time.

After graduating in 2015, I worked eight years at Huawei and Tencent in Shenzhen — the best internationally-oriented companies, large platforms, brilliant colleagues, and the finest offices I could have asked for: Huawei's Bantian headquarters, Tencent's Binhai Tower. When COVID ended in 2023, I set a world-travel plan in motion — fulfilling an impulse sparked at sixteen by a high school geography book. From September 30, 2023, when I left Tencent, to October 2025: two full years. After two years of wandering, standing at the milestone of thirty-five, I find myself lost and in pain. Thirty-five — too old to go back, not yet high enough to reach forward.

3.

This luck also showed up as sensitivity: to herd psychology, to sociology, to the way large companies manage their people. It showed up in my risk awareness and financial management. The Crowd, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile — these four classics gave me framework and practice. I was very fortunate not to have joined the collective game of Chinese real estate. Counting from Evergrande's collapse in 2021, 2025 is the fifth year of this financial crisis — which also became the backdrop for Tencent's cost-cutting that ended my contract.

Post-graduation luck #1: Salaries from Huawei and Tencent allowed me to build real savings — a first curve.

Post-graduation luck #2: I put 70% of those savings into Xiaomi stock at 1.810 HKD. Using tools, using the insight of smarter people, using the current of the times — making money with money. As long as I don't lose, I'll take it.

4.

Perhaps because of my sensitivity to social trends — or call it personal heroism (none of my business, yet I couldn't help paying attention; why couldn't I just be an ostrich?) — my occasional remarks left people puzzled. Two moments led my manager to misread me, and ultimately to the non-renewal.

① In 2021, stationed at a Tencent subsidiary in Wuhan, I helped the Shenzhen manager oversee the local team. At year-end, after the performance review, the manager asked — as was his custom — if I had a question. I asked from a macro-trend angle: Would the Shenzhen team be expanding headcount in 2022? He immediately read it as me complaining about having too many miscellaneous tasks. "Mars, I don't know what you're trying to say." I explained at once — it wasn't personal, I was trying to gauge the financial crisis's impact on the internet industry, based on signals I'd picked up from senior leadership chatting in the elevator. The misunderstanding seemed to pass.

② At the end of 2022, after another review, he again asked for my question. Again I approached it from a macro angle: "I feel like young people today are tending toward 'lying flat'..." He went silent. More than half a year later, in August 2023, he called me in and said my contract would not be renewed in September — citing that "lying flat" remark. Only then did I realize I'd been misunderstood a second time: he thought I was announcing my own checked-out attitude, when I was discussing a societal trend. By then it was too late. I accepted the outcome calmly — and set the world-travel plan in motion. People are alive. I had no mortgage. Money: you can't bring it when you're born, you can't take it when you die.

③ There was also a personal reason for leaving. People are products of their environment. Engineering-trained thinking is overly rational. Seven years of school, eight years of work — day and night conditioned by computational thinking. The cost: unable to relax, unable to speak lightly, unable to be interesting. And the essence of life is easy laughter, looseness, vitality. So I needed to break out and change myself. Only now, having stepped off the track I'd been on for over a decade, the difficulty of reinventing myself has hit me all at once. I am confused, and lost.

5.

When I graduated in 2015, I was a blank page — emotional intelligence, the ability to handle conflict and misunderstanding: all zero. Now in 2025, on this National Day holiday, standing in my hometown, I find myself thinking of her — a high school classmate. Six and a half years after graduation, in the half-year before I finished my master's, we became a couple. But she had already been working for two and a half years, and her plan to return to our hometown was already set. By June, when I graduated, my plan was Guangzhou or Shenzhen. So we had half a year, then long-distance, then well-meaning elders who made things worse — and that was the end of it.

Today I thought about adding her on WeChat and suggesting a coffee — just to reconnect, just as a courtesy. I also need people around me to offer some life-level advice. I'm someone who genuinely listens.

In the years that followed, I had two more relationships — one for four years, a gap of three years, then one for two years. There were problems and shortcomings on my side in both. Those experiences confirmed something: everything takes time to learn. Work requires investment. Love, family, and life all require investment. God is fair. Nothing can be done lazily.

6.

I first read The Three-Body Problem on a flight from Beijing to Guangzhou in 2015, the day I graduated. Later at Huawei, I read it a second time — taking notes and writing diary entries — so I could discuss it more precisely with my colleagues over lunch. In 2025, on a break in Los Angeles, I read the whole trilogy a third time, in English, to improve my language skills. Ten years of devotion to one book series. I suppose that makes me strange. Time to let it go. Time to forget. Having written it here, that's enough of a footprint.

7.

This is the seventh section of this diary. Seven is a beautiful prime. The universe speaks without words. A kind of magical luck.

I have four choices:
① Go to Tokyo, stay in IT, work at a high level — fully level up my Japanese and live Japanese culture.
② Attend NUS for a third master's in Financial Engineering, pivot to investment banking using my computer science background, and build a life in Singapore.
③ Double down on cross-border e-commerce with North America, become an international businessman, and build a life in California.
④ Do none of the above — continue traveling, and spend winters back in my home base: Shenzhen.

What makes all four agonizing is fundamentally the same: my cash savings haven't reached where I'd like them to be. Option ② means 500,000 RMB in tuition plus time. Option ③ means heavy capital investment. Option ④ means pure spending with no effort. All of them make me hesitate.

Here I offer a small prayer: in the next three to five years, may Xiaomi stock slowly and steadily rise. The appreciation of that asset would give me far more freedom of choice.

Since 2023, driven by a kind of overflow of goodwill, I've been practicing active generosity toward the people and situations around me. From a market-economics perspective, it hasn't paid off — economically, it's been a net drain. And some of the low behavior I've encountered — in contrast to the environments of Huawei and Tencent — has been hard to digest. Goodwill is finite. It must go to the right people and the right causes.

Keep going. In these coming months, I need to think clearly and choose one path — then throw myself into it completely.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
— The Little Prince

One of my principles is keeping my words, and practicing this principle in my daily life. I think I will get good fortune in my future. I think I will get real friends across the globe. I think I will be a great man, and then meet the One I would love and arrive at the destiny of the whole life.

I messaged my Bishop, Brother Paul and Sister Spence "Merry Christmas and I will be back to LA at March 2026" on December 25th, 2025, when I was living and studying in Tokyo. I did it, and now I am in Arcadia, Los Angeles — driving from Arcadia to Diamond Bar every Sunday morning. Missionary Hines and Smith are continuing to teach me important concepts. This is the reason why I am now writing this journal to make a learning conclusion.

The concept of Endowment and the meaning of the Temple — I read these two articles and understood the holy meaning of entering the temple: it requires the ward bishop's recommendation and the stake president's approval. I also learned the rules of temple clothing and temple marriage regulations.

Back in March 2025, the first time I was in Diamond Bar Ward, I could not distinguish the concepts of ward, stake, and temple — but I have since figured out the difference and the levels of meaning within LDS. And I had never encountered the words of Sacrament, Baptize, Missionary, Priest, Priesthood, Covenant, Gospel, Apostle, Eternality, Zion, Jerusalem, Dignity, Humble, Charity, Prophet, Testimony, Testament, Doctrine, Moses, Temptation, Worship, Resurrection, Quorum, Ordinance, Redeem, Tithing, Obligation, Repentance, Bishop, Relief, Reverent, Salvation, and Savior — even though I studied in a well-regarded university and my English skills are strong by Cambridge IELTS standards. But now, those words are deeply carved in my head after just one year of part-time reading and understanding. This is the gift from God. This is the reflection of my principle of keeping my word through action.

My missionaries Hines and Smith keep in touch with me by email and were happy to see me back in LA again. They are great people and friends who share wisdom and knowledge with me, and are now introducing the Temple Baptism to me. I am doing my best to arrange a temple recommendation with my Bishop Prochet.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful night on which I wrote down this journal from my inner heart. God bless us a peaceful life, and God bless every kind and struggling person to have enough energy to chase their eternal will.

In humanity's eternal search for the meaning of life, Hermann Hesse's literary classic Siddhartha, the documentary Samsara, and Kim Ki-duk's film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring together construct a grand metaphor of flux and awakening. Though different in form, all three converge on a single core: life is not a straight sprint forward, but a circular motion that repeats — and only through deep experience and complete release can the individual reach the other shore within.

I. The Ground of Desire: Endless Circulation

The documentary Samsara, through its silent and stunning visual language, renders the cycles of the macro world. From volcanic eruption to industrial assembly line, from thriving metropolis to barren wasteland, the camera captures the frenzy and exhaustion of all living beings driven by desire, aversion, and delusion. This "samsara" is not only the religious concept of reincarnation — it is the eternal alternation of matter and craving in the actual world.

In Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, this circulation is compressed into the lifespan of a solitary monastery and one monk. The mischievous cruelty of childhood in spring, the stirring of desire in the summer of youth, the enraged killing of middle age in autumn — the director captures with precision how desire sprouts, runs wild, and finally withers through the turning of seasons. Each generation seems to repeat the same errors. This fatalistic sense of recurrence is the most unsettling portrait of what samsara actually means.

II. The Value of Experience: Becoming Enlightened in the World

Hesse puts forward a profound proposition in Siddhartha: wisdom cannot be transmitted — only experience is real. Siddhartha does not simply follow the Buddha's teachings as his friend Govinda does. Instead he chooses to plunge into the world. He passes through the heights of power, the depths of sensual indulgence, and the corruption of wealth — and only then, sitting beside a river, does he hear the earth's song.

This resonates exactly with how the old monk in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter teaches his student. Faced with the student's lostness, he does not offer empty scripture. He lets the young man go — to live through the anguish of love and the judgment of the law. Life must be burned in fire before compassion can rise from the ashes. As Siddhartha discovers, the river — like the flowing images in Samsara — is simultaneously past and future; all suffering and all joy are inseparable parts of a complete life.

III. The Other Shore of Awakening: Letting Go Is Completion

All three works arrive at a transcendent stillness. Samsara ends with the destruction of a sand mandala — a metaphor for the emptiness that remains when all splendor has fallen. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter closes with a new spring arriving: the aged student has become the new master, carrying rocks up the mountain — not only a continuation of ascetic practice, but a calm acceptance of cause and consequence.

Siddhartha's smile beside the river is the highest form of this awakening. He no longer tries to resist time. He no longer tries to escape desire. He has learned to listen. He discovers that the world is already complete — that every single moment contains eternity within it.

How does a drop of water never dry out? By flowing into the sea.

Mild crisis — cash is king.
Moderate crisis — gold is king.
Deep crisis — guns are king.
Extreme crisis — food is king.
No crisis — women are king.

Women are worthless before wealth.
Wealth is worthless before power.
Power is worthless before guns.
Guns are worthless before the poor.
The poor are worthless before women.

In January, while still in Tokyo, I had a series of conversations with ChatGPT and Gemini about psychology and discovered the concept of the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Secondary confirmation came through Xiaohongshu and Douyin. HSP is a double-edged trait — learning to use it well has become one of the central questions of this period. That month I wrote a piece on the subject: Life as a Game: The HSP's Sense of Authorship. Another piece — Life as a Game: If Xiaomi Loses, Money Has No Meaning — was also, in hindsight, an expression of the same observational sensitivity applied to social and market trends.

Being able to spend three months in Tokyo came down to two things. One: as a student I'd once turned down a Waseda University winter camp — this short language program was a kind of private restitution. Two: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano, Tokyo Love Story, Long Vacation — all lodged in my mind years ago. Sakamoto in particular, ever since his pure piano piece Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, has felt to me like someone who communes with something beyond the ordinary — what in Chinese one might call "channeling spirits." Today, in the early hours in Los Angeles, a blogger's analysis confirmed: Ryuichi Sakamoto was an HSP. That same perceptual faculty is what made me back Liang Bo and Chen Chusheng years ago, when both looked like acts of defiance — against the crowd, against commercial logic. Under long-termism, both have gone far and stayed steady. An HSP who learns to use the trait well becomes a late-bloomer of consequence. Whether Liang Bo and Chen Chusheng are HSPs I can't say with certainty. But perhaps the converse is more reliable: HSPs are naturally suited to become artists.

Combining my childhood experiences, my record at Huawei and Tencent, and my track record reading social and industry trends, I've confirmed it: I am highly sensitive. The productive application of this trait is industrial trend observation — specifically, using it to select companies in public markets and wait with patience, generating the financial returns that fund the life rhythm I want.

This round of sensitivity, turned inward: honest reflection, pushing toward genuine self-knowledge.

Eight Questions

① Can I really sustain all four languages — Chinese, English, Japanese, French — along with a lifelong curiosity about the world? English has long been real: communication, work, reading full books. But do I have the capacity and the time for Japanese and French at that same level? When I was younger I never found learning taxing. Recently I've confirmed what I'd rather not admit: switching between language databases causes a pause of several seconds — a glitch that makes me uncomfortable. And that discomfort is the signal. I don't need to cling to this. I can move the language hobby further down the timeline. The most urgent thing, the thing that matters most right now: apply HSP's observational acuity to industry and market analysis, select the right stocks, secure sufficient financial returns. Then come back later, leisurely, and be a language enthusiast. Which is, after all, itself an HSP's kind of joy.

② Can I really work out a dimensional-reduction way of living? Financially, using a USD card to spend in Japan or China is the cleaner form of that arbitrage. The full version means becoming a business operator — running cross-border e-commerce between North America and East Asia, selling Chinese and Japanese goods to North American consumers, needing only modest USD margins to live comfortably in East Asia without being an office worker. I ran small experiments in 2025. 2026 I'll push a little harder. The market will have its answer eventually. As long as I don't lose money, even without profits, I'll have learned something real.

③ Have I overestimated my ability to stay idle without restlessness? Taleb — author of my favorite book — worked eight years, then became himself. As an HSP, I was never well-suited to repetitive engineering work; during the industry's upswing the mismatch didn't show, but from 2021 onward the environment grew relentlessly intense, and the "spiritual quality" HSPs seek became a liability. Eight years in, the software engineering chapter ended. I'd actually been preparing for that ending for three years — modeling it loosely on Taleb's eight years — building toward the freedom to be idle on my own terms. This is now year three of that global wandering. And some anxiety has started to surface. I once wanted to test whether I had the stillness of Ding Yuanying from The Distant Savior — three quiet years in an ancient city. Year three tells me: the stillness I assumed I had is not as deep as I believed. This may also connect to a stock that fell nearly 50% over the six months from October 2025 to March 2026. HSPs love solitude — most people can't handle three months without work. For me, solitude requires a foundation of passive income, or a capital base that earns while I rest.

④ Moving between Shenzhen, Tokyo, and Los Angeles creates emotional friction at every transition. I'd never seen plum blossoms before Tokyo — then suddenly saw them everywhere, all at once. Never seen peacocks roaming wild before LA — then they were on every street. Japan's excessive civility and cleanliness. America's absolute freedom and individuality. East Asia whitens its beauty standards; the West darkens them. Sometimes I want the open warmth of a Western embrace; sometimes I want Tokyo's quiet orderliness; sometimes I want China's quality-to-price ratio. This wanting-of-all-three is a black hole in my thinking. I'm trying to build the capacity to inhabit that black hole — to turn it into a genuine synthesis. The probability of succeeding is low. Or at least there's no visible output yet. But there's enough time ahead to keep trying, as long as the financial floor holds. HSPs genuinely love this kind of singular, unreplicable "creation."

⑤ Identity and belonging. Right now I write in Chinese — it's the language I use to communicate with my own soul. Though HSPs have a natural skepticism toward group systems, the Chinese language corpus has been feeding me for thirty years. To genuinely reconstruct that thirty-year imprint would take at least another five years of deliberate rewiring. To strip away three layers of your own skin — that requires a particular kind of ruthlessness. I'll watch quietly to see whether I'm that kind of person.

⑥ Adaptive fluency. In the longer run, I'll probably develop the ability to shift registers entirely — speaking each person's language, meeting each world on its own terms. This doesn't conflict with authenticity; it's a higher-order form of it. The challenge is controlling empathy without emotional flooding, and controlling analytical curiosity without letting it scatter. Seeing the homeless encampments and cannabis culture along LA's streets, I no longer need to empathize or investigate. It simply is. I no longer need to puzzle over why America's infrastructure is so far behind Japan and China. It simply is. What I need to receive is this: America has the world's first-ranked capital markets. Fish where the fish are. Just as SoftBank's PayPay — a Japanese domestic mobile payment system — chose to list on NASDAQ rather than the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

⑦ One more experiment: do I have enough self-discipline to go deep into three books on my reading list — and simultaneously keep my hands off Douyin, Xiaohongshu, WeChat groups, and TikTok?

⑧ A four-year social observation, from someone who holds onto things: this is my fourth visit to Arcadia 88 Beef Noodle in Arcadia — a Shanghai-Taiwanese husband-and-wife shop, first visited in December 2023. A bowl of tomato and egg noodles has gone from $12 to $19. A 58% price increase. Tokyo's basic cost of living has also risen noticeably. Both Japan and America have had years of rising equity markets; some inflation is a natural feature of healthy economic growth. China's deflation is the harder story. After the nostalgia: cook at home.

On the HSP

HSPs are often labeled as "overthinkers" or "too emotional." But high sensitivity has never been a flaw — it is a distinct form of being: fine-grained perception, deep empathy, a rich inner life. A natural inclination toward self-reflection, toward thinking, toward the philosophical and the meaningful. And an equally natural tendency to exhaust in crowds — requiring solitude to recover and settle.

① Inner peace is a feeling of gentle, unobstructed flow. Not the absence of waves — but a deep underlying steadiness. However loud the wind outside, there is a place inside that holds. This peace is not escape. It is the foundation from which an HSP can live well and stay clear.

② Deep relationships. Many assume HSPs avoid people. What we actually avoid is the consumption of shallow small talk and performance. Once inner peace is established, the desire for genuine connection becomes stronger, not weaker. A relationship of mutual understanding and honesty is nourishment for us — not a burden.

③ Professional mastery is the real-world anchor. HSPs may not thrive navigating complex social webs, but we tend to go deep in focused domains. Through sustained accumulation and refinement, building solid expertise creates space for choice — and reduces the friction cost of living in the world.

④ A life aligned with one's values is the destination of all the above. HSPs are acutely intolerant of inauthenticity. When life diverges from inner conviction, the dissonance is constant and corrosive. Only when outer form and inner system match does the HSP feel genuinely grounded, complete, and at peace.

These four connect and build on each other: peace brings inner clarity; clarity opens toward deep relationship; maintaining independence and growth within relationship depends on the confidence that professional mastery provides; and all of it must ultimately land in a life that reflects one's values — completing the loop.

The HSP's Ceiling

The highly sensitive person is, by nature, a receiver of the era's emotional frequencies — built to catch what others miss. The gift runs through every trait. What HSPs are capable of at their best:

1. Hidden group spiritual leader — your depth and contagious quality can move and carry large numbers of people.

2. Authentic expression — in a crowd of performers, you reach the essential truth the fastest.

3. Luminous clarity — you produce what is true, good, and beautiful, because that is what you are.

4. Irreplicable — strong learning capacity, fast update speed, angles that consistently catch people off guard.

5. Introspection at the highest level — mature object separation, able to see clearly into both your own and others' weaknesses mid-game.

High sensitivity paired with high capacity for decisive action — that combination is unstoppable. Without the iron hand, don't ignite the compassionate heart.

① New Year 2025 was in Diamond Bar, Los Angeles County. My daily reading: the English edition of the entire Three-Body Problem trilogy, the English edition of Antifragile, and the Mormon scripture The Book of Mormon — considered heretical by Christianity's three main branches: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. The Hong Kong stock market was cheerful in the first half of 2025; after October, a pullback put everyone in low spirits. In The Three-Body Problem there is a hibernation technology — you identify a future moment you believe in, enter stasis, and wake up only when the time comes to verify your conclusion. I have a position that needs two to three more years to mature. The volatility in between will affect my mood, and I keep thinking: if only hibernation were real. Through all of this I've come to recognize that my composure is not as still as water as I believed. There is still desire, aversion, attachment. There is an information cocoon.

② In March, I finished The Book of Mormon in Los Angeles and went through baptism. Two things I hadn't known before clicked into place. First: the word "Baptist" — as in Hong Kong Baptist University. Second: the West is not universally as open as media portrays. There is a small subset of people living out a strict, family-centered, almost ascetic discipline — committed to one partner, one path. And I discovered this is a global organization with a member registry. Wherever I went — Vancouver, Hong Kong, Tokyo — the local community was there.

③ Late March brought a crisis that needed handling — a person of genuinely bad character who had to be removed. It clarified something: the basic principles of respect, collaboration, integrity, and mutual support that I took for granted in big tech are a luxury outside those walls. My old environment had kept me simple. Fortunately I'd always been relatively independent — I never freeloaded off others, which kept a safe distance maintained. For this kind of person: inform mutual acquaintances of the character issue, don't engage, don't argue, execute deletion. April through June I ran some social experiments — made contact with people living at the lower edges of society. Every one of them had a life story that could fill a film.

④ July was at a friend's home in Vancouver. Comparing myself to someone my age: he started at a Vancouver university in July 2023, graduated June 2025, secured a formal job, opened a new chapter. I was still drifting. Is what I call "thinking things through" actually just overthinking? Or worse — am I overestimating myself? The self-doubt comes from trying to apprentice myself to Taleb. Taleb spent years accumulating knowledge across disciplines while working — multiple languages, mathematics, finance, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy — then struck out on his own after eight years. I'm still circling the entrance. Two to three more years before I know whether I can even get in the door. That is the source of the present pain.

⑤ August: returned to Shenzhen. By inertia, my coffee chats were still limited to former Tencent, Huawei, and ByteDance colleagues — I didn't notice the cocoon until the Tokyo coffee chats in December made it visible. Somewhere during that period back in China, something shifted — years of easy looseness suddenly became a vague, directionless anxiety. That was when I realized I wasn't as mentally spacious as I'd always assumed. I'm flesh and blood too. I can feel like a kite that's lost its string. It was also when I understood, concretely, how hard it is to convert a casual idea or conversation into a real action. In my old work environment, an idea from a meeting could be executed by the time the meeting ended. That contrast was striking.

⑥ December 15th: I landed in Tokyo regardless — figure out housing, meet people, find a language school, sort the rest later. The Tokyo coffee chats gave me a lot to think about, and some genuine, tangible gains. I've been working through the two volumes of Standard Japanese at the school's pace — making up for a gap I felt since student days. Something has shifted in how I think about multilingualism. With AI evolving exponentially, the practical value of having Chinese, English, French, and Japanese hard-wired in my brain has diminished significantly. I sometimes ask myself: am I indulging a personal vanity? And I've noticed my brain takes a two-second pause to switch between language databases — it doesn't flip instantly.

⑦ The thing that shaped 2025 most forcefully was a particular brand. Through shared belief in it, a few people found each other — or ended up on the same boat. Three companions maintained this community: Will (Imperial College, University of Edinburgh, HKU), Oracle (Shanghai Jiao Tong, PhD from New York, now teaching computer science at Chongqing University on a talent recruitment program), and Mickey (mathematics at Sichuan University). The peak produces false devotees; dusk reveals the true believers. Whatever the outcome in the years ahead, the courage and conviction these three showed is rare and precious. A genuine friendship was formed.

1. Plans succeed in secrecy.

2. Don't be eager to teach others.

3. Don't forsake what's near to seek what's far.

4. Society mocks poverty, not prostitution.

5. A cup of rice earns gratitude; a bushel creates resentment.

6. Kneel too long and you forget how to stand.

7. To have met you at all is the highest fortune.

8. The concern is not scarcity but inequality.

9. Morning runs. Reading. Writing.

10. Clothes are better new; people are better old.

11. What's it to you? What's it to me?

12. Give without expecting return. If you expect return, don't give.

13. Rationality is avoiding systemic ruin.

14. No rush. No fear. No shame.

15. The pessimist is correct; the optimist succeeds.

16. History is a good teacher and friend — it saves others, and saves yourself.

17. If criticism is not free, praise means nothing.

18. Too many clever people. Too few wise ones.

19. Without broad learning you cannot navigate change; without precise thinking you cannot grasp subtlety.

20. You admire him, you respect him — but you don't want to be him.

21. A wealthy colleague's personal motto: May I die young and never be reborn.

22. The peak produces false devotees; dusk reveals the true believers.

23. Civil officials wear birds on their robes; military officials wear beasts.

24. Both excessive worship and excessive contempt for others come from not knowing them.

25. Six external causes of illness; seven internal injuries of emotion. Everyone gets sick sometime.

26. A kind friend's personal motto: May I become cold-hearted and profit-driven.

27. When selling, the buyer is king. When sick, the doctor is king.

28. A scholar can't out-argue an old woman in the street. As a butcher he might manage.

29. The sages' books were written to be read. Try to use them to get things done and they're useless.

30. Vileness is the passport of the vile; nobility is the epitaph of the noble.

31. "Labor is glorious. Heaven rewards diligence. Diligence is the foundation." — Read mostly in reverse.

32. Heaven and earth are not benevolent — they treat all things as straw dogs. The sage is not benevolent — he treats the people as straw dogs.

33. When the waters of Canglang run clear, I wash my hat-strings. When the waters run muddy, I wash my feet.

34. If my abilities can only bring me poverty, then poverty is my worth.

35. The greatest fortune in life is meeting people who tell you what to read — not how to eat, drink, and gamble.

36. Computers and books are simple: treat them well and they treat you well. Spend this life with simple people and simple things.

37. A person's success owes gratitude not only to family, friends, the public, lovers, mentors, and investors — but also to enemies.

38. Like in The Three-Body Problem — the internet is a dark forest. Every spectator holds a gun, waiting for drama to arrive. Always wanting more, never less.

39. A complete and correct understanding of life requires only this: get seriously ill once. Lie in a hospital for a few days. Ideally be forced into surgery. Or watch the person in the next bed be carried into the crematorium.

40. A systematic absence of sports and cultural events cannot offset prolonged systemic anxiety. Those who participate in sports and culture are winners; those who compete purely for money are the wounded.

41. What is wealth? Stocks, bonds, savings, gold, property, even cash — none of it qualifies. True wealth is the good food you've eaten and the rich experiences you've lived.

42. "You are completely a country person. You have never lived in another culture. Without that, how can you understand another society? Before you decide to teach, you should go abroad — live inside a completely different culture and let it seep into you."

Tokyo Love Story is an urban love story filmed at the height of Japan's economic boom. The crowded streets in the background are themselves a testament to that vitality. Filmed in 1990, broadcast on NHK in 1991. The drama ends like this:

"Hello, Kanji — it must be evening there. I'm writing to say a proper goodbye. It's a little sad, but it isn't only sad. When all is said and done, walking the same streets as you, in the same season — that's something I'll always remember. Kanji, this moment right now is the most beautiful one. This moment of parting with you. Being able to be with you like this — I think I'll be able to keep going, and be strong. Meeting you was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I won't say goodbye, and I won't make any promises — I feel certain we'll meet again. P.S. How are you?" — Rika left the Tokyo headquarters for the Los Angeles office. Six months later, she resigned. No one knew where she went.

1993

If there were no magnetic field between people, why would Kanji — three years later, on a street surging with strangers — sense her from a distance, see her, and call out her name? In an era without the internet, without contact lists. It really was 難しい.

"It isn't often that you meet someone you could love for a lifetime. But once you fall in love, that's a different story. That's why I treasure every memory of having loved you. I truly mean that. The memories of loving you, and the memories of being loved by you — they're all right here, safe inside me. It's not about wondering what love will look like tomorrow. The person I was when I loved you — that's how I became who I am now. And I can honestly say to myself: you did well. No matter what I'm doing, I am always myself." — Rika

Yoyogi Park, Shibuya

I spent the whole afternoon walking through Yoyogi Park in Shibuya, trying to find that star-shaped plaza. Across the pedestrian bridge, over the main road — the star pattern and the side pillars were still there, unchanged after thirty years. That was lucky. If the structure had been rebuilt, I could never have found it from memory alone.

小田和正 — Love Story は突然に

Oda Kazumasa, graduate of Waseda University's School of Science and Engineering. The theme song of Tokyo Love Story:

何から伝えれば良いのか
分からないまま時は流れて
浮かんでは消えてゆく
ありふれた言葉だけ

君があんまり素敵だから
ただ素直に
好きと言えないで
多分もうすぐ　雨も止んで二人黄昏

あの日あの時あの場所で
君に会えなかったら
僕等はいつまでも
見知らぬ二人のまま

誰かが甘く誘う言葉に
もう心揺れたりしないで
切ないけどそんな風に
心は縛れない

明日になれば君を
きっと今より
もっと好きになる
その全てが僕の中で時を超えてゆく

君のために翼になる
君を守りつづける
柔らかく君を包む
あの風になる

あの日あの時あの場所で
君に会えなかったら
僕等はいつまでも
見知らぬ二人のまま

今君の心が動いた言葉とめて
肩を寄せて
僕は忘れないこの日を
君を誰にも渡さない

君のために翼になる
君を守りつづける
柔らかく君を包む
あの風になる

あの日あの時あの場所で
君に会えなかったら
僕等はいつまでも
見知らぬ二人のまま

誰かが甘く誘う言葉に
もう心揺れたりしないで
君を包む
あの風になる

あの日あの時あの場所で
君に会えなかったら
僕等はいつまでも
見知らぬ二人のまま

① Low-dimensional love is obsessed with permanence — a quantifiable, provable permanence. No coffee with anyone of the opposite sex. Check in when you go out. Phone open for inspection. Salary handed over. Gifts required on Valentine's Day, Qixi, birthdays. New car, new apartment before the wedding. Relationship status posted publicly. "You love me — prove that you love me." Love as entitlement, love as extraction.

② Mid-dimensional love is value exchange. Most people, through life experience and collective observation, arrive at a principle that seems to work: compatibility — matched backgrounds, matched ambitions. Exchange is not transaction. Exchange is mutual elevation, shared growth. Adults have their own lives, their own things to build. They choose a partner to form a team — to climb together through the social middle and upper layers. If the love fades, cut losses cleanly, without excessive entanglement. "You love me, I love you." Mutual giving.

③ High-dimensional love exists in emptiness. At the spiritual level, great love is without condition. I love you, and it has nothing to do with whether you love me back. The loving itself is already happiness. You love that person — you want them to win, to flourish, to live simply and joyfully. This kind of person is complete within themselves. They don't need another to fill a void. When it's time to part, they part cleanly — no wounds to heal, no assets to divide, no need for a second love. To love one person fully in one lifetime is enough. Love is love. It needs no reason.

Rui Xiaodan and Ding Yuanying

In The Distant Savior, Rui Xiaodan and Ding Yuanying share three years. When Rui Xiaodan leaves at the end, she leaves happy — a woman of heaven. Ding Yuanying, at her departure, coughs up blood. That "coughing blood" is not literary decoration — it is what happens when grief accumulates beyond what the body can hold. Rui Xiaodan's own father didn't understand her love. Her longtime colleagues didn't understand it. Only two close friends did.

What they wanted for each other was the same thing: simplicity, joy, growth. And both of them acted on it. Their philosophy of love: I love you, and it has nothing to do with you. To complete the other. To give without reservation.

After becoming a couple:

Rui: "This truly is the devil's way."
Ding: "I never claimed to be anything good."
Rui: "Didn't you say you didn't want to be destroyed by a woman? What changed?"
Ding: "When there are no tricks, no tactics left — what remains?"
Rui: "What remains?"
Ding: "The heart the Creator gave you."

Xu Wei — "Love"

This song carries Xu Wei's devotion to his wife, and hers to him. It pierces through life itself — permanent on the timeline of the universe.

I sing for you
grateful for your grace
you live inside my life
deep in the years, you are the beautiful sky

You hold me with such tenderness
melting the ice and snow inside my heart
this gift you've given shakes me
like the first time I ever saw the sea

In this world I am alone and wild
doubt drifting through my chest
without you I might have withered
I might have fallen dark

The joy your love has given me
is like the first time I stood
beneath the brilliant highland sun
and felt it reach all the way through

I sing for you
you live inside my life
a shining miracle
you are a beautiful grace

We will both grow old, both dissolve into the wind
melt into the light
but love will go on illuminating the sky
illuminating the world
illuminating every life as it grows

This revelation of living — always so strange
appearing in the spring
and yet it was from your eyes
gazing at me with such depth
that I saw the future

I left Huawei in 2020, the last good year of the internet boom, and remotely interviewed for Tencent from a mountain in Wudang. That same May, after leaving Huawei, I began buying Xiaomi on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Before I explain this particular bet, let me revisit the ones that came before.

One principle first: if Xiaomi loses — if I'm wrong — and the whole social system freezes up, money stops circulating and loses all meaning anyway. The suffering wouldn't be mine alone. It would belong to a population of over a billion. Emotion is a virus; it spreads. In that world, apartments and bank account balances mean nothing. With four languages — Chinese, English, Japanese, French — I can start over in a different circle: Los Angeles, Tokyo, somewhere else. I've built myself options. An option is both a choice and a hedge.

One principle of doing things well: keep your plans close. In writing this, I'm violating that principle. If I lose, I accept it. We start again.

1. The Gaokao Game

In 2008, everyone around me — parents, teachers, homeroom teacher — advised me to apply to universities in Wuhan. I ignored them all and applied only to schools in Beijing and Shanghai: Central University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. On the last day of applications, I changed my choices alone. I picked a 211-tier school in Beijing that most people didn't rate highly, and a cold, obscure major — Software Engineering — that almost nobody had heard of. The annual tuition was 20,000 RMB, four times the cost of a standard program. That price alone eliminated my competition. My logic: the number of students who had a high enough score, were willing to pay 20,000 a year, and were willing to enter an unfashionable major was vanishingly small. I wouldn't drop below the cutoff.

The outcome confirmed it. I made it to Beijing. The major turned out not to matter — what mattered was learning the cultural and logical differences between north and south China. And Software Engineering became one of the most sought-after degrees by the time I graduated.

2. The Real Estate Game

In September 2014, I was moving from Beijing to Paris for my second master's degree. Society had already started producing twisted values: laughing at poverty rather than prostitution, the idea that no matter how hard a Tsinghua graduate worked, they could never outpace the appreciation on an old couple's apartment. While waiting in line to process paperwork at the school in Paris, I said to a classmate: "China should have a financial crisis sooner rather than later — let people hit the wall and recalibrate." The response I got: "Wei Zheng, how can you curse your own country?"

By 2020, every ambitious young person I knew was buying property — 10 million RMB inside the city, 7 million for second-hand. Driving past a Evergrande development in the suburbs of Guangzhou, I saw the sign at the gate — "Evergrande: Fortune 500" — and said aloud: "Fortune 500 today, bankrupt in a year, quite possibly." The person next to me stared at me for three full seconds.

In 2021, a young woman from Hangzhou, under some kind of pressure, wanted to borrow money to cobble together a down payment for an apartment. She came to me. I declined — but I gave her a reason: "Even if you're going to buy, wait until Evergrande actually collapses first." My younger brother had spent over ten years in Shenzhen as a real estate agent. In 2022, some family members, perhaps feeling sorry for me after so many years in Shenzhen without my own place, offered to pool money and help me buy something at 10 million plus. I declined. I said something that wasn't easy to hear: "Do you believe I could drag all four of your families into a hole you'd never climb out of?"

3. The COVID Game

Just before the 2020 Lunar New Year, still at Huawei, I took a few days of leave early and took the high-speed rail home to Hubei. The train transferred in Hankou, Wuhan. On the train I was scrolling my phone, and every ten minutes the numbers in the news were growing exponentially. I have a rule: I handle my own problems myself, even with family. But that day I asked someone to drive out to the suburban high-speed rail station to pick me up. Two hours later at home, I said I needed to buy a plane ticket and leave. Several family members said: "Wait until after the New Year's dinner tomorrow." I said: "By then I might not be able to leave." Looking back, the ticket I bought turned out to be the last commercial flight to depart Hubei province — out of Xiangyang Airport. My Huawei manager — also a friend — later asked me to walk him through the logic of how I made that call.

4. The Xiaomi Game

I'll acknowledge upfront: Xiaomi is a deeply contested investment. I once ran an informal survey among acquaintances in their thirties at major tech companies — 90% dismissed Xiaomi without a second thought. Today I'm not arguing from a consumer's perspective, or even the company's own fundamentals. I'm arguing from the perspective of what the government cannot afford not to do.

4.1 The government needs two strong legs to carry its ambitions: Huawei and Xiaomi. The influencers chasing engagement and conflict never stop to ask what the government actually needs — which is why that entire class of content creators has been quietly removed. You don't see them anymore.

4.2 Why not Tencent or ByteDance? Consider 1 trillion RMB in revenue. In an internet company, that revenue passes through very few hands — few supply chain links, few jobs created, few tax collection points along the way. In a manufacturing company, the same revenue ripples through layer after layer of suppliers. That 1 trillion could generate 50 trillion in downstream economic activity, with the government collecting taxes at every node. With over 14 million graduates entering the workforce every year, any government would prioritize companies like Xiaomi — and the supply chains behind them — as job-creation engines and social stabilizers.

4.3 The government needs to drive consumption. In the era of real estate, housing was the engine of Chinese consumer spending — the backbone of GDP growth. That engine is gone. The next largest consumption category is automobiles. The government will use every mechanism available to push people toward replacing combustion vehicles with electric ones. The subsidies for appliances and cars in recent years are part of this. Unlike real estate, cars can be exported. When Beijing negotiates with the EU and other economies, policy will tilt toward protecting the automotive sector.

4.4 If consumption doesn't recover, if employment doesn't stabilize, if people keep their money in the bank and stop spending — social confidence reaches its final floor. Those who cannot make a good life will broadcast their despair, and despair spreads like a virus. At that point, even if you're a senior-level tech employee with real wealth, your own circle offers no safety or happiness. And at that point, money means nothing anyway.

I finished Learning from Japan at the gate. My plan for the next three months: use the environment as teacher and myself as student. Five hours of Japanese study a day, working to push my level from N4 to N2 — enough to hold a real conversation. And I want to read this book at least two more times while I'm here. When a book is good, the principle is simple: read it again.

Lately I've been practicing songs by Nakashima Miyuki and Nakashima Mika. The former is a true master — songwriter, composer, vocalist, all in one — born in Sapporo, the northernmost major city, in Hokkaido. The film Love Letter was shot in Otaru, a small city just south of Sapporo. It's winter now, and at Pudong I passed several young women heading to Hokkaido to ski. They said skiing releases a lot of unhappiness. I believe them.

Going through Nakashima Miyuki's catalogue, I confirmed what people say online: her songs fed half of Hong Kong's music scene in the last century. Countless works were covered in Cantonese and became classics in their own right. There's also a rumor — unverified — that Beyond's lead vocalist Wong Ka-kui despised cover versions on principle.

QQ Music describes her this way: "Her voice was born in Showa, passed through Heisei, and arrived in Reiwa." Showa, Heisei, Reiwa — Japan still keeps its traditional era names. Showa is the era most people know from World War II, Emperor Hirohito reigning for nearly sixty years. Then came thirty years of Heisei — roughly 1990 to 2020 — the era people call Japan's Lost Thirty Years, the age of the herbivore generation and the hikikomori. And now we're in Reiwa, year seven.

The Lost Thirty Years

Learning from Japan maps the social evolution of those thirty Heisei years. Japan missed the Web1 era — PC internet, roughly 2000 to 2010 — and the Web2 era — mobile internet, 2010 to 2020. Now it's trying to catch up in Web3 and AI, which is why it's actively recruiting engineers from abroad.

In 1990, Japan sat at the peak of both its stock market and its real estate market. What followed was a collapse with no floor: persistently low and eventually negative interest rates, unemployment, credential devaluation, herbivore men, adult children living at home, an aging population, a birth rate in freefall. The middle-to-high income in the Tokyo metropolitan area was around 10 million yen in 1990. In 2025, it is still around 10 million yen. Thirty-five years, and incomes have not grown — because prices haven't grown either. The cycle lasted thirty years. It hollowed out two generations.

The bottom came around 2020. The last five years have seen the Nikkei return to — and exceed — its 1990 peak. Youth employment is approaching 100%. Real estate prices have doubled from their trough. Bank interest rates have turned positive again.

Two Dramas, Two Eras

NHK produced Tokyo Love Story in 1990 — one of the most beloved Japanese dramas ever made. It captures the upswing: streets full of young people, everyone moving, everyone wanting. Six years later came Long Vacation, with Kimura Takuya as a man with nowhere to be, who simply says: "Let's just think of it as a long vacation." That line became an anthem for a generation with no good reason to hurry.

People are products of their environment. When the economic tide is rising, people release the best of themselves toward each other — goodwill, generosity, the sense that things are getting better for everyone at once. That is when human nature has the space to be good.

— Written in Setagaya City, Tokyo

1. Ding Yuanying on Weak Culture vs. Strong Culture

Society can be understood through three layers: technology, institution, and culture. From a single individual to an entire nation, any kind of fate is ultimately a product of cultural character. Strong culture produces strong people; weak culture produces weak people. This is the law — call it the Way of Heaven — and it does not bend to human will.

"What is strong culture? What is weak culture?"

Strong culture is culture that follows the natural laws of things. Weak culture is culture that depends on the morality of the strong — that hopes to receive what it hasn't earned, that waits for a savior. Strong culture, in martial terms, is a secret manual. Weak culture, because it is easy to learn, easy to understand, easy to use, has become the popular variety. Take the culture industry: literature and film are arts that probe the soul. If a work of literature or film can crack the cultural code of a higher plane of thought, its power is to awaken consciousness and shake the soul to its roots. Since that is what all sentient beings need, it is both virtue and market and fame. The profit margin of spiritual salvation equals that of drug addiction — and without the criminal risk or the moral cost. That profit is not mine to decide. It is decided by the human soul. God makes people reach into their own pockets; they have no choice but to reach. Because it was not I who gave people a spirit — it was God.

2. Ding Yuanying on National Culture

Our nation has always prided itself on being cultured — yet it never thinks to ask: what culture, exactly? The culture of truth and reality, or a weak culture? A culture that follows the laws of things, or one that violates them? Any kind of fate is ultimately a product of that cultural character, and it does not bend to human will.

3. Ding Yuanying on Zigeunerweisen

Comparing Mutter and Friedman playing the same piece — Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen: Mutter expresses only sorrow, grief, and lamentation; Friedman expresses sorrow with indignation, tragedy, and desolation. Mutter carries something of the court lady's delicate anguish, but lacks something of the Gypsy's unbroken spirit. Heifetz is a great violinist, but for this particular piece, his interpretation is not necessarily the highest expression. Perhaps he cares too much about technical mastery — and in doing so, picks up the faintest trace of craftsmanship, loses the faintest trace of devotion. Among the three, only Friedman is both hand and heart. Mutter is heart without hand reaching it. The heart is desire; the spirit is a plane of being — the convergence of culture, experience, and gift. Everyone believes Mutter wants to play it well. But her foundation was painted there by God, and as long as she cannot transcend God, she cannot paint over the feminine quality that is her ground color. Mutter's hands are a woman's hands.

4. Han Chufeng's Inner Thought About Ding Yuanying

Nietzsche: The higher man is alone not because he wishes to be alone, but because he cannot find his kind around him.

5. Ding Yuanying on His Paralyzed Father and Filial Piety

To his brother: "If my reputation for filial piety comes at the cost of my father's suffering and dignity, then I truly don't know what kind of thing I am."

To his mother: "Mom, if you raised children only to be taken care of in old age, then don't tell me how great a mother's love is. You raised us ultimately for yourself — that's an exchange, and whether it's a fair one is still up for debate. If you ended up with an unfilial son like me, consider it a loss."

6. Ding Yuanying's Self-Mocking Verse at Rui Xiaodan's Ambush Dinner

Born a man of the back hills, briefly a guest in the front hall,
Half-drunk, I dance through the archive, half a book in hand —
Speaking of vast skies from the bottom of a well.

Grand ambitions toy with fame, the sea measures fortune and ruin.
When pockets run empty, I rage and blame the cosmos for its wrongs.

7. Xiao Yawen to Rui Xiaodan About Ding Yuanying

Women — so many of the base things in us are bone-deep, and as long as you're a woman you can't throw them off. Even I know this, let alone someone perceptive like him. I worked as his assistant for a year. No matter how much he respected women on the surface, it never covered what was in his bones — a fear of women. Fear is contempt. "Only women and small-minded men are difficult to manage." From a woman's point of view, Ding Yuanying is not attractive. He offers nothing practical, none of the things women actually want.

He can only mean something as a person — as a friend. Any closer and that value is destroyed. He will never argue with you. Every pore of his radiates a lofty, condescending tolerance for ordinary culture — a tolerance so complete it doesn't bother to reason with you, a tolerance so pervasive it makes you feel vulgar and small. When you're about to suffocate, about to go mad, the only word left in you is: run. He won't let himself stumble twice. And you — unable to have what you want — will simply suffer the ache of longing. How bitter that longing is, all the poetry of the ages has already said it. You are a woman. You have a woman's nature. Once you fall in, it's very hard to climb out. Ding Yuanying has no meaning for women. Every woman carries desire, aversion, and attachment — the woman without those belongs to heaven, not this world.

8. Xiao Yawen

"Does this even need teaching? It's instinct. The very word 'teaching' is an insult to the Creator."

9. Han Chufeng Receiving Rui Xiaodan

Miss Rui, you are the guest and I am the host — making sure you eat and sleep well, that's no problem. But if you want to sit at the same table with me and talk about Ding Yuanying, then on what grounds? Vase or true confidante — you have to weigh yourself first. I apologize for any lack of courtesy. You came to me and I've surely disappointed you. Yuanying's fear of women goes to his bones — you cannot teach him, cannot fight him. It would be more honest to pay for company. As for how I'd describe him as a person: one sentence is enough. Yuanying is a man who sees clearly. He's not driven by the need to distinguish himself. A bowl of rice is enough. He likes quiet, likes to be alone — to a woman, that reads as passive, antisocial, without ambition.

10. Rui Xiaodan Piercing the Veil with Ding Yuanying

Rui: "How do you see women? Say the thing at the bottom of your heart."

Ding: "Women are the model of formal logic and the obstacle to dialectical logic. I have no wish to damage women, nor to be damaged by them."

Rui: "Are women really that hard to keep?"

Ding: "A true confidante has always existed — but that depends on whether the man is a good wine. Throughout history, how many men have aged themselves to that rare, almost flavorless depth? This is not something that can be forced. Muddle through as best you can."

Rui: "I have done everything a woman is capable of doing — including my shame, and what you might consider my indecency. I will have no regrets after this. You may leave now."

Ding: "I am human, and I have not yet evolved to the point where I can ignore instinct at a moment like this. You are a piece of jade — but I am not a craftsman. I am only a man with a modest grasp of opportunism, at best earning enough small coins to satisfy ordinary people. What you require is the soul of a masculine culture. I cannot pretend I don't know that just because you haven't said it. To accept you is to accept a certain height. I don't have that confidence. I consider myself a man of some learning — but today I must admit you taught me something. You made me understand the sanctity of a woman not through words, but through the soul. That you did this comes from a corresponding dignity. Thank you."

Rui: "A man who cannot transcend his instincts is no hero. You let a woman experience the pleasure of being conquered. Thank you."

11. Ding Yuanying Guiding Rui Xiaodan on the Case

Ding: "This person needs a period. You can draw one for him."

Rui: "What is the period?"

Ding: "A sense of where the soul belongs. It is a basic need of human nature. Help him find a clean place for his soul to rest. What he needs is not confession — but a reason that makes confession possible. Civilization is powerless before a person who cannot be defined by the word 'human.'"

12. After Becoming a Couple

Rui: "This truly is the devil's way."

Ding: "I never claimed to be anything good."

Rui: "Didn't you say you didn't want to be destroyed by a woman? What changed your mind?"

Ding: "When there are no tricks, no tactics left — what remains?"

Rui: "What remains?"

Ding: "The heart the Creator gave you."

Freedom is worldly. It does not live in the air, or somewhere else — it lives on the ground.

As a modern person: can you freely dispose of your own time? Can you freely choose a profession, and freely walk away from one? Can you stand as an equal before someone of enormous wealth, without flinching? Can you resist the pull of any interest group that comes with an offer? None of this is merely a matter of attitude or courage. It is a real-world capability — one that must be built, and can be lost.

Compared to freedom, ideals are something different: a person's self-expectation, a way of expressing self-worth. Dreams are a kind of "life bubble" — they can be large or small, gradually realized or left unrealized entirely. But freedom cannot be absent, not even for a moment.

In university — that sealed, vacuum-like state — being a free-thinking intellectual seems almost easy. You ask nothing of society; society asks nothing of you. But once you step outside the gates, the years that follow — one year, several years, a decade — become harder, one day at a time. There was a saying that stayed with me from those years: "As an intellectual, you must have a profession by which you do not make a living."

There is a kind of sudden clarity in that sentence. It warns: you must free yourself from personal and material dependence on any external organization. And your choice of profession should come from interest and responsibility — not from the pressure of survival. The saying draws from an older set of values: without stable property, no stable mind; without a stable mind, no freedom; without freedom, no morality.

In a commercial society, freedom of thought is no longer just a philosophical term. It is an expensive existential posture — one grounded in freedom of both mind and material means.

Dreams are optional. Freedom cannot be absent, not even for a moment.

@Tokyo

If I were just another cog in the machine, I think life would lose its meaning. There's a Chinese novel called The Distant Savior. The savior isn't some distant figure in a faraway place — the savior is yourself. You are your own master.

In 2023, everything felt like years of intention finally crystallizing into reality, setting gears in motion that could no longer be reversed. At the Tencent offline writing and reading salon I organized, one session was devoted to science fiction. My contribution was the Three-Body Problem trilogy. A colleague named Carry shared a Hugo Award-winning short story: Tower of Babylon.

It was my first encounter with the concept. The story goes: the people of earth wanted to bypass God's intermediaries — the priests — and speak to God directly. To reach heaven, humanity began building the Tower of Babel. God, finding these people presumptuous and foolish, invented different languages as punishment. Humans could no longer communicate with one another. The tower could not be built. Humanity could not reach God.

In the first half of 2025, I was in Los Angeles. For reasons I hadn't entirely planned, I joined the Mormon church and began reading the Bible in English. The Old Testament opens with the Tower of Babel. Since then, my church membership has followed me: from Los Angeles, to Vancouver, to Hong Kong Island, and now to a parish in Minato Ward — the most expensive district in Tokyo.

Arriving in Tokyo in December, certain details kept colliding with one another. Combined with changes in age and mindset, I sometimes wonder: have I been cursed by the Tower of Babel? Is this the punishment — to be pulled in four directions by four languages, never fully at home in any of them?

After scouting a Japanese language school in Shinjuku, I sat with Luna-sensei in a nearby café. Knowing her business philosophy is built on the information gap between China and Japan, I couldn't help myself — I started talking. I laid out what I can only call a "reality-defying" theory of how to live:

Ninety percent of people spend their entire lives competing for resources within a single circle, grinding through KPIs and performance reviews to level up. But China, the US, and Japan are three separate circles. Between those circles exist information gaps — about services, prices, opportunities — that most people never see. Why not use the infrastructure that governments have spent decades building? Earn in dollars, spend in yen: that's a dimensional strike. If you earn $10,000 a month in the US and bring it to Tokyo, it becomes 1.5 million yen after tax — roughly 2 million pre-tax. Almost no Japanese worker earns that. Build the channel, and earning $10,000 a month in America is entirely ordinary. The same logic applies to Shenzhen: $10,000 becomes 73,000 RMB after conversion — around 120,000 pre-tax. That number dominates. And while US-China relations carry real uncertainty, US-Japan relations do not. Use the current. Ride the wind.

Sometimes I get in my own head. I wonder if I'm being arrogant — if I should just go back to Shenzhen and be a normal worker like everyone else, rather than chasing some idea that might turn out to be an empty basket. Insisting on being my own master. Insisting on a path that crosses outside China. Trying to build a black hole of information and price arbitrage across three economies — China, Japan, America — using four languages as the instrument. Is it delusion? Sometimes, on this solitary one-way road, I genuinely don't know.

There's a strange coincidence I keep coming back to. My Chinese name, in Japanese pronunciation, sounds like gisei. And gisei — 犠牲 — means sacrifice, or victim. When I realized that, I felt it: the language that gave me power also delivered a dark punchline.

Tomorrow is Sunday. I'll wake up early and take myself to the Minato Ward parish for service. I'll introduce myself — let people know who Mars is. Most likely I'll end up at the front, answering the oldest questions: Where do I come from? What am I doing here? What am I confused about?

2025: Los Angeles to Vancouver, Hong Kong Island to Tokyo's Minato Ward. Here's to 2026 — may luck find me wherever I land.

@Tokyo

縁の起こり、2025年12月17日、早稲田大學理工（りこう）キャンパス東門（もん）のタリーズコーヒー（Tully's Coffee）、不思議（ふしぎ）な縁（えん）の始まりだった。

12月25日、Wechatで坂本龍一の『戦場（せんじょう）のメリークリスマス』の話になった。この曲（きょく）は私の6年間の生活（せいかつ）のリズムに寄り添（よ）い、そして「みなみ」の10年間の青春（せいしゅん）にも寄り添（よ）ってきたものだった。

2026年の新しい年（とし）を迎え、一月８日（ようか）、カフェで二度目（にどめ）の再会（さいかい）。家族にも話したことのないような言葉をお互いに打ち明け、自然（しぜん）と心の深い部分（ぶぶん）で通（つう）じ合うことができた。「知己（ちき）」という言葉を、以前（いぜん）は軽々（かるがる）しく使（つか）おうとは思（おも）わなかったが、今回（こんかい）は本当に得難い（えがたい）縁だと感じ、次のような思いを書き記した。

「特別な女のこに出会いました。彼女の名前はみなみ。彼女は勇敢（ゆうかん）で、考えが深く（ふかく）、そしてきれいです。彼女は去年の一年間、一人で20か国（こく）以上（いじょう）を旅（たび）しました。彼女は語学（ごがく）学校（がっこう）でも勉強しています。さらに重要（じゅうよう）なことに、私達は人生、社会（しゃかい）の論理（ろんり）、そして国家（こっか）意識（いしき）に同じ考えを持っています。彼女は18歳で大學一年生（せい）だった2016年から、坂本龍一の『戦場のメリークリスマス』を聴いています。彼女はただ美しい（うつくしい）の女の子ではありません。それは、私の人生で一番のことだと思います。」

今週（こんしゅう）の月曜日、一月12日は成人の日で、学校は休みたった。一人でマクドナルド（McDonald）に座り（すわり）、ぼんやりと日本語の復習（ふくしゅう）をしながら、心の中では彼女のことが気（き）になって落ち着かなかった。WeChatで会話（かいわ）始めると、みなみが神保町（じんぼうちょう）で見かけたという『戦場のメリークリスマス』のポスト（Post）を共有（きょうゆう）してくれた。二人の自然（しぜん）なやり取りが、たまらなく嬉し（うれし）かった。

「成人（せいじん）」という言葉に脳（のう）が刺激（しげき）され、敏感（びんかん）な神経（しんけい）がまた時間（じかん）を計算（けいさん）し始める。2008年、18歳で大學に入り（はいり）、物事（ものこと）が分かり始めたあの頃（ころ）から17年が経（た）った。大學時代（じだい）の一つの歌が、この17年間の「海を超え（こえ）てた歳月（さいげつ）」を物語（ものがた）っている。

今この瞬間（しゅんかん）、確信（かくしん）している。ようやく「運命（うんめい）の人」を見つけたのだと。

Once I travelled 7 seas
Once I sang 700 songs
Once I walked 7000 miles
And waiting 17 years until find the one

1月14日（じゅうよっか）、３回目（かいめ）の再会（さいかい）。早稲田大學の自習室（じしゅうしつ）で、私達は拙い（つたない）日本語を使（つか）いながら、一緒（いっしょ）に練習（れんしゅう）した。

1月17日（じゅうななにち）は土曜日（どようび）で、最初（さいしょ）に出会（であ）ってからちょうど一ヶ月（いっかげつ）が経（た）つ日（ひ）だった。代々木公園に散歩（さんぽ）に誘え（さそえ）ないだろうかと、心中でずっと願い（ねがい）、頭（あたま）の中で考え（かんがえ）巡（めぐ）らせていた。今の気持ちにぴったりな曲（きょく）が2つある。方大同（カリル・フォン）の『特別な人』と、趙雷（ジャオ・レイ）の『南方姑娘（なんぽうのむすめ）』だ。

From 2008, I studied near the West 2nd Ring Road — the "Beixiaguan Base," as we called it. At eighteen, something would catch my attention each time I took the bus down Xueyuan Road toward the universities clustered around the West 3rd Ring. Passing the Weigongcun area, I'd lean my head against the cold glass and stare at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I was curious: what does social science actually do? Is it useful? What kind of people work inside those buildings? A seed, nothing more. My major was computer science — about as far from social science as you can get.

I graduated in 2015 and caught the tail end of the internet boom. From 2015 to 2020, changing jobs was easy and normal — interviewers didn't try to trip you up. Then, from 2020 onward, that seed from 2008 began to sprout. I started asking questions I'd never thought to ask before: Why are the gaps between industries so enormous? Everyone seems equally hardworking and intelligent — so why do internet workers earn so disproportionately much? Why is real estate so obscenely profitable that Tsinghua and Peking University graduates go into property sales? Working hard is fine — but why does that mean staying until eleven every night? We're all made of flesh and blood. Nobody can sustain that for twenty years. And yet everyone does it, every day. Why?

Fortunately, colleagues started recommending books: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile. Reading them, I felt a strange kind of flow — a quiet excitement — and a sense of resonance with authors I'd never met, writing from places I'd never been. Real estate, the internet industry — these are just fragments of a larger system. Getting rich in them isn't purely a reflection of your own ability. It's randomness: you happened to graduate into the right industry at the right moment.

Conclusion First

When the economy is good, most people are generous, easygoing, "good." But that goodness doesn't reveal the deepest layers of human character. When the economy turns, something else becomes possible: you see who people really are when things get hard. For 99% of people, hard times amplify and expose the crude, ugly side of human nature. But there's a remaining 1% — people who seemed slow or naive during the boom years — who, when the tide goes out, still hold to their resilience, their principles, their courtesy. Those people are the light of humanity.

The English title of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils — Jin Yong's novel — is almost too apt: half-god, half-devil, good and evil residing in the same being, separated by a single thought. A life's work is learning how to keep the devil's side in check — without exhausting yourself in the process. A cycle. A positive cycle. A kind of happiness.

2023: The Experiments

When the pandemic ended in 2023, I began what I'd call wild sociology — informal social experiments and group observation. Four concrete projects: an offline writing and reading salon at Tencent, an outdoor karaoke group, a tennis group, an English and French conversation corner. All of it outside work hours, on weekends, self-funded, entirely self-driven. The post-pandemic mood was optimistic. People wanted to get out, socialize, spend money. The energy was genuinely good.

2024: The Exhaustion

By 2024, the environment had grown tired — slowly, imperceptibly — and it was dragging people down with it. Fewer people came out. Activities became harder to organize. And after a year of experiments, I'd also discovered how wide the gap was between what I'd expected and what actually existed. Respect and basic courtesy, it turned out, were not default behaviors among this group of "smart, accomplished" people. I'd been naive. I was also tired. So I let go — and left to travel the world alone for a year. There's a Liang Bo song called Appear and Leave.

2025: The Reckoning

In the first half of 2025, I was in Los Angeles — running a simple ongoing sociological log, something to compare against in future years. In August I returned to Shenzhen, and spent four months observing old acquaintances again. The exhaustion had settled into numbness. The stock market helped, a little.

Among the same group of people, the divergence had become unmistakable. Under the sustained pressure of cost-cutting and layoffs, a portion of the group had been shown the door. The relationships that had seemed "friendly" were now being tested by reality: interest and resource exchange, it turned out, was the actual engine driving most interactions. Remove the mutual benefit or the status alignment, and the warmth evaporates instantly. Interesting? Most people would shrug: that's just how society works, everyone's the same. The 1% idealists shake their heads: people shouldn't be this way.

Layer the internet on top — its amplification of gender conflict, mutual harm, everyone too afraid to offer genuine warmth for fear of being hurt — and trust reaches its absolute floor. People retreat into their own shells, doing quiet self-repair. There's a Liang Bo song called Changed.

A Dream

From 2023 to 2025 — we gathered, and then we scattered. I had a dream: in a pitch-black night, there were still a few fireflies. A group of brave companions chasing the flickering lights, releasing something beautiful into the dark for each other. There are two Liang Bo songs: Take a Stand, and In the Dark Night.

In December 2025, at the tail end of the year, I joined Iris's Japanese language group — a community of young people from Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and beyond, with multilingual backgrounds and practices. I'm a practitioner of Chinese, English, Japanese, and French myself. I saw Iris organize an offline Japanese-English karaoke gathering in Cheguongmiao, and I went. Watching her, I thought of myself in 2023. She is a pure and brave person.

I. Three Lives

Around the year 2000, in summers when the rivers still ran fierce and wild children still played recklessly in wild ponds — oblivious to the height of the sky and the existence of death. Accidents happened often, but never dampened the fun. Before I turned twelve, three times I was pulled underwater by whirlpools and currents. No head above the surface. Four seconds of darkness and thrashing, carved into memory. And each time, the name of the bigger kid who pulled me out is carved there too.

The three places: Xiyan Pond, Jinjia Bay, Kongjia River. The three who saved me: Gong XX, Gong YY, Li ZZ. At the time, we laughed it off and moved on — not a trace of fear. Twenty years later, those three rivers have dried up entirely.

In the summer of 2002, sixth grade — fifty out of sixty days spent in the water, floating with a watermelon cradled in my arms. Then one day, out of nowhere, I taught myself a rough crawl stroke. Around that time I also put a puppy that had just learned to walk into the water, to test whether dogs could really swim instinctively. The experiment confirmed: yes, they can.

In 2022, I looked out at the calm, fenced-in water of the OCT residential complex and felt none of the old thrill. I floated on my back, stared up at the sky, and let my thoughts drift to those three names. To still be healthy — in body and in mind — is its own kind of fortune.

II. Three Animal Lives

A wild child's summer meant climbing trees, poking wasp nests, picking lotus pods, digging sweet potatoes, catching birds, netting fish, and trapping crayfish. Around age ten, a kid with a good grip climbed bare-handed to the top of a poplar tree — over ten meters up — and came down with a nest and a fledgling inside.

On the ground, the mother bird returned. She circled one meter above our heads, crying out without stop — completely ignored by the pack of us. The fledgling struggled in my hands. A few minutes later, it twisted its neck ninety degrees, closed its eyes: "dead." We laughed. How could a bird be clever enough to fake its own death? After half a minute of prodding, it seemed to realize the act wasn't working — it woke up and started struggling again. Then it twisted its head one hundred and eighty degrees. The children went quiet. We all understood at once: something had gone very wrong.

Yes. The bird had killed itself. Its wings were already large enough that within a few more days it could have flown — and no one could have caught it. But just days before that freedom, it fell into our hands. We were too young to know the difference between play and death.

One winter, a group of us were wandering in the fields when we came across a mother snake and her young ones sunning themselves on a ridge. Without a word — with a kind of wordless, unanimous understanding — seven or eight children picked up rocks and hurled them. The mother snake was killed. A ten-centimeter baby snake slipped away.

By the time we tired ourselves out and turned back on the same path home, something unlikely happened: the baby snake was at the scene of the accident, searching for its mother. Again, with that same wordless understanding, we picked up rocks and threw them. The baby snake died too. The wild children laughed, filled with something that felt like victory, and walked away without looking back.

To this day, that memory troubles me.

"If you tell me you'll come at four in the afternoon, I'll start feeling happy at three. The closer the time gets, the happier I feel."
— The Little Prince