20230101

Dear TK, happy New Year!

I do not know whether you remember me. At 12:05 p.m. on Sunday, March 8, 2020, I posted on Weibo ( https://m.weibo.cn/5599221112/4480174525076491 ) asking for help, and you replied at 9:13 p.m. on Wednesday the 11th.

You briefly gave me the link I needed, but I never thanked you directly. This long private message, two years later, is my belated thanks (if you do not mind my expressing gratitude in lengthy and complicated words).

The day I asked was a transition between jobs, from Tencent to ByteDance. The following Monday I resigned from Tencent, and on Friday the 13th I joined ByteDance. During that period, a Weibo post you made at 13:08 on December 9, 2015 reminded me how to “tell whether I have been brainwashed”—or, put another way, how to think independently and carefully.

I need not describe in detail how I applied your method, but I want to say that it works. I can even say it was this method that led me, after nearly two years in ByteDance Shenzhen Department A, to transfer to ByteDance Shanghai Department B in March 2022 (either move closer to xx or farther from yyyy ;)).

Careful, independent thinking is difficult. Whenever life and work overwhelm me, I pause my current tasks and try to observe, think about, and create other things. Then I return to discuss with myself how they connect to life and work. Some of these things have become my hobbies.

Literature is one of my hobbies. I believe its definition is broad and rich: in ancient times it may have been the classical Chinese we study today; in modern times it may have been writers’ cries in vernacular Chinese. Today it can even be conversations like this letter, or your neural-network-like words scattered across the Internet.

I have followed your writing on Weibo, Zhihu, and WeChat since university. I felt you had seen and thought more than I had. Some opinions might not be “correct,” but they were certainly scientific in spirit. Science is never afraid of error; it is a treasure of human civilisation. I would not call you its discoverer or owner—that would be shallow—but I dare say you draw maps to that treasure and shine for a moment in human civilisation.

I need not explain “mapmaker.” “One who shines” is my strongly subjective description. This year I discovered how much you enjoy chatting with readers :), and learned that you helped many people during the pandemic, whether on public Weibo or in group chats—and surely through other channels too. My respect for you grew further.

At the same time, I have been thinking about what kind of person I want to become. I cannot become any “other person,” including you, but I may become “a kind of person.” It is like object-oriented programming: once we define a CLASS, it should do what its name describes. Code sometimes needs refactoring or rewriting, so what this “kind of person” does will also change with the times.

At a broad level, I cannot yet give you a precise adjective, sentence, paragraph, or long Weibo message describing what I should do. Human language is so imprecise.

But I do not think I was wrong to write this letter. Human language can be beautiful, enduring, astonishing, and overwhelming—please forgive my incomplete vocabulary. Most importantly, like other art, it can cross species and time and space—perhaps everything—to connect and communicate us.

I think I have now said everything I wanted to say. I put more in two (or more) articles. If you have time and interest, I hope you will read them and share your thoughts. They were written more than half a month ago:

This letter is long and may fail to send for various reasons. If you have received it, I hope you will reply when you have time.

Thank you, TK—from an ordinary Internet reader.