I used to think a journey was something you could point at on a map. Now I think most of it happens quietly: a signal you learn to hear, a trail you learn to read, a language you learn to think in. None of these chapters announced themselves as important while they were happening. They only became a journey when I looked back and saw the line connecting them.

Skills

Ways of listening, observing, and reaching beyond what is familiar.

Amateur radio. I hold a Chinese amateur radio licence under the call sign BG7OWW. Radio taught me that distance can be crossed with patience: listen for the faint signal, tune carefully, then answer with something clear enough to travel. The practice is simple to describe—listen, tune, answer—and slow to learn. It rewards exactly the kind of attention that everyday life rarely asks for.

Diving. I am a PADI Open Water Diver. Underwater, every movement asks for calm and attention: breath, buoyancy, observation. Diving changed observation from something passive into a way of moving carefully through an unfamiliar world. Beneath the surface, rushing is not just useless; it is impossible.

English. English began as a certification—5.5 out of 6.0—and became something larger. It gave me another way to enter conversations, understand unfamiliar contexts, and keep learning beyond one language. A second language is less a skill than a second set of eyes.

Movement

I understand distance differently when the body has to cross it.

Cycling. I ride a GIANT Talon. On a bicycle, distance becomes something I can feel rather than measure. The trail slows the world just enough for small changes in terrain, weather, and direction to matter—cadence on a climb, the horizon opening after a turn.

Badminton. I play with a YONEX Nanoflare 700. A rally is built from anticipation, timing, and control. What looks fast from outside becomes, from inside, a quiet pattern of decisions: timing the return, choosing the moment, holding the control.

Music

Breath, repetition, and the patience to shape a tone.

Clarinet. The clarinet taught me to shape expression through breath, repetition, and restraint. A phrase only begins to feel alive when technique stops drawing attention to itself. Most of practice is repetition with attention; the tone is what survives it.

Making

The moment an idea stops being private and becomes something others can try.

Hackathons. Hackathons compress the distance between imagining and making. An unfinished idea becomes sketches, decisions, prototypes, and eventually something another person can actually experience. That step—an idea becoming experienceable—is the part of making I care about most.

Education

The place where curiosity gradually became direction.

I grew through both middle school and high school at The Affiliated High School of SCNU. It became a long background to how I learned, questioned, and gradually found my own direction. What I remember is less any single classroom than the continuity: years of learning and questioning that slowly turned curiosity into a direction.

World

Some places stay as coordinates. Others become part of how I see.

Hong Kong is a city I return to with curiosity—familiar enough to recognize, alive enough to keep changing. Singapore was a compact encounter with another rhythm of city, culture, and possibility. Hainan means summer, sea, and time spent learning beyond the classroom. New York, for a while, made a distant city part of ordinary life and changed the scale of what felt familiar. Boston I remember through a quieter rhythm of streets, learning, and daily observation.

Then the usefulness of what is of no use is clear. — Zhuangzi

The things that seem unrelated—or even useless—rarely explain themselves in the moment. A signal, a road, a note, a language, a place: each becomes a dot. Only later, looking back, do the connections appear. You cannot always know which dot will matter until the line finds it.