My 2023

I started this blog on a whim, never expecting it to last more than a year. I dedicate this post to the year that has passed.

I am ashamed to say that it has been a long time since I wrote anything literary. As a science-and-engineering person, I never accumulated much literary learning, and I returned every scrap of classical Chinese I memorized in high school to my teachers. I am now in the state of knowing that some classical line must describe my feelings perfectly, while not remembering what it is. Please bear with me.

Good Beans and a Good Show

Even now, I have never eaten beans as good as those that night—and I have never seen a show as good as that one again.

Kong Yiji was the only man who wore a long gown while drinking standing up

A line that circulated this year said: “Education is long-term and comes with delays, like a closed loop. Years later, you suddenly realize something in a single moment: that is when the bullet hits, and education is finally complete.”

Customers in short jackets stood outside the counter, drinking while they rested. For one extra penny, they could buy salted bamboo shoots or fennel beans; for a dozen pennies, a meat dish. Only customers in long gowns could stroll into the room next door, order food and wine, and sit down to drink.

…

Kong Yiji was the only man who wore a long gown while drinking standing up.

After reading, one does not want to waste one’s youth and talent, to cast a pearl before swine or leave one’s abilities unrecognized. Whose childhood dream was not to enter Tsinghua or Peking University, become a scientist, engineer, doctor, or artist, and then serve the people?

Confucianism’s central political ideal is the path described in The Great Learning: cultivate oneself, regulate the family, govern the state, and bring peace to the world. The “Four Sentences of Hengqu”—“establish the mind for Heaven and Earth, establish the lives of the people, continue the lost learning of past sages, and bring peace for all generations”—still stir the blood when read, let alone practiced. I have always believed that people should hold such an aspiration; serving the people should not be empty talk.

But reality is what it is. Everyone has received an education and possesses talents, great or small. In a world short of jobs rather than people, if your abilities are inferior to someone else’s, you may never get your chance. You are swallowed by the current of the age and turned into fuel for the engine that drives its wheels.

Even taking off the long gown to make a living can leave you in deeper trouble. Once you lose the little uniqueness you had and are branded as less skilled than others, putting the gown back on becomes difficult.

Days whose ending is visible from the beginning; a life running between three points. Repetition is not the only frightening thing—there are layoffs, and the hardships of retirement. You cannot remain eighteen forever, yet someone is always eighteen. The more children are born, the greater your chance of being laid off; the fewer are born, the greater the risk to your old-age support.

A hoe furrows the farmer’s body, an electric screwdriver twists sparks from a factory worker’s joints, and a keyboard scripts my future at my desk.

The answer “an abundant supply of cheap labor,” once written on a geography test, has become a self-mocking reality. As a boy I used my pen as a gun and fired bullets I believed righteous at examination papers. Ten years later, walking home after work in the early morning, I heard a bullet whistle in the wind. I turned—and it struck me between the eyebrows.

Everyone laughs at Kong Yiji for being unable to take off his long gown. Everyone is Kong Yiji in a long gown.

Knowing it cannot be obtained quickly, I entrust the after-echo to the sorrowful wind

I am a mayfly lodging between Heaven and Earth, a grain of sand in the vast sea. I grieve that life is brief and envy the Yangtze’s endless flow. I would ride with immortals and embrace the bright moon forever—but knowing that cannot be obtained quickly, I entrust my lingering echo to the sorrowful wind.

I am a mayfly in the universe, as small as a grain of sand in the sea. Life passes in an instant; a century from now, nothing but a stone may remain, without a trace of me.

I still remember being shown a newspaper as a child and asked which of China’s top universities I wanted to attend. Ignorant of how high the sky and how deep the earth were, I answered without hesitation: “Tsinghua or Peking University.”

For more than a decade, like most Chinese students, I rose before dawn and returned after dark. Crossing the single-plank bridge through armies of competitors was almost a zero-sum game, an arms race with guns replaced by pens. Effort was not about becoming better, but about avoiding a worse life.

Now I understand that there is always someone beyond you and a mountain beyond every mountain. Some aim for Harvard or MIT and treat Tsinghua or Peking as a safety net; some leave school young, enter business, and become billionaires. I see only the cold moon and warm sun wearing away human life.

Carried along by shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, doing futile things, I could not stop to experience life. It took me ten years to find what I truly love, to feel the joy of learning for love of it, and to gain something genuinely valuable from learning.

A lowly scholar of modest destiny

I, Bo, am a man of humble destiny, a mere scholar. I have no road on which to request a sword and serve the state, yet I admire those who cast aside their pens for great deeds. I have left behind rank and office to serve far away… When the right companion appears, why should I be ashamed to play the flowing-water melody?

Wang Bo described himself as “a man of humble destiny, a mere scholar.” If even a brilliant man like Wang Bo struggled to meet a discerning patron, what of ordinary people like us? What if we are not swift horses either?

Imprisoned, I long for a road I cannot reach; small in person and weak in strength, I carry great wishes I cannot fulfill. Where is the road ahead? The road ahead is boundless and unclear!

Regret cannot mend the past; the future can still be pursued. The mistake has not taken me too far; I know now what is right and what was wrong.

Lamenting the past is useless. While there is still time to turn back from a wrong road, once you have found your own path, there is no need to hesitate—walk forward boldly.

Hello, World

People burdened by life are everywhere, and so are people who have found a purpose. Their aims may look different, but I believe even Du Fu, a poet from a thousand years ago, held the great wish to “shelter all the poor scholars beneath one roof.” Anyone shaped by Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought in modern society can possess this sense of social responsibility and ultimate goal.

The road beyond the mighty pass was hard as iron; now we stride over it anew.

Mao Zedong advanced this process in China. Now it is our turn to take up the baton. Taking off the long gown changes nothing—that is defeatism, escapism, surrender. Shouldn’t our task be to let everyone wear a long gown?

If I have done all I could yet cannot reach the goal, I can have no regrets. Who could condemn me?

Finally, with the thing I love—programming—I challenge this imperfect world:

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References

• The moment the bullet hits the forehead is when education completes its loop, and we should accept the ordinary