和自己斗争 Fighting with Myself

AI-generated translation.

Over the past two years, MuMu has discovered quite a few deep-rooted flaws in myself—each one exposed under the bright eyes of the broad masses represented by classmates like Li Shuo and Cong Hao: stubbornness, overthinking, narrowness, pettiness, self-isolation, jealousy, an intense desire to possess, resistance to new things, and many more that I won’t list one by one.

The first time MuMu really broke down was after CET-4 in some year, in the empty classrooms on the third and fourth floors of Teaching Building No. 3. Cong Hao recalled today that after I read Southern Weekly I started writing furiously and crying furiously. I hadn’t brought tissues, so tears and snot were all mixed together in a terrible mess. On the way back, passing Building 13, we could still hear some department’s graduation song being sung itself hoarse. The second breakdown happened in some winter before a math competition. Cong Hao and I were cramming at the last minute in Room 318 of Building 11, and then MuMu just started talking and talking and talking… The result was that both of us crashed the next day at Beihang.

Youcai asked me today what the most unforgettable thing of 2007 had been. I thought for a long time and said it was all those frequent all-nighters. But after thinking more carefully, it was actually taking part in the infrared positioning project. Only from then on did I slowly begin to find my footing. We had been working on that thing continuously from winter 2006 to summer 2007. Looking back on it from start to finish, it was probably the most meaningful thing I’ve done in college so far. To my shame, back then Li Shuo had to persuade me for quite a while before I agreed to join. From the earliest stage of validating the plan and experimenting, to drawing boards and making boards, to making trip after trip to Zhongfa hunting for narrow-angle LEDs, to cascade debugging, and finally boxing it all up—we learned much more than just “reliability design.”

I remember that while their whole big crowd went off to study transmission principles and information theory in the study rooms, I would be in the lab drawing boards. Sun would be memorizing G somewhere around Teaching Building 3, 9, or 2. Whenever I finished one part, I’d call him over to check it and teach me the next part, hehe. By then he had already taken a national first prize in embedded systems. Added to Li Shuo’s worshipful attitude toward him, I couldn’t help being a little afraid of him—I really do bully the weak and fear the strong… But later facts proved that classmate Sun was actually very kind to students… During winter break our boards came out, and we excitedly rushed over to debug them in real life. Hiboy picked up my board and said it looked like Sun’s style, and my heart gave a little thrill of delight. Then he continued by saying things like this pad should be set like this and that copper should be poured like that… Only later did I realize that in pure technical skill Hiboy was still better—and that remains true even now.

An aside: during finals that winter, empty seats in BUPT classrooms were as scarce as ever. Yun, Chicken Essence, Xiao Huang, me, and Li Shuo all ran to the fifth floor of Teaching Building 2 to occupy seats. Their transmission principles and information theory, and my automatic control and data structures, were all conquered there. Later we concluded that it was actually quite nice that our majors and exam schedules were different. My transmission principles and information theory electives were examined earlier, so I secretly brought the information theory paper out to them. Their data structures exam came before mine, so Yun, Chicken Essence, Da Huang, and Xiao Huang copied all the programs they had整理ed for me, along with the bug they discovered in the topic-selection program: each person was supposedly limited to choosing twice, but if you deleted the IE cookies you could choose endlessly. Then when the time came you could try one topic after another and do whichever one you knew how to do…

In winter 2006, I went home on the lunar 23rd. I didn’t buy a ticket at school. One especially dark and freezing morning around six, Xiao Huang and I went to the North Railway Station to buy my ticket home. On the last night, I was the only person left in the whole building. From outside, Building 11 looked like one huge black mass. When I felt my way to the third floor, I discovered that the door at the corridor entrance was actually shut!! I started sweating then, cold sweat and regular sweat together, but since there was nobody around, I somehow got braver. I went up and saw the lock was hanging there but not actually locked, pushed the door open, and found the corridor pitch black. And I had no idea where the light switch was!!! More sweating. I kept my head down and walked forward, lighting the way with my phone, groped my way into the dorm room, turned on the light, locked the door, climbed into bed, and didn’t dare get down again… Suddenly the phone rang. I got up and answered—it was Dad. He gave me a whole string of instructions and I responded one by one. I had just lain back down when it rang again. It was still Dad, saying a bunch more things… I think the old man missed me.

After school started in 2007, I kept going to Zhongfa, once a week. Xiao Huang and the others needed sensors for Imagine Cup, so they also went weekly. Somehow we ran into Wang Hao at Zhichun, hehe. The first time I ever ran into someone from high school outside school in Beijing, and of all places it was Zhichun. I told Xiao Huang that was the guy across from my old home, and he also did electronics design. Later, when we went to buy parts and get invoices in the summer, we ran into students from Jiaotong University and went up to chat. They knew Wang Hao too and said he worked on radio frequency. Later they won a national second prize in RF—that’s a later story. I still remember Xiao Huang helping fix the network for a motor vendor on the second floor in Zhichun, because they had promised him a little motor from the kind their cart used if he fixed it. In the end the network didn’t get fixed and the motor never made it into his hands… hehe.

As for buying narrow-angle LEDs, I got burned many times. Everyone said the shop all the way to the left after entering Zhongfa had the most complete models and the best quality, so I went straight there. First I bought a whole pile of wide-angle ones—at least they were still infrared tubes. The second time was even worse: I somehow bought a whole bag of dead tubes… I practically cried… After that I learned my lesson and bought fewer each time, but the effect was still terrible. Just when I had basically given up hope, I discovered Everlight’s counter on the first floor in Zhichun selling 15-degree narrow-angle ones, and the experimental results were excellent! So then we laughed…

And about the narrow-angle tubes, one more thing: at the beginning we asked a lot of people and tried to find other ways to achieve a narrow angle, such as putting a lens in front using optics. One evening I was taking one of Professor Lin’s electives and suddenly remembered that the old gentleman worked on optical communication, so during the break I ran up and asked him about it—the only time I ever spoke to Professor Lin at close range. I could clearly see the bloodshot veins in his two unevenly sized eyes. After hearing my problem, he suggested putting a fiber-optic head on the LED to improve collimation (or at least that is how I understood it), and then asked me what year I was in and what project I was working on. I said I was a junior. He said, “You’re already doing projects as a junior?” I can’t remember what I answered. Then he found a PhD student to help with my problem. Later that doctoral senior sent me several emails with a lot of suggestions, but none of them were really feasible. Later still, I skipped Professor Lin’s class, and in the end even skipped the exam. This year Professor Lin transferred away. Times change, people change—a small regret, but the story still has to go on…

It was spring during cascade testing. Very few people came to the lab, and we spread our setup all over the place, taking up half the room. The oscilloscope and power supply were all thrown on the floor, and Li Shuo was sitting on the floor too. (Yun said Professor Guo only decided we really looked like people working because he saw Li Shuo sitting on the floor.) Professor Guo came over, saw us, and said: “Now this looks like people doing real work!”

Then in summer came the days of frequent all-nighters. The first was for the preliminary review of the innovation award for the infrared positioning project. Li Shuo, Sun, Xiao Huang, and I stayed up the whole night. In the first half of the night, mostly Xiao Huang and I—and barely Li Shuo too, I guess—were debugging. In the second half Sun boxed everything up. It left a very deep impression on me. I have no idea where he got that aluminum case. First he covered it with insulating tape, then integrated all the scattered parts into it one by one, boxed it up, fixed the antenna and camera, and suddenly the whole thing became completely different in weight class—the conclusion being that clothes make the man and packaging matters!

Later we passed the initial review as the Electrical Engineering School’s top project, but were squeezed out by our own brothers in the final review and only got third prize. Even so, the people who had participated in infrared all ended up doing pretty well. The final review itself was kind of funny too. Looking around, it was all Innovation people. See-saw was originally scheduled second, Xue Zhou and their CASBAM project first, but because we arrived early, we went first. The old professors had just finished breakfast and were all in excellent spirits. Everything felt pretty good. Later, during the positioning demo, one old professor asked me: “You’re a teacher, right? Didn’t you just come up a moment ago?” I broke into a sweat and said I was a student and had done two projects. Da Huang said, “During the innovation award season everything was extremely rushed. At that time our lab was the most aggressive of all—we were like a pack of hungry wolves, treating the innovation awards like meat to snatch. Everyone had more than one project on their back, so time was unbelievably tight. Sun was the most amazing one. In the end even the judges were privately slipping him notes. I forget what was written on them; I only remember one was from an old grandpa in the law school.” Including his paper, Sun participated in seven projects in total. The old grandpa wrote vertically, right to left. I vaguely remember it was something like suggesting he make some project related to the elderly…

In summer we also prepared in the lab for the national competition. My teammates were gone for long stretches of time. In the first half of 2006 Hiboy had been busy with Intel’s embedded systems competition, then in August that year he went back to Shanghai to compete and won national first prize, stayed at home for a while, and had severely overdrawn his health in the first half of the year. When he returned to school his body was in bad shape, with frequent headaches. In the second half he joined Imagine Cup too, and had basically never rested, spending only a week at home over New Year’s. By the time summer vacation came, his health was still bad, so he had to go home. Then there was Li Shuo. This guy could make people absolutely furious—he was really very much like Zhu Bajie. I once joked that if I ever became a PhD or master’s advisor and had a student come to me, the first thing I’d ask would be who his father was. If his father’s name was Li Shuo, I’d reject him on the spot! Those two disappeared for long stretches over the break. Thankfully there were kind Yun, Da Huang, and Chicken Essence, who was always wandering in and out.

One problem we worked on over the vacation was wireless simplex. At that time neither Li Shuo nor Hiboy was around, and Chicken Essence had privately gone home with some girl. “The chicest one of all was Chicken Essence. Those few days some unknown little girl had him running circles around her. It was bad enough that he was陪吃陪喝陪逛街 in Beijing; in the end he even followed her back to her hometown. I couldn’t stand it (I hope Chicken Essence doesn’t curse me when he reads this, hehe). And his timing was impeccable: he came back exactly on the day after Ma Bo had finished checking this problem of ours. The whole lab had collapsed, and he was still lively…” (Maybe I’m going a little too far. I’m just waiting for him to come knock me…) So I ended up working together with Yun and Da Huang, adjusting and adjusting. One day Old Ma suddenly said he wanted to inspect our work. Everyone automatically decided on an all-nighter. Thinking about it now—and honestly even then—it really wasn’t necessary. Maybe staying up all night is addictive? Who knows. Anyway we just stayed up for no reason at all. Yun kept Xianing company while he tuned the mc2833. I was trying to handle the digital part, with extremely low efficiency. Around two-thirty I went to the component room and ran into Da Huang, and the two of us launched into one long conversation, reviewing one by one the various labs and advisors in BUPT Information. The one that left the deepest impression on me was Little Xu Jianwei—Chen Zhi kept listening from the side the whole time. I think we talked until nearly three, and everyone sighed about how inefficient and meaningless this all-nighter was… Then we went back and kept tuning.

Both Yun and I had set our center frequencies at 30.7m, but when I transmitted at 30.7, I could only receive around 30.72, so the sound that came through was full of noise. Around four I told Yun about this, and he said, “Mine and yours are exactly reversed!” So the two of us started having him transmit while I received. The circuit had just been put together when the speaker suddenly blasted Ashin’s crystal-clear “Even if I die, I still want to love~ not loving to the fullest is no fun~” Because we had done volume amplification, the sound was seriously loud. People from the other side all came over to look, and everyone got wildly excited… Now every time I hear “Even if I Die, I Still Want to Love,” I think of 2833, and of classmate Xianing’s center-frequency-adjustable board, hehe. The next morning I even overslept for the inspection, and Da Huang and the others shook me awake frantically, saying, “Get over here, Old Ma is looking for you!” I practically rolled and crawled my way there… At that time everything was one giant mess…

In summer we also went out twice for fun, and Chicken Essence was there both times. Once Chicken Essence, Yun, Xianing, and I biked back to Changping… On the way there we took a ridiculous number of wrong roads. We were exhausted, and my butt hurt badly. But Changping had changed so much. On the basketball court Chicken Essence and I reenacted the scene of when we first met: the backdrop was some Basketball Equipment Cup match, and we were both watching. I don’t remember who spoke first; I only remember, “Hey, you’re from Shandong, right?” “Me too!” When we were reminiscing, Yun photographed us, and titled the photo “Recreating the scene — the moderator and the first king of water-posting meeting.” … Xianing took photos in front of their old dorm window, and Chicken Essence and I sat on the steps of the North Cafeteria watching pretty girls. They said, “This is youth” -_-!

Another time was not long after that, when Xiao Le, Chicken Essence, and I went to Guijie to eat spicy crayfish and grilled fish. Chicken Essence was unbelievably lazy—too lazy even to peel shrimp—so in the end he actually ate the fewest shrimp. We also saw the XX car he wanted there (forgive MuMu’s total ignorance about cars)… In a few days I was going to take Wan Xiner there too… and this glutton Chicken Essence wanted to go as well…

An inserted broadcast on the origin of the name “Chicken Essence”: first of all, I didn’t come up with it. Old Shao did. Classmates from 04 Information who took Shao Zhijia’s Communications Principles lab theory class probably all remember more or less: “Today let’s look at a model report. This is class 04605 classmate Liu Chicken Essence’s report. Look at this table—how elegant!” I, by contrast, was hopeless in every possible way, and Old Shao seemed especially fond of Chicken Essence’s style, praising him openly and grandly. Then Tang Tang heard “Chicken Essence,” and after that we all followed the old gentleman and started calling him that.

And while we’re at it, the origin of “Xiao Qiang”:

Background: Innovation people from my year, some a year older, and a few a year younger all call me Xiao Qiang.

Name-giver: Yun.

Reason: At the Beijing competition, Li Shuo and I were on one team, and all our soldering was done by me, successfully on the first try each time. Yun was full of admiration and called me strong at “soldering” (“han”), which later evolved into “Xiao Qiang.”

Stories about Xiao Qiang: Xiao Xu Jianwei and Chen Zhi once came over and said they had a song for me called “Cockroach Xiao Qiang.”

The spirit of Xiao Qiang: Chicken Essence said cockroaches can live even without their heads! He also said they can survive being boiled in water for thirty minutes! So the spirit of Xiao Qiang is tenacity and toughness.

Then in September came the national competition. We chose Problem C, the oscilloscope, which seemed fairly difficult. Chicken Essence, Yun, and Da Huang chose digitally controlled filtering, did it very well and very easily, and all three got excellent results without many all-nighters, first in cascade, first in boxing it up. I, damn it, stayed up two nights!! Later I could barely stand. But even if I could go back, I’d still choose that problem, because seeing how hard Hiboy worked, he really did genuinely love it. How long did Hiboy’s computer keep running? On the final morning, when he ripped that thing off his neck in one motion, I thought he looked especially cool~ As for Li Shuo—how should I put it? A strategic error. We still couldn’t match Yun and Da Huang’s tacit understanding. Next time we can’t let him handle only “all non-technical issues”…

After that came graduate recommendation. In July, Peking University had an open day, and Li Shuo, Sun, and I went together to wander around. After getting nowhere at the information desk, we ran into the building of the School of Information Science in Science Building No. 2 and accidentally walked into the Vision and Hearing Lab—the very place I was later going to. I was determined to continue with pattern recognition. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know myself. Then while wandering randomly into some room on the second floor, we ran into the head of the hearing group, Professor Wu xh. We went up to chat, and the result was that he and Li Shuo launched into an extremely fierce debate! It was about the information entropy of a watermelon seller on the street. The teacher said, “You BUPT students think I, a Peking University professor, don’t understand theory?” The three of us turned green… Li Shuo really can talk. He kept wandering from topic to topic until it reached his specialty. Wu worked on hearing, and when he heard Li Shuo had passed piano level 8, he said, “Can you get graduate recommendation? We do research related to music. If you can get the recommendation, I want you. Get in touch when you go back…” It was all heart-stopping. In the end Li Shuo never contacted him, first because he really wanted to keep developing in computer architecture, and second because he personally felt the teacher was a little unreliable in the same way he himself was… But that’s private gossip too.

After that came endless emails, contacts, and interviews. BUPT’s graduate recommendation system gave bonus points for competitions, and because the policy kept changing, the rankings kept changing too. Sun surged all the way up from outside the top ten, became number two for two hours, and then dropped back out of the top ten. Li Shuo also spent two hours as number three, then dropped to fifth, then to seventh?? Anyway it changed many times in one day, like the stock market. Meanwhile my ranking never changed at all. Worth mentioning: while those two were temporarily ranked high, they hurried to open proof documents and mail materials to Tsinghua and Peking University. Later Tsinghua learned that Sun had fallen out of the top ten and demanded he get back into the top ten or his interview qualification would be canceled. During those days we kept seeing Sun in the lab, reading until he got tired, then standing up and slapping the wall wildly—super funny~

One Sunday afternoon I went to Peking University for the second-round interview, at the faraway Xitucheng No. 10. Sun, Yun, and Huang Pengcheng were my backup brain trust. Whenever someone ahead of me revealed a question I didn’t know, I’d call them; they’d look up relevant literature and tell me the answer. During the waiting period Senior Shi even came by twice and said, “It’s okay, don’t worry, just perform normally and you’ll be fine.” During the interview a female professor grilled me hard on infrared positioning. Since it was something I had been doing all along, I handled it one by one with ease. In the end, the department head suddenly asked me a question and told me to answer as fast as possible, which made me terribly nervous: “How many strokes are there in your name?” “49.” False alarm. After it ended, I went to ask about the result. That female professor said, “Not bad, not bad, you answered quite well.” Later Senior Shi said that teacher worked on sensors, so she would naturally be sensitive to infrared… When I came out, I called my dad and said I had passed the second round. He and Mom were at someone’s wedding banquet, with noise all around them, and they said, “Congratulations.” Then I texted Sun and a whole bunch of others.

By then it was already National Day. I bought a Thursday ticket and went home with Xiao Zhu on the night train. A few days earlier Li Shuo had brought some mooncakes from home and said he wanted to share them with everyone. When he tried to give me one, I said, “Give it to me after you pass the Peking University interview.” He called that “a very clever refusal,” which made me sweat… Thursday afternoon Li Shuo called and said Sun had received a call from Tsinghua Microelectronics—accepted—and that we should all get together. I went downstairs to the north gate and saw Sun and Master Shuo. Master Shuo was holding the mooncakes, and I immediately understood. I said, “Li Shuo, you got the notice too, didn’t you?” He said, “At that moment I really wanted to eat these damn mooncakes myself! Then I thought about it and left them intact.” I laughed smugly, laughed smugly… Only later did I learn that during his Peking University interview, Li Shuo had actually carried the whole infrared positioning project with him… Sun said during his Tsinghua interview some old man had looked down on him, but later his advisor saw the things he had made were still beautiful and came over to chat with him about digital circuits for ages. “Sun is someone who always does things other people have never even heard of. One after another he took down Beihang, Fudan, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Peking University, and in the end went to Tsinghua Microelectronics.”

Dust settled.

Everyone went back to their own homes and found their own mothers.

Thinking carefully, everyone really isn’t that far apart. Chicken Essence and Xiao Huang are in Rongke Info, Da Huang is at the Institute of Computing just across from them, if you head north from Baofusi Bridge you get to me, and then I’m on the second floor of Science Building 2 while Li Shuo is on the eighth floor of Science Building 1. Those two buildings are even connected. Science Building 2 is right by the east gate of Peking University; if you go out, cross the bridge, that’s Tsinghua’s west gate, and if you go in and keep walking and walking and walking, you reach the main building where Sun is. I have no sense of geography, but it all feels very close. And the Asian Games Village should be even closer to Baofusi Bridge, right? Whether those who stayed or those who left, everyone is still circling around inside the same nest…

Speaking of which, the day President Lin left, someone posted on the forum saying that although BUPT’s campus is small, it has a lot of flavor. I’ve now also come to like BUPT’s compact, dense layout very much. The day I went to Peking University to submit materials, Li Shuo said, “Sigh, this place is so huge. If I want to ask you out for a meal in the future, where are we even supposed to meet?!”

We’ll still get together often—upstairs, downstairs, the gym, Jinzun, the snack alley by the south gate.

Back then we could gather for any excuse at all. Li Shuo would start with, “It’s rare that everyone is so complete today,” and his next sentence would always be, “Let’s find somewhere and have a proper outing!” Hehe.

Sun still doesn’t eat aquatic things or mushrooms, and the shaved ice Li Shuo loves so much closes early when the weather turns cold.

That day in the lab it was just Sun, Li Shuo, and me. Sun said, “When are the three of us going to work together on something again…” and I thought of Mayday’s Sun Wukong. Sun is clearly the eldest brother, Li Shuo is very much like the second brother, and MuMu is just a pure laborer.

“Hehe, from then on, the lab lost its former noise. Only now and then a few of us would go there and chat nonsense, and the remaining days of the year passed by in just that plain a way…

On January 5th the lab recruited new people. Watching another batch of kids about to come in, I suddenly realized that things really had changed. Everyone was about to leave this place where we had fought together, and with the ringing of the New Year bell, we were all about to go home again.”

This year I also took part in the class merit evaluation, together with Youcai, and in the end got fourth place. Anyway, there was prize money. Chen Wei, Tiao Zi, Sulede, Li Kai, and Ma Junguo invited the two of us to dinner. Chen Wei said that when they graduated, the people in their class invited the whole class to meals in pairs, and it lasted half a month! Every gathering ended with everyone crying their hearts out. Tiao Zi drank till he was blubbering and told me, “This year we really have to make the feeling arrive!” I need to write that sentence down… Tiao Zi is a good class monitor who cries when drunk and says he hasn’t done a good enough job… Tiao Zi is a good player who won a penalty chance by shooting the ball into the goal in the last minute of a five-a-side final… Tiao Zi is a good person who does not impose on others what he himself dislikes… But speaking of which, I only remember two sentences he ever said. The first was at a freshman Youth League meeting: “I hate washing clothes!” The second was: “The feeling has to arrive!”

In November I went on a little trip to the northeast, Harbin and Dalian. Sometimes Beijing feels too stifling.

From late November to early December I caught a cold.

In mid-December Wan Xiner and I went to intern at Netcom. We got looked down on in every possible way. Security guard B saw us and picked up the walkie-talkie to say to security guard A, “I see them, I see them,” and both of us just broke into sweat… We got pushed around constantly, had nothing to do, got no drinks, and Ericsson even treated people to dinner without taking us two along. Then one day we finally found our own people. On the last working day of 2007, our own people took us along for Friday, and it was truly moving…

At the end of December, Wan Xiner made me understand Daodao’s line: “Happiness is something you go find for yourself.”

On May 4, 2007, under Yun’s coercion, temptation, and all sorts of instigation, MuMu applied to open the Electronic Circuit board on the BUPT BBS. Half a year has passed since then. On January 1, 2008, at 9 p.m., MuMu bg’d the whole board on the first floor of the big cafeteria. Whether you know MuMu or not, whether you like circuits or hate circuits, you are all welcome.

Wishing everyone a promising 2008.

Continue fighting with myself.