As You Keep Walking, the Road Grows Brighter

Of all the years of my life, the one I miss most is the year I was nineteen. That was 1998-1999, and I was a freshman at an engineering university, studying the school's flagship major. If I had stayed in that program, I might now be an engineer designing spacecraft, rockets, aircraft, or automobiles. But at the time I had no interest in that major; although I liked science, the nineteen-year-old me had no desire to spend a lifetime working with machinery of every kind.

That year saw many major events: the Asian financial crisis erupted, and the Yangtze River region, my home area, suffered catastrophic flooding. Elders told me that money was especially hard to earn. My older female cousin and my aunt later ran a restaurant for a while near my university, because they could not make a living back home; but the restaurant closed after losing money within a short time. My father was effectively bankrupt, and my older brother was in his junior year.

So my family was going through an extremely difficult time. When I arrived at the university and paid my tuition, I had less than fifty yuan left in my pocket. Living frugally, that was enough for at most a week or two. My father truly could not give me any more money for living expenses, and I was forced to solve my own survival problem. To that end, I even exaggerated some details on my application for the university's needy-student grant, because such grants were so hard to obtain. I, who had always been upright and honest, have always regarded this as one of the major blemishes of my life.

Because of this, many years later I confessed to a teacher at our university who had once overseen student affairs, asking her to forgive me for having deceived her. She said kindly to me: "Child, God forgives every young person who makes a mistake. Besides, you really were in great difficulty back then, and our experience in student affairs was still limited. We teachers have always felt we let you down. We failed to take better care of you, which is why you had such a hard time and ultimately left school early to enter society." Her words also untied a knot I had carried for many years; I had borne a heavy psychological burden over that disreputable episode when I entered university.

At the time, her own child was deeply troubled by depression, and she even entrusted the child to me, asking me to keep him by my side and help cheer him up for a while. This teacher felt that my character was reliable and that I possessed a kind of perseverance uncommon in ordinary people, and she very much hoped her child would be infected by my inner strength and climb out of the deep pit of depression.

One thing I must admit: I have been very lucky in this life. At every stage, the teachers and classmates I met were remarkable people, and without exception they all thought I was talented. When I was young, my teachers both sympathized with my family's circumstances and appreciated my ability, so they looked after me especially well. By the length of time I actually spent in school, I did not meet the requirements for a certificate of incomplete studies, but my university teachers still helped me obtain one, hoping it would help me find employment.

Yet apart from the one occasion when I went abroad and needed my university incomplete-studies certificate to apply for a visa at the U.S. embassy, I have never used it again. I keep it locked in my safe as a memento. At nineteen, after three or four months of university, I simply left school and entered society. The economic climate was harsh then; many people were unemployed, and money was far harder to earn than it is now. For a rural-born second-generation migrant drifting in the city with little social experience, every day was a struggle.

At the time, for the sake of convenience in job-hunting, I borrowed some money from a classmate and rented a room in an urban village for less than fifty yuan a month. In the room, apart from a few books, I had only a set of bedding I had brought from school. But even such spartan conditions were more than I could afford. The boy next door had dropped out of a nearby vocational school to work; he had already studied there for over two years but, because of poverty, had no choice but to leave and take a job. Both of us were struggling. There were days when the two of us often went hungry. But the admirable thing was that if one of us happened to have steamed buns on a given day, he would share one with the other.

Looking at photographs of myself from that time, I was truly emaciated and sallow. The brother I came to know through renting next door and I hit it off; despite such wretched circumstances, we both stayed positive and fought with all our might to climb out of that extreme poverty. It is not that we were never pessimistic or desperate; in fact, I was often on the verge of breaking down—when you are hungry, no one can truly be psychologically strong. There were days when we could not pay the rent. One day this brother said to me with great optimism: "Bro, the weather is about to warm up. Once it warms up a little more, we can stay under the bridge; we won't need to worry about housing."

What I regret most is that we later lost touch. He was a good brother who had shared hardship with me, and I miss him. We encouraged each other and struggled to survive together; I firmly believe that he must be as successful in his career as I am now. Because the qualities both of us showed were so similar—perseverance in hopeless circumstances, actively striving to change the situation, fighting to stay alive—such qualities are precious. Because I saw those qualities in him too, I unconditionally believe he is doing well now.

A few years ago, a university teacher of mine from that era chatted with me and said from the heart: "It makes me very happy to see you doing so well now; the stone I had hanging over my heart has finally dropped." His words moved me deeply. There is a kind of happiness in having someone in this world quietly caring about us. This teacher of mine still follows me and is one of my readers.

He is actually only a few years older than I am, and has now become an important university leader at the school I once attended. We had very similar childhoods: he, too, came from a poor rural background and built a good life today through his own striving.

Our village is a large one with several thousand people, but when I was in primary school, the entire village had only one black-and-white television and one tractor—both owned by the same man, the village's first ten-thousand-yuan household. In those days, every evening his television would be carried out and placed on a high stool atop a high table at his doorway, and everyone would gather around, three or four deep, to watch.

Today, our village has hundreds of private cars; color televisions, refrigerators, motorcycles, and farm vehicles are standard in every household. The mud-brick houses we lived in as children are all gone; every family has built multi-story buildings. Some houses are extremely luxurious, with construction and decoration costs exceeding one million yuan.

So our generation has witnessed the enormous changes that have taken place in China. When I was a child, we ate meat only at festivals; today, eating meat is no longer a problem, and losing weight is the shared aspiration of most people. I see many sarcastic comments online, mostly from pessimists who believe that most of us are living in dire straits, that we have gained nothing from China's development, and that our future will be miserable because of one crisis. This is plainly inconsistent with the facts. Some people say such things with ulterior motives, as if they wanted chaos; others may be deeply troubled by anxiety and depression, seeing everything through a pessimistic filter.

When I was in my twenties, my older brother called me an incurable blind optimist. More than twenty years later, he concedes that optimism was the single most important factor behind my achievements. The two of us have always been very close but have very different personalities. I have indeed, as my brother put it, always been "blindly optimistic." Once my brother told me a famous line by Kafka: "Each difficulty can conquer me." Without a second's hesitation, I told him: I can conquer every difficulty.

When we were in our twenties, we both lived in Beijing as drifters, sharing a single room in Wuta Si Village across from the National Library. Back then we bought local newspapers almost every day; I looked for business opportunities in the small classified ads, optimistically convinced that opportunities were everywhere. My older brother always argued to me that each of my ideas was unworkable; his analyses were thorough and plausible, but I ignored every word, kept trying, and eventually managed to establish myself, doing better year by year.

My older brother is an extremely smart guy; after all, to become the top scorer on the college entrance examination in Huanggang, Hubei, requires an extraordinary IQ. When he argued his points, his logic was rigorous, but he could never convince me. I eventually stopped even listening. To practice his eloquence, he insisted on debating with me; when I ignored him, he would draw a face on a piece of paper, pin it to the wall, and practice his speaking at the portrait. That experience has left me immune to all the pessimistic talk circulating online today. To be honest, over 99 percent of the articles those people write cannot match my brother's arguments; after all, probably not one of them could have scored top marks on the national college entrance exam.

I have always held fast to blindly optimistic beliefs and a bias for immediate action, along with the perseverance to keep my grip on the green mountain and never let go. I believe the worry-free life I enjoy today in food, clothing, housing, and transport is the direct result of these qualities.

The Wuta Si Village of old has now become a park, and I have bought a home near the National Library, spending much of my time there reading and doing research. The first time I entered the National Library after coming to Beijing, I felt a very strong desire: I wanted to spend the rest of my life around here. This place is my ideal home; I want to live a life centered on farming and reading in this neighborhood, and I envy no other way of life.

More than ten years ago, I settled down near the National Library, so I have essentially fulfilled this wish. To this day I live the life I have always loved at the National Library—this very article was written in one of its reading rooms. The director of the National Library and a director at the Hubei Provincial Library have both become friends with me despite the gap in our ages. Now, 20,000 to 30,000 people read my articles every day, something I could never have imagined back then.

I say this not to show off, but to say that as long as we stay positive and optimistic, work hard, and persevere, we can live the life we want. There is a lot of pessimistic talk online now, and that is normal. Since I was about twenty, I have watched many people on the Internet use rigorous arguments to predict that China would collapse. I am now forty-six years old, and what I have witnessed with my own eyes is that our country has grown ever stronger, and my own life and those of my fellow villagers have improved markedly.

To be honest, I have become immune to these remarks. In 1998, amid the financial crisis and catastrophic floods, I did not break down at the lowest point of my life, and neither did this country. In 2003, during the SARS outbreak, I was living in the Beixiaguan neighborhood across from the National Library, one of the worst-hit core areas; my relatives and friends were all anxious on my behalf. In those days, when I occasionally went out, Zhongguancun Avenue was empty, not a single person in sight—a rare sight. Back then, too, many people said China would collapse; in the end it did not. Since then I have lived through the 2008 financial crisis and the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, and each time my ears were filled with talk of collapse. But each time, the sky did not fall.

Now the United States has elected a president who has launched a trade war against the whole world, and the entire world is anxious because of this upheaval; once again I hear a great deal of talk of collapse. With all respect, the people who write such articles cannot affect me in the least. I believe they may indeed collapse, but optimists like me are certainly not going to.

They would collapse even without a trade war. According to research by Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, optimists are more likely to succeed, while pessimists are more likely to fail. Success or failure has little to do with external circumstances; it has everything to do with one's mindset. The data behind these studies are too extensive to cite here; interested readers can turn to Seligman's five-book series on happiness (or positive psychology).

From ancient times to the present, every person born into this world faces all kinds of challenges. Each generation has its own survival crisis, and each generation also has its own opportunities. Positive people seek a way out of difficult conditions and break through; negative people, like the "learned helplessness" Seligman studied, remain trapped in their own fear, unable to take steps toward survival, continually reinforcing their pessimistic expectations. Some people also like to spread their own anxiety to others; they live oppressed lives, and those they influence become oppressed too.

Compared with the difficulties I faced back then, today's social conditions are simply wonderful. I see restaurants in some places giving free meals to homeless people, and doing so with great care for their dignity. Back then I could only endure hunger, because everyone was poor and few were in a position to perform such acts of kindness. China lagged behind for too long in modern history, and it will take the efforts of several generations to close this huge gap. National rejuvenation will not happen overnight, but given time, we can live the lives we want.

I certainly do not believe that an emotionally unstable, vengeful U.S. president can single-handedly decide the direction of the world. To be honest, he overestimates his own abilities. Within a year, we will see that, apart from harming himself, his reckless actions cannot inflict substantive harm on the vast majority of people on this planet. I make this judgment because, as far as I know, over 70 percent of people in this world are positive and optimistic; when circumstances change, they will find new ways to create wealth and improve their quality of life.

Among them is a smaller number who are not only positive and optimistic but also persevering and exceptionally capable—like tigers returning to the mountains, dragons rising from the sea, and eagles soaring in the sky: vibrant, always full of strength. It is under their leadership that this world has continually moved toward a better direction.

I especially love a passage from one of Winston Churchill's speeches during World War II: "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills."

Of course, today's world is not as bad as it was in World War II, and the U.S. president and the American voters who support him are not extremists like Hitler. If we put ourselves in their shoes, we may even find that their grievances have understandable grounds, and we may eventually work out a way to coexist. But his extreme methods will not be tolerated; we will, as Churchill did, exhaust every means to resist extreme bullying and defend our right to survive.

Even if they refuse to change their position, does that mean we have no way forward? I believe that countless people like me, who long to live the lives we want, will not simply sit and wait for death. We will find breakthroughs they never anticipated, making their zero-sum wishes come to nothing; after all, their eyes are limited and cannot watch every corner. Where their reach falls short, we will build broad new roads. On this, I still hold to the "blind optimism" my brother once described.

My life experience of the past twenty-odd years tells me that a positive, optimistic person cannot be defeated by any difficulty. I believe that ten years from now, all our lives will be better than they are now, not collapsing as the pessimists predict. As long as we keep moving forward, our road in life will surely grow brighter and brighter.

At this turbulent moment in history, I offer this article as a shared encouragement to all of you!