出坡县记 Notes from Slope County

AI-generated translation.

Over the past few months, I have wanted many times to write something, but kept failing to start. Of course, the real reason is that I am lazy. Naturally there were all kinds of messy excuses too: before leaving Beijing I was frantically moving, seeing friends, and saying goodbye; after arriving in Singapore I was again frantically trying to keep up with the pace, terrified of delaying this person’s or that person’s demands. By the time I finally settled down, all those little flashes of feeling had already become hard to distinguish as true or false in the passing of time. I did not know where to begin. Recently Singapore entered the rainy season. Days of heavy rain drove away the Indonesian haze from slash-and-burn fires that had hung over the city for weeks. At night it suddenly turned cool, and caught off guard, I started sniffling nonstop. I spent a whole day lying in bed, but that at least gave me time to sort through this accumulated running account of life.

I cannot remember when exactly it began, but friends around me all seemed to be preparing to leave — some to reunite with lovers, some for the next generation, some to do more cutting-edge work, some to accumulate wealth faster… At the start of the year, when everyone asked if I wanted to go too, I was still completely firm: “I’m not going. I’m getting my teeth fixed, Beijing is close to home so I can visit my parents often, and our Cosmos project is about to go public release!” Back then, no one imagined that just a few months later I too would leave Beijing. Even though winter mornings, with endless wrangling meetings and smog outside the window, often made me desperately want to escape, the real thought of leaving only took hold at a Women’s Day dinner in the lab, when Teacher Bo one by one destroyed all my reasons for staying: “You can keep fixing your teeth abroad… your parents will probably need you more a few years from now… before and after public release, is the difference really that big for you?” Once that thought took root, I lost all energy for work. At the end of March, after seeing Zhang off, my mood dropped to rock bottom. I called Miaojing, and while talking, I could not hold back my tears. I had twisted an unchanging life into something more and more painful. It was time for a change.

There are many ways to change. Many people asked why I chose Singapore. Honestly, at first I only wanted to find somewhere warm to spend the winter. Singapore seemed safe, well-equipped, and Shizhang and Liqi were here. Then there just happened to be a startup in image search looking for a PM, and the job description matched my past experience so well that it felt practically custom-made. Angela, who is very good at metaphors, said it was “like jumping from a cruise ship onto a rubber raft.” I had no idea what storms might come, but for someone who had sailed only on big ships from the start, the unfamiliar experience of a small boat was irresistibly attractive. So I could not help wanting to try.

Even though I already had a preference in mind, before making the final decision I still talked to many people. Teacher Nie opened with, “So are you still planning to find someone or not?!”; Sister Shuang reminded me, “Startups have startup problems too. If you eventually still want to go back to a big company, this experience may not be better than staying at Microsoft or moving to another big company”; Ding Core encouraged me, “If you were a man, I’d advise you to think carefully. But for a woman, marriage and kids will probably interrupt your career someday anyway, so if you want to try, just try”; Sun said bluntly, “What does a startup need a PM for? The CEO should just handle it. You know I never buy into the PM role. My company won’t have PMs in the future either…” The team leader questioned me: “Running off to Singapore? So far from home… Do you know why Southeast Asia has no really big internet companies? The local market is too small, and overseas markets are too far away to truly connect with”; after hearing the full story, Zhiwei said, “I think it’s worth trying. The Singapore government really encourages tech startups, and it’s a technically oriented company. As long as you can learn something, that’s good. If it doesn’t work, just go back to Beijing — it’s not as if you won’t find a job. It’s just that O will be sad when you leave…”; on a work trip, Ying and his wife and DJ also sighed that getting the chance to work on a high-potential project like Cosmos was rare enough, and staying four years at Microsoft without changing project or group was even rarer. Throwing away that accumulation so easily really was a pity. “Not to mention PMs transferring to the U.S. get into the green card queue faster than most engineers. Hey, why not transfer over, get your green card lined up, and then go find a startup in California?”; Big O knew well that my ultimate life goal is to be a mother and pass my experiences on to my future children. After hours of talking about choices and the future, he sent me a message: “The more I think about it the less I think it is a good idea to go for this startup, having deeper experience in your field will give you more knowledge to share with your kids as well and to help advise them.” That card hit me right in the heart. Later, one day while eating spicy dry pot with the Baha’i little group, we talked about how life experiences shape children. Someone said that the experience of living in different places gets engraved into a person’s character almost unconsciously, like acquired genes, even in people who are already adults. So if I wanted to go to different places, then why not just go? No one can say what effect it might have on me or on the future.

And then there were my parents. I do not know how much guilt the line “When parents are alive, do not travel far” has added to the hearts of children who leave home. In recent years, some voices have pointed out that quoting only those six characters is taking the original out of context. The full line is: “When parents are alive, do not travel far; if you do travel, you must let them know where.” In other words, leaving is allowed, but you must give your parents a proper account: where you are going, what you are doing, when you will return, so they will not worry for nothing. When Teacher Nie left Microsoft for 大鱼, his mother did not speak to him for three months. When Teacher Bo returned to China to start a business, his parents asked, “What was the point of your PhD then?” So before speaking to my own parents, I had already prepared myself for a difficult battle. Yet compared with those examples, they were astonishingly open-minded. My mother gave me full trust and support and let me make the decision myself. My father fired a whole string of sharp questions at me, and after I answered them one by one, he muttered, “I still feel this isn’t necessary. Isn’t everything already fine now?” I understood that for protective Old Xu, not throwing a fit in opposition was already immense support. HP and AGL said, Xu Mumu, you really do not need to worry which choice will be better for your future kids — when they grow up, they will make their own choices and won’t listen to you anyway.

I am especially grateful for all those suggestions, doubts, and analyses. They helped me see many points I had previously ignored and think about this decision more rationally and fully, which only made me more determined: time is the only precious chip I have. Time waits for no one. I must go directly do what I want to do. Any delay, compromise, or roundabout “saving the nation by a curved route” is simply wasting life.

When I was sitting in the corner of Man Coffee in Wangjing telling the girls all this, Shanshan joked, “You really are Xu Mumu. I think life is meant to be wasted.” Before I left, she and Xiao Jiang came to Beijing from Kunming and Wuxi respectively, and all of us stayed together at Cong Hao’s place. At night we lined up to shower; Xiao Jiang helped Wang Xi do her hair; Xu Shanshan was rubbing on oils; I was eating Xiao Baxi ice cream; Cong Hao paced around irritably; Ahua stood by, smiling gently at everyone. In one instant, it felt as though time flew backward to the 11th dorm building ten years earlier, when we were all still exactly as we used to be. Before coming to Beijing this time, Shanshan had told Brother Hua that when Xu Mumu came back in the future, everyone could still see each other. Brother Hua laughed at her naivety: “When Mumu comes back later, she’ll mostly be visiting family. What does that have to do with you?” It suddenly felt as though once we parted, we might never meet again, and that made everything sad.

There was another equally sad moment when Miaojing and I sat on the round stone balls by the roadside in Xidan eating frozen yogurt and watching the women with long legs in stockings going by on an early-summer street. He sighed, “Now that even you are leaving Beijing, if I come back again it really will be like crossing the hills and finding no one waiting anymore.” Then he said that after playing the emotional card this hard, I no longer had permission to stand Xu Wei up. As the guide on my road of literary tastes, Miaojing has spent these past years wandering around outside Beijing. At the start of the year he came back to prepare for his thesis defense, and I was happy to have one more person to watch films and argue with. During the spring Beijing Film Festival, the Before trilogy was screened, and I dragged him along. When the schedule came out, even I was stunned: showtimes started around eight or nine each evening for three nights in a row. “This is basically an athletic event,” he said, looking reluctant. I played my trump card and brought up the friendship of lending him a mini fridge full of Chinese medicine during our graduation trip. “You even brought out the mini fridge! Fine then. Let’s see what cards you still have left later.” But by the second day, even I was tired and did not want to go. On the third day, a dust storm hit Beijing. It was just like the opening of Interstellar; by the time we walked from Dinghao to the crossroads at Zhongguancun, we were already coated in sand. I said maybe let’s forget it, but he insisted on finishing what we started. So we wandered from the east gate of Peking University to Wenhuiyuan through a sky full of dust and wind. When the host thanked everyone for coming despite the storm, he said beside me, “How many mini fridges must there be in this room?” So in early May, when he asked me to go hear Xu Wei, I was not especially interested, but I could hardly refuse after that. On the night before a business trip, we listened to Xu Wei sing Journey at Wukesong: “We always have to say goodbye / We gather and then part / We are always walking on long roads…” Maybe because I was about to leave, and had no idea what the future would bring, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.

The next day I flew to Seattle to do a usability study for a new product. The trip was worth it. I spent a week hanging out with Ying and his wife, saw old teammates, and said goodbye face-to-face. I also unexpectedly ran into two EVPs, Bingjie, and Senior Brother Dou. The only regret was that Uncle AC’s Beijing trip happened to overlap exactly with mine in Seattle, so I never got to say goodbye in person as I had hoped. I am very grateful to Uncle AC. He was strict and meticulous at work, helping me revise slides until deep into the night before presentations, correcting text formatting and grammar mistakes one by one. When he saw me staying silent in meetings, he asked, “Do you know first principle?” Most people talk endlessly about topics they know well, but may not actually be listening to what others are saying. When an argument reaches a deadlock, if you cut in from the most fundamental question, it may move the discussion forward… “btw you should be more confident… you could do more.” On the Great Wall, he said what a nice day it was. I replied that the day was only halfway over and something awful might still happen later. He stopped, looked serious, and said that this attitude was a problem: “life is what happens to u while u r busy making other plans.” So stop worrying all the time about things that haven’t happened yet and enjoy the current moment… When he heard I was leaving Microsoft, he scolded me: what the hell are you doing? Then the next day he called again to say that after reflecting, he felt his reaction the day before had been too intense: “I want let you know you have my support.”

I always felt I had been too lucky at Microsoft, and somewhere in my subconscious I wanted to step out and see how much I was worth without all that luck. It was actually a very immature idea. Because once I left, I discovered that what I most wanted to shake off was exactly what had been branded into me most deeply. At first, when others introduced me, they did not even say my name, only “a PM from Microsoft.” Interns interviewing with us would straightforwardly say they had looked through my LinkedIn and seen that I was “a PM from Microsoft.” I love Microsoft, but I love open source more. Looking back at these four months, most things went as expected. The only real surprise was how pure and kind the little group of teammates were. It felt a bit like going back to when I had just started working, when everyone discussed every day where to go have fun, whether to find an island and lie down like corpses, whether to go to the haunted house on Sentosa for Halloween — God, a haunted house, the last time I went to one was in high school… A whole group of people played charades crazily together, some laughing so hard they rolled on the floor. Their low laugh thresholds and poor self-control when laughing shocked me. And then there were Shizhang and Teacher Zhang, working hard to train me as the successor to Lightbulb Lin Ping and taking me along wherever they went.

Most of the time I am still very happy. It is just that my parents are the knot in my heart. Back when I first decided to come, Old Xu only muttered to himself, “I just think you really don’t need to do this,” even though I was being this stubborn. At that time Grandma was critically ill, and he was already overwhelmed caring for her. Thinking back, I feel guilty: not only did I fail to ease his burden, I went home and added to it. “Give me two years. After those two years I’ll come back, get married, have kids, and stop tossing around. Just let me toss around for these two years.” On the day he saw me off, on the road, he compromised: “If you want to go look around, then go. When you’ve seen enough, come back. You don’t even have to wait the full two years.” When I heard that, my eyes filled with tears. Back when I was job hunting and had no offer by October and called home saying I was under so much pressure I couldn’t sleep, Old Xu said, don’t be afraid — if you can’t find work, just come home and I’ll support you. Later, watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I saw Jiro tell his second son after he went independent: from now on, you have no home to return to. He meant to urge his son forward without retreat. Sometimes I wonder whether my father’s kind of doting has made me too weak. A good friend of my father’s, surnamed Shang, also had a daughter about my age. He once told my father that he should encourage her to go out into the world instead of always wanting to protect her under his own feathers. At the time I thought Uncle Shang understood me so well. When I went home in May, I heard that Uncle Shang had died suddenly of heart disease. I sat on the sofa crying my eyes out, terrified that something like that could happen.

In August, Grandma passed away. My father no longer had a mother. I went home for the funeral. It was the first funeral I had ever attended in my life, and by personally taking part in those traditional customs, I understood more deeply the sense of family duty my father carries, and saw more clearly how useless I was. When we always talk about experiencing different foreign cultures, how much do we actually understand of our own native culture? Those things we were brainwashed as children to dismiss as feudal superstition contain far too much of traditional Chinese culture. Yet in the face of all that, I feel powerless, unable to insert myself into it. The most moving line for me in The Criminal Lu Yanshi was this: “Enniang looked at Yanshi, whom she had once valued so highly, and said slowly: Yanshi, I never imagined your reading would prove this useless. What kind of place is China? Three parts scholarship, seven parts knowing how to be a person. In foreign countries, what matters is inventing this machine or that machine. In China, what matters is scheming against one another and fighting one another. If you don’t understand that science, then in China you are a useless person.” It is extreme, but it struck some unspeakable chord of recognition.

After I returned from home in August, I missed home every day, which I had never expected from someone like me who left home at thirteen. Around the Double Ninth Festival, a speech video titled “You accompanied me growing up, I’ll accompany you growing old” spread wildly online. Old Xu sent it to me, and after watching it I cried so hard I wanted to buy a ticket home immediately. All these years of living alone away from home, I have missed too much of my parents’ lives. Sometimes, waking at night, I ask myself what I am doing here. Thinking that I am so far away and cannot take part in their daily lives makes me feel deeply guilty. I have thought about going home. But somehow it always feels impossible, “like a thorn embedded in flesh: touching it hurts, but you can’t pull it out, so you let it remain there and stop touching it. But where is my heart? I really can’t say. The concern and guilt in my heart have always been there. I just don’t know what I should do to make up for it, so I keep avoiding it, refusing to touch it.” Because of this, my mood swings returned to old patterns. I would curl up by myself, not speak, not answer anyone, and not want anyone to speak to me either, tormenting Shizhang and Teacher Zhang badly. Talking about all this with Shizhang in the kitchen felt like talking to my mother in our kitchen at home more than ten years ago. Reflecting on it, it really does feel like I have returned to high school: rebellious, unwilling to go home, unwilling to talk to my parents, and yet still keeping them in my heart. Yes, I have been this twisted since childhood. It has nothing to do with where I live. The marks of the family I came from have always remained.

As for how to overcome it, I still do not know. My notes from “Slope County” have only just begun, and sometimes I vaguely feel as if time is circling back on itself. Years ago Liqi told me, “I thought my days at East Campus were my happiest, but looking back, studying in Singapore still feels better. This place is like one giant amusement park.” Once we walked from the CBD through City Hall all the way to Bugis, and he asked whether I had the illusion that we were back on the athletic field at East Campus more than ten years ago. He and Zhu-jiejie celebrated a birthday with a cake topped by two little lions. He sliced right through one of the lions, and I squealed from the side, “Aiya! How could you cut the lion like that?” It all feels like yesterday.

I still do not know where the future will be, or whether it will become better. But compared with a few years ago, I revere the unknowability of the future more. Only the present matters. I find myself getting more and more sick with nostalgia. Instead of thinking every day about somewhere else, I might as well live each day in front of me well, as if preparing material for future remembrance.