Travel April 1, 2026

On the Streets of Paris, I Thought of Shenzhen

Two cities — one defined by history, the other proven by speed. Walking along Boulevard Haussmann, I suddenly understood how urban planning shapes the human mind.

My first time in Paris was 2007, when I had just been admitted to a university in Beijing and had never left China. The second time was for school — I lived on the sixth floor of a small room near Montparnasse, no elevator, no heating in winter. Now it's the third time. I've lived in Shenzhen for eight years, then wandered for two more.

Standing on Boulevard Haussmann, I noticed a strange resemblance to Shenzhen's Shennan Avenue — both wide, straight, deliberate. But the feeling is completely different. Walking down Shennan Avenue, you feel a pressure to push forward, as if stopping means falling behind. On Haussmann, you feel watched, staged — a certain grandeur of backdrop.

A City Is an Argument

Baron Haussmann began renovating Paris in 1853, tearing down medieval alleyways to build wide boulevards. One purpose was to allow troops to move quickly through the city to suppress uprisings. This history rarely appears in travel guides.

Shenzhen is a different kind of argument. It wants to prove a city can go from fishing village to first-tier metropolis in forty years. It succeeded — but the cost of that speed is that nobody truly belongs here. Everyone is a passerby, including me, who lived there for eight years.

Maybe that's why Paris feels heavy, and Shenzhen feels anxious. One city carries too much past; the other doesn't have enough.

Reading March 15, 2026

Reading Sapiens: We Are Storytelling Animals

Harari argues it wasn't tools but storytelling that gave Sapiens dominion over the world. This made me re-examine the narratives I consume every day.

I finished the last chapter of Sapiens in a coffee shop in Tokyo. Outside the window, the crowds of Shibuya moved with dense precision — each person playing a role in some story.

Harari's core argument: Sapiens prevailed among human species because we can believe and spread "fictional stories" — nations, money, companies, religions, all products of collective imagination. Seventy thousand years ago, we learned to tell stories, and nothing has stopped us since.

We Live Inside Other People's Stories

Reading this book made me examine: of everything I consume daily, what is fact, and what is carefully constructed narrative? News, social media, corporate strategy — all stories. The question isn't the story itself, but whether I'm aware I'm being told one.

Society February 28, 2026

After Leaving Big Tech

What Huawei and Tencent taught me, and what it cost. When I finally stopped, I saw the marks those 8 years had left on me.

The afternoon I left, I sat on a bench at Shenzhen Bay Park, watching the sea. What ran through my mind wasn't freedom — it was: no morning standup tomorrow. That thought alone left a strange hollow feeling.

Eight years in big tech gave me a lot: methodology for solving complex problems, the ability to maintain structure in chaos, and an intuitive sense of scale. But it also quietly took things away: the habit of slow thought, the courage to do "useless" things, and tolerance for boredom.

Efficiency Is an Addiction

Big tech trains you to convert everything into quantifiable outcomes. That's useful — but over time you start applying the same logic to every minute of life. What's the output of a walk? What's the ROI of reading fiction? That mode of thinking is hard to turn off.

After leaving, it took me nearly six months to relearn how to "do nothing." Not laziness — but giving the brain a chance to generate thoughts that were truly its own, rather than responses to someone else's needs.