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
真的，一直到现在，我实在再没有吃到那夜似的好豆，——也不再看到那夜似的好戏了。
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.”
靠柜外站着，热热的喝了休息；倘肯多花一文，便可以买一碟盐煮笋，或者茴香豆，做下酒物了，如果出到十几文，那就能买一样荤菜，但这些顾客，多是短衣帮，大抵没有这样阔绰。只有穿长衫的，才踱进店面隔壁的房子里，要酒要菜，慢慢地坐喝。
…
孔乙己是站着喝酒而穿长衫的唯一的人。
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
寄蜉蝣于天地，渺沧海之一粟。哀吾生之须臾，羡长江之无穷。挟飞仙以遨游，抱明月而长终。知不可乎骤得，托遗响于悲风。
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
勃，三尺微命，一介书生。无路请缨，等终军之弱冠；有怀投笔，慕宗懿之长风。舍簪笏于百龄，奉晨昏于万里。非谢家之宝树，接孟氏之芳邻。他日趋庭，叨陪鲤对；今晨捧袂，喜托龙门。杨意不逢，抚凌云而自惜；钟期既遇，奏流水以何惭？
I, Bo, am a man of humble destiny, a mere scholar. I have no road on which to volunteer my tasseled spear, as Zhong Jun did at twenty; yet I harbor the resolve to cast aside my writing brush, admiring Zong Que’s long-cherished ambition. I set aside cap and tablets for a lifetime, to serve my parents by morning and evening ten thousand li away. I am not the treasured tree of the Xie family, yet I have been blessed with the good neighbor of the Meng family. In days to come I shall stand in the courtyard and humbly attend like Kong Li; this morning I hold up my sleeves, overjoyed to have climbed the Dragon Gate. I never met my Yang Yi, stroking my cloud-touching prose and pitying myself; but since I have met my Zhong Ziqi, why should I be ashamed to play the Flowing Water?
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!
悟已往之不谏，知来者之可追；实迷途其未远，觉今是而昨非。
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.
雄关漫道真如铁，而今迈步从头越。
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?
尽吾志也而不能至者，可以无悔矣，其孰能讥之乎？
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:
| |