Four Fleeting Years

1

Since leaving Nanjing, I've been meaning to write a little something for these four years. But every time my fingers found the keyboard, I didn't know where to begin, and what was in my heart never quite made it into words. Today might just be a good day for writing.

Every single day of senior year, I looked forward to graduation — after all, once I graduated I would finally have a little world of my own, and surely that would feel thrilling. But when the day actually came, it proved me wrong again. In the weeks since coming home from school, I've been picking up new knowledge and trying new things, yet after all this time my mind is still a tangle, and I don't know what to do with myself.

The whole world is buzzing, all kinds of voices trying to cram themselves into my head: "You should..." "Why don't you..." "Don't listen to them..." "What if you tried..." The scene feels like being dragged back to the days of filling in my college application after the gaokao. As if from that moment on, the consequences of every choice, large and small, would show up on my own body — real and violent.

Four years ago, before submitting my choices, I thumbed the college application guide to pieces without finding a single major I especially wanted to study. The one that mildly interested me was psychology, but the better schools in Guangdong only took humanities-track students. Then in the guide I spotted a major called "landscape architecture." After looking it up, it somehow seemed pretty decent — I figured I'd probably enjoy doing a bit of design — and my score bracket happened to line up with a school I could anchor to, so I applied, half in a daze. And that is how I came to own a crowded dorm where I could hardly sleep, canteen food I could hardly swallow, and college classmates I could hardly get close to.

2

At least I can't say I hated my major. My grades stayed strong, and I kept working toward a recommended place in grad school.

Steeped in the campus atmosphere, working on projects with my professors, I naturally spent a great deal of time around teachers and grad students. Back then it all felt fresh: the big names, armed with a mighty set of design (read: sweet-talking) skills, seemed to be living rather delicious lives. My professors kept saying I was cut out for research, and I truly did perform a good deal better than the classmates around me, so at the time I figured that ending up a university teacher would actually be a rather comfortable way to live.

Then, in junior year, wanting my grad-school resume to look better, I started hunting for internships during the breaks. The first was at Shenzhen University's architecture institute — winter break was too short, and I was back at school before I'd done much of anything. The second was three months at a design institute in Shanghai over the summer, during which I also finished my portfolio in my spare hours. It was grueling: every day after work I stayed behind to build the portfolio from scratch, always racing for the last bus back to the youth hostel, where I'd still have to wait behind a line of people for the shower. Then at seven-something the next morning, I'd crawl out of bed and begin again.

But I count that stretch among the few truly precious experiences of my college years. For the first time, I saw how my profession actually survives out in society. For the first time, I realized that what school had taught me was a drop in the ocean. For the first time, I stayed in a youth hostel — and I especially loved talking with that crowd of young people who had come to Shanghai from every corner of the country to make their way. For the first time, I tasted that strange, complicated flavor society has when set against campus.

I met masters who fought tooth and nail over design, and young people whose ways of living were nothing like mine. Everyone was anxious — for their futures, for the desires they wanted to fulfill. Talking with them shifted something in how I understood the world. The speed at which I grew there, the widening of my vision, was something school had never been able to give me — but in exchange, the hammering there was that much harder too. That experience tore an opening in my placid campus life and let me steal a glance at what lay outside.

Back at school afterward, I began to doubt myself. Things I'd always held to be correct, directions I'd held to be important, suddenly turned ambiguous. The grad-school recommendation — that seemingly can't-lose option — suddenly didn't smell so sweet. Measured against the grad students and teachers I'd come to know, the growth school could offer me felt far too slow compared with the world outside. Watching how at ease they looked while lecturing, I couldn't help turning it over and over: was a life like that really what I wanted? Still, I half doubted my own judgment — this was, after all, the 5% quota everyone was scrambling to grab. Agonizing wouldn't help; better to secure it first and decide later. Besides, from our school, in our major, a recommendation to South China University of Technology was practically a sure thing — and SCUT was the school I had dreamed of going to at the gaokao.

In the end, I did win the recommendation. And in the end, I no longer wanted it. The portfolio never came in handy during job-hunting season either.

How could I abandon, just like that, something I'd worked toward for so long? Maybe I'm a creature of feeling, someone who likes to listen to what my heart is saying in the moment. I still don't understand the force that kept me from pressing "send" after I'd assembled every last document, but I chose to respect it. Or maybe I'm a creature of reason, treating sunk costs as nothing at all. I can't say exactly why — only that I had a faint, persistent sense that it wasn't the road I wanted to walk. It was nowhere near a calling, and so there was naturally no reason to go on.

Making life choices is truly, truly hard for me. I don't live with that kind of effortless clarity; I feel that you only get one life, and I so badly want my decisions to lead somewhere good. Hence the wavering back and forth, the anxiety knocking at the door. Once the dice are thrown, there is no taking them back.

More and more, I suspect that deciding certain things in life is basically an occult art.

3

Heading into my last winter break of college, I thought my college regrets would be a volleyball title we failed to win and an utterly botched performance on the graduation-ceremony stage. Before going home, I even bought myself a new Mikasa and picked out a few rock songs to rehearse, hoping practice might help me do a little better. None of it ever happened. The pandemic swept in, and all that remained was an outside world in chaos and a heart that refused to settle.

And just like that, college was over. The pandemic tore us out of campus by force and showed us how unbelievably cruel this world can be. The story of my student years drifted weightlessly to its ending, with no sense of reality at all, and the people around me had already scattered toward their own futures. Finish primary school, start middle school; finish middle school, start high school; finish high school, start college; and at the end, collect a diploma. I can't help asking: and then what? Sixteen years of pushing in a single direction, from one school to the next — now that everything past has ended, so, what then? I don't know about anyone else; I have no idea what comes next. There is so much at this stage I simply cannot think through; I genuinely don't know what I truly want. After so many years of running along, carried in the crowd, what lies across my path now is a single-log bridge. Stepping onto it alone, it's hard not to wonder: why am I walking? And where am I going?

People who have faith, or who have found the thing they genuinely love to do — I envy them so much. At the very least, their hearts hold a direction to walk toward.

It turns out I know neither why I came nor where I am headed. Suddenly I feel like the Little Prince, drifting aimlessly from planet to planet — I, too, am wandering through this world. The Little Prince traveled among all those planets without forming a single bond; if anything, he gave many things up. He passed through those planets the way dew slides off a lotus leaf, and left with nothing. Su Shi wrote: "Life is a wayside inn, and I too am a traveler." Perhaps that is the true face of the world, hidden beneath the countless small matters of daily life. And yet — even knowing so lonely a truth, the Little Prince still chose to love. Perhaps that is exactly where the story's power lies. You can shrug at so much of this world, and still, somehow, love it deeply.

4

(Writing really does soothe the mind. It feels just like cleaning the house — by the time I've written this far, my heart genuinely feels much lighter.)

If I were to grade my own college years by the school's standards for its students, they were actually not bad — I danced, I sang, joined the student union and then quit it, played in volleyball tournaments, kept my grades near the top of my year, and even collected a scholarship every year.

I seem to always hold myself to strict standards, and much of the time I fall short of my own satisfaction. I'm stubborn, too — the type who has to reach my own bar no matter what. Hence all those nights spent studying late, drawing plans, listening to rock; moments like those kept surfacing throughout my college years.

Looking at it now, college didn't make me anyone remarkable; to this society I remain entirely dispensable. But it was there that I first found myself in a state of relative freedom and independence — able, for the first time, to steer my own life, to budget my own time and living expenses, and to build the precious ability to teach myself. I'm grateful to be someone who loves learning and loves to think; it gave me the chance to climb out of the chaos of ignorance and open my eyes to what this world looks like. Though I also fall, time and again, into the trap of overthinking — self-doubt, self-negation, suddenly not knowing what I'm doing, or where my worth and meaning lie.

The end of college is only a beginning; everything gained and lost there was merely a dress rehearsal for entering society. However much anxiety and doubt I carry about what lies ahead, I must keep moving and exploring — find my own little path through the tangle, and, while learning to understand others, keep walking with my original heart intact.

However much I disliked the courses that seemed beamed in from the last century, the careerist professors, the broken-down campus roads, the unspeakably awful canteen food... I have, at last, graduated. Happy graduation to me! Welcome, self, to an even crueler world! May I hold on to my precious confidence. Safe travels — and have fun out there.