Beneath a tree stands a cage woven from slender strips of bamboo.

The cage has no door.

Inside are two birds: Little Yellow and Little Green.

If Little Yellow raises its head, it can see Little Green’s legs. It seldom looks up. From beneath Little Green’s belly comes a steady warmth.

Little Green’s wings press against every side of the cage. Its head nearly touches the point where the bamboo strips meet. It stands all day, silent as a statue.

Little Green shifts its weight and curls its toes. The movement resembles a worm writhing in Little Yellow’s mind, and Little Yellow pecks at it. Its beak strikes bone. The shock leaves its head numb.

For a moment, Little Yellow feels that this has happened before.

But the feeling has nowhere to settle. Little Yellow has no clear sense of itself and has never seen its own body whole. Only what lies close before its eyes feels real. The past is like its back: always there, always out of sight.

When an itch makes Little Yellow turn and peck at its feathers, its back briefly enters the world. As soon as it faces forward again, that part of its body disappears.

A moth or a crawling insect can bring Little Yellow fully awake. Its eyes sharpen; its neck moves with perfect precision. When there is nothing to follow, the formless activity inside its head takes control again. The world slows. The cicadas recede in widening ripples. Branches twist into the wind. Sky and earth close together just beyond the tree.

Time has no meaning then.

Hunger, an itch, another insect—something eventually lights the world again.

After several hundred such awakenings, Little Yellow will grow old and die. Perhaps this is the mercy granted to small creatures: their lives are too brief to contain too many repetitions.

The gaps between the bamboo strips are wide. If Little Yellow folds its wings and passes through the center of one, its feathers do not even brush the sides.

One day, a line of ants crawls past the cage. Little Yellow follows them out.

Little Green is not so fortunate. However hard it strains, it can push only its beak between the strips.

Little Green refuses to eat creatures with fewer than six legs. They do not seem like proper insects to it. It feeds only when an inchworm descends from the tree or a centipede climbs the bamboo within reach.

It never saves its strength. Whatever energy it receives, it sends directly into flesh and bone.

Little Green continues to grow.

At night, the bamboo creaks.

Little Green can see very far—too far, perhaps. Its gaze crosses flowering meadows and snow-covered plains. It travels beyond a summer and a winter and arrives at a blue-green mountain.

Its hearing follows. Water running through the mountain reaches its ears with impossible clarity. The mountain becomes as real to Little Green as the cage around its body.

Little Green never turns away from it. Its breast always faces the mountain.

Yet the mountain is so distant that even a bird of Little Green’s size could not reach it in a lifetime of flight. Without the cage, Little Green might still be a prisoner—bound not by bamboo, but by its pride and by the endless distance ahead.

At night, Little Green watches a single star through the leaves. From scattered glimpses, it pieces together the broken circle of the star’s path.

The nights pass. The path shifts. Leaves turn yellow and fall around the cage. Insects grow scarce.

Before winter, Little Yellow returns once.

It is not a homecoming. One insect leads to another, and chance brings it back beneath the tree.

From outside, Little Yellow sees the cage whole. Green feathers fill every gap between the bamboo strips. The sight is strange and immense.

A shudder rises from Little Yellow’s back.

For the first time, the part of its body behind its eyes announces that it exists.

Then the feeling is gone.

The weather turns cold. Mist gathers on Little Green’s feathers and on the bamboo. Its neck now presses against the roof, forcing its head lower. Its wings hang like waterfalls, flashing gold and violet in the pale sunlight.

The wings have sealed the cage. When wind and snow fall upon Little Green’s back, the feathers hold in its warmth.

Its body melts the snow above it. Water runs down the bamboo and drips into its beak. Through the long winter, this is almost all it receives.

Sometimes a thin breath of vapor escapes from its nostrils. It is the only sign that Little Green is still alive.

One snowfall settles upon another until only the dome of the cage remains visible.

A fallen leaf is trapped beneath the bamboo. With its head bent low, Little Green follows every vein with its eyes. It studies the shapes enclosed by their branching lines. They remind it of gaps between leaves, and of the stars once seen through them.

From the distant mountain, the sound of water continues to arrive.

The leaf blackens, curls, and crumbles into the soil.

At last, the snow melts. The frozen ground softens. A few insects push their way out of the earth, and a light rain falls.

Mold appears along the bottom of the cage. Then the rain stops.

Wind after wind passes beneath the tree. The soil dries. The bamboo begins to split.

Little Green’s feathers turn brittle. Dehydration tightens the tendons in its body, drawing its wings open. They press against the cage with tremendous force.

The bamboo creaks—not only at night now, but through the day.

The sounds come faster.

Then the cage bursts.

Little Green’s wings tear the bamboo apart and lift it into the air. The strips scatter and fall across the ground.

Little Green falls with them.

Its body strikes the earth, raising a cloud of dust. For the first time, its wings open to their full extent. They stretch across the ground, longer and broader than the cage ever suggested.

They look like wings that could reach any mountain.

But Little Green’s head remains bent against its breast, fixed forever in the shape the cage has given it.

Vultures soon gather overhead. Beetles and other carrion insects emerge from the earth and climb onto the body.

By the time chance brings Little Yellow back again, only Little Green’s skeleton and a few scattered feathers remain.

Little Yellow has grown old. Its feathers are pale and coarse. Its wings can barely open, and its eyes have clouded. More and more of the world now slips past without waking it.

But it sees the bones.

Little Green’s wings extend across the ground, forcing Little Yellow’s vision outward. It cannot take them in as a moth, a worm, or a single bamboo strip. It must see the cage, the bones, the earth, and the distance between them all at once.

For the first time, Little Yellow sees a world too large to disappear when it turns its head.

A shudder rises from its back.

This time, it passes through its entire body.

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Behind her was a story that moved me. The final film never showed it.

Rural healthcare runs thin. Sometimes a single doctor covers hundreds of families, an entire village’s worth of sickness and birth and dying. She was one of those doctors. One night in 1998, she went to a neighboring village to deliver a baby. No streetlights. No real road. She fell down an earthen slope. Eight months pregnant. By the time she reached the hospital she had lost too much blood. The boy didn’t survive. Already fully formed. She lost the ability to have children.

Son preference is a backward idea. But decades ago, in that small village, it ran deeper than preference. It was closer to faith.

After the accident, her husband started going out every evening after dinner. Shovel and hoe. Out the door. Their daughter never knew where. Not until she was much older.

In 1998, he began repairing the road.

Then, in 2018, China’s poverty alleviation campaign reached the village. Excavators arrived and finished what he had started. Only then did he stop.

That road connected the village to the outside world. No one used it.

Except his wife.

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One of the Iranian girls is being sexually harassed by her manager. The specifics look like this: the manager staring at her lips and saying, “Your lips are beautiful.” Standing close behind her to smell her hair. When she rolled up her sleeves to wash dishes, he ran his wet hand down her bare arm. She made a sound of obvious disgust, but the manager just laughed. “I’m only joking with you,” he said. “I thought you liked it.”

She dealt with something similar back when she was working in Iran, but that was a coworker. Back then, she could turn to her dad or her friends for help. They could corner the guy, threaten him, maybe even beat him up. She eventually reported it to her manager, and the coworker was disciplined.

But now, she is in an unfamiliar environment. She has no family or friends here to stand up for her. And she doesn’t know who to complain to, because the man harassing her is already the manager.

She scored an 8.5 on her IELTS and earned a 4.0 GPA. Yet, she hasn’t been able to break into the film industry as she hoped, and she is struggling just to make rent.

She told me she feels like she is failing.

Meanwhile, Iran is caught in a war. Her family back home frequently hears the sound of bombs going off.

Things might have been terrible in the past, but she had her friends and family by her side, and the hope of reaching a better place. Now, having crossed half the globe, that once-promised land has turned into a hell beneath her feet—and she can’t even go home.

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A diamond is worth nothing. Yet it costs more than gold. Because “A Diamond Is Forever” seized the diamond’s meaning and never gave it back.

The slogan isn’t powerful. We are weak.

We know, somewhere beneath the ceremony, that marriages and vows don’t survive every test. The person standing across from us, dressed in their finest, still fills us with doubt. We need something hard to hold up something fragile.

Covalent bonds make diamonds the hardest substance in nature. And so we surrender the right to define them. We eagerly agree that diamonds mean permanence — so we can spend several months’ salary on a rock, and fit ourselves with a psychological prosthetic.

Instant noodles work the other way.

The packaging shows glistening slabs of beef. Inside the packet: pellets of dried meat the size of mung beans. We are forced to accept these as equivalent. Because of a single line of fine print at the bottom of the box: Images are for reference only. The company reserves the right of final interpretation. The company has lawyers. Reality can’t out-argue them. And besides, the noodles are cheap. Low prices keep people quiet in the face of injustice.

Religion and myth resemble the first case — humanity shaped God from the contours of its own emptiness. Imperial power resembles the second. It didn’t want to bother with explanations, so it needed an army.

All power, at its root, is the power to define. The statesman Andrew Fletcher put it plainly: give me the making of a nation’s songs, and I care not who makes its laws.

So where does that power sit now, after the arrival of large language models?

AI has conscripted nearly the entire body of human text. It re-encoded every word across tens of thousands of dimensions, giving each one direction and distance, building a semantic space no human can directly picture. In that space, cat sits close to dog. Grief sits close to tears. How those dimensions were drawn, how the system moves through them — nobody knows.

Human consensus has been vaporized into gas. It came from us, but it has no single author to hold responsible. A prompt re-condenses that gas into a shape — carrying your particular confusions, your knowledge, your biases, all exposed at once. AI reads the outline of the answer you want, then searches for a very narrow intersection: the place where you and the collective overlap. It generates its answer there.

The moment you stop asking, you have your own private myth.

In collective myth, thunder happens because Zeus wills it. The explanation’s power has nothing to do with whether it’s true. It comes from the number of people who believe it. Consensus gives an explanation its weight, and its meaning.

Private myth is different. It fits you better. But it is lighter. No one else’s weight presses down on it. It can reach into corners collective myth never touches — but whether it can hold you up while you act in those corners depends entirely on how much weight you carry yourself.

This is the real question AI puts to us:

How does a person become heavy enough that a private myth — believed by no one else — carries the same weight as a faith held by millions.

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A note before we begin: this is a cognitive decoder, not a historical account. Languages fossilize choices made centuries ago. Some of what follows explains why those choices happened. Some of it just names what’s already frozen.

I. Humans are the boundary of the world

French tracks whether the world has crossed you.

Every substance has its totality. Cold is a totality. Fear is a totality. Time is a totality. Humans are temporary containers — we cut off a piece and hold it.

English says you are 35. French says you have 35 years. J’ai 35 ans. You don’t own all of time. You’ve occupied 35 years of it.

J’ai froid — I’ve cut a piece of the world’s cold and loaded it into this human-shaped vessel. J’ai peur — I’m holding a portion of the world’s fear. J’ai faim — I have hunger.

Être is different. The energy is too large. It shatters the container. You stop being the one who experiences. You become the result. The world crosses you, covers you over.

Je suis fatigué — I am fatigue. Fatigue has rewritten me. Elle est arrivée — she is the person who has arrived. Arrival rewrote her existence.

Sometimes avoir and être are interchangeable. It depends entirely on the angle you choose.

J’ai peur — I’m holding a portion of fear. Je suis effrayé — I am a person fear has broken open. J’ai chaud — I’m hot. Je suis chaud — I’m aroused. Il a l’air idiot — he’s giving off stupid energy, though maybe he isn’t, at the core. Il est idiot — stupidity has punched through his boundary. He and stupidity are the same thing now.

Related grammar:

1.The so-called “house verbs” (DR MRS VANDERTRAMP)

Nothing to do with physical movement. Running is also physical movement — why doesn’t it take être? Because you run ten kilometers and you’re still in a state of running. But the moment you cross the finish line, your existence itself changes. You are a person who has arrived. Falling, leaving, departing — these aren’t quantities cut from a larger substance. They rewrite what you are. Every step up a staircase (monter): your body is now higher.

Elle est arrivée — the past participle arrivée. When the action ends, energy stops flowing. It cools, solidifies — becomes the static property of a “past participle.” Cooled energy, to fully rewrite the subject’s body, must agree in gender and number.

The ultimate trigger is whether the energy finds an external target.

Je suis sorti — I went out, I am the person who has gone out. The energy of going out acted on me. My state was rewritten. Être.

J’ai sorti la poubelle — I took out the trash. Energy acted on an external object. Avoir.

2.Passive voice

La ville a été détruite par la guerre. The city was destroyed by the war. The city’s existence was rewritten. Of course it uses être.

3.Articles

Definite (le/la/les) — the whole totality. All the coffee in the world. All time. J’aime le café — I like coffee as a substance. Indefinite (un/une) — cutting one countable unit from the whole. Un café, s’il vous plaît. Partitive (du/de la) — extracting an uncountable portion. Je bois du café.

Je mange une pomme → Je ne mange pas de pomme. Negation turns the article into de. The eating has been severed from the apple. Connection broken.

4.Prepositions de and à

De — the thing is still outside your boundary.

English uses decide to, try to. French uses de. Different thresholds of involvement.

Décider de faire, essayer de faire, refuser de faire — you and the action are separated. It hangs there, whole, untouched.

Continuer de faire — the inertia of a complete state. Il continue de pleuvoir. Rain continues. The state is whole, unbroken, boundary unbreached.

À — the action has pressed itself against the boundary. Or broken through.

Hésiter à faire — hesitation. You’re already being pulled. Your boundary has gone blurry.

Deeper than hesitation, use à:

Commencer à — the knife has entered the bread. That’s when starting begins. Réussir à — success is the knife going all the way through. Renoncer à — you cut in, then withdrew.

Continuer à faire — not inertia. Active forward pressure. Each repetition a new cut.

Il continue à frapper à la porte. Each knock is a fresh thrust. Continue à marcher! — take the next step, keep pushing forward.

II. Subject and object

French cares about who sends the energy, and who receives it.

Related grammar:

1.Direct and indirect objects (COD/COI)

Does the subject’s energy hit the object directly? Je le vois — I see him. Or through a medium? Je lui parle — I speak to him. The energy arrives via language.

2.Jouer vs. faire

If you play at an object, energy going outward — jouer. Guitar, chess, tennis, golf. If you’re working on yourself, energy returning inward — faire. Cycling, skiing still use faire. You’re not hand-spinning the wheels like a DJ. You’re not cradling the skis and fussing with them. The work lands on you.

“Want to play tennis after work?” — jouer. You’re engaging the game as an object. “Do you do sports?” — Je fais du tennis. You’re performing tennis as a discipline on your own body.

3.Reflexive verbs (se)

I wash the apple. Energy flows outward, subject to object. I wash myself — Je me lave — subject and object are the same. Energy circles back. Se marks the return.

J’ai lavé la voiture — energy outward, avoir. Je me suis lavé — energy returned, être.

4.Adjective position

After the noun: objective, physical attribute. Une pomme rouge. Color, nationality, shape — the world’s properties, observed.

Before the noun: your subjective filter wraps the noun before it even appears. Un beau livre. Beautiful, ugly, good, bad, new, old, large, small — these come from you.

Exception:Un film intéressant. Adjectives derived from verbs carry residual action energy. They must wait for the noun to appear before attaching. Always after.

III. Time is three-dimensional

English time is linear. Before and after. French time is a stage.

Related grammar:

1.Passé composé vs. imparfait

The stage is always open. Furniture set, lights on. No one knows when it began or when it ends. This continuous backdrop — imparfait.

Someone steps onto the stage. A single action, frozen against the backdrop — passé composé.

2.Où for time clauses

Le jour où... — not “on that day.” Inside that day. Time is a room you can enter. Où is where, and in French, time has a where.

IV. Degrees of certainty

How certain you are determines your grammar.

Related grammar:

1.Indicative — I vouch for this. It’s real.

Je sais qu’il est en danger. You’re sitting in the judge’s seat. You’ve given this event full reality backing. It exists in three-dimensional physical space.

2.Conditional — I’m not certain. This depends.

Il partirait (s’il avait le choix). The conjugation: partir- (the root of simple future — pure forward momentum) + -ait (imperfect ending — pulling it back, unresolved). Future and past tearing at the action from both sides. It can’t land. It floats in a parallel universe, waiting for an external condition to break the deadlock.

3.Subjunctive(I prefer: the weakened mood) — I refuse to vouch. This lives in my subjective space.

In English: I’m happy that you’re here. Both sides of that carry equal weight.

In French, once the subject states emotion or will, it dominates everything. Energy floods to the subject’s side. The subordinate clause — where the other person lives — gets drained. Demoted.

Je suis content que tu sois là. Imagine a giant, laughing I in the main clause — then a small figure inside a glass globe in the subordinate. The globe holds the scene. The scene has lost its grip on reality.

These aren’t three tenses. They’re three levels of a speaker’s willingness to certify reality.

Je crains qu’il ne soit en danger. My fear occupies the entire sentence. The subordinate clause is drained. The ne isn’t negation — it’s a physical leak of my psychological resistance. A residue of my subconscious rejecting that reality, surfacing in the grammar.

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Buy me a coffee.

You used to herd sheep every day with the neighbor’s boy. He was two years older than you and often ate at your house. He stood up for you. He also made a fool of himself trying to show off. Some adults called him a rogue, but you never thought he was bad.

One day you talked back to your parents. You were grounded and couldn’t go out with him. At dusk the sky darkened. A cold wind slipped in through the window. Through the narrow crack you saw several adults walking past in hurried steps.

The next day, he was dead. Il est mort.

A few days later, a story began circulating in the village: the shepherd boy had been eaten by a wolf because he had lied too many times. The logic was airtight. The chain of cause and effect, immaculate.

Years later, sorrow still rises in you when you think of it. But what you remember are not the lessons. You remember him walking with his head lowered among the sheep, pressing his palm against his straw hat. You remember him catching a small insect and gently placing it on top of a sheep’s head. The sun was so bright you had to shield your eyes; through your fingers you saw him turn a cartwheel on the hillside.

You don’t know why you remember these trivial things. But you do.

A story foregrounds causality. An event simply occurs.

This is neither active nor passive. It resembles an ancient grammatical form: the middle voice. In reflexive constructions—se in French—the action and its result fall upon the same bearer.

Je m’évanouis. I faint.
Le soleil se lève. The sun rises.
La porte s’ouvre. The door opens.

An agent may exist. Language simply chooses not to spotlight it.

When the villagers told of the boy’s death, they chose active causality: he lied, therefore he lost trust, therefore he died.

But to you, death was not the conclusion of a moral equation. It was a state that descended.

C’est arrivé. It happened.
Il est mort. He died.

You prefer to stop there. Not because causality is false, but because reducing a death to a lesson feels arrogant—and violent.

Even the most meticulously constructed story resembles an exquisite marionette. However masterful the craft, the fine threads will catch the light, reminding the audience that everything has been arranged, that every cause has been selected, that every explanation carries the limits of the one who gives it.

In The Stranger, Meursault stands on the beach. The sun presses down; sweat slips into his eyes. The flash of a blade burns his vision. He fires. The Arab falls. The novel does not assemble a transparent chain of hatred. Causality has not vanished; it simply remains unlit. What we confront are heat, light, and disorientation.

Sometimes people do not act for grand reasons. Sometimes, in an inarticulate instant, a condition takes hold—and something occurs.

Human beings cling to causality; without it we feel we would fall into the abyss. Yet in the double-slit experiment, the effect appears to precede the cause. Light behaves as if it already knows whether it will be observed.

I do not reject causality. I only want to make room for another way of seeing—not “why did this happen,” but “this happened.”

We loosen the ropes of cause and effect. The sentences settle, spare and detached. And then, almost imperceptibly, the marionette’s shoulder trembles.

La marionnette s’est mise à bouger.
The marionette began to move.

This is where literature begins.

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Today is the Chinese Lunar New Year. According to superstition, it is the “Red Horse, Red Sheep Calamity.” I don’t understand it either, but it probably means this year is very dangerous.

I went to dinner with two friends. One just broke up and decided to go back to China and never come to Canada again. The other, right after New Year’s Eve, received news that she was fired.

As for me, I have just learned French for 15 days. I finished the A1 course and can understand the notes in fortune cookies.

Why learn French? It is a kind of attempt. To see if I can, under the premise of meaninglessness, still take action.

Summer 2025, after graduating from Seneca, I went back to China and rested for three months. Mid-September, I returned to Toronto. I slept on a classmate’s sofa for a month, then moved to a house near the school.

I don’t know if I should stay in Canada or go back to China. I have no motive and no reason. Neither side is a good choice.

In the four-plus months since arriving in Canada, I have averaged 13 hours a day playing on my phone. The rest of the time, I watch dramas. I go to sleep at 7 or 8 in the morning every day. During this time, except for receiving three writing drafts, I had no income. I did not submit a single resume. First, I don’t know what to do. Second, in this state, even if I went to work, it would not help my problem. I would only question my meaning in Canada even more after being tired from work every day.

End of January 2026, I suddenly thought: if this continues, when my birthday comes in May, I will have made no progress at all this year.

Just then, Alex finished climbing Taipei 101. I watched his interview on CNN. The host asked him why he does such high-risk things. He said climbing 101 has very low risk, it’s just that constant repetition is a bit boring. He said the vast majority of people live in unchosen danger. For him, climbing is a risk he actively chose. Through 30-plus years of strict training, he held uncertainty in his own hands. He became his own God.

I feel that the mainstream lifestyle is living in unexamined risk.

Graduated from university 14 years ago, I only went to work for 4 years. The remaining time, I opened a noodle restaurant, learned film with a director, and went to school in Canada. More time was spent doing nothing, swimming and petting my cat every day. As for income, when I worked I earned not bad, and at the same time, I spent very little.

Going to school in Canada was deadly. I had many hesitations, constantly asking myself for meaning. After surviving it, I know I can live anywhere, and succeed in whatever I want to do. Because in the past, the things I actively did (although pitifully few) never failed.

Since I currently cannot ask for meaning and cannot find a motive, I will actively choose a risk and make a bet with myself:

From February 1st to my birthday, about 100 days, I will learn French full-time. If before my birthday, I can finish B1 French and reach the English level I had before going abroad, I will try to stay in Canada. If not, I go back to China. During this period, meaning has nothing to do with me.

Learning French is like a coin I tossed.

No matter the result, this process itself is adding weights to one side of the scale, breaking the balance of being unable to choose.

I have already walked into a wider world, I should not turn back anymore. I must keep walking, walk out the answer, walk until the equator connects again.

Wish everyone a Happy New Year, forever keep courage.

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If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.

— Hermann Hesse, Demian

1.The Incubator and the Crystal Coffin

I was three and a half when my first cousin was born. My parents took me to the hospital. It was December. The Gobi Desert was dry and cold. We arrived late; the sky was a dark teal, cupped over the hospital like a bowl.

The hospital was a Soviet-style building. It had tall doors with glass panes and long metal handles. Inside, a wide staircase stretched upward. The floor was paved with large, patterned bricks; a heavy stomp would echo. The lobby ceiling was high, making anyone standing beneath it feel small. The smell of disinfectant made the air feel a few degrees colder.

In the delivery room, babies lay crying on a communal platform under small white quilts. They weren’t swaddled; their limbs flailed in the air. My cousin was not lying with them, nor did she have a small cotton quilt. She lay alone in an incubator.

The incubator had a transparent lid over a green base, lined with a cotton mat. My cousin was smaller than the others—half the size, perhaps. She was purplish, her eyes squeezed shut by wrinkled skin. Inside the case, a black fly crawled. She didn’t cry. A nurse in white stood by. My uncle looked at the incubator, looked away, then couldn’t help but look back.

The scene in my memory is silent. No crying babies, no buzzing fly. It’s as if a spotlight hit the incubator, drowning out everything else.

My cousin was a month premature, weighing just over four pounds. She survived. Years later, my uncle would say it was terrifying—her fingers were thinner than chopsticks.

Later, I saw a textbook photo of Chairman Mao lying in his crystal coffin. It reminded me of the incubator. In my memory, the green base of that machine bled into the rest of the image, making me believe the leader’s crystal coffin had a green bottom, too.

2.The Soldier in the Shell

Around age three, I started having fantasies. I imagined I was a hero—infinite energy, yet extremely fragile. I spent most of my time sleeping inside a glowing eggshell to recover. A group of companions guarded me, each a different color (a trope from cartoons, I suppose). When the world was on the brink of destruction and my guards failed, I would emerge. Infinite light would flood out, and the world would be restored.

“World destruction” meant cracking earth and falling rocks. There were no villains. Most of the time, they didn’t even appear. After saving the world, I would be drained and hurt, reverting to a newborn state—like my cousin in the incubator. In the fantasy, I returned to the shell to heal. In reality, I wrapped myself tight in my quilt, smelling the cotton, and fell asleep.

This fantasy lasted three or four years. The monotonous plot repeated itself. It became my kindergarten daydream and my customary bedtime story.

My grandmother’s shop sold fifty-cent “blind bags.” They were likely foreign trash, repackaged for cheap sale. I often took things from the counter; my grandparents didn’t mind. Once, I took a bag containing a plastic egg. Inside were colored parts. I clenched them between my teeth to snap them together, building an American soldier in tactical gear, helmet, and gas mask.

It was my cheapest, shabbiest toy. His limbs and head wobbled. But he was the only toy I ever named: “Little Egg Man.” He became the protagonist of every story I invented.

Around six or seven, watching pretty girls dance on TV, I began to imagine them falling and getting hurt, so I could help them up. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to be the one hurt, so they would pity me. Unlike martial arts novels, I didn’t crave their care or romance. I just wanted to suffer, and to be seen suffering. Sometimes, I would squeeze my legs together. The girl downstairs taught me this; she called it “holding pee” or “twisting the dough.” We didn’t know shame yet. Sometimes we did it in front of our parents.

Gradually, the fantasy shifted. I was injured, suspended high in the air, watched by girls I liked. There was no sex. Their sadness and tears were the whole point. After every fantasy, I sneezed—as if to compensate for the shame.

3.The Injured Bat

That same year, or maybe the next. A summer evening. I was playing outside with other kids. One girl was about two years older and much taller. She suggested a role-playing game. I jumped to the front. “My grandma’s house is just ahead,” I told them. “We can play at the gate. I’ll lead the way.” It was only twenty or thirty meters, but I seized every chance to perform. Children were ignored. Adults assumed we knew nothing. We just had to obey school rules and listen to our parents.

Grandma lived in the single-story housing area on the back hill. The family had built a room facing the street to open a small shop. They hung a wooden sign: “Prosperous Shop.” A double-stranded wire ran from the room, split at the end, and hooked onto a long nail. A warm light bulb dangled from it. That night, we played under the light. Small insects circled above our heads.

The girl said she wanted to be a bat. Before anyone else could speak, she spread her jacket, flapping it like wings. She spun on the small patch of brick pavement. Raising her hands high, she let out a long cry—”Ah”—then leaned to the side and fell. It was a slow, affected fall. Her body twisted into a Z-shape. Her legs were pinned to one side. One hand braced the ground; the other clutched her opposite shoulder. “Ah,” she said. “I’m hurt.”

My eyes widened. Goosebumps rose instantly on my back and arms. It felt as if my most secret fantasy had been pierced through, then displayed—clumsily and completely—for everyone to see.

I panicked and looked at the other kids. They stood there, oblivious. They saw nothing wrong. The girl claimed she was injured saving us, so we had to find herbs to cure her. The boys didn’t get it. They waved their fists, pouting and making “ch-ch-ping-ping” noises, pretending to be Transformers. The tall girl soon lost interest. The fake fall had been the climax. She had fulfilled her fantasy. The show was over.

Her behavior confused and unsettled me. Did she also enjoy being watched while injured? Why didn’t she feel shame? Why didn’t she sneeze? The clumsy scene under the lamp replayed in my mind. The drainage ditch, the bushes, the broken bricks, the peeling green door of the shop—I reconstructed the set over and over. The girl fell before me, again and again. As the replays multiplied, my perspective pulled back and rose higher. I seemed to be looking down on someone else’s life.

4.The Worship

I don’t know how missionaries got into 404, a secret nuclear city. When I was in first grade, Grandma brought home a thick Bible. Most women of her generation couldn’t read. I mocked her for carrying a book she couldn’t understand. She glanced at me. “Little brat,” she said.

404 was small. There wasn’t much to do. We went to Grandma’s three or four times a week. We usually didn’t call ahead. After dinner, we just walked over.

Grandma sat cross-legged on the bed. She told me God made man from mud, blew breath into the nostrils, and the man came alive. I laughed loudly, rolling around on the bed. I told her humans evolved from apes and she was superstitious. She asked why the monkeys in the zoo hadn’t turned into people after all these years. “They can’t anymore,” I said. “Only before.” I climbed off the bed, put on my shoes, and ran through the hallway to the main room, laughing. “Mom! Grandma says people are made of mud! Hahahaha!”

I was not yet seven, but I was a staunch materialist. I believed in neither ghosts nor gods. Most Chinese children born in the nineties were like me; we sentenced religion to death before we ever met it. The school held regular anti-cult campaigns. They took us to cinemas to watch propaganda films or to classrooms filled with blown-up photos. We lined up in our baggy uniforms to look at pictures of corpses, heads flattened by shovels. The captions said the victims’ families had joined a cult.After Falun Gong was branded a cult, we watched footage of their self-immolations in Tiananmen Square—the charred bodies.

After converting, Grandma listened to sermons on a tape recorder every night. On weekends, she went to worship and called her friends “sisters.” The recordings sounded monotonous and old, like they were made years ago. But childhood was long. My mind had few sentences or images to play with. Like the children’s books on the shelf, the tapes naturally attracted me.

When Grandma played the tapes, I grunted in fake protest, then sat nearby to listen. Sometimes she fell asleep and snored; I kept listening. The wall clock ticked. The cassette tape spun, emitting a faint, continuous white noise.

The tape said Jehovah preferred Abel’s offering, so Cain killed Abel in resentment. I thought Jehovah was at fault; he hadn’t treated them equally. The tape talked about the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I didn’t understand. How could a father split off a person to be his own son? What shocked me most was God telling Abraham to burn his only son as a sacrifice. The tape said God eventually replaced the boy with a lamb, concluding: “So people say, God has his own plan.” I didn’t understand how such a cruel figure could be God.

The easiest story to understand was Jesus being betrayed and nailed to the cross. Jesus was a perfect hero. He was powerful enough to cleanse all human sin, yet fragile enough to be easily destroyed—like the baby in the incubator.

The details of Jesus’ suffering were more specific than my bedtime fantasies. They were also more shameful. They made me want to squeeze my legs together.

That winter, Grandma said there was a church gathering at night and offered to take me. I thought superstitious gatherings were boring, but Mom told me to go have fun. Maybe she wanted to play ping pong, or maybe she just wanted a break from me.

404 had no church. That night, Grandma and I went to a bungalow on the back hill. It must have been someone’s home. A guide led us through a kitchen, a small living room, a courtyard, and a hallway. Behind a curtain made of paper beads, a woman holding a child watched us. We disturbed three or four people before finally entering a large, square room.

The room was crowded but not warm. A long table near the door held sunflower seeds and candy. Most of the people were women my grandmother’s age. One person sat in a wheelchair. I whispered to Grandma, asking why God hadn’t made him stand up. She slapped my hand.

Everyone sat on small stools cracking sunflower seeds. The floor was covered in shells. Later, they gathered around the stove to sing hymns. I stood between Grandma’s legs, clutching a piece of candy. Opposite us sat a man in his thirties. He held his son’s hand, rubbing his head affectionately against the boy’s, singing, “I am a child who believes in the Lord.” The boy was younger than me. He had heart stickers on his face and looked confused.

Thinking back, that day must have been Christmas.

5. The White Popsicle Cart

Grandma’s character didn’t change after she converted. Neither did her lifestyle. Perhaps she just knew a few more old ladies to greet. She ran the small shop. Every day at 5 PM, dressed in white clothes and a white hat, she pushed a small wooden cart lined with a cotton quilt to our elementary school gate to sell popsicles and snacks.

After school, a crowd of kids rushed out the gate like mad. Clutching small change, they squeezed against the cart, shouting, “Me first!” Some would steal snacks from the wooden box on the side during the chaos. Grandma leaned half her body over the cart, pressing down the lid, waiting for them to calm down before selling. I would stand nearby for a while. When it was crowded, she didn’t speak; she just grabbed a handful of snacks and stuffed them into my hand. When it was quiet, she lifted the quilt and let me take my time picking a popsicle. When Grandma gave me snacks, other kids always glared at me.

Another old lady copied Grandma and set up a cart across from her. But kids rarely went there. My family said it was because kids liked Grandma better. Grandma didn’t speak; she just looked at the ground.

I hadn’t finished elementary school when Grandma died. It was a sudden heart attack. The family didn’t know how serious it was, or that moving a heart attack patient is taboo. They supported her and moved her several times, even tossing her around to use the bathroom. By the time she reached the hospital, there was no hope.

My uncle sat by the bed, stroking Grandma’s face over and over. Mom was crying. My four- or five-year-old cousin was crying too. I felt I should cry, but I couldn’t. Back at Grandma’s house, while the family discussed the funeral, I tried to brew up some emotion, but still couldn’t cry. My father looked at my face and sneered.

I didn’t understand what happened. Grandma had chest pains before lunch. By afternoon, while the sky was still bright, she was gone. The Bible was so thick, yet it was useless.

The family followed the church rules and didn’t burn paper money for her. That seemed to be the only effect religion had on her.

A few years later, Grandpa dreamed that Grandma had no money to spend on the other side. The tradition of burning paper money at Qingming returned. The sermon tapes and the Bible were long gone.

6. The Trinity

Many years later, I vaguely guessed that lust and suffering are two sides of the same coin.

Jesus wore a crown of thorns. Blood clotted on his cheek and hair. Under the gaze of countless people, he was taken to the execution stand. The hammer drove iron nails into his palms, one by one. The viewers’ hearts were wrenched, again and again. Jesus knew this clearly, so he was happy.

Without an audience, Jesus’s suffering would lose its meaning. When God blew breath into the mud man’s nostrils, did he blow in a story? That the girl and I longed to place ourselves on a high stage, letting the gaze give meaning to the pain. This scene is so mesmerizing that God’s instrument of torture became the symbol of religion.

But real suffering has no stage. It happens quietly, plainly, like a white popsicle cart vanishing at the school gate.

I abandoned my childhood fantasy. I took myself down from the cross and stood in the watching crowd.

Now, 404 has been abandoned and repainted. I look through the transparent glass of the incubator at the wrinkled baby inside, eyes closed tight.

I gaze at him through the glass of memory. Long, and silent.

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I recently started writing a new memoir about City 404, titled Jesus in City 404. The themes involve lust and suffering, running deeper than my previous work, so the writing has been slow. The prolonged contemplation gave me a headache, so I procrastinated by scrolling through Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)—a Chinese social media platform.

I posted a status update there, mentioning that I had started publishing on Substack and received my first subscription fee. That bit of happiness made me want to show off. I was truly specific-grateful to the netizen who paid; it felt like receiving recognition from the wider world.

In the post, I explained the mechanisms of Medium and Substack, analyzing their pros and cons, and encouraged others to use translation tools to write for the internet outside the Great Firewall. Soon, the post garnered thousands of views and over a hundred likes.

After posting, I received an invitation from a classmate to attend her son’s birthday party. There, I met an Iranian writer I knew. He had quit his job and was negotiating a book deal with a publisher. We drank and chatted, each of us complaining about our respective ethnicities.

On the ride home after the party, I found that my post had been flagged for a violation. The reason: “Promoting side hustles; potential risk.”

I remembered the unwritten rules of the Chinese internet: you cannot use the word “money” (qian); you must replace it with “rice” (mi). For US dollars, you have to use a 🔪 emoji. I edited the post to comply with these absurdities and reposted it.

One minute later, my account was designated as a “Risk Account.” All operations were banned. A verification box popped up, demanding my real name and ID number.

Among all the censorship I have encountered, this penalty was the mildest, yet I cared about it more than ever before. That ID input box felt like a boot stamping on my face, asking if I yielded. It was a threat: “You may express yourself, but I hold your name and your life in my hands.”

Meanwhile, the homepage of Little Red Book was flooded with posts about making easy money or teaching people how to churn out AI slop for profit—all completely unrestricted. I realized the problem wasn’t that I was discussing a side hustle. The problem was that any expression encouraging people to step outside the wall and bypass censorship could never be encouraged.

I vented to an AI. I told it I was facing a choice: Should I give up 95% of my life—my cats, my friends, my parents—for that 5% of freedom of expression?

The AI replied: “That 5% of expression is 100% of your oxygen.”

Returning to China or choosing the Chinese internet means cutting out my tongue. I would keep my old life, but I would live as a mute, or have to learn ventriloquism to survive. Staying abroad means cutting the umbilical cord. I keep my voice, but I constantly feel weightless, floating in a void.

After nearly two years in Canada, I have adapted to this weightlessness, as well as the accompanying loneliness and boredom. I can currently use AI translation to express myself; although the nuance is discounted, I accept this imperfection. I can spend time learning English writing—perhaps it will take years—but these are not insurmountable problems.

My first article, Growing Up in City 404, hit the #1 spot on Hacker News and was read by 50,000 foreign readers. It was also published in China, read by at least a million people. Both versions are public, and so far, there have been no issues. But assuming one day someone reports me for “leaking state secrets” (even though Factory 404 is no longer a secret, and I haven’t described any classified content), I would still face severe consequences. And make no mistake: the one who turns me in will be, inevitably, a fellow Chinese.

If one day my English writing reaches a native level, my audience will shift to people who share neither my cultural nor linguistic background. I might become an object of curiosity, a specimen of exoticism, stuck in a paradoxical vacuum of language and culture.

But I have no choice. I lack the motivation or desire for any other kind of life. Writing feels like a compulsion; regardless of motivation, I must finish it. I only hope I have the courage to tell my story with enough honesty.

My sincere thanks to everyone who subscribed. Right now, this is my warmest corner.

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When I was a child, my dreams were incredibly vivid, and my feelings felt even more real than reality. I often dreamed of receiving gifts. Some of these dreams I can remember to this day—for instance, dreaming that the Smurfs gave me Smurf erasers. When we were little, we used white, square erasers that cost 50 cents, with a Smurf pattern printed in the middle. The pattern was small and the printing quality wasn’t very high. The pattern was outlined in black, but like writing with a ballpoint pen, every stroke might drag a thread of ink, leaving excess marks. The colors inside often bled outside the lines; if I had the chance to pick one, I would choose one where the pattern wasn’t misprinted. The erasers in my dreams weren’t square; they were three-dimensional Smurfs, like wax figures. In the dream, the blonde Smurfette and Papa Smurf in his red hat gave me a whole handful of them, complete with ribbon-tied packaging.

In my dreams, I was always abnormally pleasantly surprised and excited by the gifts, but after waking up, there was only an immense sense of loss. After similar things happened many times, whenever a sweet dream descended—one so wonderful it couldn’t possibly happen in real life—I would realize within the dream that I was dreaming.

As the light penetrating my eyelids grew brighter, the “me” in the dream became increasingly frantic. I would hug the gifts tight, sit on them, or clench them in my mouth. But still, when I opened my eyes, there was only an empty pillow and duvet.

That regret intensified the panic in the next dream. Why couldn’t I keep anything?

When I was three or four years old, the gift I wanted most was a younger brother or sister. I fantasized about playing with toys with them and teaching them to recognize every object. I had very close friends and played with them almost every day, but I still felt it wasn’t enough. In kindergarten, I didn’t talk much with others. At home in the evenings, Mom was studying, and Dad would disappear right after dinner.

He was so enthusiastic about playing Mahjong that he played all night almost every night, then would find a duty room to sleep secretly when he went to work the next day. I don’t know how he managed to be awarded the Model Worker, go to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for dinner. Once, Mom had to go to Zhangye on a business trip and instructed him not to go out that day. Dad made me go to sleep early. Just as my consciousness was becoming a bit blurry, he took his keys and went out. The sound of the door closing woke me up. I sat up and shouted loudly for Dad and Mom. No one answered in the dark room. I sat alone on the bed and wailed. At three in the morning, Mom returned home from her trip and saw this scene.

That day, Mom brought me a model airplane, but I couldn’t be consoled no matter what; I cried until my neck twitched with sobs. That model airplane was considered exquisite among my many toys, but I hardly ever played with it. I felt it was like an ornament in a stranger’s house.

I thought everyone was like me, that everything that happened in childhood was imprinted in the brain like movies and those vivid dreams. Later, I slowly discovered that almost no one possesses this miserable talent.

The desire for a younger brother or sister was so strong that when I was alone, I no longer used “I”, but used “Big Brother” to refer to myself, fantasizing that I was talking to my younger siblings. Sitting cross-legged on the red carpet by the bed, holding a toy car, I would say silently in my heart, “Brother will teach you, this is a police car, a police car is driven by police.” I could distinguish the occasion; as long as there was a second person around, I would not enter that possessed state.

At that time, our factory TV station broadcast the foreign TV series Tarzan. Tarzan never used personal pronouns, but used the name “Tarzan” to refer to himself. I couldn’t understand the plot, so I couldn’t remember it. I only remember him saying in the exaggerated tone of a dubbed movie, “Tarzan is going to save Jane, Tarzan likes Jane.” I didn’t empathize with him at all because of my own experience; I just didn’t understand how someone could be so silly as to not use “I” when there were people around.

At three and a half years old, I witnessed an astonishing scene. At that time, I slept with Mom. I was on the side near the window, and Mom was near the only bedside table and lamp. I was curled up in the quilt, watching Mom, my eyelids already fighting to stay open. She leaned against the headboard, took off her glasses, and put them aside. A green light slowly emerged from her belly, rose up, and floated above her hands. The green orb of light was about the size of two fists. It looked soft, and in the middle were two black eyes, like the eyes of the earliest Mickey Mouse—two vertical, slender ovals with no whites. Mom looked at the orb and squeezed her hands toward the middle. The orb slowly left her hands, blinking at Mom, and Mom looked back at it. The orb was about to rise to the ceiling, then turned and flew out the bedroom door. I was too sleepy and didn’t have the strength to get up; I just thought that tomorrow I must ask Mom what this was all about.

When I got up the next day, I asked where that little green sprite had gone. Mom asked, “What little sprite?” I said, “The little sprite from when we were sleeping. You even squeezed it, and then it slowly flew away.” I dragged Mom to the living room, rummaged behind the curtains, and looked left and right outside the windows. Then we went to the bathroom, and I even opened the toilet tank lid. Mom said, “Look, there’s no little sprite.” I was very anxious and asked, “Where on earth did it go?” Mom said it might have flown away out the window. I looked at the bathroom window, feeling empty inside.

About six or seven years ago, I finally learned that before me, Mom had had a “molar pregnancy,” which is roughly when the fetus dies in the womb before taking shape. After that, my parents didn’t try for a child for several years. They traveled to various places during every holiday to recuperate. They were both over thirty when they gave birth to me. After having me, Mom was pregnant with another child, but because of the One-Child Policy, she had to abort it. Otherwise, both my parents would have lost their jobs. In the circumstances of that time, losing a job for such a reason meant it would be nearly impossible to find work again. The compensation for this loss was an “Honorary Certificate for One-Child Parents.” The red cover is printed with the National Emblem of China, and inside there is only a single stamped page, certifying that I am my parents’ only child. When I was little, I asked Mom, “What’s so glorious about this? Isn’t everyone an only child?” Mom didn’t say much, only that there were some who weren’t.

When Mom had the abortion, I was three and a half years old.

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I used to work as an editor for a non-fiction platform. My job was to filter through submissions. One day, a manuscript arrived from a drug addict who had just been released from prison. He was writing to earn money for his next fix.

The writing was poor—scattered, with no clear theme. Naturally, we rejected it. But there was one detail buried in the mess that I have never forgotten. It still shakes me today.

The author started out smoking weed but wanted to try something harder: heroin. But he was afraid. So, he polled the fellow users around him: What do you see when you’re high? Some said they saw a desert. Most said they saw the ocean.

Eventually, he took the leap. He shot up, felt a wave of calm, and indeed, he saw the ocean.

But he found the experience boring. He wondered if everyone saw the same thing. Then, he thought of a man named Brother Long.

Brother Long was a legend in their circle. He once jumped from a third-floor window to escape the police, landing on a vendor’s awning like a Jackie Chan movie. More importantly, he was the heaviest user anyone knew. As the author wrote: “Brother Long eats meth like candy.”

The “ocean” and “desert” answers suddenly seemed trivial. The author became obsessed with one question: What does Brother Long see?

Finally, he met the legend.

Brother Long said he saw nothing. The author pressed him: “The ocean? The desert? Camels? There has to be something.”

Brother Long said he really didn’t see anything. But every night before bed, he would pour a basin of cold water to wet the foot of his bed. Under the blanket, his feet would stay damp all night. It made him feel like he was sleeping in his mother’s womb.

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4. Communism on Hollow Ground

Welfare in 404 was excellent. We almost never had to buy rice, flour, or oil; watermelon and Hami melon were handed out by the sackful. When my uncle’s family received fish, they would bring a few to our house, and when our family received chicken, we would send some back in return. Neighbors and residents from different floors also exchanged goods based on mutual trust and social ties. In 404, basic necessities cost almost nothing, the wealth gap among the plant workers was very small.

There were no hidden worries about life in 404, so most of our family’s money was used to buy “toys.” In 1992, my parents’ combined salary was 500 yuan, yet they spent 3,500 yuan to buy a VCR. In 1997, a television with a “picture-in-picture” function cost 7,400 yuan. The wealthiest person in the entire plant area was a scavenger; in the 1990s, he was already worth over a hundred thousand yuan.He knew how to do business and made a fortune starting from collecting scrap; he eventually bought trucks to haul coal, and everyone called him the “King of Trash.”

Later, when I read descriptions of communism in political textbooks, I felt that 404 was pretty much exactly that.

People in the plant area loved to eat and frequently went out to restaurants. After finishing their meals, they would scuffle at the counter, shoving each other out of the way to settle the bill. Because everyone treated each other to meals, I ate at the hotpot restaurant in front of the primary school 17 times during the first month it opened.

Near my father’s workplace, there was a small potsticker shop called “Baishun Chicken” (Hundred Prosperities Chicken). The wooden chopping block in the shop was twenty centimeters thick; because they chopped filling all day long and the knife fell so densely, a pit ten centimeters deep had been carved into the middle of the board.

Baishun Chicken was originally a hotpot restaurant located in the middle of the free market, and business was extraordinarily bustling. In the dead of winter, the heat in the shop was overwhelming, and everyone ate hotpot in short sleeves. Especially during the Lunar New Year period, there were several times more people than usual, with swarms of people squeezing into the shop. It was on one such New Year’s evening that the ground in front of the hotpot restaurant collapsed; someone fell into a two-meter-deep pit and was seriously injured.

This incident made it into the plant newspaper. My mother clicked her tongue in wonder, saying that the people of 404 loved eating so much they had literally stomped the ground into a collapse.

Scaffolding was erected in front of Baishun Chicken, surrounded by green netting. With the reopening nowhere in sight, an auntie from the shop came out and opened this potsticker shop of the same name.

The plant area was small and life was leisurely; the most lively events were the sports activities organized by the various units. In my memory, the sports meets never stopped; they were held from the beginning of the year to the end, and everyone seemed to be preparing for a sports competition at any given moment. Consequently, most people of my parents’ generation were skilled athletes. The floodlit stadium was brilliantly lit at night; while my parents competed on the field, we children would gather by the rostrum to trade Water Margin collector cards.

I have a hazy memory that a circus once performed at the stadium. Swings were set up high in the arena, and performers fastened with red silk performed as trapezes. Snake charmers put tiny snakes into their mouths, and the snakes would crawl out of their nostrils.

Aside from sports competitions, the main leisure activity for people in the plant was taking a stroll after dinner. Everyone walked off their meals on the same street, and when they ran into acquaintances, they would stand in the road and chat. I truly disliked tagging along with my parents; the streets were full of people they knew, and a path of a few hundred meters often took half an hour to walk.

Every evening, it was exceptionally lively in front of the Workers’ Club. Adults gathered in groups of three or five to chat under the statue of Chairman Mao. Children would climb onto the base of the statue and walk along the narrow ledge, circling the Chairman.

Later, I saw many Chairman Mao statues in various places, but the one at 404 was the most “utilized.”

Diagonally across from the Workers’ Club was the Xinhua Bookstore; in the early years, it had subscribed to books in eight languages. On the second floor of the bookstore was a barbershop, where the hair piled on the floor was over half a person high. The adults said the hair was taken to be made into soy sauce. I never knew if it was actually true.

The aunties inside wore white coats, just like doctors. Many parrots were kept in the shop, all locked in cages and placed on the floor; you had to bypass the piles of hair to see them.

Once, the older girl from downstairs showed me the braid she had cut off. The hair was tied with a ribbon and placed in an exquisite box. I found it very singular, so when I got home, I took a “Dada” bubble gum box and cut my hair in front of the mirror. My hair wasn’t very long, so I only cut half a box of fragments, which couldn’t be tied with a ribbon at all. When my mother came home and found out, she dragged me into the barbershop. The auntie pointed at me and laughed out loud, saying my hair looked like it had been gnawed by a dog.

I couldn’t explain the situation, and my hair looked very ugly, so I just pouted and cried. I have long hair now, but I still detest talkative barbers.

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5. The Execution & Sorghum Wine

The 404 plant possessed a complete set of administrative organs, including a Finance Bureau, a Land Bureau, a television station, a newspaper, and even a Higher Education Admissions Office. The plant area also had its own public security and judicial system; in addition to a detention center of two or three rooms, there was a Public Security Bureau and an Intermediate People’s Court.

Behind my primary school were the single-story houses on the hill, and further back was the “Back Mountain”—that was where 404’s execution ground was located.

There was a middle school kid in the plant who owed money for table time to an old man at the billiards hall. The old man cornered him at school, threatening that if he didn’t pay, he wouldn’t let him continue his studies. If the old man told the teacher, the entire plant would find out about it. The kid went to the old man’s house and hacked him to death with an axe.

The debt was only 5 yuan.

After the deed was done, he found his classmates, telling them he was going to leave and saying see you.

He headed to the railway tracks to escape by hopping a train, but was caught.

The trial was swift. The judge shouted, ‘Death penalty, execute immediately.’ A tall placard was stuck into the back of his collar, looming over his head. His name was written on it, crossed out with a large red ‘X’.

He was taken to the Back Mountain and executed by firing squad. To mask the scent of blood, they sprinkled sorghum wine on the ground. The smell of the wine drifted far across the Gobi Desert.

On the way to my grandmother’s house, there was a large transformer with a sign hanging on it: “High Voltage Danger, Do Not Climb.” Yet, back then, someone climbed it anyway.

Fights were common in 404. Once, a man beat his opponent unconscious. The police thought the victim was dead and arrested the attacker. In the plant, if you caused a loss of life, death was the only certainty. During the escort, he suddenly broke free; in his desperation, he climbed onto the transformer. His hands touched the current, and both his arms were blasted through. He underwent an amputation. When the man who was “beaten to death” woke up from his faint, the police realized it was a misjudgment.

The government organs were negligent in this matter, so the assault was no longer pursued, and they promised to help him find a wife.

The government arranged to find a woman from the surrounding countryside, saying that if she agreed to the marriage, she would be given an urban household registration (hukou户口， a golden ticket for rural people at the time). The woman agreed. After entering the plant, she opened a small bar that also sold ice cream. She raised several children and bought houses for them.

The arcade hall has been running till now, named “The Big World.”

During junior high, a few of my close friends and I enrolled in the Mathematics Olympiad. Ostensibly, it was for academic purposes, but really, it was just an excuse to hang out. After class, we would go to the Beef Noodle House at the open market, copy each other’s homework, and then buy ice cream from “The Big World” to take to the zoo.

I don’t know where the owner learned the recipe, but the ice cream was always soft and fluffy — a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla swirling together perfectly. It tasted amazing. Every time we ate it, we would slap our thighs in high praise.

Having been away from the factory area for a long time, I am no longer certain about many things and beliefs, but I am still absolutely sure that “The Big World” ice cream is the most delicious ice cream in the world.

Further south “The Big World” was the Nuclear City Zoo.

In the beginning, the zoo was impressive. My eldest uncle was the one responsible for stocking it; he traveled across the country to handpick and transport these animals back to 404. It housed yaks from Qinghai, spotted deer from the Northeast, and exotic birds like peacocks. The largest cage held monkeys brought from Guangxi; they would climb on a hanging cableway, making a loud ruckus. There was even a funhouse with distorted mirrors and amusement machines, though those were closed year-round — it wasn’t ‘cost-effective’ to staff them.

But over time, the zoo began to devolve. The rare birds disappeared one by one. The peacock cage was filled with guinea fowl, then black chickens, and finally, it held only a few domestic hens, identical to the ones in my grandmother’s backyard. The spotted deer was replaced by a lonely sheep. After eating hay for several years, even the sheep vanished without a trace.

When I was a child, there used to be a black bear in the zoo, pacing back and forth in its cage all day long.

Then came the accident involving a little girl named Yanzi (meaning ‘Swallow’). She had gotten too close to the railings. The bear licked her leg through the bars.

A bear’s tongue is covered in backward-facing barbs. That lick tearing off a chunk of flesh and severing her tendons instantly.

Yanzi ended up in a wheelchair, never able to stand again.

I used to see her often on the streets when I was a child. She looked tiny, huddled in her wheelchair, as if time had stopped for her and she never grew up.

The bear was killed.

Why would a bear be killed? Wasn’t it just an animal? I didn’t quite understand it. After hearing my mother talk about it, I conjured a scene in my mind: the bear, with its paws tied behind its back, walking with its head bowed past the zoo, past the club, circling the primary school and my grandmother’s house, before being pushed toward the Back Mountain. The guards plucked the plaque from the back of its neck and shot it dead. Just like that boy who owed money.

By the time I reached junior high, the monkey cage at the zoo was empty. For years, no new monkeys were introduced, so the existing ones bred with their close relatives. One by one, they went insane.

I remember seeing the last old monkey, huddled in the cage, foaming at the mouth，its eyes a blood-red.

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6. The Great Migration

After the zoo was abandoned, the ground beneath the factory area began to collapse due to the air-defense tunnels beneath. First it was the free market, then the nearby athletic field.

Around that time, the higher authorities made a decision: “production and living must be separated,” and so the entire plant began to relocate. The workers and their families voted on whether to move to Jiuquan or Jiayuguan( the western end of the Great Wall ). When the Mining Area TV broadcast this news, I stood by the television and told my parents, “If we move, let’s just move; as long as we don’t go to Jiuquan. Jiuquan is provincial.”

In 2006, eighty military trucks began the move, making three trips every day. Over the course of half a year, we moved into Jiayuguan one after another. American satellites detected this unusual activity and thought some kind of military operation was underway.

That was the first time the secretive 404 appeared on the CCTV Evening News. An older woman said to the camera, “I’ve never lived in such a big house,” and then covered her mouth and laughed. My friends and I said she was an embarrassment; which single-story house in 404 wasn’t over a hundred square meters?

During the first year in Jiayuguan, the property management hadn’t caught up yet; in the entire plant community, that woman from the news was the only one who paid the heating fee. People around her called her a fool, so she went to ask for a refund. She was unsuccessful, and because of this, she didn’t leave her house for several days.

As the 404 relocation finished, housing prices in Jiayuguan doubled within a few months, and many restaurants on the brink of closing were brought back to life.

Compared to 404, Jiayuguan was already considered a bustling big city. A group of kids from the plant let loose their long-repressed temperaments, perming their hair so it stood straight up, cutting school, and frequenting internet cafes and various entertainment venues.

The kid living across from my grandmother’s house joined a gang, following thugs and staying away from school and home for over ten days straight. His parents caught him and locked him in the house with iron chains. Later, he still managed to escape on the pretext of participating in an essay competition.

His mother’s spirits were low, and she moped at home all day. Someone advised her to play some mahjong to clear her head. She went, but people around her would point and whisper, saying she still had the mood to play mahjong when her son had turned out like that.

Arriving in a new place, both the adults and children of 404 felt somewhat at a loss. Most of my close classmates entered Jiuquan Steel No. 3 Middle School; I and another classmate entered the City No. 1 Middle School. At night, the two of us would walk through the campus in our flip-flops. He said, “If we were in 404, we’d definitely be looked down upon for dressing like this.”

“Here, dressing like this can still make us look down on others,” he added.

We were completely unadapted to the new life. Soon, my grades plummeted, and my remaining pride turned into paranoia. Coupled with the feeling of living under someone else’s roof, I nearly fell into depression during my first year of high school.

After graduating high school, I chose to go to a university in another province, and after graduation, I came to work in Beijing.

7. The Bricked-Up Door

In October 2015, my father and I visited 404 again. At the entrance of the plant area, several armed police officers in camouflage stood guard, holding rifles and inspecting everyone’s identification. I hadn’t changed my ID card, so I was still counted as a person of 404.

After entering the plant, we walked from south to north. After a gap of eight years, the zoo had been taken over by vast patches of weeds, and warning signs for collapses stood beside the animal cages. Outside the zoo were several residential buildings; the window glass was covered in dirt, and many panes were broken.

My father and I picked up stones from the roadside and threw them at the windows; the glass was smashed with holes, making dull thuds. My father shouted with excitement. We threw stones for a long time, stopping only when our arms were sore and weak.

The free market had been sealed off. The main street I had walked countless times was painted with white lines, making it look like a highway. The Red Building, the club, and the Pioneer Square had also been repainted; twenty-odd years later, they looked newer than when I first saw them.

I passed the once-grand plant hospital, which had been built under the supervision of Soviet experts. Behind the hospital was a Patriotic Education Base, its gates usually tightly shut. I had gone in once when my primary school organized a patriotic education trip; inside, it introduced the history of the 404 plant’s construction, with many documents and old objects. I didn’t understand why we had to look at those things back then; I only remember that the expressions of the people in the black-and-white photos were like the heroes in old movies. That generation truly gave their entire lives without asking for anything in return, and they were genuinely proud of it.

Later, an old man entered the education base for some reason and saw a photo of himself from the time the plant was built. “This is me! This person is me!” he cried out with tears in his eyes. At seventy years old, it was the first time he had seen that photo of himself.

Unlike him, I seemed to have left no mark on this place. I once climbed the base of Chairman Mao’s statue and ran up and down the arched bridge in the zoo. But standing there now, those memories felt like hallucinations. I began to doubt if I had really done those things.

Passing the hospital and the communication building, I stood under the locust tree where I used to play. I looked up at my old home. The windows were broken. The entrance to my unit had been walled up with solid brick.

My 404 really can’t be found anymore.

Stay tuned if you’re interested!

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Years later, when I saw “404 Not Found” on a computer screen, I was confused. How did the internet know my hometown was a secret?

404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base. In 1958, elite scientists and laborers from across China gathered in the Gobi Desert to build a city from scratch, with a single goal: to build the atomic bomb. I grew up in this small city.

1. The City That Didn’t Exist

In my childhood bedroom, a glossy map of China hung on the wall. I used to believe it showed our factory area, the 404. On that map, I saw Shanxi, where my father was from, and the Northeast, my mother’s home. Our neighbors had roots in Shandong and Shanghai.

At age three, I would trace the map with my small finger, trying to find 404’s Central Park or the Workers’ Club. I couldn’t find them. I assumed the large blue patch was my home, and the green patch belonged to my friend upstairs.

In reality, Factory 404 was not marked on any map.

Years later, when I first used the internet and saw “404: Page Not Found” pop up on a screen, I was genuinely perplexed. How did the computer know that “404” couldn’t be found？

Located west of the Yumen Pass, 404 was a secret society hidden in the Gobi Desert. In 1958, the state mobilized thousands to build this oasis for the radioactive industry. Conditions were brutal. Sandstorms were a daily reality. The early settlers dug holes in the ground and covered them with thatch just to survive the nights. To this day, the name of our railway station remains “Di Wo Pu” — which literally means “Low-Lying Hollow.”

Water was scarce. With only 50 millimeters of annual rainfall, drilling for wells was futile. Initially, water had to be trucked in, costing as much as gasoline. There wasn’t a single tree, only scattered camel grass. When construction workers took their children to the nearest town, Yumen, the kids would point at a real tree and scream, “Look! Giant camel grass!”

Even years later, the sandstorms persisted. Small stones were lifted by the wind and painfully hit our faces. Sometimes the sky turned tangerine color. When the storm finally settled, the ground was blanketed in a layer of dust. Every step kicked up a puff of fine powder.

The first generation of 404 were the country’s brightest elites. We had locksmiths who could replicate a key just by glancing at it, and lathe operators who could diagnose a machine’s fault with their eyes closed. It wasn’t just engineers. There were top-notch chefs and pastry masters drawn from major cities. To this day, the taste of the cream pastries I ate as a child remains a vivid memory — a sweet luxury in the middle of a barren desert.

But the most crucial hands belonged to the machinists. At that time, sophisticated CNC machines didn’t exist, yet the core components of an atomic bomb required a level of precision that bordered on the impossible. The final, most delicate cuts were executed by human hands manually guiding the machine tools, maintaining a margin of error within 1/80th the width of a human hair.

The legendary “finishing touches” were performed by Yuan Gongpu, a master lathe operator recruited from the Shanghai Automobile Chassis Factory. His story was typical of that generation: he had just gotten married in Shanghai in April, only to be whisked away to the desolate Northwest in August.

During the “Three Years of Hardship” (1959–1961), when more than 30 million people across China starved to death, our factory area faced a desperate crisis. At one point, there were only a few days’ worth of rations left in the warehouses, and workers began to suffer from severe edema due to malnutrition.

Deep in the Northwestern hinterland, transportation was notoriously difficult, so the factory decided it had to survive on its own. They established a farm to grow their own grain and vegetables. They channeled melting snow and ice from the Qilian Mountains for water, and organized hunting teams to venture deep into the mountains to bring back meat.

Gradually, the factory area achieved self-sufficiency. As life improved, 404 grew into a fully functioning city. It built its own department stores and cinemas, and even established dedicated factories just to produce vinegar and popsicles. By the time I was born, this small enclave of fewer than 30,000 people even boasted its own zoo.

2.The Radioactive Sofa

The initial slogan proposed during the establishment of 404 was: “Dedicate your youth, dedicate your life, and dedicate your descendants.”

I am that descendant — the third generation. I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

By then, the city’s mission had shifted. With the bomb long finished, 404 had transformed into a massive processing center for nuclear waste. Spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants across the country were transported here, where they were submerged in deep cooling pools for reprocessing.

Despite its remote location in the desert, 404 held a strange political prestige. When the weather forecast aired on provincial TV, the capital, Lanzhou, was mentioned first. The second city was always the “Gansu Mining Area” — the code name for 404.

Our license plates started with “Gan-A,” the same as the provincial capital. We laughed at people from other cities like Jiayuguan (“Gan-B”) or Jiuquan (“Gan-F”). Even as kids, we joked, “We’re still number one.” Because our grandparents were the country’s elite and we lived in the “Nuclear City,” I always felt like I was living at the center of the world.

But there was a darker side to this status. Because of the radioactive materials, our residential area was separated from the factory by an hour-long train ride.

The most dangerous job was “working in the pit.” Shifts there were strictly limited to thirty minutes to minimize radiation exposure. Workers had to shower and change into protective gear immediately after their shifts. As kids, most of us had never seen the factory; our parents simply described it as “dirty.”

Occasionally, we heard whispers about accidents — hair falling out overnight, or leaks caused by local farmers digging up buried chemical drums and protective gear. Once, a soldier entered the residential area after coming into contact with radioactive material. His hands turned a necrotic black, like charred wood. The authorities didn’t just isolate him; they traced his entire trajectory and burned every single item he had touched. A friend of my father lost his entire sofa because of this. Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.

Our life in the residential area was anchored by the Workers’ Club and the department store. The town was small — less than two kilometers from end to end — and bookended by parks: a fishpond in the north and a zoo in the south.

My home was in the north, near the tallest structure in town: the Communication Building. It was a seven-story tower topped with a massive four-sided clock. No matter where you stood in the factory area, you could see the time and hear its chimes ringing across the desert.

Both my parents worked nearby. Just south of my home, past the Communication Building, was the bank. A stone’s throw east of that was my kindergarten.

When I was three and a half, my mother took me to Beijing for her studies. It was my first time leaving the desert. I remember jumping for joy inside the train carriage. When we reached Tiananmen Square, I was overwhelmed. I ran wild, waving a red inflatable toy hammer. I became a spectacle myself — a group of foreign tourists sat on the ground and pulled me over to take photos, unaware they were posing with a child from a secret nuclear city.

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3. Pigs in Kindergarten

After returning from Beijing to 404, I was sent to the kindergarten.

The kindergarten was housed in a small, Western-style villa. While we sat inside the classroom, pigs roamed freely in the yard outside. Through the window, we could watch them rooting through the dirt. It was a perfect cycle: we ate the pigs, and the pigs ate our leftovers.

I couldn’t stomach the fatty meat, so whenever the teacher wasn’t looking, I would squeeze it in my hand and secretly stash it in my pocket. My mother only discovered this habit when she did the laundry. A few days later, when I visited the kindergarten teacher — who happened to be a former colleague of my mother — I hid behind my mom’s leg and confessed that I didn’t like pork. The teacher smiled. The next day, the cafeteria served radish and vermicelli dumplings.

There was a formidable female teacher at the kindergarten. Unrequited love had driven her mad. Yet, strangely, we children weren’t afraid of her. When she struck the ground with a long bamboo pole to demand silence, some kids would simply climb up the pole, giggling. The factory area was a sealed-off world; she wasn’t the only one whose mind cracked under the strain of isolation and failed relationships. Later, her hair turned half-white and she grew heavy. She wandered the streets every day, yet the kindergarten continued to pay her salary.

My home life had its own rhythm: my father was often out playing mahjong at friends’ houses, leaving my mother and me at home. While she was studying for a college exam, I played alone in my bedroom, weaving stories with my toys, emerging every hour just to ask her how the studying was going.

My biggest dream in kindergarten was to be a big brother. I wanted to care for a younger sibling. But under the One-Child Policy, if my mother had another child, she and my dad would lose their jobs. She had to follow the rules and terminate a pregnancy. My wish was impossible.

Whenever I felt unhappy, I would climb up to the second-floor terrace of the kindergarten, lift my shirt, and press my bare belly against the icy stone wall. I would whisper to myself, “Big brother wants to go home.” As the cold seeped into my skin, I would pull my shirt down, letting my body warmth return. This physical sensation — from freezing to warm — somehow soothed my longing to be an older brother. But as a result, my digestion deteriorated, and my once-chubby figure withered into a skinny little bamboo stick.

My best friend lived upstairs. (We would eventually be neighbors for 13 years.)

Back in kindergarten, when she was in the Senior Group (the ‘Big Class’), I was still in the Middle Group. After lunch, I would spot her in the playroom across the hall and shout that I wanted to be in the Senior Group, too.

My mother pulled some strings with a former colleague, allowing me to move up a level early to join her. During nap time, our little beds were right next to each other. We would clutch candy wrappers in our hands, giggling endlessly. The teacher would scold us for disturbing the nap, but we Hid behind our parents, still laughing.

There was another boy in the neighboring unit, and the three of us often played under the acacia tree in front of our building. At four or five years old, I was deeply troubled by a serious question: which of us would eventually marry her?

After all the pigs in the backyard were consumed, I graduated from kindergarten and entered elementary school.

My elementary school was right next to the kindergarten. In front of the gates stood raised square concrete blocks — entrances to the air-raid shelters. In our factory town, these entrances were everywhere: at schools, residential buildings, and hospitals. To survive air raids and nuclear strikes, the underground of 404 was a labyrinth of interconnected tunnels. My parents told me that during the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1969, the Soviet Union had threatened to attack China’s nuclear facilities. Back then, alarms rang frequently, sending teachers and students rushing underground.

By the time I entered school, the shelters had long been abandoned, serving only as a playground. I once tried to use an umbrella to parachute off one of the concrete blocks and ended up spraining my ankle.

It was the season when residents hung Chinese cabbage outside to dry for winter. My classmates invented a game of rock-paper-scissors nearby. The rule was simple: the loser had to grab a cabbage and throw it down into the air-raid shelter. They played all afternoon. By sunset, not a single cabbage was left in front of the building.

School started at 8:30, but I would often arrive at 6:30, all by myself. I went that early precisely because no one else was there; in that solitude, I felt a quiet sense of freedom. Once, I misread the clock and arrived at 5:00 AM, only to find a little girl from the neighboring class already there. We stood at the school gate with nothing to do, so she started telling ghost stories. She told me about a room next to the slide that was locked year-round, where someone had seen a pair of bloody eyes peering out. As she spoke, she clutched her own neck and stared at me with such a sharp, intense look that I almost cried.

This was the golden age of 404—a utopian bubble built on hollow ground. But bubbles, no matter how beautiful, eventually burst.

In Part 2 next week: The darkness creeps in. We’ll talk about the executions in the “Back Mountain,” the animals in the zoo going mad, and the day the entire city began to migrate into the unknown.

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