Personal Autobiography
Born in Changshan, the westernmost small county by longitude in Zhejiang’s territory, with a population merely 2.1% that of Hangzhou, the childhood life in my memory was filled with verdant hills, clear waters, and babbling brooks; that joyful laughter, that free breeze filling the fields after school, have traversed more than ten years of time, surging in my heart, never having left.
Yet before starting primary school, I lived with my mom and dad, in Hangzhou, in Lishui, at one express delivery station after another; my father’s broad, towering shoulders and my mother’s smiling face constructed an unbreakable line of defense against setbacks in my childhood, escorting my, jewel-like, precious childhood along the bustling journeys. On the night before summer vacation began, which for me at the time was already deep into the night, I sat on the bed, covered by the quilt, reading Souvenirs Entomologiques, thinking of my father approaching me in a speeding minivan. Waiting, waiting, waiting, the sound of a horn tore through the silence of the night sky, coming from the doorway, startling my grandparents and a flock of birds suitable as poetic imagery. What was I thinking? I hoped Mom and Dad would read to me by my bedside, however, they took me away that very night.
Examining it many years later, this seemingly simple little matter practically contains the code that runs through my life and character. First: I was reading. I was reading popular science books like Souvenirs Entomologiques, STEM-related works; it turns out God had long since planted the seeds of exploring the world in my heart, which also echoed from afar my subsequent love for sci-fi, and grafted onto my curiosity and exploration of the computer world. Second: one of my implicit purposes was to make Mom and Dad think that I was a studious, good child. The vines of caring about others’ gazes, which still entangle me to this day, had also long sprouted in my young heart. My preoccupation with the gaze of others, for one, ought to lie in the drastic change of environment after leaving my parents in the first grade—this being the external cause; and second, the drastic change in personality with the onset of puberty—this being the internal cause. Listening to what my mother and my residual memories tell me, the even younger me was extroverted, second to none.
Has the past me of the past truly disappeared? Not necessarily. In the eyes of my past self, in the clothing shop named “Yi Zhi Du Xiu”, that inquiry to the boss—for an elementary school extracurricular practical research course based on the punning use of Chinese characters, made ahead of that close companion of mine—was the inner me, the me of the distant past, successfully taking control of my throat, and making a sound. Just as he can now only scream silently in my heart.
Silent screams will eventually break through a cage made of iron. In the sixth grade, those three words I “screamed” at the teacher, “I forgot!”, left a vivid impression. Her subsequent, head-on, endless berating of me, or whatever other word you want to use, her figure standing on the podium, her eyes harboring disgust. God, it still makes the present me want to slap her across the face. Did she not understand my kindness? Did she not understand the cause and effect? Did she not know what consequences berating an elementary school student without sufficient reason would bring? Even if you apologize later, how can you completely restore the wound? This was my desperate leap of a cornered dog, of a sixth-grade elementary school student, and the loss of control of a teacher who possessed authority and power in front of students.
I have reason to deduce that, from then until now, I am “afraid of all teachers.”
The fear of relatively unfamiliar elders seems to have a reluctant answer, so where does the avoidance of peers begin? At least in elementary school, I possessed an absolutely normal social life.
Boarding is a challenge for any new middle schooler, and for me, who had been meticulously cared for by my grandparents, it was even more difficult. My “scream” was the shower on the first night in the dormitory. And the second shower inside a dormitory would be postponed until the night of September 11, 2023, about seven years later. The story branches in two; let us tell one at a time. Living in the dorm for five consecutive days in one go, without showering, brushing teeth, or washing one’s face, anyone would stink to high heaven—this seems normal? But setting aside words of symbolic meaning, that vividly lifelike action of my classmate—approaching me, nostrils flaring, hastily retreating, left hand fanning the air—“Eww, so smelly!”, was a heavy blow to me in the sense of pre-symbolic language. I read the pre-symbolic, while he perhaps merely expressed the symbolic. This is perhaps the reason I refuse to output pre-symbolic language. The past me was quite active on social media platforms, but after being called inconsistent between my outer and inner selves by classmates, I began to lean towards silence on social media platforms, silence, silence in all places.
If you can spin a cocoon to bind yourself, you can break out of the cocoon and become a butterfly. I have already spun a cocoon to bind myself, yet I have still not broken out to become a butterfly.
My love for programming still began with that blue Easy Programming Language tutorial in elementary school. She was definitely the thickest and heaviest book I owned at the time. Although the contents have long faded from memory, the fact that the simple virus I wrote in Easy Programming Language was believed to be real still makes me happy whenever I think about it up to this day. Fast forward to middle school, I heard about competitive programming, and began to teach myself for it. I should still be able to find the code left over from teaching myself programming in January 2019; at that time oj.noi.cn was still accessible, and I must have ground through dozens of problems on it—though far fewer than the four hundred plus problems I ground through during the summer after my senior year of high school, but, after all, the high school entrance exam was imminent back then. My worn-out, truly worn-out copy of Beginning Algorithm Contests (The Discouragement Classic), with its Tsinghua-purple cover, was a treasure I couldn’t put down even during summer camp. Even on the bus ride home on Fridays, I was still mentally executing the code from that book in my mind. I truly loved her so much.
The Master said: “To learn alone and without friends makes one solitary, uncultivated, and of narrow hearing.” Pure self-study was ultimately of limited help to me. Lacking a teacher’s guidance, before I participated in NOIp for the first time in my first year of high school, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a preliminary round that was purely a written test without touching a computer. Thus, with a ranking of 1500/3000, I was eliminated without even entering the Senior Division final round. Thinking about it now, I really should have registered for the Junior Division. However, my homeroom teacher and the IT teacher clearly didn’t know the gap between my level and the level required by the competition either. In a small town, not only the test-grinders, but even the teachers, suffer from the information gap.
Shortly after that, I was hospitalized for two weeks due to depression. Then, medical leave, for a year. I still feel that my homeroom teacher in the tenth grade, Class of 2019, was the best teacher I have ever met. Coming back from the leave of absence, there is even less to say: self-harm, attempted suicide, going home, returning to school, self-harm, aborted suicide, going home, returning to school… this cycle repeated for a long time before it stopped. This period coincided with my father’s death; my mother was deeply grieved, to the point of madness. It practically formed a negative feedback loop with me. A total mess. Come to think of it, a certain nurse pityingly believed that the growth rings of dozens of cuts on my arm were perhaps, objectively speaking, still a manifestation of my firm willpower. I seemed to accept her statement at the bottom of my heart. I consider myself to be of firm willpower. But this ought to have nothing to do with the fact that I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral.
The opening ceremony a few days ago should be the second large-scale occasion where I publicly wore arm sleeves; the first should have been wearing the class uniform, taking graduation photos. During the several years from then until this moment, with scars on my arm, I have always worn long sleeves and long pants. In the summer, aside from being slightly hot, what’s so strange about it—it’s super cool, okay?
Next, let us look to the future. I have an incomparably urgent desire to change my major, to enter Computer Science; my entire summer’s preparation was for this, my goal since childhood has been for this, and my not choosing physics—thereby losing the right to choose almost all engineering majors—was caused by the information gap between my teachers and me, as well as my nonchalant or perhaps overly trusting mindset. But it is not too late. If possible, I would still like to set my lifelong career in computers and calligraphy. Although the latter is currently limited to hard-tipped pens. Yet for me to set such goals right now inevitably carries the suspicion of being naive.
I have no fear of the challenges of knowledge in a world composed of electronic circuits, and I am willing to meet them with my consistent effort from the past, aiming for a guaranteed postgraduate recommendation to Zhejiang University. This answer is bound to be in the style of my age—naive and unsettled.
As for career planning, no one can give a textbook-format answer before actually studying, and my simple, unadorned answer is a developer. I love that wonderful world composed of lines and lines of code. One night, it occurred to me that each of those programs that run perfectly after compilation is practically my proud child; I love her so much.
I am no longer willing to change myself, to cater to others. I seem to have understood that famous quote by Hemingway, though the phrasing I prefer is, “A man can be destroyed, can be defeated, but cannot be changed.”
May my “comfort zone” expand evermore.
2023/9/13 21:18