On University

Whenever people talk about university, they seem obliged to invoke “an independent spirit and free thought.” I’m not that grand, so I’ll stick to recounting my own university years.

Recalling the past is a rather painful business. The whole process is like looking at yourself through frosted glass, or paper soaked in oil — not only blurry, but hard to make out. Often I feel like Harry Potter stepping into the Pensieve, desperate to grab that blurred version of myself in the scene and say, “You’re doing it wrong” — but I have no way to reach in, and no way to get a word out.

(I)

The year I took the college entrance exam, several things hit at once. First came the university enrollment expansion, then Guangdong rolled out the 3+1 pilot system, then my mother fell gravely ill, and finally — for reasons no one could explain — the application forms we’d solemnly filled out before the exam all had to be refilled afterward. Suffice it to say, I was put through the wringer. The refill only slightly changed my choice of schools; nothing else changed — every single one of my preferences was computer science, with the “no reassignment” box checked.

This application eventually landed in the hands of a teacher at Sun Yat-sen University’s admissions office. She sighed, shook her head, and called me:

“Is this student XX? Your score falls just a little short of the computer science program — such a pity. Would you be willing to transfer to applied mathematics?”

“No,” I answered, firmly and stubbornly. At the time I’d read The Road Ahead and was convinced I was bound to computers for life; I still held a kind of pilgrim’s reverence for computer science education in China, and anything else was simply outside the realm of my consideration.

“Well, applied mathematics, you know… talk it over with your parents, and I’ll call you again in a few days. Give me a final answer then.”

That was the only time I ever had contact with a teacher from Sun Yat-sen University. She was extremely kind, patiently explaining the merits of applied mathematics and how it connects to computing later on. But I couldn’t take it in. The only thing that made me hesitate, even slightly, was whether to accept this admission so I could be closer to home and more easily care for my mother — which had been my original reason for putting Sun Yat-sen first. After discussing it with my father, we both concluded that this was a choice that would shape my whole life, and that it was better not to leave computer science.

And so I began to wait for an olive branch from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

As someone who had taken the college entrance exam exactly once, I made a terrible mistake: HIT’s computer science department simply doesn’t consider applicants who list it second.

I waited nearly half a month more in something close to despair. One by one my classmates found their destinations, while I alone drifted like a kite with its string cut, fluttering through Guangdong’s peculiar rainstorms.

In the end, Northeastern University’s computer science department took me in. The day I got the admission letter, I nearly cried — for a while I’d gloomily believed I wouldn’t have a school to attend that year at all. Because apart from those three first-tier preferences, I hadn’t applied anywhere else.

Years later, a question kept circling in my mind: if I had chosen Sun Yat-sen, what would my life have been? More than a decade on, I’ve gradually figured it out: there are no “what ifs” in this world; every choice exacts an opportunity cost, and once you’ve chosen, there’s no point in regret. No single choice in life truly determines your whole life — the roads to Rome are some long, some short, it’s only a matter of time. Life’s path is measured in years, even decades, and success or failure isn’t decided in a single moment. Of course, then again, the various choices you make at different times, gathered together, define a person. Laozi said, “Fortune hides in misfortune, misfortune lurks in fortune.” Life is full of such hidden turns, fortunes and misfortunes abound. Just keep walking forward.

(II)

Northeastern University is best known for Neusoft Group and Liu Jiren. Unfortunately, in the Internet age, even IBM was in decline — let alone Neusoft, which did the same software, services, and systems integration. But back then, Neusoft, like Lenovo and Huawei, was a monument of the national IT industry.

In the first year of university, students weren’t allowed to own computers. To write a program, we had to make a special trip to the computing lab, pull on blue cloth shoe covers, carefully insert our floppy disks, open the same blue Turbo C interface, and write something.

Computer penetration was low back then, and my classmates still held computers in a kind of awe. I, however, had my own computer since the tenth grade — from DOS 6, through Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, I’d long since lost any awe. While my classmates were still clumsily copying the Pascal the teacher had “written on the blackboard” from their notes into Turbo Pascal with awkward fingers, I could already conceive a problem on my own and solve it in C.

That was pretty impressive. Unfortunately there were only five girls in the whole class, so no one appreciated it. And I knew perfectly well myself that I’d just read one or two more books and played with computers two years longer than everyone else — like a marathon where I’d gotten a ten- or twenty-meter head start.

I can understand the school’s original intention in banning computers for freshmen, but this paternalistic chasing and blocking actually backfired. Many kids were driven to internet cafés, and the rule that dormitory gates locked at eleven pushed plenty of them to pull all-nighters at those cafés. Young people were at the height of overflowing hormones, and the internet café owners’ secret to drumming up business was games plus all kinds of adrenaline-triggering pictures and little movies. This stuff could be bought at every “electronics street” springing up across the country with Zhongguancun as the model — five yuan a disk, returns and exchanges guaranteed, discounts for bulk. Shenyang’s Sanhao Street was certainly no slouch either; all sorts of disks could be had there.

The domestic education system has a huge fault line between high school and university. Coming up through high school, we were barely allowed to touch the outside world — like the Monkey King pinned under Five Elements Mountain. For several years, our living space and our understanding of society were confined within a tiny campus. Meanwhile, all the ignorance and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) lurking in the Pandora’s box within us slowly piled up, accumulating into a terrifying presence. Then, in university, the restraints and the “protective umbrella” suddenly vanished, the box burst open, and it was all too easy to bring disaster on oneself or others.

I remember reading a news story years ago: eight young men in one dormitory at a famous university pooled their money to hire a prostitute, spent the night carousing in their room, and the next morning she collapsed at the doorway from exhaustion as she tried to leave, and the whole thing came to light. Afterward, the school, the parents, and the moralists all rushed to denounce the students’ moral depravity, but forgot to reflect on their own problems. The young men paid a huge price for their actions — that’s the responsibility adults must bear — but the Pandora’s box hidden inside wave after wave of students has never been dealt with at the root.

For the whole of my freshman year, I was a good boy. I attended classes seriously, was proactive, went to the library when I had nothing to do, got good grades in every subject, collected various scholarships — quite the model student. Not that there was no Pandora’s box inside me; it just was still sealed, continuing to gather strength — I don’t know whether to thank or curse the school’s tight control over freshmen.

(III)

In sophomore year we all had our own computers, and dorm rooms suddenly got a little crowded. The capable get more work: because I was a little ahead of the pack in computing, classmates from my class — and even other classes — would call on me for advice when assembling a PC.

When I went home for the holidays, the moment relatives and friends heard my father introduce me as a computer science major, they’d pounce like a drowning man on a rope: “Help me put together a machine,” “Help me kill some viruses,” “My computer won’t boot, take a look,” “Help me reinstall 98”… Even now, when I go back to my wife’s parents’ home, the relatives there still ask me to look at their computers: “My 360 antivirus check score has dropped recently, can you take a look?” Every time this happens, I smile wryly and remember Prof. Randy’s story about his mother introducing him:

This is my son. He’s a doctor. But not the kind which can help people.

From a layman’s perspective, you’re just the guy who puts computers together. So put them together.

With my own computer, I cut way down on time in the library, and even on time in class. I played around with all kinds of novel software, installed a dual-boot system running Win98 and Red Hat. There was no Fedora back then, let alone Ubuntu — the only option for running Linux seemed to be Red Hat (I think Red Flag Linux had also just come out). To the students around me, setting up a local network, installing Linux, and being able to write a few lines of code made you practically a god.

Now I often reflect on how important it is to have broad horizons. That’s why kids today are far stronger than we were. The horizons are just so different — I almost wish I’d been born a generation later. We surfed the web on 28.8k/56k modems, and when a classmate’s home got ISDN, it suddenly felt like heaven. We didn’t know what kids our age abroad were up to; we didn’t even know what the software industry — especially the internet landscape — looked like at the time. When you lack horizons, you get smug about being able to bluff your way through listing directories in Linux, writing a perpetual calendar in C (that computes leap years!), or throwing together a webpage with ASP.

I could already write webpages in high school, and after the college entrance exam I even used FrontPage to build a website praying for my mother’s health, hanging it on a personal homepage on NetEase (or maybe Geocities, I can’t remember). By sophomore year, ChinaRen was already booming. Chen Yizhou, Zhou Yunfan, and Yang Ning gave talks at various universities, radiating charisma on stage like idols, while the audience below was still clueless about the internet. Inspired by ChinaRen but constrained by its features, I later built a class website with ASP, uploading everyone’s photos and adding a bunch of features only I thought were cool (like a CET-4 question bank). At the time, the hormones in my body didn’t steer me toward building a FaceMash — what a shame. Still, this marked the beginning of my using the skills at hand to win award after award.

In sophomore year I won a lot of awards and landed a decent part-time job, with a lot of silver coming in every month, and I started to get full of myself. There’s a passage in the Dao De Jing I especially like: “He who does not display himself shines; he who does not justify himself is distinguished; he who does not boast is credited; he who does not glory himself endures.” I was the counterexample to every one of these: I displayed, I justified, I boasted, I gloried.

Back then, I flitted between competitions and activities while starting to lose myself in money. Every time I brought home a fat stack of cash from my part-time job, I’d sit on my bed, spit on my fingers, and count the bills one by one in front of the whole dorm in the most unskilled way imaginable — utterly, shamelessly nouveau riche. If there’d been a girl around, I’d have surely spread the money out like Kong Yiji and said crudely: “Buy!” That smugness and showing off — even now, thinking back, I want to slap myself.

Let me talk about part-time work during university.

In freshman year, the only outlet for part-time work was tutoring. For twenty-five to thirty yuan per two hours, I’d endure the bitter cold, wrap myself up like a rice dumpling, and traverse half the city to teach at a student’s home. After a winter snowfall in Shenyang, the roads were so slick they were like a giant mirror laid flat across the street — one careless step and you’d fall. Once I fell hard, splitting my trousers and exposing the dark red long johns underneath, like a battle wound on my leg. I sat on the ground, heartbroken, frustrated, helpless, because the bike had broken and I couldn’t ride on — that trip’s earnings were doomed to be lost.

Two of the kids I tutored were especially memorable. One was the child of a wealthy woman with a pretty face and a hot body, whom I taught computer skills — fifty yuan for two hours. Once the price was settled, I handed my bike to a classmate nearby (we all stood on the street holding up signs back then), got into the rich woman’s car, and was driven to a lakeside garden in what was said to be the wealthy district — much like a kept boy toy. Her child was six, smart, and quickly learned to play Quake 2, even knowing every English word in the menus. Teaching a kid like that Win98 was an insult to me, because he was too sharp — basically mastered everything in one lesson, then pestered me to teach him games. I taught him a bit, then lost interest, and after a few sessions told the wealthy woman her child already knew everything and didn’t need me. She was generous and paid me more than the actual amount.

The other child was a girl preparing for the college entrance exam. I can’t remember what she looked like — certainly nothing remarkable. In the sweltering heat she wrapped herself up from head to toe, as if a single glance at any part of her other than her face and hands would cost her her chastity; and her mother sat off to the side, glaring, monitoring the whole session, as if I were a thug just released from prison and one false move would doom her precious daughter. I usually open with a few jokes and small talk with students, but every time I went to her place I had to pull a long face, be all business, and pretend to be a stuffy old pedant. Tutoring a student and family like that was exhausting for everyone.

In sophomore year, an unexpected plum of a job fell into my lap. There was a private business owner who wanted a numerical computation program with a heavy computational load; he’d hired several groups and wasn’t satisfied with anything they produced. My teacher eventually recommended me, and I found that this sort of thing came easily to me, hardly any effort at all. I quickly built a prototype and passed the interview smoothly. The boss asked how much I wanted per month. I mustered all my courage, straining to imagine myself with my underwear on the outside flying toward Krypton, and only then nervously quoted a monthly rate of 1,500, hoping he wouldn’t slash it in half on the spot — but to my delight he agreed without a second thought. Less than half a year into our collaboration, he voluntarily raised the price to 3,000 — but that’s getting ahead of the story. In 2000, Neusoft paid fresh undergraduates only 1,900; forget foreign firms — even a tycoon like Huawei paid undergraduates 3,000-4,000. I made that much just by staying up late on weekends without delaying my coursework in the slightest — I can’t tell you how cool I felt. If heaven had given me a tail to turn me into a Saiyan, my tail would have stuck up higher than my head.

As the saying goes, “He who takes no thought for the future will soon have troubles at hand.” The sudden income freed me from the grind of tutoring and from budgeting five yuan a day for three square meals — all of which was excellent. But the arrogance it bred in me, and the hormones that had been slowly accumulating, nearly ruined me. I started skipping classes, binge-watching shows, playing games, watching porn, then pulling an all-weekend code-writing marathon to deliver the goods. The positive energy I’d absorbed in freshman year from Lincoln, Franklin, Gates, and all those Carnegie-flavored chicken-soup books was dispelled clean by this dark fog, and bit by bit I wrecked myself through indulgence.

Fortunately, I’ve never been the type to throw money around or live a life of extravagance. Even amid my dissipation, I remembered to send money home to help with household expenses every time I’d saved up ten thousand yuan. From freshman year on I’d taken out a student loan for tuition and covered my living expenses essentially on my own; being able to give back to my family now was both my blessing and my great fortune. Otherwise, I’d either have lost it all in the stock market or lost myself all the more thoroughly in the growing pile of money.

Speaking of the stock market — in sophomore year I began my amateur career as a retail investor. I soon suffered the most painful lesson of my life: I bought 400 shares of Sichuan Changhong at 12 yuan, and it slid all the way down to 4 yuan in the crash. And the brokerage I used, Southern Securities, collapsed with a bang in one of the following years.

In China, nearly every man with a respectable job has played the market. As a veteran retail investor of many years, I’ve seen demon stocks like Haihong Holding and Chihong Zinc & Germanium, and I’ve profited handsomely from long-term holdings in Vanke, Suning, and China Merchants Bank. On balance, though I’ve made quite a bit in the market — the house and the car both owe something to it — after years steeped in it I’ve come to see clearly: if you don’t put real effort into something, you’re better off not doing it at all. I’d typically buy a stock, then forget about it, remembering a year or even several years later. That’s really no different from playing the lottery: I didn’t watch economic trends, didn’t fret over company earnings reports — I just withdrew money from the market when I needed it. Profit and loss depended entirely on heaven’s mood.

Back to my sophomore year. My mental maturity was a notch above my peers’ at the time, but compared with kids today it’s not even in the same league. Today’s kids are exposed to so much of the outside world, start experiencing entrepreneurship at a young age — it honestly makes me ashamed of myself. If only I’d poured my excess hormones into some unknown endeavor back then! But I poured them into QQ.

One by one my classmates began canoodling with girlfriends under the moonlight or huddling together in the library to cram, and I felt lonely and anxious. Eighteen is the age when the blood runs hot — as Feng Tang put it, “Give me a girl at eighteen.” The raging fire in the heart of a boy with no direction, no vision of the future, and no perspective was ignited by QQ. QQ back then was like Momo half a year before its rebranding — what boys and girls chatted about, you know. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog if you don’t tell them. So I started packaging myself — astronomy, geography, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, poetry and prose — whatever was flattering, I’d read up on. People were more reserved then; like the Goddess of Disillusionment teaching Baoyu the arts of love, first there was poetry recitation and talent shows, a long buildup. These days it’s as explicit as can be — right to the point. When I was starting my company, I once heard a talk on how to operate a user base of loser guys, and it inspired me. So I registered an account on Momo, using a pretty girl’s photo as my avatar. The men who added me got creepier and creepier, every sentence below the waist, and one even sent a nude photo of himself right off the bat — so disgusting I nearly smashed my phone. The internet environment was truly nothing like 2000.

I hooked a girl from out of town on QQ, as bursting with springtime ardor as I was. It was a relationship with impure motives — it ignited fiercely and ended just as fast. Over half a year went by in flirtation and long-distance romance, and I grew not at all. The only consolation was that the part-time work continued, and I successfully joined the college’s Computer Science and Technology Association (the “Ke Xie”).

(IV)

Junior year brought real specialized courses, and they made me lament the uselessness of a computer science education. With many textbooks, teaching myself was more effective than listening to the teacher — in fact, most of the time the teacher wasn’t teaching, just writing on the blackboard. Of the several specialized courses I took, the teachers’ urge to write on the blackboard was stronger than a young boy’s desire for a girl. A quicksort filled half the blackboard; for an inner join SQL query, the teacher would copy it from his lesson plan onto the blackboard character by character.

So my odds of skipping class kept rising, and I spent more and more time on the Ke Xie activities. I liked being around a group of people who loved technology with a passion — even if they disparaged my ASP and exalted their PHP, I didn’t care, as long as I didn’t have to hear the sound of chalk striking the blackboard. Today’s geek boys gather together and say “write the code, change the world”; back then the best we could come up with was building a management information system — “write the code, make the money.” Horizons, horizons!

2001 was the debut year of .NET. Back then a Visual Studio .NET beta came on a set of four or five discs, and installing it once felt like it took half a century. Out of my deep love for Microsoft technology, I dove into .NET without hesitation. I’d already been writing the part-time software in Delphi for a while; on a whim, I rewrote all the code in .NET. Unfortunately, .NET at that time ran like a pile of shit on a Celeron, and the StringGrid I relied on was a regular memory glutton — no amount of memory seemed to be enough. When I initialized a matrix of sixty thousand rows by sixty columns, the hard drive churned and churned to no avail, making me feel like I was constipated. With no other choice, I switched back to Delphi.

Before Delphi I’d always used VB. VB’s speed was maddening, but writing code in it really was idiot-proof. Delphi had originally been my roommate’s area of study, but before he’d even finished that Delphi beginner’s guide, I snatched it from him and learned it in a few days. Sometimes I think I have a bit of a gift for learning languages: after my family moved from Xinjiang to Jiuquan, I spoke the Jiuquan dialect fluently, until my parents firmly put a stop to it; later we moved to Guangdong, where I could understand Cantonese within a month and communicate without difficulty within three; after a stint at Juniper, my English — though tinged with an Indian and Eastern European accent — was fluent and comfortable enough. As for programming languages, I’ve gone through Basic, C, Pascal, C#, PHP, Python, Erlang, Go, Haskell, and so on — syntax has never been an obstacle. This is probably down to my pragmatic temperament: with a language, once I understand the syntax roughly, I can’t wait to start coding, filling in the gaps as problems come up. This makes for fast learning, at the cost of being less systematic. But isn’t programming, after all, about solving problems?

In ’01 Microsoft ran a .NET training camp, and I was selected to attend. The camp taught a lot of practical things, and for the first time I felt the enormous gulf between industry and academia. After it ended we learned Microsoft was holding an Asia-wide .NET developer competition, so we formed a team, ostensibly representing Northeastern University — I was the most junior member of the team (and probably contributed the most code).

With a new goal to strive for, my relationship with impure motives gradually faded. There was no formal breakup, but the QQ account I no longer logged into silently declared it all.

We built an enterprise information system in .NET, which made it through the Northeast regional round and earned us a ticket to Beijing. At that point, though it wasn’t official, I was already tacitly allowed to use the college lab’s equipment — a privilege of graduate students.

In the competition held at Beihang University, we lost to Beihang, who went on to represent China in the Asian finals in Seoul. On the way back, everyone was listless.

Despite the defeat, I wrote a lot of code and picked up a lot of technology at that competition — for instance, Microsoft Agent, which nobody knows about these days (the technology behind that paperclip in Office, or the little lion in Rising Antivirus). I later put that technology to use when courting the woman who’s now my wife — I made an electronic love letter that, once opened, would pop up a little figure on the screen and start singing “I Look Up, I Look Down, I Look Left, I Look Right” while doing the motions. Even a brooding programmer who can’t soulfully belt out “I’ll never break your heart” can absolutely capture a girl’s heart by unleashing a move like that.

Of course, that technology, like the once-faddish Flash, has long since disappeared — the post-90s generation may never even have heard of it.

Back from the competition, I formally joined the lab’s 863 Program group, researching the preposterous field of virtual enterprise information integration. Preposterous or not, papers still had to be published. After a few failures, I figured out the trick to publishing papers and successfully published an article as first author in the core journal Computer Applications (the one in Chengdu, I think that’s the name). I quietly came to feel that publishing in a domestic core journal was really no big deal — the essence boils down to a few words: “make simple problems complicated.” For example, an algorithm you could explain clearly to a classmate would certainly never make it; it has to be formalized, and the more complex the formula, the better — ideally something that makes readers go, “Holy shit, that’s sick.” Then you’ve succeeded. Of course, a formalized algorithm alone isn’t enough; you also need some impressive definitions, supplemented by schematic diagrams shrouded in mist. The diagrams should live up to the same standard as the formulas — not meant to be understood, but to be incomprehensible: the less people understand it, the higher your cachet. Following the same recipe, I published two more core journal papers.

After that, publishing held no more interest. I was appalled by the pedantry of academia as a whole — everyone was forced, as if they’d swallowed opium, to squander every ounce of their life force in a haze of smoke, torturing their own intelligence to the limit.

(V)

Senior year was rather plain, mainly about finding a job. That mule-headed stubbornness from filling out applications came back — this time, it was Beijing or bust. The job market that year was bad: Huawei and its ilk were still digesting the excess headcount from the previous two years, and well-known foreign firms basically turned up their noses at schools in the Northeast (HIT perhaps excepted), so there were no decent campus recruitments. NEC sounded like a good company, but its test didn’t cover computer science or programming — it played IQ puzzles. Those nauseating questions that give you three shapes and ask you to pick the next one really are slow to do if you’ve never seen them before. I was only halfway through when someone handed in their paper and left. At the time I despised interview-question banks the most, but in the end I had to bow to reality and read through some of the questions on the BBS.

I waited and waited — at long last, the campus recruitment for Digital China came. From written test to interview to meeting the Northeast regional general manager, I felt that the process of a big company hiring one person was truly a case of having nothing better to do — not only did it mess with the poor students, it wasted its own time. Of course, if campus recruiting serves as a means to brush up the company’s presence and image, then I can understand it. After meeting the Northeast regional general manager, HR told us to wait for word from headquarters — and that wait lasted over a month. Just then, China Software (CS&S) sent a notice for an interview in Beijing. After passing the on-site interview past Daliushu North (the location of CS&S headquarters — I remember the place name very clearly), I decided to go check out Digital China headquarters and see what was really going on. After coordinating with HR in advance, I arrived at Digital China HQ. Clearly, they’d forgotten all about it — or maybe they’d originally planned to hire none of that batch of campus recruits. My appearance presented them with a small problem, so they arranged yet another round of interviews. With CS&S’s offer in hand, I was much more confident, and my performance probably exceeded their expectations, so Digital China made me an offer too.

This experience taught me: for some things, if you push a little harder and put in a little more effort, you just might make them happen. If I’d quietly waited for Digital China’s offer back then, I might have waited forever.

Back in Shenyang, I kept hoping that a towering foreign firm like IBM or Microsoft would come recruit on campus, but heaven didn’t oblige. In the end, after weighing everything, I painfully gave up the .NET opportunity at CS&S and chose to work at Digital China in the networking equipment industry — a field I had no concept of whatsoever. Back then, if a student was lucky enough to join a foreign firm — high pay, good status — it was a very glorious thing, so fresh graduates racked their brains to claw their way onto that path. Ten years east of the river, ten years west. Now foreign firms in China are doing poorly on the whole — or rather, private enterprises have risen dramatically and stolen their thunder. In any case, if today’s fresh graduates had to choose between Microsoft, IBM, Oracle on the one hand and Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent on the other, I’d bet the vast majority would pick the latter.

(VI)

What’s lost is often the most precious, and the wise cherish it all the more before it slips away. Every stretch of time, once passed, is gone forever. After reading Start-up Nation, I particularly envy the Israelis: everyone serves in the military, and students serve three years after high school. In those three years they face society, face teams, face superiors, go through a great deal, and learn many lessons. Most crucially, in those three years they come to know themselves more fully and grow more mature. When they return to campus, they know more clearly what they want. Becoming mature is no easy thing — it took me a long time to gradually figure out who I am and what I want.