2021: Mountains and Rivers in a Dream

From the snow of one winter to the twelfth month of the next, wintersweet covered the branches, yet the world seemed to have changed.

The mountains and rivers are gone. Where is the traveler now?

This was a new experiment, the first time I had written in this form. Every new path begins with an attempt, so I wanted to use it to record this turn of the seasons and an unforgettable 2021.

For both the world and me, it was a year of abrupt change.

The original entry was accompanied by The Longing in a Short Letter, Mayfly, The Thief of Years, A Lonely Ballad, and Light.

1. Study and daily life

The main movement of life, and the foundation beneath everything else.

1.1 From high school to university

This year I crossed the distance between high school and university, leaving compulsory education and one complete stage of memory behind.

From hectares to thousands of mu, the scale of the campus changed. From hundreds of meters to kilometers, distance acquired depth. From five floors to towers of dozens, height changed. From a hundred li to a thousand, lights spread across the horizon.

University was a new setting and the beginning of a new kind of study. It was a platform: it would not direct me to success, but it could propel me forward.

1.2 Learning how to learn again

The gaokao was one of the great mountains of my life. When it ended, so did the familiar structure of school instruction. University demanded self-directed learning. I could not require a teacher to make me understand. No fixed group of friends would accompany every step. No one else would keep pushing me forward. I had to become my own guide through unfamiliar terrain.

There was still companionship among travelers and warmth from those who had already climbed higher. But walking together depended on what each person could contribute, and advice from the summit often came from someone recognizing an earlier version of themselves.

Behind every height worthy of admiration is sustained effort. Talent alone can still end like the story of Fang Zhongyong.

At first, I merely attended lectures and completed assignments. I had no time to preview and did not know how to review. I was doing things I had rarely needed to do before while losing the methods that had once helped me.

In high school, most of my learning had been self-directed. I worked during class, read my own books, solved problems in evening study, and tried to understand where formulas came from. Even though I never trusted my memory, understanding mathematics and physics as connected systems gave me unusually durable recall. When details faded, I could often derive them again.

That produced a peculiar arc in my grades: strongest at the beginning of a term, weaker in the middle, and rising again near the end. I never understood how people could say that everything once learned had simply disappeared. I hoped I would not become one of them.

The turning point at university came a month before midterms. Preparing for a mathematical modeling competition, I started from zero and completed an introductory course in two weeks. I began spending long periods studying away from the dormitory.

During the week before exams, I finished the day's linear algebra and calculus problems before reading modeling papers. The papers became a reward for finishing exercises. Then came the disorienting Asia-Pacific Mathematical Contest in Modeling, interrupted by a morning midterm, followed by another modeling competition that I largely completed alone, alongside an ACM monthly contest.

The habit of independent study took root. It moved from the Third Teaching Building to the library, and from the first social post made at dawn or late at night to an ordinary routine. A lake on campus witnessed the change.

1.3 A new daily environment

I learned the university's dining halls, dormitory, and teaching buildings; how to use its study desks; how to reserve entry to the library. Weekly events, meal times, and places became regular. I began tracking expenses, keeping a journal, and arranging my days, while depending less on Todo lists.

The phone became less important. The computer became the main instrument for both making and learning. Playing few games became playing none.

At first I moved around with my roommates. Once everything was familiar, I preferred to move independently. Without friends beside me, I had to walk alone; without the ability to stand alone, what could friendship mean?

It took time to collect and arrange everything I needed. Eventually the desk in my dormitory was complete, daily necessities had their places, and I had learned to wash my own clothes and maintain a basic order. In winter I soaked my feet every night.

Once the road is familiar, no companion is required for every step. A solitary soul must still travel toward its own distance.

I found a rhythm and a way of living that did not depend on idle voices around me. As winter break arrived, I hoped to keep it in the following year.

1.4 What I learned and what I planned

The year's main academic subjects were Calculus I, Linear Algebra B, self-taught mathematical modeling, and programming.

The year's practical skills were:

1. using LaTeX independently and producing a complete modeling paper;
2. learning part of MATLAB;
3. filling gaps in C++.

My next priorities were MATLAB and Python, followed by possible work in Java, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS. Coursework would include Calculus II, university physics, probability and statistics, discrete mathematics or topology, and operations research.

For programming contests, I needed to turn understood algorithms into code, recover missing data structures and algorithms, and solve more problems that could not be answered from templates alone.

For mathematical modeling, I needed deeper MATLAB practice, review of foundational models, and a broader repertoire beyond familiar problem categories.

Once I stepped onto this road, I could no longer let it go. The earliest dream still had to continue flowing.

1.5 Communities

Thousands of household lights, yet not one left for me. — Lost

During student-organization interviews, I described my high-school experience planning events, making posters, and entering competitions. Nearly every application succeeded. I joined too many groups, though I did not regret any one of them. The real problem was deciding which obligations came first.

My class

The class was small, with only a little over twenty students, but it did not feel like a traditional collective. It was closer to an administrative unit inside the school. I felt little belonging or shared agency there.

The mathematical modeling office

This became one of the groups whose members genuinely knew one another. People, purpose, activities, and even the tone of a group chat all affect whether a collective becomes real.

Joining was one of the best decisions of the semester. Through competitions and the modeling association, I met collaborators, strong students from other majors, and older students who could act as guides. It showed me what highly capable classmates were actually doing.

ACM

I was nominally part of the association's external-relations department, though the department itself had little presence. The important part was entering its competitions, finding programming teammates, and meeting generous older students.

Weiyue Studio

This was another important community. We met weekly and produced posts for the university library's public account. It connected me to the library as a participant rather than only a visitor, and that sense of belonging helped build my library habit. It also provided a study room.

Visual and communications groups

Too many commitments caused me to miss some training, but I still joined most activities and met interesting people. Another department introduced me to Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects, leaving me with practical skills even when the organization itself felt neither especially good nor bad.

2. Growth and change

What is growing up? Perhaps it is only the overthrow of yesterday.

2.1 Responsibility and pressure

I turned eighteen and became an adult with full legal rights. I left compulsory education, entered higher education, and stepped a little farther into society.

More choice and authority brought more pressure. Daily life, society, and study arrived like water. My growth meant my parents were growing older. It meant that my position on the axis of age had shifted and that more of the family's weight would eventually move onto me.

Money could no longer be ignored. Employment and direction became practical concerns. Would abandoned dreams and youth survive only as permanent memories? Did it truly have to be that way?

2.2 Personality

I had once imagined myself as an old-fashioned, graceful young scholar: driven by curiosity, many interests, creativity, and invention. I was becoming more organized, more focused, and cooler in expression, as though an entire transition had occurred overnight beneath flowering pear trees.

What happened while I moved from INTP toward INTJ? Was it disappointment after something precious broke, or pressure beneath a night without edges? As my steps became steadier and my expression clearer, did I still remember the earlier self? Did I still carry youth?

Should I congratulate you for repairing an old weakness and finally delivering the full moon that the past was denied?

I could not remain as I had been. Had I betrayed the past?

2.3 What I was pursuing

Maximize personal meaning and self-realization.

This did not mean maximizing personal advantage. The root objective was meaning.

I wanted to turn ideas into reality, seek invention and creativity, follow genuine interests, and understand the nature of things. These were forms of self-realization and personal meaning: satisfaction in the self, value created in the world, and contribution to society.

2.4 Confidence

Had Fengqing lost confidence?

Yes.

University made me question my ability to learn. Twice, short calculus tests contained problems I could not solve. I began doubting what I had considered an ability to understand, absorb, and use new knowledge quickly. The sense of advantage that study had once given me was challenged.

At the same time, the language of relentless competition became common around me. It sounded a little like diligence compensating for dullness. I did not believe I was dull, nor that effort should be reduced to that implication. Effort was action taken toward a dream and a requirement for realizing personal value.

2.5 Relationships

Most university groups did not feel like communities. Coldness became my first response to acquaintances and strangers. I rarely greeted anyone outside my friends and barely spoke to classmates beyond the dormitory. Relationships within the dormitory were complicated, and I did not like living there.

Strangely, I made more friends outside my own major.

Passersby had little to do with my road. I would keep walking and let the noise behind me fade.

3. Passersby and friends

3.1 Acquaintances

People came and went. Crowds were made of passersby, and the world arrived in an endless stream of faces briefly seen. I called all of them acquaintances.

An acquaintance was someone who never entered my life: a person known in passing or merely encountered within the same environment or organization. It was a broad category, and placing someone there meant no lasting connection had formed.

Perhaps that boundary proved that I was cold. I did not mind. The judgments of passersby did not enter my field of concern.

It was the filter through which friendship had to pass. Better an empty space than company chosen without care. How many people could truly walk together? Interests, maneuvering, and empty social obligation remained outside the boundary. My heart was reserved for those who had reached it.

Thousands of lights behind me, none of them a place to return.

3.2 Fellow travelers

In organizations and competitions, I still met people with similar goals, histories, or language. Time with them carried little pressure. These were fellow travelers.

3.3 Closest friends

I had only two. Curiously, genuine understanding came during the latter half of each period: late middle school and late high school. The same had once been true in primary school, though that friendship was lost along the road.

I did not want to describe them here. A future record of people and years would have a place for them.

3.4 A broken jade pendant

We met once, as though it were yesterday. Today the jade is scattered, and grief cannot become tears.

Some of what happened with her remained in journals, essays, and letters. Some writing disappeared forever when a phone was replaced. My earlier self would never have believed how completely one person could fill the heart.

With her, I suddenly had a vulnerability, and also armor.

What did an emptied heart feel like? People remember incomplete things with particular clarity.

I did not want to write it here. One day I would tell it again.

She entered your life and left traces everywhere. In that spring and summer she became a permanent memory, forever remaining at one instant.

4. A year measured by apps

Zhihu

• 18,113 questions and 26,468 answers viewed, more activity than 99.99% of users;
• an average of 49.6 questions and 72.5 answers each day;
• most interested in social science, engineering, and technology;
• most often active in the morning.

The volume was astonishing. It confirmed that Zhihu was my largest source of reading that year, though the prominence of engineering still surprised me.

NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music

• a reported "musical soul" of 83 years old;
• the word "youth" appeared 194 times in the year's lyrics;
• five nights listening after midnight, including Missing You, Unable to Meet at 3:06 a.m. on November 5;
• 35% Japanese pop, 29% light music, and 18% Chinese music;
• 160 hours of shared listening with Zhuxiaozhu.

The sample was incomplete because I listened relatively little through those apps and played many tracks through Listen1 on the computer.

QQ

• most active conversations: Hikari, Changsu, Shuye, and Yuanxi;
• 145 contacts in 2019, 108 in 2020, and 176 in 2021.

Seeing other people begin at two hundred contacts and rise to three or four hundred made me wonder whether mine was the only list capable of shrinking.

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Time and a shortage of inspiration kept this yearbook from being as complete as I intended.

"The overturning of 2021" referred both to the period around me—US-China confrontation, repeated pandemic waves, and major domestic policies—and to the year I turned eighteen. Its growth and experiences formed the highest point of my life so far. They would shape my future and also change the meaning of my past.

Years depart and days race on. May you not forget that day. May you remember the young person you were. May the future remain open.

To anyone who read this far: may the wind carry you toward the clouds.

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This entry was first published at the Fengqing Inn archive. It is preserved here as part of the personal record.