Ha, it is still hard for me to answer 'who am I' now. It's too broad—I mean, what should I include in this section?

Looking back at my 19 years of life, it's pretty boring—go to a normal kindergarten, then move to a normal primary school, junior high, high school, and then university. It’s always very, very confusing to me when I watch some 'Japanese after-school anime'—don’t they need to study? How can they start a band, become idols, or even go to another world for adventure?

So, when I think about who I am, I would try to start by separating these 19 years into stages (btw, I am reviewing finite state machines now for my final—maybe kind of the same). This page might be full of grammar mistakes and some total nonsense things. I am sorry for that:(.

I do not know who is gonna read all this stuff (maybe nobody will read it even after I die), but if you are not from China or familiar with China, the word 'dongbei' may seem pretty weird. It is the pronunciation of 'northeastern' in Mandarin. I wasn’t born in Dongbei, actually, but I grew up there, so I consider it my hometown.

In 2004, I was born in Beijing (Ha, I am also from a big city :)). My father was a construction worker in Beijing. That year, he was just promoted to be a small leader in a local construction company. My mom comes from Heilongjiang (a province in northeastern China). That year, she had just started a small breakfast shop. They met in Beijing, got married, and had me. Before my mom came to Beijing, she had just gotten divorced—which was a kind of 'stain of life' back then. If you really know Chinese culture, especially the so-called 'Confucianism,' you may understand. This is also what led her to come to Beijing—to have her own life. Before my father came to Beijing, he was the son of a not poor, but not rich, farming family. My older sister, the daughter of my mom and her previous husband, was still in Heilongjiang and attending high school.

Too much about my family so far. Anyway, I was born. Since my dad worked in a construction company, before I moved to Dongbei, I spent most of my life in the 'living area' of the construction sites—an area of dorms and other living facilities for construction workers from all over the country. Of course, I cannot remember too much about life there—it’s more than 10 years ago—but it was a wonderful time. I played with leftover rebar wire, binding it to make small toys; I watched the then-most popular TV animation GG Bond and Happy Superman (btw, I still really recommend you watch them); one piece of ground that wasn’t covered by hardened cement was reclaimed by workers to plant chili and Suzi. EVERYTHING WAS SOOOOOO GREAT!

I enjoyed this life until I was 7—time for primary school. My parents were so busy with their work, and I had to stay in the living area if I wanted to stay with them, which was actually not a great place for a student. So, they decided to send me to my aunt's home (which is in Heilongjiang). She was a primary school teacher there, so maybe I could be better educated. Thus, at the end of the summer of 2011, I, with one bag of luggage, stepped onto the train to Heilongjiang.

It was pretty weird—I had only been to Heilongjiang 1 or 2 times before I moved there with my aunt, but I felt a sense of belonging the very first second I jumped out of the train. Qiqihar—the city my aunt lived in—was the city. Even years later, I can still remember the huge picture of Mao Zedong hung on the wall and many commercial billboards around it. We took another bus for an hour, and we arrived—Ang'angxi.

There, I started my primary school life. First time making friends, first time handing in homework, first time getting a terrible score—many, many things happened to me for the first time. My aunt lived in a house (like an apartment?) given by the school, which was really close to a high school. Every day after school, my friends and I squeezed through the high school’s fence (the school is called NO. 11 high school, btw) to play on the campus. From a more "modern," or a more "metropolitan" view, the school was really poor—no playground, no facilities, just two academic buildings and an empty area in front of them, but it was still very, very fun, especially during the winter.

If you have seen a map of China, you may have seen how far north the northeastern part of China is. Qiqihar is not that far north, but still closer to the north than 95% of cities. The normal precipitation in Qiqihar during winter is 5mm—which is pretty high. Each time after snow, the school would call students to clean the grounds and pile it in the empty area. We had a lot, lot of snow to play with. At the same time, the average temperature during winter is -15℃ to -20℃. If you have experience living in such an environment, you would know how easy it is for a person to get diarrhea. So, during the winter vacation, my daily activities were: hungry, eat, play with snow, diarrhea, hungry, eat... not very healthy, but pretty memorable.

Compared to my later time in Beijing, or places near Beijing, the period living in Qiqihar was actually pretty short. I was there for around 4 years. I left when I finished my third year in primary school. But in many cases, length is not the most crucial factor—memory is. Even though I haven’t been there for about 10 years since I left, and I have no pictures with me, I can still feel a sense of belonging when thinking back to that place and that time.

I know, I know this name looks pretty similar to Heilongjiang, but they are different places. If you look at the map, you may see that this place surrounds Beijing. That’s true: Beijing was, at least for a period of time, part of Hebei. It was after 1949 that Peking became Beijing and then the capital of China. Anyway, I was not living in Beijing at this time—I lived in Hebei. There is a pretty famous commuter town called Yanjiao. This town—politically it is a town, but there are over 900,000 living here (more than the population of San Francisco)—is only literally one river away from Beijing. Every morning, over 300,000 people commute to Beijing from here, which takes around 2 hours if the destination is Beijing’s CBD.

I lived here. As you can see, this is a kind of hopeless town—it is also a town for hopeless people. Most people living here are working-age people with their small families, unable to handle renting or buying a house in Beijing. They may have worked in Beijing for 10 years and yet are unable to even get permission to have a car in Beijing (people need a Beijing driver’s plate to drive in Beijing, while they need to win the so-called "license plate lottery." Even this lottery is not open to everybody—you have to fulfill about 10 requirements for it). You may be able to imagine how a public primary school works here.

And I studied in such a primary school for another 2 years. It wasn’t that bad, to be honest; it wasn’t a hopeless school like the ones you see on TV—most students just purely didn’t care about studying, but they weren’t mostly bad people. It’s actually pretty understandable—if you have some knowledge about China’s education system.

In China, children can go to school for almost free (you may need to pay for books and uniforms, mostly 50-80 RMB per year when I was there) until junior high, which is called "9-year compulsory education." After a student finishes junior high, he or she attends a province-wide test to get accepted by a high school, or they go to vocational high school if no high school accepts them. At the same time, there is a policy called "5-5 separation," which means only 50% of junior high graduates can go to high school. But this policy is not school-wide but province-wide—for schools with better teachers and resources, this number is never 50% but 100%, while for those not so good, a 10% acceptance rate has happened before. Also, because of the compulsory education policy, each primary school has 1-2 "connecting junior high schools" for students to choose after primary school—of course, you can go to other better junior high schools outside the list, but you have to get much, much higher grades than others. It’s a clear path, or a "string," for children in China—for a better university, you need a better high school; for a better high school, you need a better junior high; for a better junior high, you need a great primary school. Now the question is, what decides which primary school you go to? Where you live.

Now I believe you can probably understand why students here don’t care too much about their studies—it’s useless. The place they live has already decided that they cannot go to a good primary school, thus not a good junior high, and so on. Actually, most of my classmates here didn’t go to university—not even community colleges. About half of them started working after graduating from junior high, and almost all the rest started work as factory workers, insurance salespeople, or waiters in restaurants after high school. I only lived in this town for around 2 years, but it affected me a lot—especially the importance of equality.

This part is not as light-hearted as previous parts, ha! When I left Yanjiao, I wasn’t actually that aware of these things—what can a 12-year-old child know? I was pretty excited, with a little bit of fear, to move to the next place—Beijing.

Why this part is called "rich man"? Because I am RICH.

Just kidding. As I mentioned in the previous part, the main factor determining which school you attend is where you live. But there is another way: private school. Paying more money, you can kind of have better educational resources. Unlike in the United States, the best educational resources (and also things like hospitals) are often public. For instance, if you take the top-twenty-university enrollment rate, the best high schools are public high schools in Beijing. However, without a Beijing "Hukou," you cannot study there. Even if you get into these high schools, you cannot take the Gaokao (university entrance exam)—which is the most important test for high school students in China—in Beijing.

Tooooo far from the main topic. Anyway, during this period, I finally moved to Beijing, the center of northern China, and started my junior high. It was there, in junior high, that I first got in touch with personal computers. Of course, I had seen computers before, but it was the first time that I could really "touch" a computer with my hands, and that was the starting point that made me want to learn something related to them in the future. I was really stunned by it the first time I used it (probably not that stunned) because it was kind of a totally new thing for me. I joined a club started by a computer teacher and began my first course with computers—an introduction to Photoshop.

Yes, my first computer course was learning how to use Photoshop. Now, after around 6 years, I’ve forgotten most of the tricks in Photoshop. But I can still remember the first time I opened the software and saw the startup page—it took so long because the computer was kind of outdated. Anyway, that was my first time getting started with computers. After that, I was pretty intrigued by it, and I really wanted to learn more. So, I reached out to my teacher from the PS course and joined her club for programming—not actual programming, but using platforms like Scratch that only require dragging blocks and a little bit of logic. The first program I made was a mock piano: you press different keys and hear different sounds. I now kind of regret not listening to her suggestions about starting to learn some real programming languages like Python :(.

I know, as a junior in college, junior high school life was only around four to five years ago, but I can hardly remember that many things because my life in junior high was pretty—boring. Or, I should say, my life over the past 19 years can pretty much be summed up with the word "boring"—not many faults, but also not many achievements. There is one theory that "teachers only remember those in class who have the best and worst performances," and this is really kind of true for me: unable to stand out from a bunch of people, both in positive and negative ways. With this kind of boring personality, I moved on to high school.

Unlike other students, I only spent two years in junior high school. My school’s program allowed me to spend two years in junior high and then spend four years in high school, starting the so-called "international courses" earlier. There was a test before joining this program, and to be honest, I was pretty surprised and kind of perplexed that I could be one of them. Now looking back, it wasn’t that hard to predict I’d join the program. During my two years in junior high, my worst ranking among all students in my grade was 40th out of around 300 people, and my best was 10th. Not a good enough score to make all the teachers and students remember me, but okay enough to get into a program that took around 40 people.

I can recall a lot more from high school than from other periods—its closeness to now is definitely one reason, but another important reason is that it was the first time I could spend a pretty long period of time with the same group of people. Most of my classmates were also my junior high classmates, or at least people from the same grade, so it reduced a lot of effort in meeting new people.

In most cases, the last sentence of the previous paragraph would be "reduced a lot of effort in making new friends," and it was the sentence I wanted to write at first. But one question is: who is my friend? Are friends some people you can contact and expect an immediate reply from, or somebody you can hang out with, someone I can talk to about the games I’m playing and the anime I’m watching, or someone I can share my thoughts and opinions with? What is the definition of a friend—or, in other words, what differentiates friends from classmates and colleagues? That is the question that has perplexed me for years, and it’s still almost impossible for me to get a clear answer.

Again, we seem to be getting too far away from what we’re talking about. Anyway, I started my high school life—in the same campus as my junior high, but in a different building. Our first classroom was on the first floor—which was the best, and I really missed it when we moved to the third floor in our fourth year. We woke up at 6 in the morning, ran to the classroom to use the final few minutes to prepare for the vocabulary quiz every morning. Vocabulary quiz—one of the "nightmares" in high school (not that serious actually). One essential step in preparing for the TOEFL is vocabulary. In order to keep us acquiring more vocab, our teacher would assign vocabulary tasks every night and quiz us the next morning. On average, we tried to remember around 200 words every day, and she would pick 30 to 40 to test us.

I was really bad at this. I couldn’t remember that many words in just a few hours after classes—and even if I could, on some days, I could barely remember them after a 6ish-hour sleep. Now, looking back, especially after preparing for the GRE test and having to remember even more vocabulary, it’s easy for me to see that the most basic reason is that I really hated it. I didn’t want to spend f**king hours staring at one word and trying to etch it into my brain. So, for around 3 years, until I submitted my final TOEFL score just a few weeks before the application deadline, my morning schedule was wake up, wash my face and brush my teeth, put on clothes, run to the classroom, and try to remember even one more word before the quiz. Even with that, I could hardly get a score over 50 percent.

Aside from vocabulary, I was pretty okay in my journey preparing for the TOEFL test. Although I couldn’t get a score higher than 110 (out of 120), which is generally believed to be required to get into a top university in the USA, I got an okay score that helped me get an acceptance letter from NYU. For my other courses, it wasn’t as torturous as TOEFL, but also not that great. Looking back, I took 6 AP tests, but only got a 5 on 2 of them. It’s always pretty hard to admit that, as a computer engineering student, I only got a 3 in AP Computer Science A. But learning itself is always fun. Even when studying for these courses, I was really interested. It was always fun to learn something new, even if it was just class knowledge.

Although learning is pretty fun, for one person, the most memorable things in high school are often not connected to studying: friends, lovers, colleagues, partners in projects, and time spent with them. I am not a person who is good at making friends (or maybe somebody considers me his or her friend, and I do not think they see me that way). I am pretty, even from my own perspective, really dim in social interactions. As I wrote above, I really cannot differentiate between friends and relationships like classmates and colleagues. So, maybe to avoid making myself look awkward, I normally don’t consider someone under the word "friend" but under the other relationships mentioned above, which are a little "further" than friends. And that is one reason I have almost never hung out with my friends (maybe once or twice as I can recall). Another big reason is that I often think I don’t have enough money to hang out. Going to a private school really cost a lot, and so does studying at NYU.

Among the 40ish students in the class, the number of people I can call "friends" without worry is around 3 or 4. Pretty high percentage, huh. I cannot say that my relationships with others were bad or that we were like strangers—we could, in many cases, talk together and have some fun, but there was still a kind of gap between us, from my view. Or, when thinking "she/he is my friend," I would worry about the question, "does she/he also think I am her/his friend?" But at least, after graduating from high school, I can still consider some of them friends, even though we are separated, which is pretty enough for me.

Alright, too much about friends, let’s move to the part about "lovers." This shouldn’t be plural, actually, because there was only one experience in my high school life, or I should say my whole 19 years of life until now (about to become 20 years!!!!). I would definitely not say she was my "first love," because a similar kind of feeling had happened before, but I didn’t recognize that as "like" or even "love" until I met her.

Okay, I am not the kind of person who can write something romantic. She and I were both from the same junior high and joined the same program, and we were in the same math class when in the junior high. However, to be honest, I was unable to recall who she was before we moved to high school. We were assigned to the same class, and that’s how it started. I cannot recall many details about the first meetings, but what I can remember is that my first impression of her was "weird." She was the kind of person who could ask you questions like, "Do you guys really download porn on your laptops?" (btw, that’s pretty outdated—it’s the internet era now). We weren’t that familiar with each other until the third year, and of course, I didn’t consider her one of my "friends" before then (but from her view, she had already considered me one). Then one unclear day, I started to have the kind of feeling that "I like her." Of course, I didn’t tell her—#MeToo was a trend, and more importantly, I didn’t think I was good enough for her. I also didn’t take any action—I couldn’t differentiate whether it was a kind of admiration for some of her personality traits when working together, or if it was "like." But that changed on New Year's Eve when I sent her a message saying "Happy New Year!!" and she replied with something else. She said that she liked me.

Alright, everybody would be pretty confused or at a loss the first time they’re told that someone other than a family member likes them, right? Now looking back, I wouldn’t say that the "yes" I replied was without consideration, but it was definitely not a reply made under heavy consideration either. The next morning I begged (or kind of cajoled) my older sister into picking out the very first gift with me for her—it was a necklace, not expensive, not fancy, just a normal one made of normal metal. I can say that she was pretty happy, at least from my perspective. I remember the night I gave it to her, and I put it on for her—my hand was shaking, definitely. Dude, it was the first time I put a necklace on a girl—definitely shaking.

This love—or relationship—lasted for around 4 months, and we broke up in April. It was a wonderful period of time, I believe (at least from my perspective, except for the days when I said we should break up), and we both had a pretty good time. If you ask me "why" now, I’m unable to provide a clear answer. I would say that I couldn’t take such responsibilities—although I know there weren’t any responsibilities for me to take, and she didn’t ask me for any "responsibilities"—I couldn’t (and cannot now) say that I could stand by her or behind her when she, or we, face problems. Okay, okay, I know this really sounds like something a scumbag says, but this was what was in my mind. I don’t think I was, and I still don’t think I am, strong enough to deal with these kinds of problems. The capability for such strength comes partly from what we normally call "hard qualities," like money, but more from the softer part, and I don’t think my personality and mind are strong enough to say "it’s fine; don’t worry; I’m here with you" no matter what happens. I can’t even do that for myself. Or, in other words, I am also looking somebody else could say them to me. Maybe being friends is a better choice, for her, me, and us. We don’t message each other now, but we may have dinner together when she comes to New York City for Thanksgiving or Christmas vacations, at least for the past two years.

After writing the previous paragraph, I just realized that the "love" part occupies a pretty big percentage of the high school part—sorry to the other parts. Anyway, there were also things during high school that contributed to some of my thoughts and ideas: equality, equity, and conflicts. Looking back at my own life, I have experienced both lifestyles of rich people and the general public. When I was in primary school, no matter whether in Heilongjiang or Hebei, they were both public schools and thus open to everyone. Qiqihar (and Ang'angxi) is a declining city. It was built as a transportation center in the northeastern region, but its role was replaced by another city, Harbin, after the establishment of the PRC. Also, after the so-called "opening up" policy in China, factories started moving to the southern, coastal parts; state-owned companies began transferring to private ownership. If you know something about China’s history in the last century, you probably know about the high unemployment trend during that time. It was also since then that the population flow of Qiqihar city became negative—its population has continued to decline for decades. Thus, unlike some other provinces like Henan and Shandong that have so many students, the pressure on students in Qiqihar and Heilongjiang province wasn’t that high. Also, for primary school students when I was one of them, the competition between students wasn’t that intense—we didn’t have to learn programming like some kids now in big cities like Shenzhen when we hadn’t yet started learning basic math. As I wrote in the "Now in Hebei!" part, life in Hebei was the start of my thinking, "is this really fair?"

But my ways of acquiring information were still really narrow. Real-time internet platforms like Weibo and TikTok were not so popular back then, at least not popular among primary school students. One of the only ways for me and my classmates to access information was television (newspapers were too old-fashioned for us). We, as kids, didn’t pay that much attention to what was happening around us or in the country. So, when people around you and you yourself are in the same social class, how did I start thinking about this question, or who "guided" me? My teacher. One sentence she often said was, "How can you sleep in class? How can you compare yourself with xx student? Are you as rich as him/her?"

I do not think this is a problem specific to China but is more likely faced by most countries in the world—that we are living in an unfair place. Some people are born with more rights, and some with fewer. But when I first moved to junior high school and had way more access to computers, the internet, and especially social platforms, I thought this was the problem of the rigid government we had, and this "rigidity" was specific to China and to the People's Republic of China, which is governed by the communist party. I didn’t have my own laptop in junior high, so even though I had more access to some other resources, it was still pretty restricted. When I finally got to high school and owned my very first laptop, and, most importantly, had access to a VPN and thus the internet world beyond the Great Firewall, things changed. The VPN I used for the very first time wasn’t provided by some VPN provider companies but by a company that was funded and controlled by Falun Gong. You could Google what Falun Gong is, but basically, it was a religion (not exactly) that was taken down by the Chinese government when the leader was Jiang Zemin (and that’s the reason Falun Gong has been working for years to call for judicial actions against Jiang when he was still alive).

Anyway, I can still remember the first page of that VPN software—a page called "Truth of China." I personally do not like Falun Gong—it’s not a normal religion, and it should be called a cult. But that page really provided me with the very first time I learned something I could not know through the internet controlled by the government. For instance, a pretty classic "first lesson" for almost all Chinese netizens who first have access to the real "world wide web": The Tiananmen Square Incident. On June 4th, 1989, students and workers walked onto the streets and protested. They made posters and protested together in Tiananmen Square for what they called "a clear and democratic government." At the time, the previous Chairman of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) had just passed away, and one of his ideas was the democratization of China—a democracy like the United States. Also, the "opening up policy" proposed by Deng had been implemented for a few years, and many problems had arisen due to the quick shift toward "socialism." Democracy is good, indeed, but it comes at a cost. For those students and workers in Tiananmen Square, which is only a few hundred meters away from the power center of this giant country, the cost was their lives; for others who did not care about politics, or for people born way after that, the cost was democracy itself. Even now, after more than 20 years, what those students proposed has still not been fulfilled. I’m not going to comment here about the democratic movement or the government, but this was indeed the start of me having a more comprehensive view of this country.

For most people, especially those who work day to day to support their families, democracy is definitely not something they would spend time thinking about. Democracy is always and only a method, never a destination. It is only a tool for the governors and the people to have a better life; it should never be the final goal that some people chase without knowing what to do next after achieving it. This idea occurred to me when I started to use more "professional" software like V2Ray and Shadowsocks to acquire information outside of China, and it deepened with the protests that happened in Hong Kong in 2019. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of people walked the streets demanding direct elections in Hong Kong. They held black umbrellas and wore face masks to withstand tear gas from the police. They occupied streets, airports, and universities, holding posters that read "Free Hong Kong, Revolution Now." Everything looked very good—students fighting for democracy and freedom. And this also really looked like what had happened 20 years ago in that square: students started fighting for freedom, and the government tried to arrest those students. The biggest difference was the scale, and there were no direct deaths in Hong Kong. Aside from what I mentioned above, another thing was also similar: there was no plan for what to do next. What were the plans after democracy was achieved? If they wanted to make Hong Kong better, what was the plan after the democratic side became the ruling party? The only answer they provided was, "We want democracy."

This is one reason I consider myself a pretty conservative person, both in political preference and in day-to-day life. Some of my thoughts are pretty "outdated" in the eyes of some left-wing, or liberal, people. But at the same time, I am not that conservative. I support freedom of abortion for all women for any reason; I support the legalization of same-gender marriage; I support gender transitions, etc. And these mostly come from my access to information outside China’s Great Firewall during my high school years. Also, my thoughts on equality arose. As I moved closer and closer to college application season, I also started to learn more and more about college applications, both in China and the USA. For applications in the USA, scores are important but definitely not the only important factor—at least you can take tests like the SAT and ACT multiple times and select the best score. But college applications in China merely rely on the college entrance examination, and you can only take it once per year (some places like Shanghai have another chance, but almost nobody takes it). Is that really fair? Is it fair that students in China have almost only one chance, while those in the USA, including us who apply to universities in the USA, can have multiple chances? Even within China, the test is not fair. Some provinces and cities have fewer people taking the exam, and thus it’s easier to get into a better university because it’s easier for them to get a higher ranking among all students within the area, while their parents pay the same rate of tax to the government. Is that fair? Even with the same test paper, the same score, you would end up in totally different universities based on where you live, because some cities have higher competition while others have less. You can definitely move to those cities with less pressure, and there are no restrictions for most cities (except for a few really big cities like Beijing and Shanghai). But is it fair to let those families bear this cost?

I’m sorry for the discursive nature of the above. As I wrote at the beginning, this page will contain a lot of grammar mistakes (I’ll try to use ChatGPT to check), and things will jump back and forth. Also, as I write this, I’ve just realized that this part is longer than all the previous parts combined. This is also one reason I started a page like this—it’s always easier to remember something that is close to you. And, for most of the time, we don’t try to get rid of something or forget something; inversely, we often try to remember something but fail. I really miss the time I spent in Qiqihar and Yanjiao, though I cannot recall them clearly and in detail.

Also, I guess that’s it, at least for now. I started writing this page in March 2024, and today is September 4, 2024. If I were a writer, I would definitely have starved to death by now. These 6000ish words kind of recorded my life before coming to New York City and NYU. The writing extended over a really long time, especially between the "Rich Guy" and "High School" parts—I was on summer vacation and pretty busy (alright, I was just lazy) to write during that time. So, when you’re reading this (btw, thank you so much if you’ve read everything—or just scanned through it), at times you might think, "What the f**k is he talking about?" I apologize for that. From now on, I probably won’t update this page until I graduate from NYU Tandon’s undergraduate program. Again, if you’ve read from the beginning, I hope you kind of understand what kind of person I am, since I am unable to do that. So, if you read all the above rambling and kind of know what kind of person I am, please tell me. Again, thank you for reading!