Ape-arently Thirty-Five

(I)

Flowers Fall, and There Is Nothing to Be Done

This February is a special month for my whole life, because I’m finally about to cross that thirty-five curse which turns programmers pale at the mere mention of it.

In the ancient era of programmers (89–05), this curse circulated in the streets: the programmer as a profession doesn’t last past thirty-five. In other words, if by thirty-five you haven’t transitioned into an architect or PLM who doesn’t write code and “only uses their brain,” or into a manager or salesperson who doesn’t write code and “only flaps their lips,” then you will surely be slapped dead on the beach by the 25-year-old wave behind you.

A dozen years ago, I was genuinely terrified of this. In the days when I lived in Huilongguan, my desk and bookshelf were crammed with books on corporate management. Leaning over the desk, I often thought: put in nine years of hard work, and before thirty, escape the sea of bitterness that is being a code monkey. Oh, that’s right — in those ancient times programmers weren’t yet called code monkeys. Instead, an article on CSDN titled “Programmers and Prostitutes” forcibly elevated this profession — barely a decade old in China — to a position as titillating as that of the oldest profession.

Before thirty I did get my wish and became a manager. I loved management work — setting strategy, building teams, the challenge of making products, the sense of accomplishment that comes from growing the people around you — but somehow I still didn’t want to put down the keyboard. When my day job gradually stopped allowing me to write code, I started using weekends — sometimes at the National Library, sometimes at Tsinghua Science Park — squeezing out time to write a bit of code, just to console myself. This state of affairs sometimes tore at me: was this wavering of mine driven by a genuine love of coding, or by the fear of leaving the front lines and one day finding myself “circling the tree three times, with no branch to perch on”?

We know that though the drivers differ, love and fear can both motivate, can both make a person do something well. But I didn’t want the gaudy bubble of my life, once pricked, to splash out nothing but fear of the future. If that were the case, better to make a clean decision, switch to a profession I truly loved, and happily unfold my ambitions rather than anxiously stand guard.

Fortunately, later, during my startup days, at Innovation Works I met a programmer revered as a demigod of the ancient era: Jian Jing. If you’ve heard of UCDOS and Ourgame, then you should be able to recall that name. By then he had long since crossed the thirty-five curse — after finishing his startup run at Ourgame, he spent some time as an angel investor, then began a project called DialGenie. In our few conversations, I learned that he was still writing code. Later I came across a published interview with him that struck a chord, and I copied it down:

I’d been away from technology for about ten years, but the moment I touched it again, everything came back, as if I had never left — those things had perhaps been deliberately buried by me. In the end I decided to follow my heart’s guidance and return to my old way of life, rather than becoming a traveler living out “alternative” days.

The knot in my heart was completely untied. From then on I no longer wavered or felt lost. The thirty-five curse — at least — has nothing to do with me.

(II)

Ten Years, a Dream of Yangzhou

In this life we inevitably get stuck with a lot of labels. Some people get tagged by their friends as tall-rich-handsome or fair-rich-beautiful. The label my friends gave me: dumpy-fat-black-round — the darkened, deluxe edition of dumpy-fat-round.

At work, my current label is VP. VP is a touching label, because it isn’t worth a P.

On my WeChat public account, my label is “Programmer Jun.” Programmer Jun, Programmer Jun — it sounds refined and dashing: feather fan in hand, silken headscarf, and in the space of a laugh the “Eighth Prince” bugs scatter into ash. But the picture readers have of me is: a hunched-over, middle-aged, toe-picking uncle, thick glasses perched on his nose, drooling at the code on his screen.

At home, my label finally becomes honorable. My daughter is forever crowning me King, because it legally paves the way for her to be THE princess. For this noble label I must pay a small, trivial price: whenever she isn’t being a princess, I must transform at a moment’s notice into her mount — the kind of cute creature that lies on the floor wagging its head, looking slightly smarter than the Bull Demon King’s Jade-Water Golden-Eyed Beast.

Labels are a fascinating existence. Everyone spends their whole life striving for one label after another. Don’t imagine that because you’re indifferent to fame and fortune, free of desires, you have no label — perhaps you have unconsciously tagged yourself :“a match for Liu Ling,” while your friends, in private, affectionately call you :“Pigsy.”

Over the past decade or more, I’ve worked hard and been lucky, tagging myself in succession with :husband, :manager, :inventor, :“mortgage slave,” :father, :entrepreneur, :author, :“Silicon Valley code monkey,” and so on.

Yet labels are like used sanitary pads: no matter how clean and glossy before, once used, once their historic mission is fulfilled, they should be tossed in the trash and sealed away in the archives. A person shouldn’t guard them and let them become their whole life — there are still so many new labels to seize! In this I must learn from old Federer — his Grand Slam trophies, which dazzle my dog eyes, are toys for his children at play; and when, not long ago, he went to enormous trouble to reclaim the Australian Open trophy that had been lost for seven years, his daughters cheerfully wanted to use it to serve soup.

(III)

Let the Young Men at the Crossroads Wave Their Flags and Drums

Life is one journey after another. People who travel often share a feeling: you must receive the worst events with the best mood, because you can hardly predict what will happen along the way.

In 2007 my wife and I traveled in Europe. Driving from Germany across the border into Austria, the weather suddenly turned: the originally azure sky was swallowed by a vast black cloud, and rain poured down like Niagara Falls. Four or five in the afternoon was instantly wrapped in a black curtain, like the dead of night. At the border we’d planned to rest a while at a service station before heading to our next destination, but we changed our minds on the spot, wanting to finish the fight in one push — and instead got trapped in the downpour, inching along the highway. The rain was so heavy that even the wipers at maximum speed couldn’t clear the water long enough to give us a glimpse of the road, and visibility was so poor that we could only hold our lane by making out the faint lights of the car ahead. We drove like that, holding our breath, trembling, for about half an hour, until a wondrous dividing line appeared at the horizon — half azure, half pitch black — with a beautiful rainbow hanging in the distance, echoing the dense green villages lined up along the highway, so beautiful it stirred the heart. The terror of the journey had purchased a sight rarely seen.

But in life, many times you don’t get this kind of happy ending. Sometimes you travel a long way only to end up back at the starting point, laboring with all your heart for nothing. Yet this is like spice: the more finely crushed, the more finely ground, the more intense the fragrance. Jobs talked about connecting the dots — the older I get, the more I feel it.

On a sunny Friday in November 2015, I took the day off. After dropping the little one at preschool, my wife and I strolled aimlessly along a small path near the Cupertino library. Blue sky, intoxicating red leaves on either side of the road, spelling out the splendor of autumn. We were relaxed as rarely before, arms linked, savoring our soon-to-be-scarce world of two — the Monday after next, I would report to Tubi TV and plunge back into the busy world of startups. How many hardships and obstacles lay ahead, nobody knew.

Looking back now on that year-plus of campaign, I actually made it through: I endured the early days when an outage would hit almost every evening, right in prime time, like clockwork; endured the hard slog of rewriting the entire API system; endured colleagues coming and going; endured a three-and-a-half-hour commute every day; endured offer after offer tempting me — and even endured until my kid reached pre-K age.

Feng Lun says greatness is stewed out. To stew is to persist. Ordinary things, through persistence, become extraordinary. I’ve written on my public account for three years, and the words written over these three years have made me who I am; I’ve run for three years, and I’m still running. Writing and running have no special meaning in themselves — persistence is what gives them a different meaning. In this day-after-day, week-after-week persistence, my ambition will not be worn flat by life’s ups and downs, nor will my enthusiasm rise or perish based on others’ opinions. If in the early days I wrote to chase whatever was trending, now I write when I want to write. Writing something with tens of thousands of reads is of course wonderful; but if it gets only a few hundred, I won’t be discouraged and switch topics because of it.