Today is my twenty-first birthday, so let me begin by wishing myself a happy one. How quickly time goes. I still remember September 9 of last year — waking up that morning, I still hadn’t shaken the sense of defeat left by a setback in my career.
I woke that day the way I always did, hoping something unexpected would come along and lift me out of that mood. What followed felt as if fate itself were steering me: I went out with my parents to a newly opened mall, sat down in a coffee shop, and opened a video site.
I played the video of Steve Jobs’s last words. The gist was this: Jobs had stood at the very peak of the business world and redefined the smartphone — by any measure, the highest of honors. Yet set against death, that honor wasn’t worth mentioning. In the face of death, all the fame and fortune that look so enviable from the outside lose their meaning entirely. What Jobs told me was that money should not be all we chase; we should also chase the things that have nothing to do with wealth.
And those things, plainly, are a healthy body, a happy family, and a positive way of living.
Then I played a video of Professor Luo Xiang. He said something I will never forget: a person’s real success is not how brilliant they look in their moment of glory — what matters is whether, when you stumble, when you are at your lowest, you still have the courage to keep walking forward.
Once again, true to form, Professor Luo was there just as I fell — another pair of hands reaching out to me. Those hands didn’t just pull me up from the bottom; they led me out of the fog, guiding me, pushing me, onto the sunlit road.
A year has passed since then. I have read more books this past year, and little by little, the crude, threadbare inner world deep inside me has begun to take real shape.
When I need somewhere to stay, I walk in. It is a shelter, but never an escape. The problems of the real world have to be met with an open, optimistic heart — if we can’t even set our attitude straight, how can we hope to solve anything? I open a book and step into a fiction alongside its people. There I taste the whole range of human life, its warmth and its chill. I see the characters at their most luminous and at their darkest. By the time a book ends, I feel I have lived through many lives, and I come away understanding something new about my own.
I have come to see that the only way to face life’s uncertainty is to build an inner world — and the only way to make that world grow is to read. So I read, I understood, I shared. I never imagined my sharing had helped anyone; all along I was merely furnishing my own unsightly inner world, passing on the scraps of what little I knew.
Thank you, stranger. It turns out the light I carry can shine on the people around me after all.
…
I wake, and my mind seems to hold nothing of the worldly at all. I don’t know what money is, or fame, and I follow no rules laid down in advance. I wake in a little house in the middle of an oasis. The house is small — small, but not shabby; humble, but not lavish either. It has everything daily life requires. Sunlight drifts in through the window like a fine rain, but where it lands on my skin there is no chill of rain, only warmth. I look out the window and see a rainbow. I push open the door, and I feel I have stepped into another world. My friends come toward me, one after another — so many of them. I see them, and I recognize them: Fugui from To Live, Ye Wenjie from The Three-Body Problem, Ximen Nao from Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out…
Zhengyang Yao
September 9, 2025