When Silicon Valley Meets Seattle
If you ask whether Lingnan is a hard place to live, the answer comes: where the heart is at peace, there is home. — Su Shi
It has been more than four months since I uprooted myself from Silicon Valley to the Greater Seattle area; and it was nearly four years ago that I hauled myself from Beijing to the Bay Area. My parents gave me the restless gene, and I have passed it on to the next generation without stint — born in Xinjiang, I was six when I followed my parents back to Gansu, and twelve when we drifted on to Guangdong; my eldest, at two, followed me from Beijing to Silicon Valley, and at six she will take her two-year-old sister and move on again to Seattle. I may not be able to out-write my father, and to date my professional achievements have not surpassed his either, but when it comes to uprooting a family — to the knack of turning each city one has passed through into a “hometown” — I can fairly claim that the pupil has outdone the master.
Our generation lives in an age without hometowns, and yet we cling, perversely, to the hometown feeling. As an atypical wanderer, I have always found the hometown to be something both crisp and blurred. Xinjiang is the home that bore and raised me; Gansu is my father’s home; Guangdong is my childhood playmates’ home; Beijing is the home most like a home — to date it has consumed the longest stretch (a full third) of my life. And Silicon Valley, the holy land in every programmer’s heart, where I lived for more than two years, is my spiritual home.
The more one drifts, the more composed one must be. Look at how easily Su Dongpo took it — banished to Huangzhou, he wrote, “I shall simply be a man of Qi’an; why must I return to the old hills?”; reaching Lingnan and tasting the lychees of “the concubine’s smile,” he wrote, “I would not mind being a Lingnan man all my life”; and at last, in Hainan, “I was originally a man of Dan’er, a sojourner in Xishu.” The old gentleman Dongpo traveled ever southward, south by southeast; I travel ever westward, west by northwest.
Silicon Valley people love to mock themselves: “fine hills, fine waters, fine loneliness.” Coming to a plain, honest, sprawling village from the neon of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, loneliness is only natural. But for programmers inured to 996, living out their days on a two-point line, loneliness is something of a false problem — there is always a world-class problem waiting for you to solve (say, making the app’s color change with its “shell”), always a boss-level bug waiting for you to write it, and the hormones of young laborers scarcely need to be discharged through drinking contests at the dinner table, singing contests in the KTV, or card games in WeChat Moments.
Friends often ask me to compare the Bay Area with Seattle. I tell them I spend my days grinding along a two-point line, so I can’t compare.
