about
The homepage of a software developer who has worked with embedded systems and multimedia technologies for years.
Also the playground of one of those air-fairies—someone who still imagines living like an artist, writing stories, traveling around the world, and all that.
Who am I
I write.
Most of the time, I write software—for a living and for fun. One of the pleasures of programming is getting to play with dozens of computer languages, which gives me a peculiar sense of accomplishment considering how difficult I've always found learning languages in the real world. Like many ambitious young people just out of college, I once planned to learn Japanese, German, and perhaps Spanish as well. Unfortunately, I still can't read Kafka or Márquez in the original, or watch anime without subtitles.
Occasionally, I write other things too: poems, essays, and a story or two, mostly in Chinese and entirely for fun.
I paint too.
Although I rarely set up an easel these days, I painted a great deal when I was younger, especially before I was persuaded to give up my dream of becoming a fashion designer and turn to computer science instead. Computer science was comforting: everything had to be either true or false, with nothing inexplicable. At least, that was how it seemed before ChatGPT came along.
Timeline
An obscure rural town
1980 - 1997
Datong, Shanxi, China
The town was small, rural, and old, hidden among the mountains for hundreds of years. To me, it felt like a monotonous little planet that held me captive, with only a handful of books in my parents' closet offering a window onto the outside world. What I learned from those books was that my hometown was insignificant, that there was nothing there for me, and that I should get away as soon as possible. That's the truth. I don't want to disguise what I felt when I was young, even if it makes me sound snobbish, arrogant, or petty.
But that doesn't make the years I spent there negligible. They were the same years everyone once had in youth: nostalgic, sunny, quiet, and mostly happy.
A city buried in the dirt
1997 - 2004
Xi'an, China
My first impression of the city was not a good one, largely because of its lack of modern buildings—which, in my mind then, were essential symbols of urban prosperity. Most of the apartment blocks were Soviet-style buildings: four to six stories high, dull, dreary, and characterless.
People there seemed to live in the past. Whenever someone compared Xi'an unfavorably with another city, the conversation would suddenly rewind—years, decades, even centuries. Someone would ask with a certain scorn where those other cities had been when emperors here were lighting beacon fires along the Great Wall.For a country boy who had barely seen a real city before, it was easy to become intoxicated by the illusion that the ruins of glorious empires were everywhere around him.
The effect on a young man was not entirely healthy. It took me years to stop looking inward and to accept the reality of what had long been happening in the wider world.
Brave new world
2004 - 2005
Beijing, China
"All phenomena which admit of definition are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows, like dew drops and lightning flashes. They ought to be regarded thus."
Self-exile
2005 - 2011
Nanjing, China
I had once been fascinated by the Southern Dynasties of ancient China, and that fascination became my only real reason for making the abrupt decision to move to Nanjing—another old capital of vanished dynasties. The move, however, ended in disappointment. My romantic expectations collapsed almost immediately. The people I met there seemed very different from those in Xi'an: more realistic, more pragmatic, and far less inclined to linger over the past.
It was only recently that I realized the mistake was mine.
Still, life there was not bad. I had a stable job and a decent income, made several friends, met my wife... Yet I always felt that Nanjing would be only one of the many temporary stops in my life.
The imperial capital
2012 - 2015
Beijing, China
It was the winter of 2011 when I moved back to Beijing, a city I had once thought I loved. The cold air brought a touch of familiarity, while everything else reminded me that this was no longer the city I remembered. By then, people had begun calling it “the Imperial Capital.”
The golden state
2015 -
California, USA
When I was young, whenever someone asked what I dreamed of having one day, my answer was always:
- Have a yard while I'm alive.
- Be buried in the soil after I die.
- Wear a shirt throughout the whole year
