Do I Love Solving Hard Problems, or Do Hard Problems Love to Find Me?

My wife and I were classmates from junior high through high school; we have witnessed each other's growth. In the Chinese saying, we are childhood sweethearts. She is perhaps the person in the world who knows me best; she has seen my past and present and will also witness my future. She has told me many times that, in her view, I always choose the hardest road, always do the hardest problems, and live far from an easy life.

This seems to be my fate. Looking back over my first half of life, from schooldays into society, I have never been able to escape this fate. At school I was always drawn into various disputes and given the hardest responsibility of settling conflicts; I was also always expected by teachers of every subject to solve their most difficult, final "grand finale" problems. After leaving school, my family of origin, the extended family after marriage, and my own small family have always had all kinds of hard problems for me to solve. At work, whenever the thorniest problems arose, people around me always turned their eyes to me.

I remember that after the autumn harvest holiday in my first year of senior high (a holiday that is now an ancient legend to young people), when we returned to school, Mr. Yang, our Chinese teacher, collected the assignment he had given before the break—he had asked each of us to write an article describing our inner feelings during the holiday. I wrote a flowing piece of more than eight thousand characters; no other student wrote more than three thousand. I thought the teacher would be pleased with my article, but instead he dressed the whole class down without a kind word.

He said what we had written was all unreadable. What Zhou Zhiyuan wrote had a glimmer of something, he said, but the article was as short as a rabbit's tail—it felt as though you had just tasted the radish when the radish was already gone. In short, it was also a pile of crap. At fifteen or sixteen I had some vanity, and being scolded like that by the teacher felt deeply embarrassing.

This was a common trait of teachers in the Huanggang region of Hubei in that era; the standards they set for their students were so high that young teachers today cannot understand. That is why, in our time, education in my hometown Huanggang was preeminent in China and produced many eccentric, unconventional students. Middle-school students across the whole country felt awe the moment they saw a Huanggang exam paper; many people could not solve those questions even until their calves cramped up.

I may count as one of these eccentrics, although when I was in school I was crushed and howling under the wheels of other eccentrics far above my level. But in perseverance, grit, thick-skinnedness, and daring, I have also crushed them—many of them have long since achieved fame, become leaders in their fields, and retired early to enjoy their twilight years. I still have the nerve, thick-skinned and miserable, to start over again and again and keep chasing after them from behind; sheer brute stubbornness alone is enough to rank me among the eccentrics' immortals.

My wife also says that someone like me in China probably only fits a place like Beijing, because anywhere else I would seem too "odd" (gese) and find it hard to survive. "Gese" is Beijing dialect for someone too unusual. My wife and I have known each other for 32 years and been married for 20; our child is already an adult. After all this time together, she still thinks I am so conspicuously "odd" that I remain, among all the people she knows, one of a kind to this day—which shows I really am quite odd.

Beijing is a great city where, amid a sea of people, one can hide oneself; it is extraordinarily tolerant—everyone ignores your existence and treats you like air, so of course the tolerance is great. So Beijing does indeed suit unconventional people, but perhaps only unconventional people who came to struggle in Beijing in the early years. After all, when I first arrived, the small bungalow I rented in the Shangdi area cost only 50–80 yuan a month; drifting in Beijing was not too expensive.

So in those days, the Shangdi, Shucun, and Meiyuan areas were often full of young literary types in all sorts of outlandish dress, and hot-brained, addle-minded, passionate "spirited youths" like me who always wanted to save the world. I remember that twenty years ago, outside the National Library, people would even spread a cloth covered in writing on the ground—mostly proclaiming what "earth-shattering" works they had written or what great inventions they had made—in order to attract attention. Compared with them, an eccentric like me was fairly close to normal. My surging passion was all hidden inside; outwardly I appeared as a kind-faced, even slightly shy country bumpkin.

Now housing prices in the capital are steep, and Beijing has truly become a place where "dwelling is not easy." As everyone knows, people like us, whose behavior is out of step with society, mostly lack the ability to make a living, so it is hard to survive in Beijing—in this respect I am an oddball among oddballs: I actually have strong survival skills, so I can carry on being unconventional to the end. I thank the Creator for this; its abundant favor moves me to tears.

Young people today seem a little less restless than we were, and less naive and cocky than the youth of our time. In our era, many of us were infected with an incurable disease, lifelong and hard to cure; we held a conviction whose right or wrong is hard to judge—we always felt we had the power to change the world, and we always had a "who if not me" courage that charged forward. Even if we were reduced to spreading a newspaper and sleeping under a bridge, we still believed that one day we would influence the world.

Among my peers I have met many such people. I myself have spent long nights in train-station waiting halls, on park benches, and under bridge overpasses, feeding mosquitoes with my own flesh while still full of fantasy, believing that one day I would have the power to influence and change the world. This conviction still sustains me today and makes me, as my wife says, always choose the hardest road and the thorniest problems when making life choices.

Perhaps among today's youth there are also many with this same foolish streak I had when young, but I have no chance to meet them; after all, spirited youths only want to deal with other spirited youths and spirited maidens, and they are ashamed to associate with an old soldier like me.

Someone like me, radiating foolishness from the inside out, is highly recognizable in a crowd. We stick our necks out, always overestimate ourselves, and hitting the south wall does not necessarily make us turn back; instead we go looking for a new south wall to hit. My beloved teacher from middle school often, when I sprang to my feet in outrage, would call me and patiently persuade me to calm down, not to take too great a risk, fearing I would fall into a pit.

As an outsider he could see the other side of the problem: perhaps it was not that I chose the thorniest problems, but that the thorniest problems chose me. There may be some trait in me that makes me easily chosen by hard problems. And behind every thorny problem lies risk; he did not want his student to take on too much.

In this world there really are people who have inherited certain genes that destine them to live their lives alongside hard problems. In the end it is hard to tell whether they love solving problems, or whether problems simply love coming for them. Today, dealing with thorny diseases, I always feel my own level is far too low to produce work that satisfies me; I feel frustrated again and again, yet I can never escape them and remain locked in combat.

I never seem to be satisfied with myself; I never feel my level is high. Even when some patients are already quite satisfied, I am still not satisfied. I am always trying to find a better way to solve the problem, and a way to solve it even better. It feels just like my reaction after the teacher in my first senior-high year judged my article too low in level: within me there is both dejection and unwillingness; struck down again and again, I get up again and again and keep moving forward. When will this cycle end? I fear it will not end until death.

Hard problems have become an inseparable part of my life. If they were cut out of my life, what would become of it? Would it really be much easier, as my wife imagines? Or would I instead fall into endless, draining, bewildering thoughts of "Who am I? Where am I? Where am I come from? Where am I going?"? I do not know, and I have no time to think about these questions, because before my eyes there are always many thorny problems still unsolved, and I cannot stop.

Hard problems do not necessarily make our lives more splendid, but they give our lives a certain cohesion, so that we do not scatter into a pile of loose sand or drift into utter boredom. In this sense, I am grateful for all the hard problems I have met in this life: they have defeated the old me, shaped the present me, and are continuously forging the future me.