My senior colleague is a very kind-looking person, about my father’s age, but much gentler in temperament.
Why do I say “looking”? Because my coworkers have mixed opinions of him.
The “negative” part is that he’s a little stingy when it comes to employees’ salaries.
As for what the truth is, I can’t judge after only a few dozen days of knowing him. (Though the salary and benefits really aren’t ideal...
On my first day at work, he had an interview.
To meet me, he told the reporter that a young person was joining the company and that he had to go see her first.
Not knowing the details, I rushed to the destination by taxi after opening a bank account.
Little did I know, this was an extraordinary city.
Taking a taxi was so much slower than taking the subway—so much slower. This was the first thing that shocked me (or, more accurately, taught me something) after I officially came to Beijing to live, study, and work.
As a result, I didn’t arrive at the company until noon, and my senior colleague pushed the interview to the afternoon.
When he starts talking, he really goes on and on; his desire to express himself is extraordinarily strong.
We talked for a long time yesterday. I also slacked off for a long time while we were talking—if I’m chatting and interacting, I don’t have to work! (laughs)
In the morning, I accepted a delivery for him: a little booklet with calligraphy and paintings by Zhao Mengfu, a reproduction, of course.
While he was looking at this little treasure, the conversation turned to collectibles.
He said he had once found and bought an antique Qing-dynasty bed. Later, he bought a new home and had to move, but there was no way to move the old bed, so he had no choice but to give it to the buyer of the home he had been living in.
That was when he slowly began to realize that, in this world, apart from yourself, everything else is an external possession.
What else can be yours besides yourself? Things you can fit inside your mind—knowledge, memories, and so on.
He also said that health and happiness are the most important things. Being healthy, feeling a little happiness every day, and creating a little happiness every day—that is the best kind of time.
I kept nodding as I listened.
I remembered him saying that after that move, he stopped stockpiling books at home (and stopped collecting things in general). You can’t take them with you when you die, and your children may not value those objects in the same way you do.
Hmm, buying that little booklet was also for one of his plans.
I have a coworker who lives in Yanjiao and, following the routine they’ve had since the pandemic, works in the office every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
My senior colleague had been wrestling with this. He wanted every employee to come to work as normal, so he asked friends about two places to live close to the company. The rent was more than twice what my coworker was paying where they lived.
My coworker said it wasn’t okay. They cared a lot about their inner life. Leaving Yanjiao would mean leaving their circle of friends, moving into a smaller space, and living less comfortably. Even if the increased work compensation could make up for some of it, it would still be hard to decide to leave Yanjiao.
Those words quieted my senior colleague down. He listened as if he understood, but didn’t quite.
He had talked with me about similar topics before, saying things like where you place yourself determines what kind of growth, progress, or return you receive. He said that if someone always kept themselves in Yanjiao, the feeling of being out of place and separated from Beijing would be harder to eliminate. Not just “hard to eliminate,” but “harder to eliminate”—the latter sounds even more despairing than the former.
I could almost understand his perspective. He was trying to talk with us about experience and breadth of vision, about the bigger picture.
But maybe when material conditions can’t reach you, they weaken the power of perspective, breadth, and experience. So many people become trapped by their immediate circumstances and give up on so much. Whether those small acts of giving up are good or bad for them, who knows.
By comparison, I’m one of the slightly luckier ones.
Whether it’s living with my roommate, dealing with my landlord, commuting, working at the company, the intensity of my tasks, or using my free time to waste time, empty my mind, or explore areas I’m interested in, I haven’t run into much difficulty so far.
For now, I have a lot of freedom in how I use the time before and after work—and that freedom is precious.
Speaking of commuting, it’s common to see people packed tightly into subway cars. As for me... once, I actually failed to squeeze into a car after two or three trains had passed. With my build, I probably could have forced my way in. But I wanted to be a little more comfortable.
People say commuting two or three hours every day is torture.
But I think it’s pretty good. Isn’t nearly two hours of fixed reading time every day also a kind of happiness? I have to thank the Kindle I impulsively bought over a year ago; it’s finally proving useful now.
Some friends from earlier in my life ask how I’m doing and mention that I have more time than before. Toward the end of my time teaching, I often stayed at school until after ten or eleven at night to look up materials and prepare lessons (on better days, I could leave around eight or nine). After returning home, the only way I could recharge was by staying up until one or two in the morning.
Older colleagues at school whom I rarely saw on ordinary days, and my family, all asked me, without coordinating with one another: “Why have you lost so much weight again?”
Whenever that happened, I could only smile bitterly.
I could actually feel my body changing. I just didn’t respond to it right away.
Looking back, it was naturally exhausting, but it was worth it too.
Those young, lovely faces gave me so much courage and strength. I couldn’t possibly count it all.
I think I love myself more.
And I know myself well: with what I know about information technology, computers, and artificial intelligence, I couldn’t support the children’s desire to learn and grow over the long term.
On top of that, toward the middle and end of last semester, I felt myself becoming unfriendly in class. Maybe I’ll write about that in detail someday.
I have a friend whose life seems to be purposeful in everything, including changing tracks.
When I told him I had quit my job, he asked why I had chosen to enter education in the first place. After I explained a little, he said, “That’s also why you’re leaving.” What he meant was that I had no core or through-line when choosing my own path.
Hearing that made me uncomfortable. It felt just like what my middle-school math teacher once told me: “You don’t know how to summarize.”
I worried about it, and talked it over with a friend. We both agreed that if I was doing what I liked, that was enough.
I remembered a podcast host saying that she knew she could only be a generalist, not an expert. The thought that rushed into my mind was: A generalist... someone who can make podcast content at that level is rare too.
A senior colleague at the school once told me, “Your youth is only just beginning.”
Now it seems my youth is still continuing.