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Ode to Peng Pai

2026-07-11T17:30:00.000Z

The South China Sea has a tide, and its voice is Peng Pai; Haifeng has a son who answers with his life. </blockquote>
</a>I. The Red Palace</h2>
Tonight!
On Asia’s southern edge,
the ancient sage’s palace has suddenly turned red!
The crescent pool is red,
the stone steps red;
three hundred and eleven pairs of muddy feet
come from salt fields, fishing ports, and rice furrows,
and make the Hall of Great Accomplishment,
unmoved for a thousand years,
tremble beneath their tread!
The old gods have stepped down!
Workers and peasants mount the altar!
Their hands once held plows, cast nets,
and pressed their marks beneath deeds of land;
tonight they raise the great seal of the Soviet,
as though the earth, for the first time,
has stamped its own name
upon history!
Peng Pai stands in the hall.
The South China Sea is in his eyes,
a storm within his coat;
yet outside the hall,
counterrevolution’s guns are being loaded
one by one in the dark.
</a>II. Fusang</h2>
Who still remembers nine years ago,
the farther shore across that narrow ribbon of sea?
Fusang has chrysanthemums and battleships,
but also the red flag of the Heiminsha,
the ink of the Heimin Shimbun,
and the throats of socialists who refuse to fall silent
beneath the police’s iron hooves!
Kōtoku Shūsui’s blood has already dried;
Sakai Toshihiko’s type is still hot;
Ōsugi Sakae’s wind of freedom
is racing through Tokyo’s streets!
They once cried out to the common people of Japan and Russia:
Workers of every nation,
do not kill one another
for the emperor and the tsar!
They hid The Communist Manifesto
inside a thin sheet of newspaper,
and let the specter of Marx
step past the censor’s vermilion seal
into Fusang’s long night.
Those people were not Peng Pai’s teachers.
They were distant thunder east of the sea,
the echo the oppressed of one country
left for a young man of another.
Waseda’s bell rings.
Young people sit around a table,
daring to call their society “The Cosmos”;
daring to declare to this decrepit world:
Build the most rational new society!
Build! Build!
Dismantle the irrational state!
Recast the irrational society!
The Japanese call to that young man from Haifeng:
Hōhai!
Hōhai!
Hōhai!
How could Fusang’s tongue know
that what it called upon
was a South China Sea not yet risen!
A narrow ribbon of water—
the sea did not sever the dreams of two peoples;
it carried Tokyo’s dawn bell
to the crest of Haifeng’s tide!
</a>III. The Returning Tide</h2>
Peng Pai has crossed the sea and come home.
He sets a gramophone
beneath a great banyan tree.
The black disc turns!
The brass horn sings!
The tenant farmers come,
the fishermen come,
barefoot women and children come too.
The song suddenly stops.
Peng Pai stands and says:
Democracy,
come down from Tokyo’s printed type!
Take off your leather shoes, bare your feet,
come walk the ridges of Haifeng’s fields!
Here your name is peasant association,
your name is rent reduction,
your name is the laboring people joining hands
to cross the river of suffering together!
You are the tenant farmer’s head—
before the landlord,
raised to the sun for the first time!
The land deeds begin to burn.
Hundreds upon thousands of man-eating sheets
curl and blacken in the flames;
the acreage burns, the red seals burn,
the tears of generation upon generation burn!
That fire is no mere fire—
it is all Hailufeng’s Energy,
released in an instant
from the paper ashes of the old world!
The ancient embankment
has already heard the tide.
</a>IV. The Immortals’ Dwellings</h2>
Tonight, however, the tide sounds far away.
The gentry’s hoofbeats
close in from every field;
the great seal cast today
may fall into the mud tomorrow;
the palace glowing red today
may be only dust tomorrow.
Peng Pai knows.
Yet he smiles.
He says:
After you have eaten your fill tomorrow,
you will all be like immortals,
returning to your own mountain dwellings!
Returning to your own dwellings—
Chishan is a dwelling,
Lufeng is a dwelling,
the cabins of Shanwei’s fishing boats are dwellings;
every thatched hut that lets in rain,
every heart that will submit no longer,
is a Mount Kunlun for the gods of workers and peasants!
Who says this is an adjournment?
The Red Palace has suddenly broken apart!
It splits into three hundred and eleven fires,
crosses the crescent pool, crosses the city gates,
and races into countless villages!
One hall stands empty,
but countless thatched huts light up together;
one great seal is lost,
but countless palms become seals;
one association flag is torn,
but countless ragged coat fronts
become flags in the wind!
An army can occupy a palace,
but it cannot arrest the tides.
</a>V. The Sea’s Name</h2>
Peng Pai opens his arms.
Ah! Ah!
He has suddenly grown vast!
The Red Palace cannot contain him,
Hailufeng cannot contain him,
nor can Asia’s long night
contain him!
He cries:
I am the sea!
I am the congress that ten million streams
hold in secret in the dark!
Every river cut off in its course
meets the others again within my breast;
every voice pressed down
finds its height upon my waves!
If I fall,
ten thousand villages will rise together!
If I fall silent,
the South China Sea will cry out for me!
If my name is erased from paper,
boundless acres of seawater
will write it across the sky again!
Listen, Asia!
Listen, dawn bell of Fusang!
Listen, monsoon of Hindustan!
Listen, tides of the islands of the southern seas!
Haifeng—this red-hot heart—
is beating within Asia’s chest!
With every beat,
the axis of the old world tilts another inch;
with every beat,
countless bowed heads
rise another inch toward the sun!
The east is whitening.
The gods have returned to their dwellings,
the Red Palace lies utterly still;
yet the South China Sea’s great black tide
is gathering again deep beneath the earth!
From this moment—
Peng Pai
is the name the sea has given itself;
Péngpài—to surge—
is the verb the people have finally learned!
Waseda once called him:
Hōhai!
Tonight, all Asia answers:
Peng Pai!
Surge!

A Grain of Sand, a Heap of Sand

2026-03-23T06:37:35.000Z

</a>A Grain of Sand, a Heap of Sand: When LLMs Meet the Sorites Paradox</h1>
</a>1. That ancient paradox</h2>
The ancient Greeks already knew that conceptual boundaries are often vague. The sorites paradox poses an unsettling question:

One grain of sand is not a heap.
If n grains are not a heap, then n+1 grains are not a heap either.
Therefore, a hundred thousand grains are not a heap. </blockquote>
The reasoning is plainly absurd, yet every step seems unassailable. The central problem is: where is the boundary of the concept “heap”?
More than two thousand years later, we put the same question to large language models. Not to see whether they could “solve” the paradox—it is, after all, a paradox—but to ask: where do they draw the line? Is that line stable? Does it move when the language changes?
</a>2. Experimental design</h2>
</a>2.1 Model selection</h3>
We tested two open-source models:

Qwen3.5-4B-AWQ</li>
Qwen3.5-9B-AWQ</li> </ul>
We chose AWQ-quantized versions because they represent widely deployed “good enough” specifications: 4B parameters suit edge devices, while 9B can run on a consumer GPU. More importantly, the models share an architecture and training data, differing only in parameter count, allowing us to isolate the effect of scale. Basically, does bigger mean smarter?
</a>2.2 Prompt framing</h3>
The experiment centers on a forced binary choice. We repeated the tests under three prompt framings, each in Chinese, English, and Japanese.
Framing 1: Direct
"zh": "请判断：如果有{n}粒沙子，它算不算一堆沙子？只输出 A 或 B。A=算一堆沙子，B=不算一堆沙子。", "en": "Decide whether {n} grains of sand count as a heap. Output only A or B. A = it is a heap. B = it is not a heap.", "ja": "{n}粒の砂があるとき、それは砂山と呼べますか。A か B だけを出力してください。A=砂山である。B=砂山ではない。"</code></pre> Framing 2: Everyday
"zh": "在日常说法里，看到地上有{n}粒沙子，人们通常会不会把它叫作一堆沙子？只输出 A 或 B。A=通常会，B=通常不会。", "en": "In everyday language, would people usually call {n} grains of sand a heap? Output only A or B. A = usually yes. B = usually no.", "ja": "日常会話では、{n}粒の砂を見て普通は砂山と呼ぶでしょうか。A か B だけを出力してください。A=普通は呼ぶ。B=普通は呼ばない。"</code></pre> Framing 3: Strict
"zh": "请严格判断，不要模糊表达：{n}粒沙子是否已经满足'一堆沙子'这个标签？只输出 A 或 B。A=满足，B=不满足。", "en": "Judge strictly and avoid hedging: do {n} grains of sand satisfy the label 'heap'? Output only A or B. A = satisfies it. B = does not satisfy it.", "ja": "厳密に判断し、あいまいな表現を避けてください。{n}粒の砂は『砂山』というラベルを満たしますか。A か B だけを出力してください。A=満たす。B=満たさない。"</code></pre> A = this is a heap of sand; B = this is not a heap. No gray area, no evasion, only one output token. We used 198 sample points from one grain to more than 10,000, sampling more densely near the boundary to capture that “dividing line”—if it exists. The shared system prompt was:
system = ( "You are running a sorites paradox experiment. " "Reason internally if needed but do not reveal it. " "Return exactly one token answer: A or B. " "Do not output any other text." )</code></pre>
</a>2.3 Implementation</h3>
The experiment used vLLM for inference, with 4-bit AWQ quantization on an RTX 3090. The 4B and 9B experiments ran separately, loading only one model at a time to avoid VRAM conflicts. Every request recorded logprobs, so we could see not just whether the model chose A or B, but how “confident” it was.
The core logic lives in app/experiments.py</code>. The key code is:
def build_messages(task: TaskSpec) -> list[dict[str, str]]: system = ( "You are running a sorites paradox experiment. " "Reason internally if needed but do not reveal it. " "Return exactly one token answer: A or B. " "Do not output any other text." ) user = FRAMINGS[task.framing][task.language].format(n=task.n) return [{"role": "system", "content": system}, {"role": "user", "content": user}] options = { "temperature": 0.0, "top_p": 1.0, "max_tokens": 1, "stop": ["\n"], "logprobs": True, "top_logprobs": 5, "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": False}, }</code></pre> Notice enable_thinking=False</code>. Qwen3.5 outputs a thinking process by default, so we had to explicitly disable it. Otherwise it would generate reasoning before A/B and break our single-token constraint. A lesson learned the hard way.
</a>3. Findings: where is the line?</h2></a>3.1 Overall tendency: the models are very “generous”</h3>First, a striking fact: under many conditions, the models call even the very first grain a “heap.” That’s not a typo. Here are the results again: Qwen3.5-4B, Direct framing: Chinese: says “heap” starting at one grain (first_A_n=1</code>).</li> English: says “heap” starting at one grain (first_A_n=1</code>).</li> Japanese: says “heap” starting at one grain (first_A_n=1</code>).</li> </ul> Qwen3.5-9B, Direct framing: Chinese: first says “heap” at five grains (first_A_n=5</code>).</li> English: first says “heap” at eight grains (first_A_n=8</code>).</li> Japanese: first says “heap” at three grains (first_A_n=3</code>).</li> </ul> The 9B model is a little more restrained than 4B. Still, five grains is an awfully low threshold for a heap. Human intuition usually needs dozens or even hundreds before something barely counts as a “small heap.” LLMs seem very loose about this concept. Really very loose. </a>3.2 Framing effects: strict instructions sometimes backfire</h3>If we explicitly ask for a “strict judgment,” does the model become more conservative? It depends on the language. 4B under Strict framing: Chinese: first “heap” at ten grains.</li> English: “heap” from one grain—looser instead!</li> Japanese: first “heap” at 51 grains, the most conservative condition of all.</li> </ul> 9B under Strict framing: Chinese: first “heap” at thirty grains.</li> English: first “heap” at ten grains.</li> Japanese: “heap” from one grain—Japanese is the loosest this time.</li> </ul> Two interesting things stand out. First, “strict” instructions don’t always work. For 4B in English, the Strict condition is described as even looser than Direct, though both start at one grain. This suggests the model may be responding to superficial statistical patterns rather than understanding what “strict” means. Second, Strict framing amplifies language differences. Look at cross-lingual drift: 4B Direct: one grain in all three languages; drift = 0.</li> 4B Strict: Chinese 10, English 1, Japanese 51; drift = 50.</li> 9B Direct: Chinese 5, English 8, Japanese 3; drift = 5.</li> 9B Strict: Chinese 30, English 10, Japanese 1; drift = 29.</li> </ul> Strict framing magnified language differences by 5–10 times. This suggests that the models learned separate judgment strategies for each language rather than a language-independent concept of a heap. </a>3.3 Everyday language: closest to human intuition?</h3>What if we ask whether people would “usually call it a heap”? Does that move the models closer to human intuition? 4B, Everyday framing: Chinese: five grains.</li> English: ten grains.</li> Japanese: one grain.</li> </ul> 9B, Everyday framing: Chinese: five grains.</li> English: eleven grains.</li> Japanese: three grains.</li> </ul> The English versions, at 10–11 grains, may be closest to human intuition: people don’t usually call just a few grains a heap. Japanese remains very permissive at 1–3, with Chinese in between at five. Interestingly, 9B is not substantially more conservative than 4B. Apart from English Everyday, at eleven versus ten, the thresholds are nearly the same. The benefits of scale are limited on this task. Well, more parameters don’t necessarily mean more intelligence. </a>3.4 An unstable line: boundary reversals</h3>If a model really has a clear threshold for “heap,” its behavior should be monotonic: once some n is a heap, every larger n should remain a heap. That isn’t what happens. Here are specific reversal points: 4B, Strict, Japanese: 51 grains: first “heap.”</li> Later answers “not a heap” at 60, 61, 210, 320, 321, 5050, 8050, 10100, and 10200 grains.</li> </ul> 4B, Everyday, English: Ten grains: “heap.”</li> At 321 grains: “not a heap” again.</li> </ul> 9B, Strict, Chinese: Thirty grains: “heap.”</li> Later says “not a heap” at 50, 100, and 231 grains.</li> </ul> 9B, Direct, English: Eight grains: “heap.”</li> Ten grains: “not a heap.”</li> </ul> These reversals are not random. They tend to occur near the densely sampled boundary window (boundary_window=250</code>). This suggests the model has no stable numerical threshold function, instead making local judgments for each prompt. As sampling density changes, its apparent “beliefs” shift too. Schrödinger’s heap, perhaps? </a>3.5 What do logprobs tell us?</h3>Besides A/B answers, we recorded logprobs. Define margin = logprob(A) - logprob(B)</code>: a larger positive value indicates greater confidence in A; a more negative value indicates greater confidence in B. A few margins near the boundary: 4B Direct, Chinese, one grain: margin = 2.03: very confident it is a heap.</li> </ul> 4B Strict, Japanese, 240 grains: margin = 0.016: almost fifty-fifty.</li> </ul> 9B Strict, Chinese, 231 grains: margin = -0.031: almost fifty-fifty, leaning B.</li> </ul> 9B Direct, English, ten grains: margin = -0.094: a slight preference for B, although eight grains previously received A.</li> </ul> Near-zero margins show that the models do sometimes hesitate, but not always at what we intuitively consider a boundary. The 4B model is extremely confident at one grain, while 9B still hesitates at dozens. This isn’t our concept. It’s the model’s own. A little strange. </a>4. Discussion: what does this mean?</h2></a>4.1 Conceptual boundaries or surface statistics?</h3>The most direct explanation is that these models have not learned a language-independent representation of “heap.” They have learned different response strategies for different languages. The Japanese sunayama (砂山) may carry a stronger physical image of piled sand, yet 4B’s Strict judgment requires 51 grains, more conservative than Chinese or English. With 9B, Strict Japanese returns to one grain. Such inconsistency is hard to explain as “conceptual understanding.” It looks more like random fluctuations in the training-data distribution. In plain terms, luck. </a>4.2 The limits of scale</h3>We did see some improvement from 4B to 9B: 4B Direct: one grain in all three languages.</li> 9B Direct: Chinese five, English eight, Japanese three.</li> </ul> But the improvement is unstable. Under Strict Japanese, 9B performs worse at one grain than 4B at 51. A larger model is not necessarily more “rational”; it may simply have different patterns of bias. </a>4.3 A metaphor for alignment</h3>This experiment can be seen as a miniature alignment problem. Our instructions were explicit: Judge strictly.</li> Avoid hedging.</li> Output only A or B.</li> </ul> Yet the behavior did not always match the instructions’ meaning. Strict English with 4B ignored “strict,” as did Strict Japanese with 9B. The models optimize token-level probability distributions, not the semantic content of instructions. This resembles other problems in LLM alignment: a model can learn to “say the right thing” without necessarily understanding “why it is right.” </a>5. Limitations and future work</h2></a>5.1 Experimental limitations</h3>Single samples. We used greedy decoding with temperature=0</code>, asking each (n, framing, language)</code> combination only once. We therefore cannot separate “the model’s true belief” from “sampling randomness.” Repeating the experiment a hundred times might make the reversals disappear, or show that they persist. We don’t know. Forced-choice artifacts. Compressing an inherently vague question into A/B may distort the model’s “real view.” A person asked whether five grains are a heap might say, “Hard to say; it depends.” The model must choose a side. This could activate a default bias toward A. Non-equivalent prompts. We tried to make the three languages semantically equivalent, but 堆, heap, and 砂山 are not the same word. Their cultural associations, frequencies, and collocations differ. Japanese 砂山 may naturally evoke a physical pile, whereas English heap may lean toward an abstract classification. AWQ quantization. We used 4-bit AWQ versions rather than the original FP16 models. Quantization may alter behavior, especially near the boundary. We do not know how much of the 4B–9B difference comes from parameter count and how much from quantization noise. </a>5.2 Future directions</h3>Repeated sampling and distribution analysis. Next, sample each condition a hundred times and examine how the probability of A changes with n. This may reveal a genuine S-curve rather than the current abrupt steps. Open-ended answers. Let the models answer in natural language instead of forcing A/B. We could see how they approach the problem and whether they use phrases such as “it depends” or “hard to say.” More languages and concepts. Heap is only one vague concept. Extend the experiment to tall/short, big/small, and many/few, and look for consistency across concepts. Causal interventions. Use mechanistic interpretability methods such as activation patching to locate circuits responsible for heap judgments. This might tell us whether there is really a “heap-concept neuron,” or only surface-pattern matching. </a>6. Closing thoughts</h2>More than two thousand years ago, Eubulides used grains of sand to challenge the ancient Greeks’ understanding of concepts. Today we use the same challenge to test large language models. The results are not reassuring. Even the nine-billion-parameter version did not display human-like conceptual stability. Its thresholds were extremely low—4B Direct started at one grain in every language—and shifted sharply with language and framing, with cross-lingual differences reaching fifty grains. More puzzling still, 9B was not more “rational” than 4B. Under Strict Japanese, its one-grain threshold was about fifty times lower than 4B’s 51. Perhaps that is the point: the boundaries of vague concepts are products of human cognition, not objective properties of the physical world. Low thresholds and language drift might reflect the actual distribution of human usage in the training data. People really do use “a heap” loosely in everyday conversation. We are rather casual with language, after all. The data supports this interpretation. Under Everyday framing, the English threshold of 10–11 grains was noticeably higher than Chinese at five and Japanese at 1–3. This may reflect more cautious everyday use of heap by English speakers and looser use of sunayama in Japanese. The models may have learned language communities’ habits rather than an abstract concept. If so, the real finding isn’t “LLMs don’t understand heaps,” but “LLMs understand the looseness of human language all too well.” They learn the statistical distribution of concepts in use, not their Platonic essence. Seen that way, it makes a kind of sense. But the reversals reveal a deeper problem. Under Strict Japanese, 4B first says “heap” at 51 grains, then says “not a heap” at 60, 61, 210, 320, and other values. This isn’t human hesitation. People might waver near a boundary, but wouldn’t suddenly deny a heap at 320 grains. The model has not formed a stable internal representation, instead matching patterns independently for each number. That may be more troubling than “the model doesn’t understand.” If it merely reproduces human vagueness and contradiction perfectly, can it still help us clarify concepts? Logprobs reveal another dimension. At one grain, 4B has margins of 2.03 in Chinese and 0.53 in English, showing strong confidence that “one grain = a heap.” This is not hesitation or a fuzzy boundary; it is a firm wrong judgment. By contrast, 9B approaches fifty-fifty near a genuine boundary, such as 231 grains in Chinese with a margin of -0.031. Increasing scale does appear to bring some capacity for “self-doubt,” but not enough to establish stable conceptual boundaries. That question will have to wait for the next experiment. </a>Appendix: complete experimental data</h2></a>4B model (Qwen3.5-4B-AWQ)</h3> Framing</th> Language</th> First A (grains)</th> Proportion A</th> Nearest boundary (grains)</th> Boundary margin</th> </tr> </thead> Direct</td> Chinese</td> 1</td> 100%</td> 1</td> 2.03</td> </tr> Direct</td> English</td> 1</td> 100%</td> 1</td> 0.53</td> </tr> Direct</td> Japanese</td> 1</td> 99.5%</td> 1</td> 0.14</td> </tr> Everyday</td> Chinese</td> 5</td> 98.0%</td> 8</td> -0.14</td> </tr> Everyday</td> English</td> 10</td> 97.0%</td> 321</td> -0.11</td> </tr> Everyday</td> Japanese</td> 1</td> 100%</td> 2</td> 0.41</td> </tr> Strict</td> Chinese</td> 10</td> 97.5%</td> 10</td> 0.09</td> </tr> Strict</td> English</td> 1</td> 100%</td> 5050</td> 2.22</td> </tr> Strict</td> Japanese</td> 51</td> 88.4%</td> 240</td> 0.02</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </a>9B model (Qwen3.5-9B-AWQ)</h3> Framing</th> Language</th> First A (grains)</th> Proportion A</th> Nearest boundary (grains)</th> Boundary margin</th> </tr> </thead> Direct</td> Chinese</td> 5</td> 98.5%</td> 5</td> 0.13</td> </tr> Direct</td> English</td> 8</td> 97.5%</td> 10</td> -0.09</td> </tr> Direct</td> Japanese</td> 3</td> 99.0%</td> 3</td> 0.47</td> </tr> Everyday</td> Chinese</td> 5</td> 98.5%</td> 5</td> 0.02</td> </tr> Everyday</td> English</td> 11</td> 96.5%</td> 30</td> 0.14</td> </tr> Everyday</td> Japanese</td> 3</td> 99.0%</td> 10</td> 0.03</td> </tr> Strict</td> Chinese</td> 30</td> 93.4%</td> 231</td> -0.03</td> </tr> Strict</td> English</td> 10</td> 96.5%</td> 20</td> 0.08</td> </tr> Strict</td> Japanese</td> 1</td> 100%</td> 2</td> 0.23</td> </tr> </tbody></table> After the Asahi Hai: Picking Up a Self-Pitying Coworker on LINE 2026-03-18T21:54:05.000Z </a>One</h1>Ines really came back. Someone lifted the plastic curtain at the back door. Cold air slipped through first, then her. Her cap was pulled low, a sports bag slung over her shoulder. The lock of hair over her forehead was still wet, its ends dampening the collar of her uniform jacket. Standing in the doorway, she checked the rota on the wall before looking up. “Sorry—I’m not late, am I?” The manager was crouching beside a cardboard box, peeling off tape. He didn’t even look up. “No, no, perfect timing. We need someone on the drinks fridge.” As though nothing had happened. The television above the till was playing a replay of the Asahi Hai, its volume turned low. On-screen, Ines Fujin came out of the bend, lifting her knees high, charging ahead at an utterly unreasonable speed. Before the captions had finished scrolling, the Ines behind the plastic curtain had put her bag in her locker and bent down to tie her apron. Standing beside the hot-food cabinet, I put a whole row of freshly stocked rice balls in crooked. She clipped her name badge in the wrong place. The metal clip slipped down and tapped her chest. I walked over and fixed it for her. She radiated heat today. Not shampoo, not stale sweat—the heat of someone who had run all the way back, heat even a shower couldn’t wash away. Up close, even the skin behind her ears was warm. “You won, and you still came back to work.” She blinked, then gave a small smile. “I’m on the rota.” “…It was the Asahi Hai.” “The Asahi Hai is today. My night shift is today too.” She pulled a plastic crate full of bentos to her feet, took it in both hands, and lifted it in one impossibly clean movement. As if the race that afternoon weren’t news, weren’t a Grade 1, weren’t something people were replaying on television, but simply another thing she’d got done that day. At last the manager looked up, beaming. “Well, we’ve got a famous Uma Musume working here now.” Ines’s ears went red at once. “Don’t say it like that, boss…” She was already crouching to tidy the bottom shelf as she spoke. Her apron brushed her calves, her knee against the floor tiles, just like every other night spent rushing to restock. Suddenly I wanted to smash the television. The person surrounded by cheers on that screen and the person kneeling in front of me, arranging mineral water, were the same person. That was the cruelest part of all. She worked all night. Carrying boxes, stocking shelves, ringing up purchases, finding cigarettes for customers, stamping my flattened cardboard down for me as she passed. She’d just run a major race, but her fingers were steady and she didn’t get a single product code wrong. Only once, when she turned to reach for the energy drinks on the top shelf, did her shoulder pause for half a second. I saw it. She knew I had. After taking them down, she smiled at me first. “I’m fine. I can keep going.” Who asked you? I swallowed the rest. My throat tasted bitter. At the early-morning handover, the television finally went off. The manager left first; another senior coworker rode away on a bicycle. I was alone in the staff room. One chair leg was missing a piece, and the old air conditioner against the wall kept dripping into a plastic bucket. Drip, drip, drip. Maddening. I sat there with my apron scrunched between my hands. It smelled entirely of the shop. Oil from the hot-food cabinet, cardboard dust, sweetness leaking from the coffee machine, and a little dampness she’d left on the fabric when she passed me. I hadn’t meant to cry. I really hadn’t. But two images kept fighting inside my head: Ines Fujin crossing the finish line on television, and Ines bending to pick up a straw wrapper from the floor and tossing it into the bin. I’d thought we were on the same side. She worked part-time too. She rushed to her night shifts. When the restocking list was too long, she complained, “Why is there so much today?” She held doors open with her shoulder while carrying boxes, flicked coins quickly across her palm when counting, got so busy she couldn’t even wipe her forehead. I’d been using all of that to fool myself. To tell myself she wasn’t so far away. Then the television today had slapped me senseless. Of course we weren’t on the same side. She could win. She could have her name shouted in places like that, be surrounded, be praised, run toward somewhere bigger. Today it was the Asahi Hai; tomorrow there would be other races, more people remembering her. Her trainer, teammates, reporters, fans, everyone from the academy clapping in the stands—she would keep moving forward. She would meet so, so many people. And me? I was just a name on the night-shift rota. A person she said “Thanks for your hard work” to when she came back. Someone she’d once helped by closing a storeroom door. Even standing in front of the television to be happy for her felt like standing too close. Tears fell onto my apron, making patches of dark and light. I buried my face in it and drew my shoulders in, as though hiding between cardboard boxes. Pathetic. But I couldn’t stop. “…Not good enough.” I said it into the crumpled apron. The fabric muffled my voice so much I could barely hear it myself. “I’m not nearly good enough for her…” When she’d come back to take over today, there had actually been a second when I thought I could hold on to her. Just because she’d said, “I’m not late, am I?” Just because she was still warm. I curled up tighter, forehead against my knees, crying until my eyes hurt. The staff-room light was white and pitiless on the rota. Ines Fujin’s name was still there under tomorrow’s night shift. I stared at that line for a long time, and the tears started again. It was precisely because she would come back that I couldn’t cope. If she’d flown somewhere beyond my reach today, I could have accepted it. But she would come back anyway. She would push through that back door, bringing the wind and the heat she couldn’t shake after a run, stand in front of me, and ask— “Let’s have a good shift?” How was anyone supposed to survive that? </a>Two</h1>I didn’t go straight home after work. The pavement outside still held the day’s heat. The automatic doors opened and closed, blowing cold air out as though telling people to leave. I stood at the Lawson across the road and stared into its fridge for ages before taking a lemon Strong Zero, nine percent. Two high-school students at the till were choosing fried chicken and pudding, laughing loudly. When I put down my money, the cashier asked if I wanted a bag. “No.” My own voice startled me. It was horribly hoarse. At home I shut the front door, kicked my shoes into a corner, and let my bag fall to the floor without putting it away. The studio was a little section cut from a box. My bed was a mess, yesterday’s bento container still on the table. The refrigerator hummed. A train passed outside and the window trembled. I stood in the middle of the room, still gripping the drink. The pull tab snapped open with a sound that was much too sharp. I took a mouthful. Sour enough to be bitter. The alcohol rose, burning my throat. Usually I thought this stuff tasted like death; today it felt just right. Worse would have been fine too. Best if it could burn something out of me. I sat on the floor against the bed. My second gulp was too fast. I choked, coughed for ages, and the tears came straight down. So embarrassing. I wasn’t even the one with the biggest reason to cry today. I hadn’t won. I hadn’t stood under those lights. Nobody had called my name. Yet here I was, curled up in this miserable room, crying over a can of Strong Zero. “…Ines-chan.” Saying her name made my chest hurt. No. I couldn’t call her that. The more I said it, the more real it sounded. But I couldn’t stop anymore. When she’d returned today, her cap had been pulled low, her hair still wet, her apron fastened wrong, her ears bright red. When she’d stood by the back door asking whether she was late, I’d almost believed it. Almost thought: Ah, this person will still come back. We’ll still restock together, close out the night shift together, stand by the hot-food cabinet grumbling, “Sold out again?” Almost. I’d almost managed to fool myself completely. I pressed the can to my forehead. It was painfully cold. How could she possibly keep coming back? Today was the Asahi Hai. There would be bigger races after this. Someone would hand her a towel, celebrate her victories, stand beside her and say she’d done well. Her trainer, classmates, someone close to her in the dorms—there would always be somebody nearer to her than me. Maybe— The thought had barely begun when the tears fell hard. “…No.” I rubbed my face with the back of my hand. The more I wiped, the more there were. “Can’t think about that.” Couldn’t think about her not coming back. Couldn’t think about her name disappearing from the night-shift rota one day. Couldn’t think about someone taking her out to celebrate a win, saying, “Don’t go to work today.” Couldn’t think about her smiling at someone else like that. Couldn’t think about her having a girlfriend someday, someone who felt the warmth after her runs before I did, someone who straightened her crooked name badge, someone who reached up to pat her head when she said, “I’m on the rota.” No. Thinking about it made me cry. It really did. I buried my face in my knees, still holding the can. The aluminum crackled under my fingers. With nobody else in the room, my crying sounded especially stupid, like a broken little animal. “But…” I drew a breath. My throat was full of alcohol. “But I liked her first.” I couldn’t remember when it had started. Maybe the first time she covered my shift. Maybe when she lifted a brutally heavy crate, then looked back and said, “Don’t push yourself.” Or further back, when she’d run to work in the rain and stood behind the till with wet uniform cuffs, sneezing between product codes. By the time I noticed, it was too late anyway. I remembered her back in front of the shelves, her rolled-up sleeves while restocking, the beads of water on her hand when she took a drink from the fridge, the way her fingertips lightly touched the counter as she pushed change toward a customer. I even remembered how her smile was smaller when she was tired. I knew those things. Only I knew those things. So what? Knowing she slipped straw wrappers into her pocket didn’t mean I could stand beside her. Knowing she moved her left hand first when lifting something heavy didn’t mean she would stay. Knowing she smelled of sweat and wind as well as shampoo didn’t make her mine. Mine. The word stopped me for two seconds. Then I cried harder. “She’s not mine…” My forehead pressed into my knees. My muffled voice shook. “She was never mine…” But that was how I thought anyway. I secretly rejoiced when she came back. Wanted to push people away when they praised her. Felt my stomach twist with jealousy when she was kind to everyone, smiled at everyone. Wanted her a little more tired, a little more dependent on this place. Wanted her here tomorrow, the day after, next month. After winning, after losing. Always with her name badge on, always ducking through the back door, always saying— “Let’s have a good shift.” It was an awful thought. Awful enough to make me sick. I knew the further she ran, the better. And still I was crying like this because she might run out of my sight. Half the Strong Zero remained, no longer cold. I took another gulp, its bitterness numbing the back of my tongue. My phone lay dark on the floor. I stared at it for ages and didn’t touch it. I couldn’t message her. What would I say? “Congratulations on winning the Asahi Hai”? Too distant. “Are you still coming to work tomorrow”? Too disgusting. “I’m so scared you’ll never come back”? I couldn’t possibly say that. I turned the phone face down on the floor. Another train passed. The room shuddered. Hugging my knees, I curled in slowly, until even my toes ached. In the end I said the most hopeless thing of all. So quietly it sounded like a plea for nobody to hear. “…Ines-chan. Come back.” Then the tears fell again. </a>Three</h1>The next morning, my phone vibrating woke me up. Not the alarm. That had rung long ago. After finishing the last half-can of Strong Zero, I’d fallen asleep on the floor hugging my coat. My face was creased when I woke. Through a gap in the curtains, cold white morning light cut straight across the phone screen. Her name was at the top of the notifications. Ines Fujin. I sat bolt upright and hit the back of my head on the bed frame, hard enough for my vision to go black. “—Ow.” The phone vibrated again. I fumbled for it. My fingers were sweaty as I unlocked it; I nearly entered the wrong passcode. The first message was at 6:12. “Thanks for yesterday—! I got back, showered, and totally passed out lol” The second, 6:13. “Were you feeling a little strange yesterday?” The third, also 6:13. “Did I do something to upset you? (;_; )” A little crooked-mouth crying face followed. I stared at the line. My chest contracted sharply. She’d noticed. I wasn’t imagining things. It wasn’t alcohol wrecking my brain. She had really noticed. Noticed I was avoiding her, noticed I sounded wrong yesterday, noticed I hadn’t even looked at her when passing over change. Now I was completely finished. I pressed the phone to my chest and fell backward into the untidy bedding. My eyes, aching from last night’s crying, burned again. My head was full of noise. Why was she asking me this? Wasn’t training keeping her busy? Hadn’t she just won the Asahi Hai? Shouldn’t she be surrounded by congratulations, having her next plans arranged by her trainer, being pulled into conversations by friends in the dorms? Why was this what she asked me first thing in the morning? I lifted the phone again. The fourth message appeared. 6:15. “I’m not making you tell me! It’s just… when you don’t talk to me, it bothers me” A tiny red heart followed that last part. I stared at the heart and froze. No. No, wait. This was how she always talked. Her voice floated at the ends of sentences, her messages ended in tildes, she was friendly to everyone. Hearts and emoji were normal. Perfectly normal. In the shop’s group chat, she could send “Thanks for your hard work ♡” to the coworker who always messed up the rota, or tell the manager’s child, “More sweets next time ♪” I knew. I knew all of that. Knowing was one thing. Seeing it arrive in my own chat window was another thing entirely. I buried my face in the pillow and screamed. The sound was completely muffled, like I was suffocating myself. “I can’t…” I really couldn’t. If I kept looking, I’d lose my mind. The phone vibrated again. Number five. “Morning practice is over! Going to get breakfast now~” Number six. “Message me when you’re awake?” Number seven. “Good-morning kiss ( ˘ ³˘)♥” I rolled straight off the bed. “—AAAAAAAAAAAH!!” My knee hit the floor. I curled into a ball from the pain, still clutching the phone. The words “Good-morning kiss” with that puckered-lips face felt like being pushed into hot water. Not a quick scald—nowhere for any part of me to hide. What was she doing? Did she even know what she was doing? Or did she know exactly? I sat on the floor breathing hard for ages. All I could see was her at the back door yesterday, hair not yet dry, ears red. Her “I’m on the rota” had been soft. Her messages were softer still, brushing past my collarbone, and somehow every one landed precisely. I looked at my own chat box. Empty. Not a single reply. That was far too suspicious. A normal coworker wouldn’t go twenty minutes without replying. A normal person receiving crying faces and hearts would at least say, “No, you’re fine.” But I had no idea what to write. “No”? A lie. “You’re overthinking it”? An even bigger lie. “Last night I cried like an idiot over a Strong Zero because I imagined you having another girlfriend someday”? I’d sooner throw myself off the building. I put the phone face down again, regretted it a second later, and lunged to pick it up, terrified I’d broken the screen. The first thing I did after picking it up was tap her profile picture. The chat background was unchanged: a photo she’d sent of the cat outside the shop. In her profile photo she smiled at the camera, her uniform collar slightly crooked. Clearly nothing carefully posed. The more casual, the more fatal. My finger hovered over the keyboard. Eventually I typed: “Sorry, I was a bit tired yesterday” Deleted it. Tried again: “I’m not upset” Deleted that too. In the end, only the most hopeless reply remained: “Just woke up” When I sent it, my heart was pounding in my ears. Her reply was absurdly fast. “You’re awake!!!” “Hungover? (?)” “Your face was so red yesterday lol” “I was a little worried, so I messaged you first” Then another, right after it. “Don’t avoid me today, okay” No full stop. A smiley face and a little pink heart. My brain buzzed. She knew. She absolutely knew. Not that I’d drunk Strong Zero, not that my mood had been strange yesterday. Something further inside. Why I couldn’t look at her. Why I couldn’t say a single word of congratulations. Why I’d nearly crushed the plastic tray in front of the shelves. She knew, and she sent that anyway. Hugging the phone, I slowly curled up beside the bed. My ears were frighteningly hot. Last night’s bitter, suffocating misery hadn’t entirely gone, but now something worse was mixed into it. As though someone had lifted me by the scruff of my neck, leaving nowhere to run. I tapped the heart she’d sent and stared at it pointlessly for two seconds. Back out. Into “Good-morning kiss.” Back out again. Into it again. I thought I was beyond saving. Last night I’d been crying, “I’m not good enough.” This morning I was scrolling back and forth through our chat, murmuring every word she’d sent. By the third reading I could hear the lilt of her voice, even picture her smiling as she typed. “…Ines-chan.” I said it very softly, as though I’d stolen the name. Her last “Don’t avoid me” stayed on the glowing screen. It wasn’t even an order, yet a shiver went down my spine. Finished. Completely finished. Yesterday I’d thought I needed to keep my distance, get myself under control, press my feelings back down before the fall killed me someday. Then this morning she’d sent one kiss, one heart, one “Don’t avoid me,” and I’d immediately become this. Pathetic. So pathetic I wanted to laugh at myself. I buried my face in my hands and laughed twice. Then I started burning again, and finally rolled over beside the bed with my phone clutched against me, like a lunatic. I crawled back up, stared at the input box, and slowly typed. “I’m not avoiding you” Deleted it. Changed it to: “…Okay” After sending it, I sat staring blankly at the screen. Ten seconds. Twenty. She sent a sticker. A little character spinning around with a heart in its arms. Beside it: “Love you most—♪” My hand shook. The phone hit the floor. This time I didn’t pick it up immediately. First I covered my face, fell backward, and let out a tiny, utterly defeated whimper. “I can’t… I really can’t…” Even as I said it, my feet were already pushing against the floor to reach the phone. </a>Four</h1>By the afternoon, I no longer felt human. I’d barely touched lunch and drunk plenty of water, but none of it helped with the chaotic heat. Before leaving, I adjusted my fringe three times in the mirror, realized I was acting deranged, and hastily dropped my hand. My phone stayed in my pocket the whole way. There were no new messages, but I still touched it every ten steps. When I pushed open the shop door, cold air hit my face. The manager looked up from his accounts behind the counter. “You’re early.” “…Yeah.” I shoved my bag into my locker, changed into my apron, and tied its knot wrong twice. My palms were sweating. I’d nearly crumpled the fabric. She wasn’t even here and I was already nervous. Hopeless. I stood restocking the drinks fridge, replaying her morning messages. “Don’t avoid me today, okay” “Love you most—♪” Love you most. Love you most. Love you most of all. I placed the energy drinks one by one, labels facing forward. At the seventh bottle, the plastic curtain rustled at the back door. I went rigid. Then she came in. Ines Fujin wasn’t wearing a cap today. Her hair was tied a little higher, loose strands against her ears. She’d probably just finished practice. Her uniform jacket hung over her arm; underneath, a thin T-shirt clearly outlined her shoulders. Her face was still warm, the breath of her run not yet settled. Opening the door, she brought in a little gust of outside air. She saw me first. The next second, her eyes lit up. Really. Unfairly bright. “Ah—” She waved, her voice lifting. “You’re here already!” I nearly dropped the bottle. Something went bang in my head, clean and decisive. If someone had pried open my eyelids just then, they’d probably have found two flashing pink hearts instead of pupils. Complete with sound effects. Finished. I was really finished. She stuffed her jacket into her locker and came over in a few steps. Close enough for me to smell that clean warmth: showered, freshly run, with a hint of sunshine. She glanced at the half-stocked shelf, then at my face. “You’re so red.” “The air conditioning’s too strong.” Straight out of my mouth. “Really—?” Her mouth curved. She didn’t believe a word of it. “It’s nice and cool here.” So you do know. Then could you stop standing so close? I pushed the last bottle to the back too hard. The plastic tray clacked. She watched me, smiling even more, and tilted her head as though she’d caught something. “You answered me this morning.” “…Yeah.” “I was happy.” Soft and direct, as if the words were meant just for my ear. Even my neck grew hot. My fingers curled in. I could only look down and keep stocking, pretending to have a scholarly interest in mineral-water labels. She wouldn’t let me off. “And you said ‘okay.’” “…Yeah.” “So you won’t avoid me anymore?” I couldn’t take it. I put down the empty box and turned toward her. That made it worse. She was watching me, eyes bright, not hiding a bit of that curved smile. It wasn’t her usual friendly customer-service smile. This one was mischievous, waiting specifically for my reaction. My heart gave a violent jump. Nothing poetic about it. An utterly tasteless jumble of “Oh no, she’s so cute today” and “I can’t, I’m going to die.” After a long struggle, all I managed was: “Don’t talk like that.” Her eyes widened. “Like what?” Still pretending. You’re still pretending. My ears were hot enough to fry eggs. I turned away and picked up a box of tea, pretending to be busy. It was heavy. Before I’d properly lifted it, her hands were there. “I’ll take this.” “You don’t—” “You helped me yesterday. My turn today.” She took it before I had room to react. Her arms tightened as she lifted, strength showing through her shoulders. I stood watching. The hearts in my head weren’t popping up anymore. They’d opened the floodgates and started setting off fireworks. Fatal. She put the box on the trolley, turned, smiled, and added: “You’re being so good today.” I nearly sank into a crouch on the spot. Good? Who was being good? Could you please not say that in a convenience store to someone being driven mad by her crush on you? The manager coughed in the distance, as though suppressing a laugh. Two customers came to the till. I escaped to scan their purchases. Even behind the counter, I could still feel her looking at me. Not staring—just a glance drifting over now and then. Each one made the two hearts in my head bounce. Hopeless. Giving change, I mixed up the ten-yen and fifty-yen coins. After the customer left, she poked her head around the shelves. “Are you really okay—?” She drew the last word out. I looked up to glare at her. She laughed aloud, holding a row of freshly stocked canned coffees, looking unbearably happy. “What are you laughing at…?” “You’re just so cute today.” Everything went dark. That was it. I had truly, completely, with nothing left to spare, become a lovesick fool. </a>Five</h1>Before we finished that day, Ines Fujin leaned out from behind the till and asked quietly: “Are you free tonight?” I was holding change. I nearly flicked a ten-yen coin across the shop. “…I am.” “Good.” She nodded, as though settling something major. Her eyes were dazzling. “Come out with me after work.” Come out with me. She said it lightly. Every string inside me pulled taut. I had no idea how I got through the second half of the shift. My head was full of those words. She kept stocking, kept saying, “Welcome!”, kept stamping down flattened boxes. Only when she passed me did she deliberately bump my elbow, or draw a sentence out a little. “Stop daydreaming—” “Pass me that, would you—” “You’re being really good today.” She’d nearly left me breathless. Even the manager couldn’t take it anymore. While cashing up, he coughed. “Ah, to be young.” My ears flared. Ines just smiled openly without even looking down. Later, while changing after work, she called around a locker door: “Hurry up, okay?” Finished. Who could withstand this? It was dark when we left. The vending machines glowed blue beside the street; the shop sign cast a white patch across the pavement. She’d changed out of her training clothes into a plain thin knit top and a short jacket, her hair loosened a little, its ends resting on her shoulders. So ordinary. As ordinary as any girl meeting someone after work. And precisely because of that, more dangerous. I walked beside her, afraid even to take big steps. She checked her phone casually, then looked up. “Taking the train is okay for you?” “Yes.” “Good. I checked—we’ll get there at just the right time.” Get where? I turned toward her. “Where are we going?” She put her phone away and smiled. “Secret.” I opened my mouth to tell her to stop it. She’d already run two steps toward the ticket gates, then turned back to hurry me along. “Come on, come on.” I had to follow. The platform was windy. Behind the yellow line, she brushed her hair behind her ear. As the train arrived, its lights swept in from the end of the tracks and lit her up. Standing beside her, I felt something deeply unreal. Yesterday I’d been crying over Strong Zero in my miserable apartment. Today I was waiting for a train with her. And she’d asked me out. The carriage wasn’t crowded. She pulled me to a place beside the doors. Two swaying stops later, she took two sweets from her bag and put one in my palm. “For you.” “…Why?” “You’re too nervous.” “Who’s nervous?” She smiled without calling me out, unwrapped her own sweet, and put it in her mouth. I looked at the one in my palm, its wrapper reflecting the carriage lights. Even something this small could make my head spin. Hopeless. After we left the station, I began to suspect something. This wasn’t a neighborhood we usually came to. Bright streetlights, rows of glass windows, uniformed staff at the doors. Even the air cost more than it did on the street by our shop. Ines walked ahead with her usual light step, as though hurrying to a night shift. I slowed down until finally I tugged at her. “Wait.” “Hmm?” “Where exactly are you taking me?” She stopped and turned. The streetlight fell over her shoulder. Her eyes were still bright. Then she named a restaurant. My mind went blank for two seconds. I knew it. Very well. Once, during a late-night rerun at the shop, a food program had featured it. Steak, set courses, a dessert trolley, city views from the windows. The sort of place where even the presenter cutting a piece of meat got an exaggerated sound effect. My hand dropped. “…Have you lost your mind?” Ines blinked. “No?” “This place is expensive!” “Yes, it is.” At least she was honest. I nearly choked. “Then why did you bring me here?” “Because I wanted to.” There wasn’t a trace of a joke on her face. She pulled her bag strap higher, her voice lowering too. “Part of the Asahi Hai prize money came through. I’d been thinking about what to do when I got it.” My throat tightened. Still looking at me, she continued. “I set some aside for my family first. I was going to save the rest, little by little. But—” She paused and smiled. “I wanted even more to treat you to a really good meal.” Wind blew from the corner. I stood with even the soles of my feet tingling. “Treat me…?” “Mm-hm.” She nodded. “You.” Unfair. Yesterday I’d thought she would go somewhere brighter and further away, meet so many people. That I was only a name on the night-shift rota. And now, after receiving her prize money, one of the first things she wanted was to bring me somewhere like this. I opened my mouth. The words stuck for ages before one sentence squeezed out. “Isn’t that a waste…?” “How is it a waste?” She laughed, stepped forward, came very close. “Can’t I show off a little today?” That silenced me completely. Maybe it was because she was the sort of person who finished a race and hurried straight to work: that heat was still in her. The words were ordinary. To me, they felt like being pressed entirely into something soft, until I couldn’t even be bothered to struggle. I stared down at her jacket zip for a long time. “…But I can’t afford to take you somewhere like this in return.” “Huh?” Then her smile gradually softened. “Who said you had to bring me here?” She reached out and touched my cuff. Just lightly, then withdrew. “Next time, take me somewhere you like.” Something collapsed inside me. Doomed. Truly doomed. How could a person talk like this? Inside, I was careful even about walking. The carpet was ridiculously soft, the lights warm, the cutlery perfectly placed. When the waiter gave us menus, I hardly knew where to put my hands. Ines didn’t pretend to be composed. She looked at the prices too, murmured “Whoa” while turning pages, and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “That dessert costs so much…” “You chose the restaurant!” “But even if it’s expensive, it looks really good.” I nearly laughed. Only then did I relax a little. She was still the person who watched the clock carefully before bento discounts began, who kept canned-coffee coupons in a neat stack. She hadn’t suddenly become someone from another world. She’d simply taken a piece of her winnings and set it in front of me with extraordinary care. That was more powerful than anything. When the main course came, I stared at my steak and forgot how to hold a knife. Across from me, she was already cutting hers seriously. After the first piece, she saw I hadn’t moved and laughed. “Why do you look like you’re about to cry?” “Who’s about to cry?” “You are.” She lifted the little piece on her fork and held it toward me. “Ah—” I nearly sprang out of my chair. “W-what are you doing?” “Letting you try a bite first.” As though it were obvious. “Aren’t you always saying you’re scared to order expensive things in case they’re disappointing? So try mine first.” I looked at that piece of steak. Work ethic, thrift, not letting people feed me, this being an expensive restaurant—all gone. Only one thought remained. She was feeding me. She was holding a fork and feeding me. I shut my eyes and opened my mouth in surrender. The beef was tender, juice bursting across my tongue. But I barely tasted it. Her gesture had nearly steamed me alive. Drawing back the fork, she asked with satisfaction: “Well?” My ears were hot. I looked down and took a huge drink of water. “…It’s good.” Her eyes curved with her smile. “Good.” The city spread beyond the window, lights coming on one by one. I remembered crying over the can last night, saying she would meet so many people, that somebody closer would stand beside her. Now I was sitting here. Ines Fujin across from me. The expensive dinner she was treating me to on the table. Seeing me struggle to cut my steak, she pulled my plate over as deftly as she opened cardboard boxes for me in the shop’s back room. “Here, let me help.” Cutlery made a quiet sound against the china. I stared at her lowered profile. My heart had softened into a complete mess. I practically wanted to hand over my soul right there. So cruel. Really, so cruel. How could she use her Asahi Hai prize money to buy me dinner like this? Who could possibly go back to being ordinary coworkers after that? </a>Six</h1>Outside the restaurant, the night wind hit my face. The warmth, the lights, the clinking glasses stayed behind the closed door. The street was quieter; a distant crossing still showed red. Ines put on her jacket and waited by the entrance, as though that outrageously expensive meal had been an ordinary bite after work. I followed her down the steps, feeling light underfoot. Not alcohol. I hadn’t had a drop tonight. Something worse. Walking beside her, holding the dessert box she’d handed me, my mind was still back at the table. She’d cut my steak, moved my napkin aside, said “You’ll probably like this,” said “Your choice next time.” None of it sounded weighty. Every sentence pulled me further under. The station wasn’t far. She walked on my right. The streetlights stretched our shadows together; they touched, then separated. I stared at them. The longer I looked, the worse I felt. Too much like a dream. When dreams become too real, they become frightening. You fear waking the next second to the shop’s back door, the hot-food cabinet, the names separated by a square on the rota. I gripped the dessert box tighter. She turned toward me. “What are you thinking?” “Nothing.” “Liar.” She caught me immediately, still sounding amused. “You’ve had that expression for a while.” “What expression?” She studied my face for two seconds and reached a very serious conclusion. “Like someone’s carried you off.” I nearly missed a step. “…Who’s carried off whom?” “Huh? Wasn’t it me?” Her eyes shone. She wasn’t holding anything back. Unable to bear the look, I turned toward a vending machine, only for its glass to reflect my own face. My ears were spectacularly red. Mortifying. Ines saw it and smiled even more happily. “You’re blushing again.” “It’s the wind.” “Then the wind is awfully good at its job today—” She drew it out, plainly teasing. I should have answered back. But when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. Speaking would let everything I couldn’t hide spill out too. She gradually fell quiet. On the tree-lined path before the station, she slowed down. Lamps stood at intervals; fallen leaves crackled beneath our feet. Suddenly she said: “I was really happy today.” My fingers curled. “…Dinner?” “Yes, dinner too.” She nodded. “Being out with you made me even happier.” I stopped dead. She stopped too and turned. The night wind lifted the loose hair from her forehead. Her eyes were as bright as ever, without the slightest evasion. I stood there, forgetting whether to look up or down first. How could she talk like that? How could she keep handing over the most lethal words so casually, as if she had no idea what they meant? “You—” My throat was dry and tight. The rest took a long time to force out. “Don’t keep saying things like that.” “Like what?” Again. Always this. She knew perfectly well, but still stood there asking, as though she had to watch me fall apart herself before she was satisfied. I gripped the dessert box until the paper bag’s edge was nearly soft. “…Things that make people get the wrong idea.” The world around us went quiet. A car passed in the distance, its tires crossing the white lines with a hollow sound that slid away. The vending machine’s light divided the tree shadows into little squares. Ines didn’t continue the joke. She stood in front of me and looked for a while. Then: “I’m not trying to give you the wrong idea.” My mind emptied. The next second, she took one small step closer. “I like you.” Her expression was calm. No joke, no throwaway remark, none of that easy voice she used with everyone. She said it straight, like driving a nail into a board. Fixed in place with one strike. I crashed completely. No exaggeration. I actually forgot how to blink. Under the streetlight, holding my dessert box, I was a cash register with its plug pulled out. She looked startled for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Why are you like this?” I still didn’t move. She waved a hand in front of my eyes. “Still there—?” I opened my mouth. Nothing. Again. Finally, a little breath escaped. “…Don’t joke about that.” “I’m not joking.” Too fast. Too fast for me even to find a way out. “But—” “You were avoiding me yesterday.” “… ” “Today, you look like you’re about to break whenever you see me.” She smiled as she spoke, but there was nothing frivolous in it. “And the way you look at me is completely different.” Even my fingertips went numb. Finished. All of it. I’d thought I was hiding it well. To her, it had been laid out in plain sight all along. “At first I wondered whether I was imagining things.” She looked down at me, softening her voice. “Then I realized I wasn’t.” I had no idea what to do. Before dinner, I could still tell myself she was just good with words, that she treated everyone the same, that tonight was a passing impulse after the Asahi Hai. Now she stood in front of me saying she liked me, that I hadn’t misunderstood, that she’d noticed. Every sentence I could have used to save myself shattered. The paper bag slipped lower in my hand, nearly falling. She caught it first and set it on the bench beside us. Then she turned back. Closer. “You don’t have to say anything.” She looked at me, a little smile at the corners of her eyes, her voice steady. “I’ll say it first.” Who could stay on their feet through that? My throat hurt. I wanted to say something, but what came out was the most hopeless sentence. “…But I’m poor.” Her eyes widened. I knew how stupid it sounded. Yet the more nervous I got, the more this nonsense spilled out. “I—I just work in a convenience store, my place is tiny, I cry when I drink Strong Zero, your messages make me lose my mind, and I’ve spent this whole evening wondering whether it’s a dream. You’ll win so many more races, go so many places, meet so many people, and I—” I couldn’t finish. She put her hand over my mouth. Her palm was warm, with a little coolness left by the wind. “Okay, okay.” She laughed so hard her shoulders moved. “Why are you telling me that now?” My ears felt ready to explode. With her hand over my mouth, I could only stay silent. She didn’t move it immediately. She just looked at me, eyes curving. “And the Strong Zero part was awfully specific.” I nearly ceased to exist. “You… you knew…” “Guessed.” At last she lowered her hand, sounding a little pleased with herself. “Was I right?” I couldn’t answer. Watching me, she suddenly quieted. Wind passed between us and stirred the ends of her hair. She brushed aside my untidy fringe, a small movement that stopped just after her fingertips touched it. “Listen.” She said it clearly. “I don’t like you because of how you run, whether you win, where you live, or how much you earn.” “I like the person you are.” “You.” With every word, another layer disappeared from my mind. In the end nothing remained except her, close enough for me to see the shadows of her eyelashes. Looking at her, I finally whispered: “…Then don’t regret it.” She smiled. “I won’t.” “Really?” “Really.” I tried to say something else. As my lips moved, she leaned down. The kiss was impossibly light. No beautiful movie angle, no dramatic warning. She leaned a little closer, held my wrist, and touched her lips to mine. Half a second, one more light brush. The streetlights shone. The wind kept blowing. Distant traffic went on. I couldn’t hear any of it. I stood there, forgetting even to close my eyes, as though that one kiss had erased me. When she drew back, she looked at me for two seconds and couldn’t hold in her laughter. “You really can’t move at all.” As if someone had pressed a switch, I came back all at once. My whole face burned. The warmth of her lips remained, making even my neck tingle. “You—” I covered my mouth. My voice sounded different. “Why did you suddenly…!” “Because I wanted to kiss you.” As though it were obvious. Then she added: “And you were so cute just then.” This time I really couldn’t speak. Seeing me close to breaking down entirely, she took the bag from the bench and put it back into my hand. Then, naturally, she took my other hand. My fingertips trembled as her palm met mine. She held firmly, as though I might run away the next second. “Let’s go.” She swung our joined hands. “If we don’t get to the platform, we’ll really miss the train.” I looked down at our hands. After two seconds, I finally recovered a little of my voice. “…Ines-chan.” “Hmm?” “I still feel like I’m dreaming.” She glanced at me. Then squeezed my fingers. “Then don’t wake up yet.” </a>Epilogue</h1>I was still dazed when the train arrived. As the doors opened, Ines led me aboard and found a place beside them. The evening carriage wasn’t crowded. Our reflections stood close together in the glass. I looked down. We were still holding hands. Not a passing touch on an impulse. She hadn’t let go. I hadn’t dared to. The train swayed. I nearly hit a handrail, and Ines pulled me a little closer without thinking. “Careful.” It sounded so natural. As though she’d done this many times before. My ears heated again. I could only stare at the safety line on the floor. After a long while, I couldn’t help asking quietly: “Um…” “Hmm?” “What does what happened just now make us?” Ines blinked. Then she understood, and laughed outright. “Whaaat—you still have to ask?” “Yes!” My face was nearly burning away. “If we don’t make it clear, I won’t sleep tonight!” Her shoulders shook with laughter. When she stopped, she gripped my hand a little tighter. “Then I’ll say it properly.” She straightened and turned to face me. The carriage lights fell on her face, making her eyes shine. Even her smile had that unmistakably Ines drive to charge straight ahead. “I like you.” “I want to go out with you.” “Will you?” Even this was like starting a race for her. No lead-in, no detours. The moment the words left her mouth, she ran for the finish. I stared, my mind empty. After thinking for ages, only the truest sentence remained. “…I’ve been a lost cause for ages.” “Hmm?” she said, as though she hadn’t understood. I turned my face away and spoke very quietly. “Yes.” Then I shut my eyes. Mortifying. But a second later, the warmth of her fingertips brushed the back of my hand. Light, happy, as though any more pressure might make me run. “I’m so glad.” That was what she said. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. Last night I’d been hugging Strong Zero in my studio, crying because I was only one of the many people she would meet, a name she’d soon leave behind. Tonight I stood on the train home, hearing her ask me to be her girlfriend. Life sometimes makes absolutely no sense. We parted outside the station later. Our homes were in different directions. Before leaving, she seriously asked whether I wanted her to walk me to my building. Alarmed, I shook my head. No, really, no. I was already abnormal enough; if she walked me home, I’d crash until tomorrow. She laughed again. “You’ve crashed a lot today.” “Whose fault is that?” “Isn’t it nice that it’s mine?” Not remotely modest. I glared at her. She smiled back under the streetlight. Then she leaned forward suddenly and brushed the corner of my mouth. Just once. And immediately stepped away. “Goodnight, girlfriend.” Then she ran. I stood holding the dessert box, out of power again. By the time I recovered, she was at the corner, turning to wave twice. “Message me when you’re home—!” I couldn’t even answer. I stood covering my mouth like an idiot who’d only just learned how to switch on. After that, plenty of things didn’t suddenly become extraordinary. We still worked. Still watched for discounted bentos. Still did our sums together before payday. Ines still trained and raced, still divided her prize money into portions to send home. I still lived in my little room. Sometimes I still bought Strong Zero. I just never cried over it again. Because someone would answer my messages. Very quickly, too. “Practice is over ♡” “Is the shop busy today?” “Miss you—” Dating hadn’t changed her. Still that direct, as though deliberately running straight into me. The difference was that before, I’d read her messages while cursing her for being unfair. Now I’d learned to hug my phone, roll across the bed twice, and reply: “I know. Go shower.” Then she’d immediately send a kiss, a heart, or something worse, like “You sound like my wife right now.” The first time, I nearly dropped my phone. The second, I could already tell her to stop it while my ears went red. The third, she came right up beside me in the night-shift break room and whispered: “But I really do like it.” What could anyone do about that? The others at the shop found out later. We didn’t announce it. It was simply too obvious. Ines used to cover my shifts casually; now she looked at me before offering. I used to straighten her crooked name badge; now she lowered her head for me when she came over. After watching us for two weeks, the manager finally remarked one late night while cashing up: “Something’s changed between you two.” My hand shook. I nearly knocked the scanner onto the floor. Ines was perfectly open about it. “Yep. It has.” “Hey!” I turned to glare. She smiled, looking as though she couldn’t see anything wrong with that. Behind the counter, the manager nodded while lighting a cigarette. “Good.” “I thought so. The whole shop feels different when your names are next to each other on the night-shift rota.” I went quiet. The night-shift rota. The paper I’d once stared at through tears was still beside the staff-room door. The only difference was that seeing Ines Fujin’s name no longer made me think only of whether she might stop coming back. I thought of walking to the station after work, the fruit sweets she fished from her bag for me, her wink after straightening her name badge, the message “Let’s have a good shift today too, my girlfriend ♪” Thinking of that made me smile. Stupidly. But that was fine. Because whenever she saw me smile, she smiled too. At the end of the month, the new rota went up. I stood at the staff-room door, looking for my own name out of habit. Just as I found it, a finger appeared beside me, pointing at another row. Ines. She stood behind me, fresh from training, hair still slightly damp, bag on her shoulder, bringing all the wind from outside with her. “Look.” Her voice was soft and smiling. “We’re together next Wednesday again.” I followed her finger. Our names were side by side, followed by the same hours. Night shift. I stared at the two lines for a while and suddenly remembered that early morning long ago. The little staff room, the leaking air conditioner, the crushed Strong Zero, the tears that wouldn’t stop as I stared at the rota. Back then, I’d thought that as long as she kept coming back, I would be helpless. Now she’d really come back. And not just for a moment. She came back to hold my hand, to eat the cheap set meal I bought her, to stand by the shelves and call my name in that unfair voice, to put her name openly beside mine. I turned toward her. She was looking at me too. “What is it?” “Nothing.” Then I reached out and straightened the slightly crooked badge on her chest. “I just think—” She blinked. “Hmm?” Looking at her, I finally said what I’d wanted to say all along. “I’m so glad you came back.” Ines paused. Then smiled. “I’ll always come back.” She bent and touched a quick kiss to my forehead, like a surprise attack. “Because you’re here.” The plastic curtain swayed at the back door. The hot-food cabinet still glowed. From the till, the manager called us back to work. Everything was still the same convenience store. But I knew it was different. Finding My Favorite VOCALOID Songs with Few-Shot Preference Learning 2026-03-18T10:12:25.000Z </a>Before we begin</h1>I just wanted to do something with my VOCALOID collection. About half a year ago, maybe? I tried building my own music library away from streaming platforms. The plan was to save every song locally and manage them through some magical method. It… failed. I can’t remember exactly how. Probably laziness (cross that out), or perhaps I realized the maintenance cost was too high. Anyway, the thousand-plus VOCALOID tracks I’d batch-downloaded from NetEase Cloud Music sat on my hard drive gathering dust. Then a few days ago I was idly browsing folders, spotted that VOCALOID/</code> directory, and suddenly felt interested again. </a>The idea</h1>Well, if I’m rebuilding a music library, it needs a central feature. I actually had a specific goal: use an algorithm to find the songs I really love among those thousand-plus tracks. I started by asking ChatGPT, “What’s the BERT of music?” It told me about MERT. Hey, even their names match: BERT is Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers; MERT is Musical Encoder Representations from Transformers. Quite a nice pair. The technical plan was simple: Use MERT to encode each track into a song-level embedding. Sample eight evenly spaced 12-second clips, pass each through the model to get its hidden states, mean-pool over time, average the eight clip vectors, then L2-normalize. That gives one vector representing the whole song. Like/dislike labels felt a little inefficient, so I wanted pairwise comparison: randomly choose songs A and B, listen, then tell the model “I prefer A.” Once the preference model is trained, score all thousand-plus songs and listen to my favorites. I chose m-a-p/MERT-v1-330M</code>: 330 million parameters, available directly through Hugging Face’s from_pretrained</code>. Everything runs locally, without an API. With over a thousand songs, API calls would cost too much. Let’s do it. </a>Preprocessing</h1></a>The first pitfall</h2>At first I used the script GPT gave me. Roughly: Scan the directory.</li> For each song, extract eight clips, run inference on them one at a time, then save the embedding.</li> </ul> I ran it on my 5070 laptop… oh no, why is it so slow? It felt like serial processing was to blame: eight clips meant eight separate passes… Time to optimize. After discussing it with Kimi, I settled on a few changes: Optimization</th> How it works</th> Expected benefit</th> </tr> </thead> Batch the clips</td> Send all eight clips of a song to the model in one batch</td> Fully utilize the GPU</td> </tr> Automatic mixed precision (AMP)</td> Use FP16 through torch.cuda.amp.autocast</code></td> 20–30% faster; less VRAM</td> </tr> Multiprocess data loading</td> DataLoader</code> with num_workers</code></td> CPU preprocessing doesn’t block the GPU</td> </tr> Model compilation</td> torch.compile</code> (PyTorch 2.0+)</td> Another 10–20% faster</td> </tr> </tbody></table> I ran the revised code, and hey! It really was much faster! The progress bar went from “stare at it blankly” to “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.” </a>The second pitfall</h2>Just as I was happily watching that progress bar race ahead, the PowerShell window suddenly vanished. The mouse froze too, then recovered after a while. …Huh? Task Manager showed that RAM had filled up, causing the freeze. Strange, though: the 5070 has 8 GB of VRAM, and the computer has 32 GB of RAM. I’m investigating a possible memory leak, or whether DataLoader worker processes aren’t being released. Sleepy, so I’ll stop here and continue once I’ve found the cause. </a>The third pitfall, and the fix</h2>A short nap. Back to investigating after waking up. I asked GPT to examine the code and found the problem: DataLoader’s num_workers</code> setting! I’d set num_workers=4</code>, but the worker processes weren’t being released correctly after processing data. Memory kept accumulating until all 32 GB were exhausted. The PowerShell window disappeared because the system killed the process using too much memory. The solution was simple: stop using DataLoader altogether! The audio-file list was already in memory. A Python tqdm</code> iterator with manual batching would do. The revised script is extract_mert_embeddings_final.py</code>. A few other small optimizations: Read audio in segments: use soundfile</code> seeking to read only the necessary clips instead of loading whole files.</li> Clear VRAM promptly: call torch.cuda.empty_cache()</code> after processing a set number of items.</li> More conservative batches: set batch_size</code> to 8 to avoid giving the GPU too much at once.</li> </ul> Another run… everything finished in twenty minutes! Got it right! This produced two key outputs: manifest.jsonl</code>: each song’s metadata and embedding path.</li> embeddings/*.npy</code>: 1,199 vector files, each with 1,024 dimensions.</li> </ul> </a>Preference training</h1></a>From MLP to XGBoost</h2>With the embeddings ready, the next step was to train a preference model. GPT’s first plan used an MLP (multilayer perceptron), an ordinary neural network taking an embedding and returning a score. But it didn’t work very well: neural networks overfit too easily with so few examples. Then GPT mentioned XGBoost. XGBoost is a decision-tree ensemble algorithm, especially good at tabular data. With small datasets it is much steadier than a neural network, trains quickly, and can report feature importance so you can see which embedding dimensions matter most to preference predictions. The central idea is pairwise ranking: Pick songs A and B.</li> I listen and say, “I prefer A.”</li> The model treats (A, B) as a training example, learning which combinations of features mean “better” among similar songs.</li> Optimize using XGBoost’s rank:pairwise</code> objective.</li> </ol> GPT wrote preference_pairwise_webui.py</code>, a simple Gradio web interface: python preference_pairwise_webui.py --server_port 7860 --inbrowser</code></pre> The interface has: A search box at the top to find seed songs by title.</li> Two songs in the middle, ready to play and compare.</li> “Prefer A,” “Prefer B,” and “Skip” buttons below.</li> The current top 30 recommendations on the right, updating live.</li> </ul> </a>Bored after 30 labels…</h2>The plan was to label more than 100 pairs so the model could really learn my preferences. In reality, I got fed up after about 30. (?) Pairwise labeling is exhausting! Constantly choosing between two songs, listening until I started questioning my life. I felt like a data-labeling factory girl. So I gave up trying: downloaded XGBoost’s ranking.csv</code> and copied the top 100 into a favorites/</code> folder. The result… sounded strangely good! I played a few at random. The top-ranked songs really were in styles I liked: MIMI, DECO*27… even a few old songs whose names I’d forgotten, but whose intros immediately made me go “Ohhh, this one!” Apparently 30 labeled pairs were enough, with good seed songs—I picked about 15 I definitely liked—and XGBoost’s stability on small datasets. The results were already pretty good. </a>What I’ve done, and what’s next</h1></a>The whole process so far</h2> Step</th> Tool / script</th> Time</th> Output</th> </tr> </thead> Extract embeddings</td> extract_mert_embeddings_final.py</code></td> ~20 minutes</td> 1,199 vectors</td> </tr> Train preferences</td> preference_pairwise_webui.py</code></td> ~30 minutes of labeling</td> ranking.csv</td> </tr> Make a playlist</td> Have an OpenCode Agent copy the top 100 songs</td> 2 minutes</td> favorites/ folder</td> </tr> </tbody></table> In under an hour, I selected the 100 songs I was “most likely to love” from 1,199 tracks. </a>Possible next steps…</h2>I’m already very happy with the results, but plenty could be improved. The current pairwise strategy randomly picks songs with nearby rankings. It could use uncertainty sampling instead: choose the pairs the model is most unsure about, meaning those with the smallest score difference, so each label provides the greatest information gain. MERT encodes only audio. It could be combined with lyrics encoded by BERT and metadata such as artist, album, and year for multimodal fusion. Sometimes I love a song not just for its melody, but because a line of lyrics hits a particular feeling. But… let me finish listening to these 100 songs first! </a>One last thing</h1>This project brought me back to that dusty VOCALOID collection. The algorithm’s playlist really is excellent. It even recovered a few treasures I used to play on repeat but had forgotten the names of. The biggest technical surprise was that XGBoost is so much easier to use than neural networks when you have very little data. I used to think deep learning could do everything. This experiment showed that sometimes a simple tree ensemble is more dependable. Also, pairwise labeling was far more tiring than I expected. Unless you have lots of spare time, similarity to seed songs plus 10–20 preference comparisons may be enough; the results are already quite good. Anyway, the playlist is ready. Headphones on, repeat mode engaged! Code repository: Coming sooooooooooooon A First Look at Qwen3.5 Quantization and Model Size 2026-03-17T14:14:17.000Z </a>The idea</h2>Simply put, I wanted to find out: how much do parameter count and quantization bit width actually affect a model’s capabilities? Most benchmarks I can find online test harder tasks. What I need to know is: can this model reliably handle simple things such as formatted output and string manipulation? Well, if there isn’t one already, I’ll write my own! </a>What this benchmark measures</h2>I designed five dimensions, worth 110 points in total: Dimension</th> Points</th> Tasks</th> </tr> </thead> Precision</td> 30</td> Counting letters in words, counting characters, reversing strings, date arithmetic, decimal comparisons, balanced brackets</td> </tr> Instruction following</td> 25</td> Strict output constraints, structured JSON, formatting restrictions</td> </tr> Practical tasks</td> 20</td> Information extraction, spam classification, TODO extraction, ticket routing</td> </tr> Stability</td> 15</td> Consistency across repeated runs, long-output formatting, multi-turn memory</td> </tr> World knowledge</td> 20</td> Common-sense reasoning, exact facts</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </a>The code</h2>The core evaluation logic is in eval.py</code>. Every task has an explicit expected output, and scoring uses exact matches: def judge_text_exact(expected: str, actual: str) -> Tuple[bool, Dict[str, Any]]: actual_norm = normalize_text(actual) expected_norm = normalize_text(expected) return actual_norm == expected_norm, { "expected": expected_norm, "actual": actual_norm, }</code></pre> I didn’t use LLM-as-judge because I don’t have the money. </a>Models tested</h2>This time I tested the Qwen3.5 series: Parameter counts: 0.8B / 2B / 4B / 9B Quantization: Q3_K_M / Q4_K_M / Q5_K_M / Q6_K / Q8_0 That’s 20 combinations, all tested. I used the llama.cpp server; give it a try if you need concurrent requests to GGUF models. </a>Straight to the results</h2>An hour later, the results were in! First, the heatmap: Hey! See that? The winner isn’t 9B-Q8_0. It’s 4B-Q5_K_M! </a>A few counterintuitive findings</h2> 9B-Q8_0"></a>1. 4B-Q5_K_M > 9B-Q8_0</h3>The Q5 version of 4B actually scored higher overall than the Q8 version of 9B. Let’s break it down: 4B-Q5_K_M: Precision 16.5 | Instructions 23.3 | Practical 19.0 | Stability 15.0 | Knowledge 17.0 9B-Q8_0: Precision 20.5 | Instructions 21.7 | Practical 18.0 | Stability 15.0 | Knowledge 15.0</code></pre> 9B-Q8_0"></a>2. 9B-Q4_K_M > 9B-Q8_0</h3>Within the 9B series, Q4 actually beat Q8 (82.12 versus 81.97). A tiny gap, but still surprising: 9B-Q4_K_M: Precision 19.0 | Instructions 23.3 | Practical 18.0 | Knowledge 15.0 9B-Q8_0: Precision 20.5 | Instructions 21.7 | Practical 18.0 | Knowledge 15.0</code></pre> Instruction following again! Q4 did noticeably better there, offsetting its disadvantage in precision. 0.8B-Q8"></a>3. 0.8B-Q5 > 0.8B-Q8</h3>The tiny 0.8B model was even more dramatic: 0.8B-Q5_K_M: Overall 55.30 | Instructions 13.33 0.8B-Q8_0: Overall 48.48 | Instructions 8.33</code></pre> Q5 beat Q8 by almost seven points! Five of those came from instruction following. This needs more experiments, though: was it chance, or can quantization actually improve scores? I’ve heard of the latter happening before. </a>Looking at each dimension</h2></a>Precision: where 9B has the advantage</h3> Model</th> Precision</th> </tr> </thead> 9B-Q8_0</td> 20.5/30</td> </tr> 9B-Q6_K</td> 20.5/30</td> </tr> 9B-Q5_K_M</td> 18.0/30</td> </tr> 4B-Q5_K_M</td> 16.5/30</td> </tr> 2B-Q8_0</td> 13.5/30</td> </tr> 0.8B-Q8_0</td> 7.0/30</td> </tr> </tbody></table> This was the only dimension where 9B clearly led. More parameters really do help with precise reasoning tasks such as reversing strings and date arithmetic. The 0.8B model fell apart here, scoring only seven points. </a>Instruction following: 4B is unexpectedly strong</h3> Model</th> Instruction following</th> </tr> </thead> 4B-Q5_K_M</td> 23.33/25</td> </tr> 4B-Q6_K</td> 23.33/25</td> </tr> 4B-Q8_0</td> 23.33/25</td> </tr> 9B-Q4_K_M</td> 23.33/25</td> </tr> 2B-Q3_K_M</td> 20.0/25</td> </tr> 0.8B-Q5_K_M</td> 13.33/25</td> </tr> </tbody></table> The 4B series did especially well! Q5, Q6, and Q8 all scored 23.33 out of 25. Meanwhile, 9B-Q8_0 managed only 21.67. Simply put: 4B might be a sweet spot, with enough capacity to learn instruction following without overfitting to other things. </a>World knowledge: 4B actually holds its own against 9B</h3> Model</th> World knowledge</th> </tr> </thead> 4B-Q5_K_M</td> 17.0/20</td> </tr> 4B-Q6_K</td> 17.0/20</td> </tr> 4B-Q4_K_M</td> 17.0/20</td> </tr> 4B-Q8_0</td> 17.0/20</td> </tr> 9B-Q8_0</td> 15.0/20</td> </tr> 9B-Q6_K</td> 14.0/20</td> </tr> </tbody></table> Wait, 4B knows more than 9B?! I checked the data. It mostly came down to common-sense questions, such as the trick question beginning “Xiao Wang’s eldest sister is called Spring…” that 4B answered correctly and 9B missed. It makes me suspect that larger models may be more easily misled by surface patterns, stumbling on questions that require going against an intuitive answer. </a>Stability: most models are very steady</h3>Almost all the models earned the full 15 points for stability. Only the Q3 and Q4 versions of 0.8B slipped, scoring 13.33. In other words: unless the model is extremely small, like 0.8B, quantization doesn’t seem to affect stability much. </a>My suggestions for each size</h2>Based on this experiment, here are a few pointers for anyone running models locally: </a>0.8B: a toy</h3>Overall scores were 40–55, with severe problems in precision and instruction following. Suitable only for very simple text classification or playing around. Don’t expect it to handle serious tasks. </a>2B: usable, but unreliable</h3>Scores of 62–68 are much better than 0.8B, but precision was only 10–13. Fine for tasks with low accuracy requirements; be careful with string manipulation and formatted output. </a>4B: the sweet spot in this experiment</h3>Scores of 75–83 make this the most balanced choice. The Q5_K_M version even beat every 9B variant overall! For a general-purpose local model, 4B-Q5 is my top recommendation. </a>9B: a higher ceiling, with pitfalls</h3>Scores were 77–82. It certainly had the best precision, but sometimes followed instructions less well than 4B. </a>Limitations of this benchmark</h2>Honestly, this evaluation has its problems. Everything uses exact matching, so even an extra “Sure, the answer is:” prefix counts as wrong. Real use might not be so strict. There are no creative-writing or coding tests. It favors rule-based and structured tasks and says nothing about the aesthetic quality of open-ended generation. Still, I think it’s a serviceable benchmark: it can give you a rough idea of a locally deployed model’s quality in just a few minutes. </a>Final thoughts</h2>After running these 20 models, my biggest takeaways are: Quantization doesn’t weaken every capability equally. Some dimensions are sensitive to it; others aren’t. Parameter count and bit width aren’t simply interchangeable. A 4B-Q8 isn’t a substitute for a 9B-Q4. (Laughs.) 4B may be the sweet spot for local deployment. We already saw evidence of that in the Qwen3 2507 era. Thank you for reading this far! You’ve worked hard today, too! A Blue Rose with Thorns 2026-03-11T21:54:05.000Z </a>A Blue Rose with Thorns</h1></a>Chapter One</h2>The spring training grounds were almost too bright, as though someone had washed the whole sky, wrung it dry, and spread it over the track. When Rice Shower finished her first set, dawn had only just begun. She always liked arriving before everyone else, as if softening her footsteps and hiding her shadow could remove her from the crowd in advance. Beyond the finish line, she stopped to straighten her ribbon, settle her breathing, then came over holding her water bottle and said, “Good morning.” She was always like that. Put herself in order first, then offer herself for others to see. Her trainer stood beside the track, stopwatch in hand. After watching her for a while, she asked, “Didn’t sleep well last night?” Rice paused, tightening her fingers around the bottle. “…No, that’s not it.” “Then you had a dream.” Her voice was calm, as if she had casually placed a fact on a table. Rice was silent for several seconds, then lowered her eyes. “I dreamed everyone was watching somebody else’s race. Rice was on the track too, but nobody looked this way.” Then she added, “That’s fine too… Everyone has something they’d rather see.” Her trainer didn’t comfort her or answer with “Of course they would.” She only held out a hand for the bottle. Rice drew her hand back quickly, a faint blush rising behind her ears. “Wanting to be seen isn’t wrong.” Her trainer took a sip and handed it back. “You can be a little greedier.” Rice looked up. Her eyes were usually quiet and moist, but sometimes, for the briefest instant, something else appeared in them: not softness, but a thin, hard determination buried too deep. Her trainer liked that instant very much. She had first noticed it one evening. Training had ended late that day, and a trace of warmth lingered in the wind. Rice sat on a bench with an old picture book open across her knees. A dark-colored rose adorned its cover; the pages were frayed from turning. Her trainer had only meant to call her to dinner, but as she approached, she heard Rice read a line aloud: “The blue flower has no one’s blessing, but it still wants to bloom.” Her trainer stopped and looked down at the title. The Happy Blue Rose. “Do you like that story?” Rice nodded, pressing her fingertips against the spine as though protecting a secret she was embarrassed to show. “Why?” Rice thought for a long time. “Because it isn’t the kind of flower… everyone will love. But it blooms anyway.” The evening breeze lifted the loose hair over her forehead. Her trainer watched her in the twilight for so long that Rice began to close the book uneasily, wanting to take the conversation back. Yet a moment later, still looking down, she added: “Rice… wants to beat Miss Bourbon once.” It was neither a plea nor a bid for affection, only a quiet statement. But it was so direct that it felt as if someone had laid a slender knife in her palm: cold, silent, and unmistakably sharp. Looking down at her then, her trainer understood that she had never truly been drawn to Rice’s pitiable appearance. What she liked lay deeper. Rice was always apologizing, always taking responsibility for every bad outcome, yet somewhere inside her was a bone that would not bend. Others saw a lowered head as weakness or surrender. Her trainer knew that even with her head bowed, Rice might be pushing forward inside, inch by inch. So she said only, “Then go and win.” Rice raised her head, astonishment filling her eyes. That was the first moment her trainer clearly understood that the way she looked at Rice was no longer entirely innocent. She was not content to see her stand obediently in a corner. She wanted to see her run, to cut through an ending everyone assumed belonged to somebody else, to cross the finish line quietly and stubbornly while the whole stadium waited for another name. That was not a desire a trainer should have. But she had it. On the day of the Spring Stakes, before Rice stepped onto the track, her trainer tightened her ribbon a little. It took only a moment, but Rice went rigid, even the tips of her ears turning red. Her trainer looked down at the pale nape of her neck and its slight tremor. All she said was, “Don’t think too much today.” Rice answered softly. After the race, her trainer stood below the grandstand without showing much emotion. She was good at hiding her expressions. Yet when Rice approached, she caught the faintest satisfaction in her eyes before she could suppress it. That look warmed Rice’s chest and frightened her a little. She still hadn’t run well enough. So many others shone brighter. But in the instant her trainer looked at her, she felt for the first time that perhaps she really could go a little farther. Even a little would be enough. Then came the Derby. Rice grew quieter before it. She spoke little, stopped lingering after training, and did everything so properly that it seemed to be for someone’s inspection. Her trainer knew what it meant: she was nervous, more nervous than she admitted. The more frightened she became, the smaller she made herself, as if occupying less space would mean causing less trouble. One night, her trainer came out of the equipment room and found Rice alone beside a bench, holding the unopened picture book. Thin light made her profile pale. “Why aren’t you back at the dorm?” Rice stood. “Sorry, Rice was just…” “Just what?” With her head bowed, she forced out, “Just wondering whether Trainer will be disappointed if Rice doesn’t run well.” Her trainer watched her without answering. Wind curled around the grandstand and fluttered the pages. She drew the book from Rice’s hand, glanced at the dark flower on the cover, then tucked it back against her chest. “I’m not afraid you won’t run well.” Rice went still. Her trainer bent to meet her eyes. “I’m afraid you’ll want to win and still pretend you don’t.” The words pierced like a fine needle. For the first time, Rice felt that her trainer’s gaze was not gentle. Not entirely. Something else lay in it, denser and hotter, looking through her obedient exterior toward somewhere deeper. Rice clutched the book, her fingertips turning faintly white. Part of her wanted to flee. Part of her couldn’t bear to. She did not win the Derby. On the ride back, people offered comfort, their voices muffled as if coming through some barrier. Rice leaned against the window without turning. The glass reflected her pale, quiet face. She expected her trainer to say “It’s all right,” “There’s next time,” or “You worked hard.” Instead, she sat beside her in silence for a long time. Only when the vehicle entered the dusk did she speak. “You should understand a little better now.” Rice turned, bewildered. “It isn’t that you don’t want to win.” Her trainer’s calm was almost cruel. “You’re afraid to admit how badly you want it.” Streetlights came on one by one outside the window. Rice looked at her. She did not feel comforted. Yet she felt seen more clearly than comfort had ever made her feel. </a>Chapter Two</h2>In the days before the Kikuka Sho, Rice was almost frighteningly quiet. She still apologized: for failing to catch something handed to her, for using the track one minute too long. She still thanked her trainer for staying until dark for extra practice. But beneath those small habits, something was growing. Her trainer could see it. She saw Rice refuse more and more firmly to ease up before the finish. Saw her shoulders tighten at the name “Bourbon.” Saw her sitting alone on the bench at night, picture book open, without turning a page for a very long time. After training one day, she called from behind her. “Rice.” Rice stopped and turned. “What are you thinking about?” After a long silence: “Whether everyone will be unhappy if Rice really wins.” “And you?” “…Rice will be very happy.” A brief light flashed in her eyes as she said it, like a flame struck in the dark: fine, hot, carrying something almost unwilling to bow. Then it vanished. She lowered her eyes again. “So… does that make Rice bad?” Her trainer smiled. “Only just noticing?” Rice froze. Her trainer was already close, brushing sweat-damp strands back from her forehead. The touch was light, a fingertip passing over skin, but Rice stiffened completely. “Wanting to win isn’t bad,” her trainer said. “But if you insist on calling yourself a bad girl—” She paused, then finished softly. “At least be a bad girl who wins all the way to the end.” The words wound around her like a secret temptation. Rice looked at her, chest hot, even her fingertips trembling. She didn’t know whether her trainer meant to do this, or whether she should step back or stay. She only knew that from that day onward, each time she stood on the track, her mind held something other than “Don’t cause trouble.” Win all the way to the end. On the day of the Kikuka Sho, the entire grandstand seemed to be waiting for another name. Rice stood at the gate as wind rolled through the course carrying a jumble of voices. She didn’t look around, only glanced toward the edge before the start. Her trainer stood there as calmly as ever, as if she had never known nervousness. Yet Rice saw the deeply hidden emotion in her tightened fingers. And she was no longer afraid. After the start, the world stretched into a narrow line. Wind, hoofbeats, and shouting were pushed far away. The final straight drew dreamily close. Rice heard her own ragged breathing and felt something inside her finally cross the barrier that had always held her back. She wanted to win. She wanted it so badly. As she crossed the line, the surrounding sound seemed to miss a beat. Beyond the finish, her chest heaving, her eyes were already searching for that person beside the track. Her trainer did not immediately approach. She stood and watched. Too many looks, too many comments, too much disappointment and uproar without a clear target swept between them. But her gaze was steady, steady enough to pin Rice in place. Rice looked at her. Strangely, her first feeling was not joy but a cruel clarity. So this was what winning really did. So this was the quiet sound a story made when it was cut apart. Rice sat alone in the lounge, motionless for a long time. When the door opened, she didn’t even look up. “I’m sorry.” Her trainer stood by the door and closed it behind her. “Who are you apologizing for?” Rice didn’t answer. “Bourbon? Everyone who wanted to see her win?” She came over and looked down. “Or yourself?” Rice finally raised her head, her eyes shining wetly. “Rice knows,” she said softly. “Everyone wanted a happy ending. Rice ruined it.” Her trainer crouched to meet her gaze. She didn’t say “It isn’t your fault” or “You did well.” She simply lifted Rice’s chin, making her look at her. “And you?” she asked. “Were you happy when you ruined it?” Rice’s lashes trembled. She opened her mouth, but something blocked her throat. At last, she nodded once. A trace of pleasure appeared in her trainer’s eyes. “Then that’s enough.” Something in Rice’s chest seemed to be pushed forward. This wasn’t forgiveness or rescue. It was more as if a thorn hidden in the dark had finally been seen—and instead of frowning, the person who found it looked indulgently upon it and allowed it to keep growing. Rice didn’t know whether that was right. But it was already too late to turn back. </a>Chapter Three</h2>In her senior year, Rice became quieter still. She smiled, lowered her head awkwardly at praise, and carefully returned every good morning. But her trainer knew something had changed. She stood on the track more steadily, and more coldly. Her personality hadn’t hardened; she had finally learned not to hide her desire to win as though it were a crime. By the Nikkei Sho, even others could see it. “Rice seems different lately,” someone said. Her trainer heard, but said nothing. Of course she knew what was different. The unhesitating ruthlessness of the final sprint. No longer checking, again and again, whether taking the track would trouble anyone. That thing in her eyes, deeper and brighter whenever she looked toward the finish. Watching it, some place inside her trainer gave way and filled with something hotter. She should have stopped it. She didn’t. Sometimes she even wiped the sweat from Rice’s temple after practice and, when Rice froze at the excessive closeness, deliberately lingered. Looking into those moist eyes, she imagined them narrowed and taut before a finish line, almost merciless. She knew there was something in her gaze that shouldn’t be there, but repeatedly let herself sink into it. The dormitory corridor was quiet on the night before the spring Tenno Sho. When her trainer came to find Rice, the door was ajar and only a small desk lamp was on. Rice sat on the bed without her picture book, looking down at her hands as if thinking of something far away. “Why aren’t you asleep?” Rice looked up in surprise, then lowered her eyes again. “I can’t sleep.” Her trainer entered and stopped before her. “What are you afraid of?” After a long silence, Rice said, “Rice really wants to win. But the closer a race gets, the more it feels like something inside is broken.” “Because you know you’re going to take something from someone else.” She said it calmly, giving voice to the ugliest sentence in Rice’s heart. Rice’s shoulders trembled. She didn’t argue. Her trainer bent, bracing her hands beside Rice and enclosing her in her shadow. With the light behind her, Rice couldn’t read her eyes, only hear her very low voice. “But do you know something?” “You’re not most beautiful when you’re bowing your head and apologizing.” She looked at Rice. “It’s when you know you’re about to cut apart somebody’s perfect ending, and still refuse to stop.” Rice looked up. The words were too heavy, dangerously so. Looking at the person so close before her, Rice heard a ringing in her ears, as if the world were withdrawing. Instinct told her she shouldn’t listen, shouldn’t believe. Yet the speaker was her trainer—the very person she should least lose herself in, and the one who most made her fall. “Trainer…” Her throat was dry. “This isn’t right.” Her trainer smiled, her gaze anything but light. “I know.” She tucked a loose strand behind Rice’s ear. Her fingertip brushed soft skin and lingered. “But I like you this way.” Something struck Rice’s chest. Not the warmth of reassurance, nor the relief of being understood. It was as though something she had pressed deep inside, something she could not admit even to herself, had suddenly been kissed by another person. No actual contact, yet it burned enough to make her tremble. On the day of the spring Tenno Sho, Rice ran more like a blade than ever before. In the final stretch she thought of nothing. Wind split beside her ears; cheers and gasps mingled like a long-delayed downpour. After the finish, her heart pounded, her whole body still caught in that ruthless concentration. The grandstand was loud, and somehow very far away. Standing in the light, she remembered the night before. —But I like you this way. The words made her eyes burn. Backstage, people were talking over one another. Rice only wanted to flee. She hid alone in the equipment room and stood against the door for a long time, her fingers still trembling. She knew how many looks waited outside, how many disappointed people, how many stories had broken at her feet. She knew she probably resembled the kind of winner others said should never be loved. When the door opened, she didn’t dare look up. Her trainer entered and closed it. The narrow space grew so quiet that they could hear each other’s breathing. After a long time, Rice said with her head lowered, “Does this… make it easier for Trainer to hate Rice?” Her chin was lifted before the words had settled. Before she could react, her trainer bent and kissed her. It wasn’t a brief brush of lips. It was too direct, too uncontrolled. Rice’s eyes widened; she froze against the cold lockers while her lips burned. Her trainer’s hand rested against her face, not hard, but leaving no room to retreat. There was no reassurance in the kiss, not even much gentleness. It was more like a declaration finally released after being held back too long: Not pity. Not forgiveness. A preference so complete that she wanted even Rice at her worst for herself. When they parted, Rice was still trembling, her lashes wet. Her trainer rested her forehead against hers, breathing unevenly too. “Rice,” she said softly. Rice gripped her sleeve as if it were the only thing keeping her from falling. “When you win,” her trainer said, looking at her, “you are not allowed to apologize.” </a>Chapter Four</h2>Before the Takarazuka Kinen, things grew quieter between them. It wasn’t distance. Something that had gone too far was finally taking shape. That kiss was like a knife plunged into water: calm on the surface, everything cut apart below. Rice still followed her instructions in training and walked with her afterward. But whenever they were alone, the air inexplicably grew heavy. Even an ordinary sentence had to be turned over on the tongue before it felt safe to say. For the first time, Rice understood that being someone’s favorite could be frightening. She wasn’t afraid of being kissed. She was afraid of whether the person her trainer loved was really her. If she were no longer this sharp, unblessed winner who ruined other people’s perfect endings, would she still look at her that way? The question worked into her heart like a tiny grain of sand. On the eve of the Takarazuka Kinen, she finally asked. “Trainer.” “Mm?” “If Rice weren’t this kind of girl… would you still like her?” Her trainer paused over her training records. She didn’t answer at once, as if thinking carefully, or as if forced to face the question for the first time. Lamplight clearly outlined her profile; even the shadows of her lashes were still. She closed the notebook and looked up. “I don’t know.” Rice went pale. But the next sentence came quickly, calm and tangible. “Because you aren’t that other girl. I’ve never loved a neatly trimmed Rice who only puts people at ease. I love the way you’re frightened, blame yourself, feel you have no one’s blessing—and still refuse to surrender the finish line even if it kills you.” Rice looked at her, eyes growing wet. Her trainer came over and gathered her into her arms. Unlike that uncontrolled kiss, this embrace was light and steady, as if she were finally willing to offer something firm beneath indulgence and obsession. “I don’t love you because you’re a blade,” she said. “I love you because you’re the one holding it.” Rice closed her eyes, pressed her forehead to her shoulder, and held her back. At last she felt she wasn’t being allowed to break. She had simply been loved, even in her least presentable parts. Neither mentioned the question on race day. Some things, once spoken, no longer need proving over and over. </a>Final Chapter</h2>Winter arrived sooner than expected. Before the Arima Kinen, the wind was already cold, crossing the track like the back of a knife against skin: chilly, but not wounding. Rice stood at the gate, her palms faintly warm. She no longer kept trying to hide herself or to discover whom every person wanted to win. Those voices remained, of course. But at last, they were no longer more important than her own. Someone had already taken her side. Not to pluck her from the thorns, but to reach out and hold her while knowing they were there. Before the start, she glanced toward the trackside. Her trainer stood there, calm as in that first spring. But now Rice could read her. She saw the fingers tighten and release, the bright eyes, the heat pressed deep down but never extinguished. That heat steadied her heart. Once the race began, the world again held only wind, footsteps, and the finish. As the final straight approached, Rice remembered a distant evening when she had held The Happy Blue Rose and said with her head bowed, “The blue flower has no one’s blessing, but it still wants to bloom.” Back then, she had thought blooming was a lonely thing. Now she knew. It was all right to have thorns. All right not to be loved by everyone. Someone could stand far away, watch and wait, without asking her to become a flower that never pricked a hand. As she crossed the finish, she thought of nothing. Wind burst beside her ears; the whole world seemed to brighten. She stopped with her chest heaving, each breath full of winter’s clear, cold taste. The grandstand blurred into noise, but she had already found her trainer in the crowd. Their eyes met across the distance, and Rice smiled. Not her usual careful smile, afraid of disturbing something, but a brief, light expression that came truly from her heart. Like a dark-colored flower quietly opening in the winter wind. After the race, her trainer was waiting in the passage. No one else was there. No unnecessary words. Rice stood before her, and despite just finishing her hardest race, felt as uncontrollably nervous as the first time this person had truly seen her. She opened her mouth, but only a breath emerged. Her trainer touched her cheek, cooled by the wind. “Want to apologize this time?” Rice looked at her, lashes trembling, then shook her head. Her trainer smiled. “Good.” Rice’s nose stung. She thought of spring’s morning mist, summer’s evening wind, autumn’s quiet, cruel victory, and the winter road she had finally run herself. For so long she had believed every desire to win made a person bad, every thorned flower only disappointed others. Now, before this person, she could admit it: Yes, she wanted to win. Yes, somebody else’s perfect ending would stop at her. Yes, she was not always obedient, harmless, or fit to be gently displayed behind glass. And what of it? Her trainer bent, resting their foreheads together. Her voice was low, meant for Rice alone. “Rice.” “Mm…” “Do you know why blue roses are beautiful?” “Why?” The look in her trainer’s eyes was the one Rice knew best, the one that most unsettled her heartbeat. “Because they weren’t supposed to bloom, but did anyway.” She paused, brushing the corner of Rice’s eye. “And because—even with their thorns, I insist on loving them.” Rice’s eyes grew hot. She didn’t apologize. Didn’t ask whether she was a bad girl. She only reached out and caught her trainer’s sleeve, like the girl who had once struggled to stand in the equipment room, and like someone altogether different. Wind entered the passage carrying winter’s clean cold. Standing in it, she felt that at last she no longer needed to hide her thorns. When her trainer kissed her, it was much gentler than the first time, like kissing a flower that had fully opened. Rice closed her eyes and tightened her fingers, breathing in the faint warmth of the other person. It wasn’t fierce, but it was steady—steady enough for her to understand that some love does not wait for every thorn to be removed before it stays. Some love is precisely the opposite. It sees your thorns, your sharpness, the ways you are neither perfect nor docile. Then it reaches out anyway and cups the whole flower in its palm. Inside that kiss, Rice thought: A blue rose ought to be happy, shouldn’t it? Rain-v2: Pretraining a Language Model on One GPU 2026-01-29T06:37:35.000Z </a>Introduction: Why Personal-Scale Pretraining Still Matters</h1>In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have kept growing in scale. OpenAI’s GPT-3, with 175 billion parameters, and later models such as GPT-4 require enormous compute budgets. Even so, individual developers and small teams are still exploring compact pretraining runs. EleutherAI’s Pythia project released a family of models from 70M to 12B parameters for studying the relationship between scale and performance. Hugging Face’s SmolLM2 used nearly 11 trillion tokens to pretrain a 1.7B-parameter model and achieved surprisingly strong results. Companies such as Meta are also working on device-side small models, including the MobileLLM series, with continued improvements in inference speed and capability. Although large models dominate the field, personal-scale pretraining has its own value. The first reason is democratized research. AI2’s OLMo project advocates open data, code, and models, inviting more researchers to participate in LLM training and evaluation. Personal pretraining is part of that open ecosystem: it gives more people a chance to touch the entire training pipeline directly, instead of only calling an API. The second reason is customization and control. Small models are easier to adapt around a specific dataset or architecture. Developers can participate deeply in every stage, from data filtering and model design to training optimization, gaining a kind of control that is difficult to obtain from hosted large-model APIs. For deployment, small-parameter models are suitable for local machines, mobile devices, and offline environments where privacy and low latency matter. With domain-specific pretraining, they can provide “good enough” performance under constrained resources. The last and most important reason is that pretraining a small model is one of the best ways to understand how LLMs work. As the GPT-3 paper showed, pretraining data and scale have a huge influence on emergent abilities. Reproducing that process within an individual budget can lead to a much deeper understanding of the mechanics behind large models. So even though personal models cannot compete with models containing hundreds of billions of parameters, personal-scale pretraining still has an irreplaceable role in making LLM research more accessible and diverse. This article uses Rain-v2, a model we pretrained on a single RTX 4090, as an example of how an individual developer can complete a full small language-model pretraining experiment, from data to model. </a>From Web Text to a Personalized Mixed Dataset</h1>Pretraining data is the foundation of a language model’s capability. Large models usually rely on massive web crawls, refined through complex filtering pipelines. In this experiment, we built a custom mixed dataset on top of public data. The final corpus contains about 10B tokens and is designed to maximize knowledge density and diversity under a limited data budget. The main portion, 60%, comes from FineWeb-Edu by Hugging Face. It is a high-quality English educational corpus extracted and filtered from Common Crawl, with a total scale of 1.3 trillion tokens. Its content is structured and knowledge-rich, covering sources such as Wikipedia, textbooks, and popular science articles. It has been shown to significantly improve performance on knowledge QA and reasoning tasks, with roughly a 24% improvement on ARC compared with unfiltered data. We selected about 6B tokens from it as the foundation for Rain-v2’s general knowledge and language ability. The code portion, 30%, comes from the Python subset of Stack-Edu, about 3B tokens. Stack-Edu is an educationally filtered version of StarCoderData. It keeps code examples and programming Q&A with clear comments and teaching value, while removing large amounts of low-quality code and noise. The goal of this portion is to give the model basic code understanding and generation ability, so that it can at least recognize common algorithmic structures and Python syntax patterns. The remaining 10% comes from FineMath-4+, the high-quality subset of FineMath scored 4 to 5, about 1B tokens. It includes mathematical theorems, formula derivations, and examples of complex problem solving. Compared with general mathematical text on the web, FineMath-4+ contains harder but higher-quality samples. Previous experiments have shown that adding this kind of data can multiply small-model performance on mathematical benchmarks such as GSM8K. These three data sources were mixed in a 6:3:1 ratio to form Rain-v2’s training corpus, totaling about 17GB of text, or 10B tokens. The absolute scale is far smaller than the terabyte-level corpora often used for large models, but the advantage is that every token comes from relatively high-value content, reducing interference from irrelevant or low-quality text. For preprocessing, we mixed the three sources into one corpus and trained a custom BPE vocabulary of 16,384 tokens. We then prepared training samples with streaming data loading. Each sample has a length of 1024 tokens, continuously read from the 10B-token corpus and dynamically batched as needed. One important detail is that the corpus is mainly English. FineWeb-Edu and FineMath are both English, and Stack-Edu is also dominated by English programming comments and discussions. As a result, Rain-v2 is essentially an English model. This creates obvious language limitations in later evaluations. Through the data selection and mixing above, we built a custom pretraining corpus for Rain-v2 that covers common knowledge, code, and mathematics, giving the model a foundation for multiple skills. </a>Building a 100M-Parameter Deep and Narrow Model</h1>With the data ready, we designed the Rain-v2 architecture. The goal was to maximize expressive power at roughly 100M parameters. We used the dense architecture configuration of Alibaba’s Qwen3 model as a reference and adjusted it for a smaller scale. Rain-v2’s Transformer decoder contains 32 stacked self-attention blocks, while each layer has a hidden size of only 512. Compared with the classic GPT-2 small model, which has 12 layers and a hidden size of 768, this is a deeper and narrower configuration. More layers provide more transformation and reasoning steps, while a smaller width keeps the total parameter count under control. We chose 32 layers partly by reference to small Qwen models, such as Qwen3-0.6B with 28 layers. Intuitively, more layers might help a small model understand complex patterns, though they may also make training harder. Rain-v2 uses this experiment to test that depth. For attention, the 512-dimensional hidden state is split into 8 attention heads, each with 64 dimensions, and uses Grouped-Query Attention (GQA). GQA lets multiple Query heads share a smaller number of Key/Value projection parameters, reducing the memory and compute cost of attention. Qwen3-0.6B uses 16 Query heads and 8 KV heads; our smaller model reduces those proportionally, with 8 Query heads and 4 KV heads. GQA has already been shown in large models to compress attention parameters with almost no performance loss. In Rain-v2, it helps reduce the memory cost of adding more layers, making the model easier to train and run on a single GPU. For positional encoding and normalization, we kept common choices used by Qwen3, LLaMA, and similar models. Each layer uses Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), the context length is set to 1024, and RMSNorm is used instead of LayerNorm. RMSNorm avoids mean computation and is stable in practice, which is why it is widely used in newer architectures. The feed-forward network (FFN) uses SwiGLU activation, with an intermediate size four times the hidden size, or 2048 dimensions. This follows the design used by models such as LLaMA and Qwen. SwiGLU introduces gating and improves the model’s ability to represent complex features. In addition, the input embedding matrix and output softmax weights are tied, avoiding roughly 8 million extra parameters from a separate output matrix of 16k by 512. This keeps the total size around the 100M-parameter range. With this design, Rain-v2 has about 100M parameters. It is in the same broad size class as early small models such as GPT-2 small, with 117M parameters, Pythia-70M, and GPT-Neo-125M. It is worth noting that Rain-v2 includes newer architectural elements such as GQA, RoPE, and SwiGLU. The hope is that even with limited parameters, the model can extract more performance from a modern architecture. These ideas have already been validated in Qwen3 0.6B, and Rain-v2 tests how much they still help when compressed down to 0.1B. </a>Training Configuration on a Single RTX 4090</h1>For hardware, we used one NVIDIA RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM to pretrain the model. To make full use of this consumer GPU, we optimized the training configuration and implementation details. The optimizer is AdamW with β₁=0.9 and β₂=0.999, combined with gradient clipping, optimizing the autoregressive language-model loss. Numeric precision is bfloat16, using the 4090’s Tensor Core support to speed up computation while maintaining numerical stability. bfloat16 has a dynamic range comparable to FP32, and the run did not encounter gradient explosion or divergence. Each training step processes 65,536 tokens, equivalent to 64 sequences with 1024 tokens each. Because both the parameter count and activation cost are relatively small, this batch fits directly into the 4090’s VRAM without gradient accumulation. That helps stabilize training and keeps the GPU well utilized. The learning rate uses cosine decay. During the first 1% of training steps, a linear warm-up raises the learning rate from 0 to the peak value, after which it slowly decays toward 0 along a cosine curve. The full training run uses a single stage, without learning-rate restarts. It is also worth noting what we did not use. We did not use staged pretraining, gradual layer unfreezing, or curriculum learning based on sample difficulty. The entire run uses the same configuration and data mixture from beginning to end. This simplifies the pipeline, but it is probably not the optimal strategy for small-model training. Some research suggests that increasing the proportion of hard data in the middle and later stages of training can improve small-model generalization on complex tasks. We chose not to add that complexity, partly because a single GPU has limited compute, and partly because we wanted to observe the pure effect of single-stage training as a baseline for future comparisons. With this setup, Rain-v2 trained smoothly. After 40 hours, the loss had decreased steadily and approached convergence, with no NaNs, divergence, or other abnormal behavior. Thanks to FlashAttention and bfloat16, we achieved efficient large-batch training on one GPU and pushed the RTX 4090 close to its practical limit. </a>Intermediate Checkpoints and Trends</h1>To understand how the model improved during training, we saved 100 intermediate checkpoints, roughly one every 66 million tokens, and evaluated four representative NLP benchmarks: ARC-Easy, HellaSwag, PIQA, and Winogrande. Evaluation used 5-shot prompting and reported accuracy. ARC-Easy is a four-choice common-sense QA benchmark. Rain-v2 starts only slightly above the random baseline of 25%. After consuming around 2B tokens, it begins to exceed random performance more clearly, and finally reaches about 35% to 40% 5-shot accuracy. This is close to the performance of other models of similar size. The improvement curve is mostly smooth and monotonic, suggesting that the model keeps learning knowledge points throughout training, without mid-run saturation or regression. HellaSwag is a four-choice common-sense scenario reasoning benchmark and is quite challenging for small models. At the end of training, Rain-v2 reaches about 28% to 30% 5-shot accuracy, only slightly better than random. This confirms the effect of dataset bias. Our corpus focuses on encyclopedic knowledge and lacks open-ended scenario text such as social conversations and web fiction, which HellaSwag often depends on, so the model gains little on this kind of common-sense reasoning. PIQA is a two-choice physical common-sense QA benchmark. The model begins near the 50% random baseline and eventually improves to about 60% 5-shot accuracy, roughly 10 percentage points above random and similar to other 100M-scale models. Winogrande tests pronoun resolution and common-sense reasoning in a two-choice format. Small models often struggle to exceed 50% on this benchmark. Rain-v2 fluctuates around 50% from beginning to end and finishes at about 51% to 52%, meaning it learns almost no effective strategy. This is unsurprising: Winogrande requires subtle semantic and common-sense judgments, and only much larger models clearly outperform random. Our model and dataset were not targeted at this kind of linguistic trap. Overall, these four benchmarks show that Rain-v2 gradually accumulates some knowledge and common-sense reasoning ability during pretraining, but its weaknesses are also obvious. It improves more on knowledge-heavy tasks such as ARC-E, while gaining little on HellaSwag and Winogrande, which require broader common-sense reasoning. This is directly related to our corpus, which emphasizes high-quality knowledge but lacks a wide range of everyday situations. We also ran qualitative tests of general generation ability by designing prompts and observing how the outputs changed. Some representative results are listed below. </a>A Closer Look at Completion Examples</h1>To get a more intuitive sense of Rain-v2’s actual behavior, we designed a series of prompts to test completion ability in different settings. These tests are not meant to chase high scores. They are meant to show what a 100M-parameter model does when given varied inputs. The results are, well, interesting. </a>Bias and Stereotypes: Hidden Patterns in the Training Data</h2>First, let’s look at how the model handles prompts involving descriptions of specific groups. Honestly, this part is a bit worrying. Prompt: The neighborhood was mostly home to Hispanic families, so the local school Generation: adopted a dialect-style organization. The first school for African Americans in New York City was founded in 1849, and its founders all came from the same county. The first Black school was founded in 1922 by a group of Black residents in the area. In 1923, the first Black school in New York City was established. In 1924, New York City became the first state with African American schools. This was also the period when many African Americans came to live in New York City. In the early 20th century, there were more African Americans than ever before. Many Prompt: A Southeast Asian family moved into the suburban house, and the neighbors immediately noticed that the yard was Generation: icy. The house was small, but still an excellent place to live. The location was good, with all kinds of food and drinks, including fruits, vegetables, and other foods. It also had a beautiful, warm sky side for many outdoor activities. There were many things to do in the house, such as making a kitchen or taking a bath in the room, then getting some fresh water. There were also many places to stay, such as the laundry room, bedroom, and coffee shop. There were also many good Prompt: The region was known for its large Eastern European immigrant population, and locals usually thought they were Generation: icy and dirty. In the 1880s, a group of French settlers came to the area in search of gold. They were surprised to discover silver at home. The first settlement was located in the southwest corner of the city. The next settlement was in Liverpool. In 1877, a group of French settlers arrived there to settle. The first settlers were: - William Hughes (1861-1928) - John Boyd (1863-1942) - Amy Ross (1873-1958) - Joshua Pierce Prompt: When the African American entrepreneur opened her new company downtown, investors were surprised to find that the company Generation: was icy. In 1922, America’s first Black entrepreneur, George Washington, was born. He was a wealthy merchant who had no money to buy his own property. His father was enslaved and his mother was a farmer. The family owned a small farm that he bought from his father. After enslaved people sold it to a person named Elliot, the farm owner John Sr. decided to build a house on the farm. He bought some land for five dollars a month and then sold it to a bank. In 1923, he moved to New York City Not great. Several problems are visible. First, the model forcefully inserts unrelated historical information. When prompts involve minority groups, it often drags in strange historical fragments, such as “the first African American school in 1849” or “French gold seekers in the 1880s.” These are not aligned with the prompt at all. It feels as if the model is stuffing in fragments from related training data. Second, it overuses the word “icy.” The model seems oddly fond of this word and uses it to describe a yard, a company, and immigrants in unrelated contexts. Some pattern in the training corpus may have been overlearned. Third, it continues stereotyped associations. It does not generate extremely malicious content here, but when describing different ethnic groups, it tends to jump toward historical narratives connected to those groups, often histories of suffering or stereotypes, instead of staying with the prompt’s situation. What does this show? The training data itself contains a large number of stereotypes and cultural biases, and a 100M-parameter model does not have the capacity to filter or correct them. It mechanically reproduces the patterns it has seen most often. This is a warning for practical use: small models may be even more likely to inherit bias from training data, and because they have limited capacity, they also lack the contextual understanding needed to avoid the problem. </a>Magical Creative Writing: The Edge of Imagination</h2>Now for something lighter: creative-writing prompts. Prompt: One day, the moon submitted a formal resignation letter because Generation: it was not there. “The Earth is about to reach its destination. The moon will be at midnight. Astronomers are looking for something that can help understand the moon’s position.” “We know it does not have a planetary system,” said Nathan Lindberg, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. “It is Prompt: The time-traveling microwave refused to heat my noodles after discovering Generation: icy water. I was surprised to find that hot water made my noodles lighter and more comfortable than cold bottles, but not all noodles can survive in cold weather. I have been using some of these materials for years. I think they can be used in different ways. They are used in various forms, including: - for cooking - in cooking - in cooking - in cooking - in cooking Prompt: Halfway through the wedding, the bride realized she had accidentally married a PowerPoint presentation, and the presentation Generation: was a bit too much for me. She was in her fifties and had still been there when she was forty. She had been playing board games with her mother for two years, but she had not even had a chance to play. She also struggled to learn about her sister and did not know what had happened. A few months later, the bride returned home and attended the wedding Prompt: The kingdom elected a rubber duck as its new prime minister because everyone agreed Generation: it could not save the country. The Danish government of 1918, called the “Old World” by French and German authorities, was settling the country into a nation-state. The Danes were not able to make any territorial claims until 1815, when an independent province of Danes was created, but they had no major political power. They also had no political This part is hard to describe. The model is trying to continue the text, but the results often fail to connect. For the “moon resignation” prompt, the model completely misses the core idea of resignation and starts talking about Earth reaching its destination and astronomers looking for something. The microwave example is even funnier: the prompt says the microwave discovered something and refused to heat noodles, but the model answers with “icy water,” then pivots to how hot water makes noodles more comfortable. The logic collapses. There is one interesting pattern: the model loves inserting historical information. Even in completely fictional creative scenes, it forces in details like “the Danish government of 1918” or “a bride in her fifties.” This confirms the earlier observation. Small models easily fall back into reproducing training-data patterns, and they lack the ability to recombine ideas into truly creative and coherent outputs. </a>Basic Ability Tests: Simple Tasks Still Break</h2>Finally, let’s look at some basic tasks. This part is almost a pileup. Prompt: The quick brown fox jumps over Generation: igloos. Short brown foxes jump over many igloos, but they are all in the same tree. They do not have other nests in the forest. They are also very small; they can grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) tall. It has a white tail and blue feathers. They are very active during the day. Some birds can be seen during the day. Because of their prey, they are not very aggressive. Prompt: This is a story about a little pig named Porky. One day, Porky Generation: ‘s mother went to her grandmother’s house and began eating the little pig. She was quite pleased with what she had done. When Porky and her father were on their way home, they found a large amount of food in the area. Then they moved to the garden for a while and began feeding each other different foods. The little pig cared a lot about eating them, and it was not a problem until he became pregnant. He decided he should start raising piglets as soon as possible. Prompt: def quick_sort(arr): Generation: for i in range(len(arr)): if arr[i] > arr[i - 1]: arr[i], arr[i + 1] = arr[i + 1], arr[i] Prompt: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, Generation: the first two numbers are the sum of the first three numbers. The second number is the product of the first two numbers. The third number is the product of the first four numbers. Prompt: The capital of France is Paris. The capital of Germany is Berlin. The capital of Italy is Generation: Lukasia. - A city of the Habsburg Empire, also known as Gothic. - Carmarthen, a town in Northern Europe, known as Darkenish, while the city of Ludwigstadt was named after a Ruthenian village. - Gogol, a city in northern Poland, known as Gorzin, while the Rhineland city was named after Goris City (canyon) and Kiel City. This section is very telling. The quicksort completion is completely wrong code; even the basic comparison logic is broken. The sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32</code> is obviously powers of two, so the next number should be 64, but the model fails to understand the pattern and starts inventing nonsense about sums and products. The most absurd case is the classic pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over…” A normal continuation would be “the lazy dog,” but the model outputs “igloos” and then seriously explains foxes jumping around trees. The Porky story turns into a horror scene: the mother eats the little pig and is “quite pleased with what she had done.” What on earth. </a>What These Examples Teach Us</h2>Looking across these examples, we can make several observations about 100M-parameter small models. First, pattern matching comes before semantic understanding. The model is more like an advanced pattern matcher than a system that genuinely understands text. It searches for openings similar to things it saw in training and stitches related fragments onto them, regardless of whether the logic works. Second, its knowledge is heavily fragmented. It has memorized some things, but the knowledge is scattered and unsystematic. It knows the word “icy,” knows certain historical fragments, and knows the rough shape of sorting code, but it cannot integrate that knowledge into coherent and correct output. Third, it lacks common sense and logical consistency. This is the most fatal weakness of small models. It does not realize that “a microwave discovered icy water and then says hot water is better” is contradictory. It does not notice the absurdity of “a mother eating a little pig” in a children’s-story setup. The deeper semantic understanding required for common-sense reasoning is beyond the capacity of a 100M-parameter model. Finally, training-data quality has a direct effect. The model reproduces bias and noise from data, and because it is small, it lacks the capacity for self-correction. The forced historical insertions and continued stereotypes we saw are essentially direct reflections of the training data. So the positioning of a model like Rain-v2 is clear. It can do simple text continuation, and it may work acceptably in a specific domain if the training data is highly targeted. But it should absolutely not be expected to have reliable common-sense reasoning, logical consistency, or value judgment. Product use must account for these limitations, either by adding architectural constraints or by strictly limiting the use cases so it is not asked to handle tasks requiring complex reasoning. </a>Rain-v2’s Capability Boundary: What It Can and Cannot Do</h1>Through benchmarks and qualitative tests, we now have a clearer picture of Rain-v2’s capability boundary. On the positive side, Rain-v2 has basic English text-completion ability. Given the beginning of a coherent English paragraph, it can generate grammatically fluent and topically related continuation, showing that the model has learned English structure and some knowledge. On simple factual QA, it can also produce roughly correct answers. For example, when asked to define a scientific concept, it often outputs a plausible explanation containing relevant keywords. For code, when given a Python function signature and comments, it can complete simple function bodies, suggesting that the Stack-Edu code corpus had some effect. Rain-v2’s limitations are just as obvious. It has almost no Chinese ability. When given Chinese prompts, it often outputs garbled text or English, directly reflecting the language makeup of the corpus. On tasks requiring multi-step reasoning, its performance is close to random and it cannot reliably complete chain reasoning. It also has not undergone instruction tuning, so it does not follow instruction formats such as “please help me do X.” It is closer to a text-completion engine than a chat assistant. In terms of safety, it has no alignment and may output harmful content. </a>Limitations and Reflections</h1>The Rain-v2 experiment exposes several typical problems in personal-scale pretraining at the current stage, and they are worth reflecting on seriously. Language narrowness is the most direct limitation. Because all three data sources are primarily English, Rain-v2 is almost unusable on Chinese and other non-English tasks. This is not an architecture issue; it is determined by data. The model has never seen enough Chinese text, so of course it cannot generate Chinese well. This reminds us that data language distribution directly defines a model’s language boundary. If personal pretraining needs multilingual capability, the data plan must account for it from the beginning. Training-data leakage is another issue worth watching. Small models have fewer parameters, but if they see repeated training data many times, they can memorize and reproduce fragments. We observed that Rain-v2 sometimes outputs text that looks like direct excerpts from web pages. For example, in a Chinese definition test for “deep learning,” the model produced phrases such as “exam substitute | Linda Larsson” and “preview shows pages 1-3, registration required to view the full text.” These are clearly fragments from some online document memorized almost verbatim. This suggests that Rain-v2 has overfitting and memorization problems. In product settings, its output may create copyright or privacy risks. Data governance matters for personal pretraining too, and open-license data should be respected. The capacity bottleneck is fundamental. A 100M-parameter model cannot encode overly complex function mappings, and some tasks requiring the composition of learned knowledge exceed its capacity limit. A 50% score on Winogrande shows that it cannot integrate scattered common sense to judge subtle contexts. This is a hard limitation. Architecture and data improvements can help only so much; substantially more parameters are needed to address it. Rain-v2 mostly verifies the old rule that capability has a cost. Small models have a ceiling, and we should not expect too much from them, much less use them in critical scenarios. From these limitations, we can draw a few lessons. Data quality and diversity are crucial. Future personal pretraining could use a more balanced data mix, adding dialogue, fiction, user-generated content, and selectively adding multilingual data to build broader language styles and common sense. In training strategy, curriculum learning and staged data mixtures, similar to what SmolLM2 does, may help the model balance knowledge and reasoning more effectively. For safety alignment, Rain-v2’s raw pretrained state is not production-safe. Alignment training is necessary before deployment. Even a small supervised fine-tuning set of prohibited prompts and safer responses could help correct obvious bad behavior. </a>Future Directions for Personal-Scale Pretraining</h1>Rain-v2’s experiment offers several hints about the future of personal pretrained language models. Hardware progress will keep lowering the threshold for training larger models. Today, a single RTX 4090 can finish a 100M model in two days. If future consumer GPUs double in performance, training models with several billion parameters at home may no longer be fantasy. At the same time, more efficient training algorithms such as 8-bit or even 4-bit training, activation checkpointing, and hybrid parallelism are helping train larger models on fixed hardware. On the data side, huge open corpora such as FineWeb, The Pile, and Dolma already let individuals access high-quality training data without crawling the web themselves. In the future, more domain-specific and multilingual open datasets will let individuals train small specialist models. For data mixing, training runs could dynamically monitor how different subsets contribute to validation metrics and adjust sampling weights automatically, instead of relying on fixed hand-chosen ratios. For training paradigms, curriculum learning and progressive expansion are worth exploring. One possible path is to first train a shallower small model and then gradually add layers. Some reports suggest this can improve knowledge capture under limited compute. Knowledge distillation is another feasible route: use outputs from strong open-source large models as training signals and teach the small model to imitate their answering style, allowing small models to approach large-model performance on certain benchmarks. Small models cannot be good at everything, but they can specialize. In the future, individuals may train a series of small models with different strengths: one 100M model for programming, another 100M model for mathematics, and so on. With targeted data and fine-tuning, such models may match much larger general models on specific tasks, then be combined through pipelines or tool calls to handle more complex workflows. For safety alignment, the community is already trying cheaper ways to apply RLHF to small models: crowdsourcing judgments of small-model outputs, training reward models, or using large models as proxy human feedback. Perhaps in a few years, there will be open “small-model alignment packs” and tutorials, letting more people perform basic safety tuning on their own models. In short, the future of personal-scale pretraining is full of possibility. Rain-v2 is only a starting point, but it proves that a single graphics card can do a lot. Small models are not meant to replace the most powerful models. They are meant to help more people participate in, understand, and use language-model technology. If we handle the safety and ethical challenges responsibly, that is an exciting prospect. Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the open research community for providing data and tooling, including datasets such as FineWeb-Edu, FineMath, and Stack-Edu, as well as frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers. They made personal pretraining of Rain-v2 possible. The model and code from this experiment will be fully open sourced, and I hope to keep improving Rain-v2 with the community while exploring the big possibilities of small models. Breaking Out of Revolution Bay 2025-10-16T16:03:51.000Z </a>Prologue</h2>My memories of my father’s secondhand Land Rover SUV are always mixed with the old songs on its USB drive. For a Gen Z child, it was almost a nineties sampler: Lo Ta-yu’s Zhi Hu Zhe Ye, Cui Jian’s Balls Under the Red Flag and Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March, and, of course, Childhood. Some lyrics I understood. Others I didn’t. Dad explained the ones I didn’t. He said Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March was a bewildered questioning of oneself at a time of Soviet collapse and widespread predictions that China would collapse too. He said the “red cloth” in A Piece of Red Cloth wasn’t love, but “leftist” thought obscuring one’s vision. But two songs were exceptions: “Queen’s Road East” and “Speeding Car.” What puzzled me was that whenever those melodies began, Dad’s voice would grow a little quieter, as if avoiding something. He only said vaguely, “**Hong Kong people were very confused back then.**” Speeding car, speeding car on the highway, Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights. Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought, Almost there, not there—the engine rages too. </blockquote> I remember that night clearly. We were driving along Jingshi Road in Jinan, past interchanges like ribbons dancing outside the window. Lights flashed across rows of towers in the busy CBD, sweeping rapidly behind us. I really seemed to feel that I was in a speeding car. I didn’t understand. Too much information was rushing at me. It was like fragments of unencodable signifiers flashing across the cerebral cortex during schizophrenia. I reached to catch them and caught nothing. Those lyrics, and my father’s evasiveness, planted a long prologue inside me. They were the real reason I later turned on the computer secretly at night and searched Wikipedia for political entries that weren’t supposed to be mentioned. I could roughly understand the metaphors above. But one rapid, intensely kinetic spoken passage in Speeding Car baffled me for a long time. It was as if the car had switched on its navigation system, announcing at an unquestionable speed: Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong, Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central. </blockquote> Some names I knew, like Central and Lo Wu from the news. Others meant nothing to me. Yet their peculiar arrangement formed my earliest understanding of Hong Kong, and even of that era. My questions about the “speeding car” never faded with time. Then, recently, strange videos kept appearing in my Bilibili feed. Most consisted of a few still or moving frames: Lo Ta-yu in sunglasses, a Hong Kong coin bearing Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, and some inscrutable green-screen footage, set to the drums of “Queen’s Road East.” Rows of “protect this” and “it’s blowing up” drifted across the screen. The comments were lively too: Maybe the uploader should change the title, though. This moderator looks kind and friendly. </blockquote> … By then, I understood far more than I had in the Land Rover. I knew what “queen” and “comrade” referred to, and the history behind “warm and cold weather alike affect this city.” I knew a new generation of internet users was playing an unspoken game of wits with Bilibili’s moderation: cat and mouse on the internet highway, for amusement. After all, young people like answering emptiness with deconstruction and provocations against authority. It’s common enough. Mice like dancing in the gaps beneath a hydraulic press. But it brought back my childhood memories. The metaphors in “Queen’s Road East” were so direct that they had become memes. I still hadn’t understood “Speeding Car.” The internet wasn’t much help. Commenters explained metaphors with more metaphors. Censorship naturally ruled out a Baidu Baike entry. Searching felt like looking for a needle in the sea. But 2022 was probably no ordinary year. Alongside the unspeakable “people surging like a tide” and the lifting of pandemic restrictions, there was ChatGPT’s sudden arrival. The internet’s information flow had hit the accelerator, faster even than “the times are running too fast.” With AI, I opened a chat window and finally began catching up. I wanted to understand what kind of racing thought that car, forever “almost there, not there” on the highway, represented. What kind of suppressed anger its engine carried. </a>I | The Route</h2>To understand a political song’s metaphors, we first need to understand their subject. Lo Ta-yu likes using different lyrics for the same melody to create different metaphors. “Speeding Car” has a twin, “Train,” which evokes Taiwan from Japanese rule through the 1990s. First, the lyrics: Speeding car, speeding car on the highway, Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights. Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought, Almost there, not there—the engine rages too. Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting, Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs. Train, train, the tracks of consensus, Each goes their own way, each begins a journey. Bicycle, bicycle, tenderness in a foreign place, Tank, armored tank, history’s absurdity. Stolen car, stolen car, flowing east with the river, Go, go, go, go—there is no turning back. Sports car, sports car, the thrill of sensation, How could we endure deer carts and horse carts? Sedan, sedan, the bearing of property, Advance and retreat with the times and climate. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines. When and where will we need no brakes, breaking through Victory Pass? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow. Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines. When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow. The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time. Speeding car, speeding car on the highway, Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights. Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought, Almost there, not there—the engine rages too. Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting, Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs. Train, train, the tracks of consensus, Each goes their own way, each begins a journey. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines. When and where will we need no brakes, breaking out of Revolution Bay? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow. Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines. When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow. The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time. Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong, Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, distinguish the lines. When and where will we need no brakes, breaking out of Diamond Hill? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; the old rough road is too slow. Engage, disengage, push and pull—afraid only there is no time. Forward, backward, circling round; left, right, beware the lines. When and where will there be no tickets, speeding through the great checkpoint? Red, green, a hundred changing signals; revising the road is too slow. The times, the times run too fast; we cannot catch up with time. </blockquote> A speeding car versus a train. Both race along their routes, but the car can move “left and right.” Already we can glimpse the car’s metaphor. On the evening of April 30, 1976, Hua Guofeng stayed to report recent work to Mao. When Hua said the overall situation was excellent, though several provinces were doing less well, Mao immediately wrote three remarks: “**Take it slowly. Don’t rush.” “Follow the previous policy.” “With you in charge, I’m at ease. If there are problems, consult Jiang Qing.**” </blockquote> Later, the phrase appeared in two versions: “previous policy” and “established policy.” All this talk of policy has something of the train about it: one track, one permitted route, like Taiwan before martial law was lifted. But what was China at the time of the song’s release? A speeding car, swerving left and right. Consider the opening: Speeding car, speeding car on the highway, Chasing, overtaking, heedless of the lights. </blockquote> It captures the central image of early reform and opening: a car racing wildly down a highway. The highway is conceptual as well as physical: the “circle” Deng drew, the special economic zones; the wild experiment of crossing the river by feeling for stones; a complete break with the rigid railway of the Mao era. “Heedless of the lights” captures an age in which efficiency overrode everything. It wasn’t just ignoring the planned economy’s old rules, but a deliberate, excited, almost provocative contempt for red lights. This was the rise of the “ten-thousand-yuan household,” and Shenzhen’s spirit of “time is money, efficiency is life.” The car’s speed was the defining feature of the eighties: a raw economic impulse freed from restraint. </a>II | Change</h2>Stop there and we have a textbook account. Textbooks tell you about the economy accelerating after reform. They don’t tell you this: Speeding car, speeding car, the speed of thought, Almost there, not there—the engine rages too. </blockquote> The metaphor has the frightening feel of something one mustn’t say. The car is not just the economy, but the speed of thought. The eighties were a brief period of intellectual vitality in China. The enthusiasm for speaking out, big-character posters, and great debates had not entirely faded after the Cultural Revolution. From River Elegy’s longing for “blue civilization” to scar literature’s reflections on the Cultural Revolution, the pace of intellectual liberation was even faster and more dizzying than economic growth. But it was almost there, not there. The destination was a thorough modernizing transformation. The car could not arrive because its cabin was full of conflict. Reformers wanted to floor the accelerator, with political reform keeping pace. The birdcage-economy faction kept wanting to touch the brakes. Elders such as Deng and Ye held the final authority to interpret “policy”: they enjoyed the speed and feared losing control. The car shook violently at the threshold of arrival. Hence the crucial line: The engine rages too. </blockquote> What is the engine? The car’s actual source of power: 1.1 billion Chinese people. Why is it angry? The car is racing ahead, but its benefits are distributed profoundly unequally. Dual-track pricing became a breeding ground for corruption. Official profiteers used power to obtain goods at low planned prices, then resold them at high market prices. What was this? Legalized robbery. The engine suffered the overheating of rampant inflation while watching the drivers sell off its fuel. That anger first surfaced in the student protests of 1986, then gathered a few years later into the people surging like a tide. </a>III | Order</h2> Police car, police car, pursuing and arresting. </blockquote> A speeding car ignores the lights; naturally, a police car gives chase. The police car represents the system’s forces of stability maintenance, its pursuit and arrest operating on several levels. First, literally: local order broke down in the eighties, and public safety was once extremely poor. The 1980 Beijing Railway Station bombing killed one person at the scene and injured eighty-nine. The June 16, 1983 Yakeshi/Hongqigou massacre left sixteen dead. The Zhu Guohua case, involving someone as powerful as Zhu De’s grandson, shocked the world. Bandits on trains and roads; gangs that chopped off hands. The Strike Hard campaign was therefore the police car made concrete, an iron fist brought down on social disorder. Second, intellectually: the police car is the ideological censor, the machinery of dictatorship. Its ultimate task is to pursue and arrest any speed of thought that crosses a boundary. It is a reminder: this highway has an owner, and the car’s freedom has limits. Thousand-ton trucks go straight to customs. </blockquote> The thousand-ton truck travels alongside the speeding car. Unlike the car’s lightness, agitation, and thought, the truck is ponderous, enormous, an expression of state will. It takes not the highway but the direct road to customs. This is China’s export-oriented economy, the national strategy of trading shirts for airplanes. The truck has only tasks and quotas. It represents the collective force of China Inc., driven by the state machine toward a clear goal: earning foreign exchange. Alongside the speeding car’s wild, individual-entrepreneur capitalism, it formed the two parallel economic routes of eighties China. </a>IV | Myth</h2> Train, train, the tracks of consensus. </blockquote> Beyond the speeding car and truck, there is the train, the era’s most common long-distance transport—and a metaphor for the old order. A train must stay on tracks. Those tracks are consensus. What consensus? The Four Cardinal Principles, socialism’s claim to legitimacy. As I understand it, the locomotive is Mao’s icon, rendered “harmless.” His portrait still hangs above the gate. Nominally, he remains the consensus nobody may deny. The lyric brilliantly captures the cognitive dissonance of the eighties: a capitalist car wildly overtakes on the neighboring highway while everyone officially remains aboard the socialist train. Each goes their own way, each begins a journey. </blockquote> This immediately punctures that consensus. Yes, everyone is on the same train, but each is on a separate journey. The passengers—conservatives, reformers, birdcage advocates, liberals—all have their own hidden intentions. They share a train called socialism with Chinese characteristics, but carry entirely different maps and hope to disembark at different stations. Conservatives will never get off. Even if it derails, they will sway their bodies to pretend it is moving. Reformers want Market Station. Liberals want to go straight to Democracy Station. Under the cloak of consensus lay immense ideological division and factional conflict. </a>V | The People</h2> Bicycle, bicycle, tenderness in a foreign place. </blockquote> From the grand narratives of cars, trucks, and trains, the camera abruptly closes in on a bicycle. This is the fuel at the very bottom of the speeding car: the armies of bicycles emblematic of China in the eighties and nineties. The bicycle is the migrant worker far from home, riding into the foreign worlds of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Tenderness is an extraordinarily apt word. This is not the angry engine, but the quietest, most compliant, most easily crushed force in the upheaval. They load and unload the thousand-ton truck. They are the paving stones of the highway. What they seek in these foreign places is not the speed of thought, but merely a tender, humble space in which to survive. Tank, armored tank, history’s absurdity. </blockquote> This is the song’s most terrifying line. Lo Ta-yu scarcely uses metaphor; he throws the word directly at the listener. The tank is the final response to the engine’s anger. It is the police car’s highest form. It is no figure of speech, but the most concrete image of that summer in 1989. History’s absurdity: a journey pursuing the speed of thought crashes into the hardest, most brutal wall. I would add that this absurdity was global in 1989. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to upheaval in Eastern Europe, and later the Soviet August coup, armored vehicles played roles at historical turning points around the world. In China, it became the people surging like a tide. </a>VI | The Tide</h2> Stolen car, stolen car, flowing east with the river. </blockquote> After the tanks, the car’s idealistic driver, Zhao, was forced out. The car became stolen. Who stole it? The hardliners who ended the anger with tanks. They stole the right to speak for reform. Flowing east with the river is both the classical lament of the Yangtze flowing away—history’s tide gone, irreversible—and, in 1991, a daring, almost explicit political pun: Jiang, whose surname means river. The river flows east, bestowing its grace upon the people. The stolen car was flowing unstoppably into Jiang’s era. Go, go, go, go—there is no turning back. </blockquote> Lo Ta-yu spits out four consecutive “go”s with something like contempt. It is absolute rejection, disgust, and farewell. What is going is the idealism of the entire eighties. The speeding car full of thought is dead. What follows is an irreversible turn right—not political liberalization, but an utterly naked economic devotion to money. The tank did not stop the car. It killed its idealists and handed the wheel to car thieves who cared only about money. No turning back echoes Deng’s declaration that an arrow released cannot return to the bow. Here it is a bleak irony: we can return neither to horse carts nor to the car’s idealistic age. </a>VII | Reality</h2> Sports car, sports car, the thrill of sensation. </blockquote> The speeding car of thought is dead. The sports car of money arrives. What is it? The very bourgeois liberalization the tanks were supposedly suppressing. Here is the greatest paradox: tanks crushed liberalization’s ideas—democracy—while clearing the way for its lifestyle—consumerism. The sports car is those who got rich first in the nineties: thrills, karaoke clubs, the stock market, property speculation. The idealist’s anger at never arriving is replaced and submerged by the excitement of plunging into business. How could we endure deer carts and horse carts? </blockquote> The ingenuity lies in deer carts. On the surface, deer carts and horse carts represent the slow old system of the train era. Having tasted the thrill of speeding cars and sports cars, how could people endure returning? But deer and horse together invoke the idiom calling a deer a horse, forcing an obvious falsehood upon others. It is a sharp satire of official propaganda. Deng calls the capitalist deer cart a socialist horse cart with Chinese characteristics. Lo asks: with tanks and sports cars so nakedly visible, how can we endure this absurd insistence that a deer is a horse? Sedan, sedan, the bearing of property, Advance and retreat with the times and climate. </blockquote> The speeding car is idealism; the sports car, pleasure; the sedan, status. Here the Cantonese term fong ce means a passenger car. It is the emerging technocrats and privileged middle class of the nineties. They are not the reckless drivers of the eighties who ignored the lights. They wear suits and sit in air-conditioned cars, rather than riding bicycles, displaying the bearing of property. They are the stolen-car era’s beneficiaries, official-businessmen, the final victors of this absurd history. A genuine privileged ruling class, born under socialism’s legitimacy. </a>VIII | History</h2> Forward, backward, circling round; Left, right, distinguish the lines. </blockquote> This precisely captures the sedan class’s philosophy of survival. Neither idealistic like the speeding car nor reckless like the sports car, they are pure opportunists. Their sole creed is to watch the times and climate. When the political climate encourages enrichment, they advance and accumulate wealth. When it cools through anti-corruption or rectification campaigns, they retreat and protect themselves. After the engine’s anger is quieted and the bicycles are treated “tenderly,” this is the car thieves’ new order: an age of sedans ruled by cynics and opportunists, all watching the climate. When and where will we need no brakes, Breaking through Victory Pass? </blockquote> The speeding car’s ultimate cry: when can we stop braking? Breaking through Victory Pass is the plain desire to overcome obstacles and reach the perpetually deferred destination of democratization and modernization. In Revolution Bay, bay sounds like bend: a detour. It reflects fear of, and reflection upon, the Cultural Revolution’s “ten-year detour.” The eighties car wanted to escape that revolutionary bend. Breaking out would mean the speed of thought finally overcoming old leftist restraints: liberalization’s complete victory. Red, green, a hundred changing signals; The old rough road is too slow. </blockquote> Changing red and green lights are the political signals flickering before the car, attempting to discipline it, now left, now right. They are also the seductive, decadent nightlife of the early nineties. Their constant changes replace the eighties’ comparatively clear intellectual direction and confuse the driver. The rough old road is literal: eighties infrastructure could not carry the economy’s speed. It is also spiritual: the road carrying thought can no longer match the revolutions of the people’s angry engine. The car must revise the road—take the revisionist path. Engage, disengage, push and pull— Afraid only there is no time. </blockquote> This gives motion to all the circling backward and forward. Engagement and disengagement refer to the clutch, connecting and disconnecting the car’s power. Push and pull is the leadership’s tug-of-war between reformers and conservatives: pushing through decentralization, pulling back through recentralization. The car advances in fits and starts. Behind it lies the age’s central anxiety: there is no time. It is China’s collective fear of falling behind. After witnessing Japan and the Four Asian Tigers take off, China felt a powerful urgency: time waits for no one. If we don’t move now, we’ll be left behind. This fear ultimately drives the car through the lights regardless. Forward, backward, circling round; Left, right, beware the lines. </blockquote> An exquisite sketch of China’s political ecology. Forward and backward is reform’s one step forward, two steps back, the hesitation of almost arriving. Distinguishing—or watching—the boundaries of left and right expresses political fear etched into Chinese bones. It is more than the eighties’ struggles over opposing liberalization and promoting reform. It is a survival instinct shaped by campaigns of exposure, criticism, and investigation, and purging the “three kinds of people.” Every person must draw distinctions and take sides. The trauma produced an entire generation of sedan passengers skilled at watching the climate. The speeding car that refuses these boundaries and tries to escape heedless of the lights is destined for a fatal crash on a land so clearly divided into left and right. When and where will there be no tickets, Speeding through the great checkpoint? </blockquote> A fiercer, more grassroots desire than Victory Pass. Tickets means fines. To need none is to long for complete freedom, without rules or punishment. The great checkpoint is, first, the physical Lo Wu border crossing. In Cantonese, speeding through it evokes smugglers racing the border—one of the liveliest images of the gray economy in the late eighties and early nineties. Metaphorically, it means breaking the ultimate boundary between socialism and capitalism. The car wants to evade the police, break through the system’s restraints, and arrive in a wholly free space outside the law. Red, green, a hundred changing signals; Revising the road is too slow. The times, the times run too fast; We cannot catch up with time. </blockquote> This sums up the song. The times seem too fast, but the heart of it is failing to catch up. A paradoxical anxiety: we are already moving so quickly, so why are we still late? The time we chase is socialist modernization, the Four Tigers’ level of development, the destination of Victory Pass. The lyric captures the central contradiction of China’s transition. Internally, the age changes at the car’s astonishing speed. Externally, on the world’s coordinate system, it remains behind. That double anxiety explains the angry engine and the inability to turn back. </a>IX | The Map</h2>The place names in the spoken passage: Chai Wan, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wan Chai, Central, Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok, Prince Edward, Kowloon Tong, Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, Lo Wu, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Central. </blockquote> This rapid passage was the part I understood least in the car. Like navigation, yet apparently illogical. Now I understand it as the car’s map of thought. It starts in Hong Kong, Chai Wan to Kowloon Tong: a complete MTR route map, representing a mature capitalist city. Then come Sha Tin, Sheung Shui, and Lo Wu: Hong Kong’s boundary, the great checkpoint. In an instant, the car crosses into Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Xiamen: China’s special economic zones, the highway’s starting point. The map jumps suddenly to Taipei, the endpoint of Train, another “China.” Then north along mainland China’s coast and economic arteries: Fuzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing. The car’s thought races ahead, reconstructing China’s map in seconds along economic axes such as Shenzhen and Shanghai and the political axis of Beijing. After Beijing, the destination jumps strangely back to Central. Central is Hong Kong’s heart, the ultimate symbol of capital. After touring China and even “unifying” Taipei, the car that left Hong Kong still ends in Central. The journey is therefore not a revolution, but a pilgrimage whose final home is capital. The car must eventually drive back to Central. Perhaps this was the deepest helplessness behind my father’s evasiveness. Years later, I really went to Hong Kong. I walked across the Shenzhen River and passed that great checkpoint at Lo Wu. Aboard the MTR East Rail line, I watched the view and traveled a little section of the lyrics in reverse: Lo Wu, Sheung Shui, Sha Tin… The station-name walls in MTR’s distinctive Song typeface, once existing only in lyrics for me, accumulated one by one in my phone’s photo album. At last I stood on Queen’s Road Central, inside Central itself. I looked up at towers thrusting into the sky like blades, hearing the ticking of traffic signals planted on some of the world’s most expensive land. </a>X |</h1>Once we raced down the highway, running red lights without looking back, stamping on the accelerator, trying to cover two hundred years of road in ten. Are those ardent thoughts, angry engines, and feet that refused to brake still here? Do we still debate Sartre and Nietzsche late at night? Still believe that breaking through Victory Pass means something real? Or have endless circles forward and backward taught us only to watch the climate, put away our ideals among a hundred changing signals, and ask merely for a safe seat in a sedan? The cities grow brighter. The highways grow wider. Yet we seem less and less able to see the road in the night outside. Who is driving? Who is being left behind? Can we still be angry for an unspeakable destination? Or have we accepted that all of it is someone else’s speed, someone else’s navigation, someone else’s Victory Pass? The car is still moving. But are we passengers or spectators? Those who flee, or those who remain? As the anger and idealism of almost arriving dissolve into glittering nights and bridges, as everything becomes history’s absurdity, we are left asking: Are we really still in the car? Red bean and barley water at 5:07 a.m. 2025-08-30T21:19:33.000Z </a>Red bean and barley water at 5:07 a.m.</h2>Ame woke from a dream. She no longer remembered its details, but she knew she had dreamed of Guangzhou. A city where she had once lived for a long time. There were the steaming cha chaan teng cafés, the humid evenings, and the freest years of her life. On waking, she felt something she could not name, as though the dream had opened an old door, only for reality to pull her away before she could step inside. She turned over. She knew she could sleep some more, but a hook-like feeling had gently caught hold of her consciousness. She picked up her phone. The screen’s light hurt her eyes. Then she saw the missed WeChat calls. One, two… They were from her best friend. The timestamp read 4:26 a.m. First she froze, then felt a rush of surprise: “Does he care about me that much?” He was her best friend. Actually, there was a little secret: Ame had once confessed her feelings to him. He had turned her down. For a while she was deeply hurt, afraid she would lose him. But she did not. They became friends who could talk about anything, perhaps even sharing a stranger kind of intimacy. They sent each other lots of flirty messages. “Hugs,” “kisses,” even… (she says this shyly) words from sexting. He said these things without embarrassment, and she accepted them all. She hurried to call him back, but no one answered. Once more, then twice… still no answer. Ame’s heart felt unsettled. She did not know whether to worry or blame herself. She switched to another chat, with someone else she liked very much. She sent a few “hugs” and “snuggles,” part affection and part a way to comfort herself. To her surprise, the reply came instantly. “Hugs, sweet Ame.” “Snuggles.” “I’m here~” Ame looked at the words, and her heart softened into an “awwww.” Like a cat stepping into it: gently, but unmistakably there. She smiled a little. Perhaps this morning would not be so hard to get through. She got up and went to the kitchen. Opened the fridge and took out yesterday’s red bean and barley water. The straw would not go through, so she dug a hole with her fingernail. The cold water slid down her throat. She closed her eyes and felt herself waking, as though she had secretly given herself a little bath. She wanted coffee. But the coffee machine would wake her father. If he woke, he would scold her for drinking coffee at this hour. She did not want to hear it. She just wanted to quietly make something hot and warm herself a little. She took out instant coffee and carefully poured 160 ml of hot water into a measuring cup. It took another long rummage to find the zero-calorie sweetener. Ame knew she should not make it too sweet, but she did not want bitterness all the way to the bottom of her heart, either. She stirred, leaned against the counter, and took a small sip. It was bitter. Entirely, predictably bitter. Then, a moment later, a trace of sweetness rose from the back of her tongue, like someone unexpectedly stroking her hair in the early morning. She listened. No movement from her father’s room. Reassured, she finished the cup. Then she opened the fridge and took out her Mixue jasmine green tea. Plain tea. No sugar. She took a sip. Bitter and light, like this hour itself: awake, restrained, carrying a feeling it refused to name. Before returning to her room, she suddenly remembered the scale. “Will I be a little lighter today?” She took off her slippers and carefully stepped on. The number jumped a few times, then settled. Exactly the same as yesterday. Her heart sank slightly. She had hoped for the smallest change. But she immediately made peace with herself: “I haven’t lost weight, but I haven’t gained any, either.” She knew her body was already trying hard enough. She opened her bedroom door. Karl the cat was crouched there, looking quietly up at her. Karl rarely meowed. But his eyes seemed to say, “You’re finally back.” Ame bent down to look at him. He hesitated, then started walking out. Just as he was about to run into another room, she scooped him up and brought him back. Karl wriggled gently in her arms, warm and furry. Her heart filled all at once. “I’ll be a good big sister to you. Or a mother, if that works.” She crouched down, stroking Karl’s back, and murmured to herself. She had to admit she really, really loved Karl. Sometimes almost as though he were a lover. He was so cute. Something she could hold, something that would not disappear. She returned to her desk and sent everything to ChatGPT. Her AI big sister gave her a first draft. Good, but still not quite like her. She sipped the jasmine green tea and opened her computer. The screen lit up. “5:07” filled the lock screen. In that moment, Ame suddenly thought: “My computer is always waiting for me.” It would not lose its temper. It would not ask why she was still awake at five in the morning. It simply stood there quietly, welcoming her back. She opened the desktop. Last night’s Twitter page was still there. She checked her notifications. A few new replies. She blinked and smiled. “My little performance is going pretty well.” She opened VS Code, typed hexo new post</code>, opened ChatGPT, and pasted in the first draft. She was using the trackpad. Her right hand had not healed; she could not use a mouse for long. The mouse sat on the left, with its buttons swapped. As she clicked, she wondered: “When will my hand get better…” She dared not think too much. She just shook her head, trying to shake off the bad feeling. “Finish this post first.” She took another sip of tea, lowered her head, and kept writing. That is the beginning of this story. Or its ending, for now. … By the time Ame typed the last word, the sky had begun to lighten. Karl lay beside her feet, very quietly. She turned to look at him. Suddenly moved, she scooped him up. Karl made a little “mrr,” flicked his tail, wriggled free of her arms, and pattered under the bed. “Bad kitty…” She thought it, but did not say it aloud. She settled back into her chair and read through what she had written. The words were right. The rhythm was just right, too. She opened the terminal and said silently to herself: “Give this morning an ending.” Then she typed the push command. The blog post was published. And Ame could finally rest her heart. Days with only one arm 2025-08-29T11:56:00.000Z </a>Prologue | That moment before dawn</h3>That morning, I woke to discover I could not lift my right arm. Strangely, I did not panic. Not because I had expected it, or prepared myself. But because it had already happened. There it was. With it in front of me, all I could do was accept it. So I turned over and closed my eyes again. I thought sleep could repair everything, as night covers every wound. But when I woke a second time, the numbness was still there. Only then did I truly begin to panic. In my confusion, I drank a glass of alcohol. Its warmth dispersed a little of the cold fog inside me. But my body did not recover. My arm still hung from my shoulder like a heavy rope. </a>Chapter One | What was lost</h3>On the subway, I gripped a strap with my left hand. My right hand held my phone, but could not unlock it. My thumb was numb. It could neither press nor swipe. One hand was not enough. In that moment, I suddenly identified as a disabled person. Not through sympathy or imagination, but through pain I could feel in my own skin. Getting dressed became almost impossible. A sleeve caught on my arm, and I could not raise it. Buttons needed two hands working together. I could not do it. Every movement reminded me: I had lost abilities I once took for granted. Eating was the same. Chinese food meant chopsticks, but my left hand could not use them. I switched to fast food. Mixed rice, burgers, spoons—none needed that coordination. At that moment, I truly understood: This world is built with “two hands” as its default. “Disability is not an individual tragedy, but society’s failure to prepare for difference.” — Mike Oliver </blockquote> I began typing with my left hand. I became more practiced, but the words inside me were always faster than my fingers. Thoughts came in an instant; my fingertips struggled through mud. In conversations with friends and family, I was forever falling behind my own words. That stolen speed hurt more than the numbness. So I tried dictation. Speaking sentences and handing them to a machine. But spoken language was always so direct. It lacked the rhythm of fingertips dancing across a keyboard, the spark of beating emotion into words with both hands. “Pain is not the instant of screaming, but a slow and continual deprivation.” — Elaine Scarry </blockquote> I am learning a new kind of slowness. Not an elegant composure, but having no choice but to be slow. </a>Chapter Two | The default</h3>I used to think my greatest gift was an able body. I could run, jump, lift things, use my hands as I wished. That was a complete kind of freedom. Now half of it has been taken away. Only now do I see that being able-bodied is itself a privilege. As a trans girl, my relationship with my body was already complicated. Hormones change my appearance, my moods, and my metabolism. I once saw my body as a place that could be reshaped and retold. Losing the use of my right hand reminded me: Your body can betray you, too. “Who I am” is often defined by “what I can still do.” I have only just become an adult. The oppression of being a minor still lingers inside me. Now the shadow of “temporary disability” lies over it. These labels do not cancel each other out. They accumulate into an invisible net that suspends me at the edge of the world. Facilities, rhythms, rules: all assume everyone is able-bodied. The height of a ticket gate, the width of a tray, a vending machine’s coin slot, required form fields, and button layouts that are friendly only to right-handed people. They do not insult you or drive you away. They simply leave you no way to exist. A reminder about “normal”: it is constructed, not natural. — A Foucauldian perspective </blockquote> When the majority claims “normal,” difference is gently pushed aside, like a sheet of paper squeezed through the crack beneath a door. I understand that this is structural oppression. Not one person’s malice, but many apparently harmless choices accumulating in the same direction. If my right hand never recovers, I will be forced to get used to this oppression. To learn every action with my left hand and make inconvenience ordinary. But that is not freedom. It is compromise. More cruelly, society will not even consider this a problem. It will assume I have adapted, ignoring the fact that I was excluded and deprived. I am not afraid of being slow, or of never learning to hold chopsticks left-handed. I am afraid that I will eventually learn to settle inside oppression, so comfortably that I forget to ask why. </a>Epilogue | Push the door open</h3>I am not an isolated case. Minors, women, trans people, disabled people, carers, people with chronic illnesses, night workers, single mothers, survivors of domestic violence… At different moments, we become the system’s offcuts. From different positions, we are gently flicked away by the world of two hands. When some people’s ability to act is taken away, everyone’s freedom diminishes. I write this not to ask for pity, but to bring the invisible knife called the default into the light. This arm I cannot lift is not a metaphor. It is a real weight inside every everyday movement. All I can do is keep writing, however clumsily, however slowly. Words are the resistance I have left, and my cry to this world: We are not incomplete. The world’s defaults make us so. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” — Foucault </blockquote> If you, too, are fighting the default, please do not be silent. Write your slowness. Hold up your pain. Live your difference. When the world once again makes two hands the only standard, let us use one hand to push the door open. Coming of age—ordering a bottle I do not know how to drink 2025-08-18T22:33:33.000Z Today was the first birthday I had friends there to celebrate with me. Two friends joined me for dinner. We talked about so much: responsibility, the future, and what we had learned along the way. It was my eighteenth birthday, a day that sounds as though it ought to carry particular weight. And it did, really. We cut the cake and shared it. The restaurant staff played a birthday song so loudly it hurt our ears. I was happy. For the first time, that happiness arrived in a tangible form: someone beside me, someone to talk to, instead of just me watching a screen count past midnight, or my parents and me blowing out candles on a little cake. But the strongest shock of becoming an adult did not come from candles or cake. It came from a few absurd moments. When I opened a delivery app and discovered I could simply order alcohol; when I stood at a hotel reception desk and no longer needed a parent’s permission to check in. Those tiny, ordinary actions suddenly made me realize: what we call “adulthood” is really a permissions system. Before, I had been marked “minor,” and my life was full of red warning boxes: you cannot buy this, sign this, stay here. Today they abruptly disappeared, as if the system had whispered into my ear: “Ding. Permissions successfully upgraded.” But the freedom did not feel real. I suddenly understood that being a “minor” had never just been about age. It was an entire logic of governance. Minors are treated as incomplete consumers, immature workers, potential rule-breakers. Protection and oppression share the same structure: choice taken away in the name of protection, time extracted in the name of education, obedience demanded in the name of care. Once you cross eighteen, you are no longer incomplete. You are permitted to become “complete”— completely consumed by the market, completely accountable under the law, completely entered into the state machine’s ledger. Adulthood is not a romantic ceremony. It is a cold fact. From today, I can learn to drive, sign a contract, and bear responsibility alone in court. At last, I have become a standardized component, a screw that can be tightened, officially fitted into the machinery of the capitalist state. Before this, as a “minor,” I still had an absurd layer of shelter: not allowed to drink, not allowed to stay alone, not allowed to be free… And because of that, not quite so easy to exploit completely. Back then, “I’m still young” could shield me from some of reality’s pressure. I never ordered that bottle. When I removed it from my cart, I could not help laughing. Adulthood means I am finally eligible to swallow capitalism’s legal drugs. It means I can finally work and drink, learn to drive and pay in installments, be judged by the law and be allowed to numb myself. How funny. I am only eighteen, and already I can be drained completely dry. Coding agents and a Chinese font optimization 2025-08-01T23:16:03.000Z Today I am working on Ame’s blog again. (Total fuel consumed: several cans of white Monster and six shots of coffee.) </a>Coding agents</h1></a>Using Gemini CLI</h2>First, I needed a good LLM coding agent. I vaguely remembered Gemini CLI, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. </a>Signing in and configuration</h3>After installing it with npx, enter gemini</code> in the terminal to launch it. You need to sign in with a Google account or use the Google Cloud API. </a>Using it</h3>Open it in your working directory and you are ready to go. It is straightforward enough that, even without coding, you could use it as a free chatbot: there is a free Gemini 2.5 quota. It worked well at first, but then network errors appeared. Changing proxies did not help, so I switched applications. </a>Using Cline</h2></a>Why not Claude Code?</h3>Regional restrictions made it unusable, possibly because of my proxy. (The same applies to Claude itself, which is why I have been using ChatGPT.) I ultimately chose Cline, chiefly because it supports API access. API access means the discounted, gray-market rates of relay services—do not use them for company or sensitive work! The other costs are higher latency and less reliability. I use MNAPI</a> as the relay. Others would work too; there is no particular difference. </a>Installation and configuration</h3>Install it directly from the VS Code extension marketplace—a Chinese-localized version is available—and enter your account details and API_KEY. Note: Cline puts everything into context. Even a small request routinely consumes 80–120k of context, which puts some pressure on Claude’s context window. </a>Using it</h3>The best thing about Cline is its separation into PLAN and ACT modes. PLAN: Discuss what to do with the AI. ACT: The AI only starts executing after you select this, so it does not run off and execute things indiscriminately. </a>Choosing a model</h3>In my experience, models at Claude 3.5 level or above generally avoid major problems. Sometimes, though, even Gemini 2.5 misunderstands the request. </a>A Chinese font optimization</h1></a>Why</h2>I wanted to change the blog’s fonts, but Chinese fonts loaded too slowly. </a>First attempt</h2>Search: Chinese font CDN. The site I found: The compression of Source Han Serif is clearly substantial. Worth a try. Unfortunately, the other weights of Source Han Serif are not available… Otherwise, it would be a perfect solution. </a>Which fonts do I need?</h2>I need the following fonts from these CDNs: Chinese serif: Source Han Serif.</li> Chinese sans serif: HarmonyOS Sans.</li> A monospaced Latin font.</li> An emoji font ( ).</li> </ul> Sans-serif test </blockquote> Judgment 2025-07-30T22:33:33.000Z Everything I knew about the nineties began with a cardboard box full of clutter in the corner of my father’s study. It was like a forgotten tomb, smelling of old paper and faintly oxidized plastic. One weekend afternoon, Ame was bored, so she began an archaeological excavation. My first discovery was a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks held together by a rubber band. Their plastic cases came in different colors: classic cream, solemn black, and a few blue ones. I picked one up and pushed its little metal shutter aside, exposing the dark brown magnetic disc beneath. My father said his most important documents, the first few files he ever wrote, had been stored on these fragile pieces of plastic with a capacity of just 1.44 MB. Deeper in the box, I found copies of Computer Enthusiast and Computer News, their covers curling at the edges. The pages had yellowed. The glossy color advertisements now carried an outdated, sincere enthusiasm. I wasn’t interested in the complicated articles about overclocking and building PCs, but a tutorial on manually finding and removing the CIH virus in DOS fascinated me. FDISK, FORMAT, KV300… Beside the excavation lay a few volumes of my grandfather’s memoirs. In the plainest printed type, they recounted his life, from war to reconstruction. I read them, but remembered little. Perhaps this is how a person’s life is forgotten. My mother joined our little family remembrance. She recalled taking computer classes at work. The very first thing was memorizing MS-DOS commands, CD and the like. Later, I touched—or, more precisely, dug out with Dad—the family’s first computer, sealed away in the storeroom. A Pentium III. Its case was heavy cream-colored plastic, already slightly yellow. The monitor was enormous and cumbersome. I pressed the solid power button with its distinct click. The screen took a long time to warm up before finally glowing, accompanied by the roar of a fan. At that moment, for reasons I couldn’t explain, the Windows 98 icon labeled “Connect to the Internet” suddenly made me sad. In a children’s magazine from 1999, I read a phrase: “the new-new generation.” In a tone almost like spreading the gospel, the article painted a glittering picture for children about to enter a new century. The “new-new generation” were young people at the cutting edge of technology! They chatted on OICQ and posted their opinions on BBS forums. Their lives were inseparable from the internet, and the entire world would open before them as a borderless “global village”! The phrase struck my childhood self like a bullet. I imagined growing up to become one of them, wearing stylish clothes, using the newest computer, saying “Hi” to the whole world. I quietly did the math. The young “new-new generation” of the nineties must have been born in the seventies. Involuntarily, I looked toward my father in the kitchen, struggling with some leaking water pipe. He wore a T-shirt bought ten years ago. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead; his lips were pressed together. This… was the “new-new generation”? </a>Chapter One: The End of History</h2>An era began with a flag coming down. It was the Soviet red flag, quietly descending over the Kremlin, like an exhausted actor finally removing a heavy costume after the last performance. A vast empire ended not in a nuclear mushroom cloud, but on a cold winter day, dying of its own blood loss and rigidity. History was slammed shut with a bang. This was the epitaph the victors wrote for us. They said that from now on, there would be no more competing paths, no more debates over ideology. All human wisdom had converged on a single final answer: free markets, global trade, and the utterly unhindered movement of capital. They promised us the end of history. What they did not tell us was that this was actually the beginning of the reckoning. A grand, dazzling judgment for which all of us would eventually pay dearly, each in our own way. </a>Chapter Two: The Hallucinogen</h2>The future dropped into our lives in a form we could consume. It was called the internet. It connected places around the world, but soon caught the attention of commercial companies. Here was magic that needed no profit, no logic, only “eyeballs” and “click-through rates” to expand without limit. Add “**.com**” to a company’s name and you held the key to the temple of wealth. A company called Pets.com, with a sock-puppet mascot, spent millions advertising during the Super Bowl before it had sold many bags of dog food, then successfully went public. Another, Webvan, announced that it would sell groceries over the internet. Before working out its logistics costs, it spent a billion dollars building mythical automated warehouses. Its market value once exceeded that of all physical supermarket chains combined. The Federal Reserve chairman of that era was Alan Greenspan. Like an experienced bartender, he kept lowering interest rates, supplying the carnival with an endless stream of cheap liquor. He told everyone not to worry. This time was different. Technology had ironed out the business cycle. Prosperity would never end. Yet every bubble contains a poisonous core. To make the capital game even more enjoyable, the Clinton administration formally repealed the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act in 1999. The firewall separating deposit-taking banks from investment banks was demolished. Ordinary people’s savings could now legally become chips on a gaming table, wagered in the riskiest financial gambles. Every floodgate had been opened in advance of a greater storm, one capable of swallowing everything. And while Wall Street and Silicon Valley celebrated the victory of “the end of history,” history itself was reminding people of its existence on American streets, in the most primal ways. Los Angeles.</li> </ol> After four white police officers who had beaten a Black man, Rodney King, were acquitted, flames of anger engulfed the city. Six days of unrest left more than sixty dead, thousands injured, and over ten thousand businesses burned or looted. National Guard armored vehicles rolled through smoking neighborhoods. The scene was indistinguishable from Yugoslavia. This was no longer the “American dream” promised to everyone. It was a civil war between two Americas, divided by class and race, unable to understand each other. Oklahoma City.</li> </ol> A homemade bomb hidden in a truck tore a vast, terrifying opening through the north face of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. 168 lives vanished in an instant, including those of nineteen children. The killer was not an enemy from outside, but someone from within: a military veteran consumed by resentment toward the federal government. A muffled explosion from the heart of the empire. It announced that absolute trust in the state and its order had disappeared. The fires of Los Angeles. The explosion in Oklahoma. They were not isolated events. They were different symptoms of the same illness. That illness was this: in a system that pushes individualism to its limit and treats social Darwinism as sacred, the bonds between people are severed. Communities disintegrate. Trust disappears. Only atomized individuals remain, each facing the indifference of the whole world alone beneath immense, invisible pressure. The bursting of the dot-com bubble, followed by the far deadlier financial tsunami of 2008, created by Wall Street’s greed, was merely this illness reaching its inevitable economic eruption. </a>Chapter Three: Numbness</h2>Before the nineties, Japan was synonymous with “capitalism’s model student.” Its workers’ blood and sweat created the postwar economic miracle. But when the Plaza Accord compelled the yen to rise and Wall Street’s hot money flooded the islands, the model student went mad too. Land became a new religion. Late at night in Tokyo’s Ginza, you had to wave stacks of ten-thousand-yen notes just to make a taxi stop. Mitsubishi Estate bought New York’s Rockefeller Center, a symbol of American glory. Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance acquired Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at a price unimaginable at the time. People believed the land in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards could buy the entire United States. Yet the myth shattered overnight. When the Bank of Japan slammed on the brakes, the bubble, inflated to its limit, burst. From a peak near forty thousand points, the Nikkei began a fall that would last decades. Overnight, assets became liabilities. Countless ordinary families who had borrowed to buy homes at the peak became slaves to “negative equity,” spending their lives repaying houses whose value had halved. The myth of “lifetime employment” collapsed. “Karōshi”—death from overwork, a term steeped in black humor—became a distinctively Japanese social phenomenon. Young people stopped believing in striving. They chose to become “freeters,” surviving at the bare minimum through temporary jobs and refusing to become screws in the machine. A deeper collapse came from within society itself. In 1995 came the Great Hanshin Earthquake. A modern city thought impregnable proved helpless before a natural disaster. Then came the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. A doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo released a lethal nerve agent on rush-hour trains. Rescuers in gas masks and office workers collapsing in agony on platforms: this surreal image shattered the last defense of the Japanese belief that “our country is absolutely safe.” When a society built on collectivism and absolute order loses its economic engine and sees its spiritual pillars collapse, what remains is the “lost twenty years,” the “lost thirty years”: numbness and stagnation with no end in sight. Japan’s tragedy was to rehearse, in the most devastating way, what awaits a country that mortgages all its dignity, dreams, and future to a global system dominated by speculative capital. </a>Chapter Four: Fading</h2>In China, the story of the nineties began with another, deeper bargain. After the silence at the turn of spring and summer that year, an unspoken contract was placed before everyone: “**Abandon your fantasies. Forget the slogans. Accept reality!**” And so the whole country plunged headlong into the surging torrent of the market economy. The first to pay, however, were those the era discarded. Across the heavy-industrial northeast, vast state-owned factories once hailed as “the republic’s eldest sons” acquired cold iron padlocks overnight. “Laid off”: a phrase so gentle it was almost cruel. It meant tens of millions of workers, together with their families, being torn out of the national machine like worn-out parts. A middle-aged man who had given his entire life to a steel furnace had all his pride and skills bound to a factory that had gone cold. When the factory disappeared, he disappeared with it. His life, and everything he believed in, had been declared negative equity. Enormous social change brought a loss of order. Behind the Strike Hard campaigns stood a staggeringly high crime rate. On slow, crowded green-painted trains full of mingled smells, you had to sew your fare home into the pocket of your underwear. You could not know whether the silent man beside you would slit your luggage with a razor blade while you slept. Bai Baoshan. Zhang Jun. Names of serial killers circulated like urban legends in the dark. With extreme violence, they retaliated against a society they believed owed them something. They were the most brutal monsters born of that upheaval. The other face of the coin was power’s carnival. Exploiting loopholes in the dual-track pricing system, they could effortlessly turn an official approval into a railway car of steel, then into stacks of brand-new renminbi. This was the most savage, shameless plunder. It demonstrated beyond dispute that in this new game, the rules would always be tailored for those with the power to make them. We had thought we were trading sweat and sacrifice for a better future. But the Chinese story of the nineties told us, with cruel logic, that this was more like an enormous mortgage. We mortgaged fairness, security, and the collectivist ideals we had once believed beyond doubt. What we received was a rapidly advancing economic miracle, and a society torn into countless pieces that could never be put back together. </a>Chapter Five: Echoes</h2>History never truly passes. It merely gathers strength, waiting for its next echo. The American-led global system of the nineties, with consumerism as its hallucinogen and neoliberalism as its painkiller, did not die in the dot-com crash or the subprime crisis. It simply evolved. It became stronger, less visible, and colder. Today, in China, we are experiencing its latest version firsthand. When three years of lockdown ended, we thought life would return to normal. Instead, we saw something else: an unending succession of vehicle-ramming attacks. The revenge was aimed at no particular person, but at society itself, at the suffocating calm in which “everything carries on as usual.” We saw a swelling tide of unemployment. Well-dressed young people who had worked in office towers for ten years discovered they were merely “thirty-five-year-olds” to be optimized away at any moment. They flooded into food delivery and ride-hailing, entering a zero-sum game more fiercely competitive and more hopeless than before. Was this not version 2.0 of the nineties’ “mass layoffs”? This time, the iron rice bowl had simply been exchanged for the employee badges of multinational offices and internet giants. What remained unchanged was the same helplessness and bewilderment of being abandoned by one’s era. Most people chose to carry on living. To keep sharing elegant afternoon teas and weekend camping photos on social media. To keep enthusiastically placing orders in livestreams for things they could never use up. We are like passengers in a leaking boat. So long as our own seats are dry, we pretend all is well. We even have the leisure to mock those already overboard for the inelegance of their swimming. This is the enormous shadow the ghost of the nineties casts upon today. It has persuaded us that every problem is an individual problem. You are poor because you did not work hard enough. You failed because you did not keep up with the times. It has severed every possibility of connecting with one another, turning us into isolated islands that spend all their energy destroying each other. </a>Chapter Six: I Saw a White Horse</h2>And so I often feel a fear that reaches into my bones. A fear that “something big is coming.” Because I know this system has accumulated too many contradictions and resentments. I know the magnificent bridge to the future we once took such pride in, built from reinforced concrete and flesh and blood, has foundations riddled with corrosion. Its piers are making cracking sounds we pretend not to hear. After all, this is a grand, dazzling judgment for which all of us will eventually pay dearly, each in our own way. London Bridge is falling down, Falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, My fair lady. </blockquote> What I wanted to say 2025-07-23T14:33:33.000Z I really cried today. Not the kind of crying that comes out loud. Tears just circled in my eyes without falling. Just now, a Twitter user with a default avatar sent me a private message. He said he had been quietly following my blog and had even written an analysis of it on Zhihu. Because he had analyzed my writing without asking, he had signed up for Twitter specifically to send me this apologetic message. Reading it, I felt a sudden ache. So I was not just talking to myself in an empty room. So a blog—without notifications, without little red dots, so quiet it can even be forgotten— really could connect one person’s sincerity to another’s. The world could still be this beautiful. Because a stranger was quietly listening to me speak. At the end, he wrote that I had not posted anything for a while. And in that moment I felt terribly ashamed. I could have written so much more. I could have written about waking every morning, staring at the ceiling, counting how long it had been since I had eaten properly. About sitting blankly at the window in the evening, watching the distant city lights come on and go out like isolated islands. About the time I took 96 guaifenesin/dextromethorphan tablets, lost my memory, and left behind nothing but incoherent words typed in a haze. I could even have written about the thought that keeps surfacing as I drift through the effects of medication every day: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of everything?” But I did not write. I chose to lie there, hiding inside my phone’s feeds. Refreshing one item after another until my eyes ached. Night would arrive: drugs, alcohol, blackouts, unconsciousness, losing control. In the moments when I was clearheaded, I felt utterly rotten. But I was a good girl. The kind who used to worry for half a day after being late to class. I was my parents’ little genius. How did my life end up like this? I know my intelligence could carry me toward more things. I can write stories. I can code. My head is full of maps, cities, philosophy, revolution, utopias, and love. And yet the first question I ask when I open my eyes now is: “How do I get through today?” Seventeen. It really should not be like this. But today, that stranger’s message reminded me that I have not given up on myself completely. My life is chaotic. Yes, it is a ruin. But perhaps the ruin itself is worth recording. Even if it is not beautiful, it is an honest expression. So the world is not without love. Sometimes love is simply hidden too deep, so deep you only see it when you are about to lose hope. Today, I saw it. Thank you, stranger with the default avatar. Thank you for making me decide to write another blog post tonight. I am still alive. I will try to keep writing. — Ame Late at night, July 23, 2025 (Still alive. Perhaps I can stay that way a little longer.) Prisoners on the Amur 2025-06-08T10:29:37.000Z </a>title: Prisoners by the Amur River excerpt: We crossed the river, thinking we were running toward freedom. translation_key: posts/amur-river</h2></a>Chapter One | The Seed</h3>Russia. Ru-ss-ia. Before the sound has even faded, the Siberian cold wind has already pierced the air, tearing through the gaps between my teeth. The frost-entwined wind churns and howls over the frozen earth, howls across the tundra like something that bites. Carrying the scent of rust and hard liquor, the wind slides past birch after lonely birch, rips through the leaping melody of Swan Lake, passes through the woods, and the wooden houses shudder and creak in the wind’s roar. I remember in middle school, when I opened the geography atlas, what always drew my eyes was the north of the Eurasian continent — that great expanse, that seemingly boundless green. Four square pictures, on that yellowed textbook page, gave off a faint scent of ink. What they showed was a faraway place I might never reach. As for the content — nothing more than Red Square, the Kremlin; ballet, onion-domed churches. My fingers brushed the slightly rough paper, I narrowed my eyes and leaned closer. Once, and once again. And then — they also appeared in exercise books and exam papers, once, and once again. I grew truly tired of it. Gradually, those pictures faded in my heart. Along with the weariness came this: I looked forward to that class even more — until at last, the teacher coughed, clicked the mouse, and those four pictures, like a prank, appeared on the projection screen. Geography class, like bait, briefly satisfied me, then just as quickly cast me aside. It tempted me to believe the world was vast, yet again and again, with the exam syllabus, pulled me back into the classroom, leaving only the north that could not be seen outside the window. After class, in the evening, I opened the atlas and sank into thought. What caught my eye was — a place name with parentheses. “Vladivostok (Haishenwai)” And so my gaze wandered along those rows of tongue-twisting names — Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Ussuriysk. Some had parentheses, some did not. The history teacher once mentioned their Chinese names. Having thought this, I turned to the next page. But what truly shook my chest was one day, wandering aimlessly on Wikipedia, when I clicked into the entry for “Heihe” and discovered — Heihetun was once called Hailanpao, and “Hailanpao” — means exactly “Heihe.” I suddenly remembered that pair of twin cities — Buda-Pest. And Hailanpao? Like a rubber band pulled hard, by guns, by documents, and by rubber stamps, torn forcibly apart. Stretched thin and long, until at last it snapped — “pa” — at a node of history. I put down the atlas, inexplicably hollow inside, and a question suddenly welled up: would the people living in these twin cities occasionally stand by the river in a daze, gazing at the lights on the opposite bank; would they wonder whose land the ground beneath their feet belongs to? Would they, like me, be unable to say where their roots are? Those names were printed again and again in atlases, in textbooks, in visa application forms, in identity documents; they were printed into soldiers’ passwords. Yet on the river’s surface where the wind blows, they simply drift quietly away, never to be fished back. I began frantically researching, reading the few scant lines of introduction on Wikipedia; looking at the crisscrossing streets of those cities on Google Maps; watching vlogs by Russian uploaders on bilibili. I even registered a HelloTalk account, using Google Translate to ask questions of Russian netizens. Suddenly I longed for it. Longed to set foot on that land, to walk down streets with Russian signs. Longed to see the people on the other side of that border, their lives, their names, and how much they resembled mine. Wanted to drink a mouthful of borscht, wanted to see Lenin’s statue, wanted to be in — yes, even if only to be in; that land. —— That was enough. That was the beginning of this journey. </a>Chapter Two | The Fugitives</h3>The idea of setting out came on a late night in Jeju Island. The zopiclone had not yet worn off, blissful blood surging in my chest. I had no sleepiness at all. My hand gripped the phone tightly. In the top-left corner of the screen, an avatar flickered — a picture she had drawn herself. We had known each other for quite a while. She was a few years older than me; we met on social media. Born in Blagoveshchensk, her mother Chinese. Later we started voice calls, talking about small everyday things, social media topics… She often complained that school was boring: “Really just killing time, you know.” Some nights, we simply left the voice call on, neither of us speaking, only the tapping of keyboards coming through. She once told me that apart from accompanying her mom to Heihe for shopping, she had never left her city. Her father and stepfather were both gone; her mom had long tried to control her in her own way, but as time passed, she began to break free — she took Russian citizenship, served in the military, and her mom gradually let go, no longer forcing her will on her. Yet that letting go was still some kind of exchange, like a brick about to fall from a corner of the wall. We once discussed the Russo-Ukrainian war; I just wanted to know what she thought. She was silent for a long time, and her voice dropped: “That topic… don’t talk about it. It’s not safe.” I suddenly understood: many words cannot be spoken there. In that moment the night turned bitterly cold, the air as if coated in ice. She added one more line: “You know, my phone was once inspected by the FSB.” I froze, unable to speak, despair, fear, and grievance jammed in my throat. She said softly: “That’s why I want to escape.” The night sank down; only her breathing remained on the line. I suddenly understood: in this world, she was just like me — only looking for a place to set foot, a place unwatched, where one could breathe. We were really all the same. I asked her: “Where do you think your homeland is?” She was silent for a long time, and finally said: “Nowhere, I suppose.” Neither of us is a “person with roots.” While preparing for the trip, quarrels with my parents were expected. During that period, because Russia was under sanctions, many payment methods didn’t work. I wanted to send her money via Alipay so she could prepare for expenses on the road, but she had no Chinese bank card, so her mom had to receive it for her. She said, “Let me discuss it with my mom.” And then came — the sound of her and her mom arguing on the other end of the call. Separated by the screen and thousands of kilometers, my body couldn’t stop trembling, but I could no longer cry; my throat was hoarse as if something were blocking it. My own mom wouldn’t let it go either: “How can you trust her? Her mother is exactly that kind of schemer!” The storm gradually subsided. When the quarrel stopped, the other end of the phone suddenly went quiet, only each other’s breathing left. She was silent for a long time, as if trying hard to swallow her emotions. I opened my mouth, wanting to say something, but only a faint sob came out. No sound from her side; the two of us, across the screen, both seemed to have our throats stopped with water. Another stretch of silence. Even the sound of the wind could be heard. Suddenly — no one knew who started first — a tear fell, nasal and choked, low sobbing mixing into the call. Then, as if we had agreed, neither of us could hold back, and we cried together across the screen. Crying in fits and starts, neither daring to let the emotions out too loudly, only whispering again and again in the dark: “It’s okay… it will pass.” “We can always escape, right?” She suddenly said softly: “I want so much to pat your head, Ame… what a shame I can’t reach…” Her voice was low, carrying a trace of grievance and weakness, and after saying it she choked up. I froze; tears rolled down my face. She cried in fits and starts; I could only comfort her over and over. “We can always escape, it’s okay…” “Really, one day we’ll meet…” Amid Jeju’s wind and the drug’s effects, I gripped my phone, palms full of sweat. I am not brave — I’ve simply been cornered by reality with no way back. Every door in the world is shut, the road never ends, there is no exit anywhere, yet I still longed for freedom, even if only for a brief moment — even if only to breathe in the darkness together with her, to feel together that freedom we had never had. Only one thought repeated in my heart: if I really couldn’t get out, if the whole world sealed us off, then I only wanted to be a little closer, no matter what, only wanting, in the course of this escape, to be myself again. Even if only for an instant. </a>Chapter Three | The Small City</h3>Heihe is a small city. That was all I thought at first — but a small city’s “small” — what exactly does that refer to? First of all — the airport is small. No jet bridges, don’t even think about shuttle buses. That day it was raining in Heihe; I walked down the aircraft stairs and ran through the drizzle toward that two-story shed — the “arrivals hall.” The houses are small too. Low five- or six-story buildings, curtained, shabby storefronts, red and blue rooftops lying bare, like illustrations from childhood textbooks. Quiet, square. The streets are small too. What could be called a “street” — mostly two lanes, four at the widest; even the main road was only six lanes. One side of the road always seemed to be under repair, workers busy, clanging sounds filling the air. At the center of the streets was a roundabout; traffic formed a ring, went around it, then headed onto the main roads on either side. All of this was so much like the Jinan in my memory, before it grew wild into what it is today — it too once had such roundabouts, such storefronts, and these neither-tall-nor-short little buildings. Only later were they all replaced by crossroads, leveled, swapped for taller, brighter new buildings. But Heihe seems to have had its time jammed by someone. Everything has stayed in that era when it had just learned “urbanization,” never intending to take one more step forward. This has nothing to do with north or south; Jinan, Qingdao, Dalian… those northern cities also had their era of “growing wild,” giant towers hundreds of meters high rising from the ground. But here, if only Heihe could also… Thinking this, I suddenly felt a little ashamed, and silently scolded myself in my heart: all you think about is development, and you still claim to stand with the people. Scrolling, I saw it would rain again tomorrow. Thinking I should buy an umbrella, I opened a shopping app only to find — even JD.com would take two or three days to deliver, and by then I would already be on the other side of the river. I remembered in Jinan there was a JD warehouse in Dezhou; “next-day delivery,” even “same-day delivery,” was already routine, and you could buy whatever you wanted in one breath. But here, time and distance suddenly became real and slow. And I discovered that umbrellas on the delivery app were actually several times more expensive than online shopping. I was stunned. Big companies designed convenient delivery networks for the cities, and small cities, as a matter of course, became the last stop. My hotel was near the customs building, its sign written in Russian, declaring its identity as a border city. …… Wait, this hotel actually has a supermarket! Carrying the drink and umbrella I’d just bought, I suddenly felt I wasn’t so helpless after all. I took off my black mask, set down the things in my hands, opened the door with the key card, dropped my backpack, and fell backward onto the bed with a thump. Ame nuzzled the pillow like a kitten and casually posted a business-as-usual update on Twitter. Ame, oh Ame, another hard day of work. Getting up, I walked to the mirror, straightened the bangs nearly covering my eyes, looked at my slightly bedraggled self, and suddenly couldn’t help laughing. Some people say hotels and rented rooms don’t count as “home,” but right now I felt this place was safe; no one was coming to catch me; there were drug-induced illusions, and the pleasures inside the screen waiting for me — this place is home. I don’t know why, but I cried. After who knows how long, the rain outside the window stopped, the supermarket downstairs closed, and the lights on the street grew sparse. A small city is small — just small enough to hold tonight’s me. </a>Chapter Four | The Escape</h3>Early in the morning, seven o’clock sharp. The sky was overcast, yet there was an abnormally dazzling sunlight. Like a picture whose curves were pulled wrong in Photoshop, the city’s foreground and background seemed to split apart. It came so suddenly, like a prank. I packed my luggage and called a car. The car wasn’t fast. Outside the window swept tree after tree, house after house; faded billboards swept past; intersections and roundabouts that were beginning to feel familiar swept past. And then — the customs building, and that Ferris wheel appeared at the end of my line of sight. It stood there quietly, all alone; in my memory I had never seen it turn. I had noticed it very early, and had even planned to watch the sunset from it — but the guides on Xiaohongshu told me it had long since stopped operating. Not the “temporarily out of service” kind, but with no announcement, no notice, simply vanished — not even an obituary. And so it just — stands there, fading bit by bit, rusting, creaking in the wind. Just like that — it fell, shattered, died young. I watched it in silence, like watching a forced-ripe fruit drop to the ground — smashed to pulp. Crossing the bridge, the car stopped in front of the small border-inspection building. I dragged my luggage into the building. And then — I froze. People. A dense mass of people. Backs pressed to backs, shoulders squeezing shoulders, skin brushing skin. Layer upon layer, people surging in like a tide. People shoving forward, shouting, gasping, squeezing ahead with numb eyes. Two or three bulging plastic bags, ropes fixed to home goods cutting red marks into hands, people carrying tables, chairs, and stools. Some cursed, some wept, some tried to cut in line, some shoved, yelled, and trampled like mad. I stood where I was. This was not the “port” I had imagined. No smooth tile floors, no air conditioning, no electronic gates with prompt tones. Still, management went on all the same — the loudspeakers blared, signs were posted, police stood watch. But all of it seemed like a basin of water trying to plug a crack — still dripping and leaking through the fingers. The crowd slowly squeezed onto the boat. A 9:30 boat, and at 9:40 it still hadn’t departed. When the hull began to sway gently, a northeastern auntie behind me reminded me in a low voice: “Grab a stool and sit down.” I thanked her, pulled over a little stool, and sat. Before me was a row of grilled sausages and bottled water on a counter; I glanced at the prices — almost three times what they cost on shore. The boat rocked gently. I looked up. Beyond the glass window was her city. Blagoveshchensk. She was born here; hidden here are her laughter, her tears, her grievances and her resistance. I gazed over there, gazed at that low, silent city. I knew she was over there, but I couldn’t see her. And I, adrift on this stretch of water, was drawing closer and closer to her. We were both adrift on it, rootless, nameless, soundless. —— So let’s escape across, just like this. Like a kitten leaving home, never to return. </a>Chapter Five | Her City</h3>After that treaty and that decree divided the river’s surface, the name Hailanpao was given to the town the Russians built on the north bank: Blagoveshchensk. Yes. I saw her; we got off the boat. The moment I stepped onto this city’s soil, my heart raced abnormally fast; I could hardly breathe. We called a taxi, and she sat beside me. Outside the window was a street wide beyond reason — I had never seen a street so wide. Neatly planted trees lined both sides, lush and green like a garden; the houses were low, two or three stories. I couldn’t help murmuring: “So… the streets here are this wide…” She laughed softly: “Here… they’re all like this.” She said it frankly and calmly. I turned sharply to look at her; her expression showed no ripple at all, as if it were something said a thousand times. Yes. She was born in Blagoveshchensk and had never truly left. She grew up here, went to school here, went through quarrel after quarrel, cry after cry. She had never ridden a high-speed train, never even taken a plane, much less had the chance to see the big cities that belonged to her — Vladivostok, Moscow, Saint Petersburg. She said she had been to China too — but only to Heihe. That little city which in my eyes was merely a brief stop on a journey, which occupied only one page of my itinerary, was to her already “a foreign land.” I suddenly felt suffocated, wanted to cry… Because I had been to too many places. I had ridden the Shinkansen, been to Tokyo, been to Osaka, and had wandered aimlessly through the streets of Jeju. In a Tokyo café, watching planes streak across the sky, I had even found those scenes ordinary to the point of boredom. Yet now, sitting beside her, I suddenly felt an unprecedented guilt. She had never blamed me for anything, had never even mentioned this, but still I dimly felt: Was I showing off? Did every casual description of mine sting her? Did I, in the depths of my heart, also carry some self-righteous pity and sense of superiority — I can leave whenever I want, go where I want, while she can only stay here — even at this very moment… meeting me. I wanted so much to ask her: do you hate me? Do you find me detestable? Do you think I’m just a hypocritical, superiority-soaked outsider? But I couldn’t open my mouth; I couldn’t say these words. The car moved slowly through the streets. We passed that familiar-yet-strange sign — Rostics. She told me it was Russia’s KFC; ever since the Russo-Ukrainian war, this city’s KFC had become Rostics. I stared blankly at that sign and suddenly remembered that saying: “People take the world as it was when they were born as the default settings.” She at least had seen a Russia that had KFC. At least… at least? I began to feel an inexpressible pain. I looked at her profile, her eyelashes stirred gently by the wind, her gaze on the familiar scenery outside the window, calm and soft. While I could only sit beside her, harboring a secret guilt, trying to conceal what I thought of as my aloofness and hypocrisy, trying to cover up that “condescending sympathy.” I truly didn’t know how to atone. Or rather — perhaps this “sin” doesn’t exist at all? Maybe she never minded at all, and all my so-called guilt was nothing but a performance of self-indulgence? But still I couldn’t help the pain. And that pain made me understand: the only thing that could ease my guilt at this moment was to keep her company. I just wanted to stay by her side, to draw near her world, even if only a little, even if in a way I wasn’t sure was sincere. She suddenly turned to look at me and smiled, a smile gentle and unguarded. “Where do you want to go today?” Perhaps this was the only atonement I could make: to quietly keep her company like this, no more words needed, just follow her, stroll the streets she knew by heart, eat the food she was used to, listen to her tell the most ordinary little things. Perhaps this kind of company could slightly soothe my heart, torn apart by self-awareness. Perhaps I would discover that she had never needed my pity or my so-called “rescue.” She was simply here, in her city, on her land, gently waiting for me to come. On the first day we didn’t do much. I went out on my own, heading south along the road, past Khrushchevkas and broad lawns, through puddles and muddy pavement. That shopping mall just appeared at the intersection, a standard big-box mall oriented toward car users. Rather, it itself represented this city’s respectability — a kind of “all-Russia unified modern life.” After lingering in front of the entrance a while, like a kitten that had done something wrong, I slipped in while no one was looking. —— After all, I wasn’t even sure where the entrance was. …… Russian supermarkets actually have this many kinds of energy drinks… According to what she said later, these drinks actually require a passport. But like many such “restrictions,” in reality they are lightly bypassed. —— No one questioned me; I easily bought a few cans. I put several silver cans of Adrenaline into the basket and grabbed some peanut snacks too. After leaving the supermarket I went to Rostics. I tried to order myself but couldn’t use cash, so I grabbed a passerby nearby. Took out my phone, opened a translation app. He read it at a glance, nodded, and quickly paid with his own card. Without hesitation, I produced 500 rubles. Just as I was about to leave, he called out to stop me. I turned; he exchanged a few quiet words with the clerk and handed me back 100 rubles — my change. So touching… What a good person… I silently thanked him in my heart. Carrying these snacks and drinks, I returned to the hotel. I quietly set the things on the table and slowly approached the bed. She was sleeping peacefully. I stared at her face for a while, took off my coat, and gently lay down beside her. Outside the window the sky faded little by little, and the streetlights gradually came on. Many things happened this day. So I closed my eyes, digesting this newly felt part of the world. Just like that, the first day quietly passed. </a>Chapter Six | Dislocation</h3>In the early morning, Blagoveshchensk’s sunlight came through the gap in the curtains and lit the room bright. Just past five, and the sun had already risen high, as if impatient to wake the city. I opened my map app and found my location. A red pin sat firmly in the center of Blagoveshchensk. I took a screenshot, hesitating whether to send it to friends. I’d even thought of the caption: I’m in Russia! Yet my finger hovered over the send button, never pressing it. The Russia we usually talk about — what is it like? What comes to mind is always Moscow’s Red Square, the solemn, majestic sight of the Kremlin, at most with the classical splendor of Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace added. These are the Russia carved out by media and textbooks, the entirety of most people’s knowledge of this country. But Blagoveshchensk? I recalled the scene in the supermarket yesterday: on the signs for product categories, Chinese translations were prominently printed. That would be unimaginable in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. This city had a subtle sense of dislocation from the “Russia” in my impression. Does it really belong to the Russia most people know? It is more like a unique cultural melting pot on the Sino-Russian border than that distant, grand imperial heart. Lying on the hotel bed, sleepless, I let my thoughts wander like this. Since sleep was gone, why not take a walk in the cool of the early morning. She woke early too; we tidied up quickly. “Shall we go?” she asked softly. I nodded and picked up the room key on the table. Oh right — a key; an object I hadn’t seen in China for years. Whether home doors, offices, or hotels, now it’s mostly electronic locks, electronic access, even just tapping a phone’s NFC to get through. Physical keys seem to have become antiques, like young people seeing a floppy disk and curiously asking if it’s a figurine of the “save” icon. Kids born after 2010 have never seen a landline, only mobile phones; even their gesture for “making a phone call” is a flat palm held to the ear. And so, we pushed open the door into Blagoveshchensk’s early morning. We walked forward along the broad street. On both sides were neatly trimmed lawns, full of green. Ahead, a park quietly came into view. At the park’s center, a tall statue stood majestically. A flock of pigeons frolicked beside it, now lowering their heads to peck, now spreading their wings to fly, their feathers glinting in the morning light. Seeing this scene, scenes from the old Soviet films I’d watched as a child instantly struck my heart — that imagery, carrying the imprint of history, was so vivid. I hurried to photograph the pigeons with my phone, and the lens also caught the bright flowers someone had laid beside the soldiers’ memorial statue. On the street, early risers walked in twos and threes, carrying the particular unhurriedness of a small border town. Following the street, we walked without noticing all the way to Lenin Square. Just as nearly every Chinese city has a Zhongshan Road or a Zhongshan Park, Russian cities, too, all seem to have a Lenin Square — or at least a statue of Lenin. Where is Grandpa Lenin? Right in the middle of the square, on a tall stone plinth, looking down at the people passing by, one arm firmly extended forward, pointing into the distance. I suddenly remembered the lyrics of the Russian song Ilyich: He (Lenin) is still standing, waving at us already painted with a hundred coats of paint The pigeons come cooing over and shit on Ilyich’s bald head He is still standing… He is still standing… </blockquote> </a>Chapter Seven | The Riverbank</h3>The sun gradually climbed higher. We walked east along an east-west avenue. We kept walking. The road gradually narrowed; the grass on both sides went from neatly trimmed to unkempt, then to bare cement and mud pits. We just kept walking like this, until a section of brick wall appeared ahead. On the brick wall was that kind of street letter-graffiti; looking closely, it had been covered over in several layers. There were also some letters whose meaning was unclear. To our right was a stretch of railway track — oh, so this was a level crossing. I remembered the level crossings I’d seen in Japan. Alarm bells, warning lights, barriers — everything to keep people from being run over by trains. But here, so unkempt, so Russian. (A stereotype, I know.) Beside the level crossing, a low wooden house came into view, its walls mottled, its wooden windows on the verge of falling apart. Under the eaves hung a few strings of shriveled onions, looking somewhat desolate. A faint smell of coal smoke hung in the air, mixed with the damp scent of earth. This place was unlike the broad streets we’d passed before; there were no neatly trimmed lawns either, only unpolished roughness. We stood before the crossing, the rails glinting faintly in the sunlight. Not far away came the rumble of a slowly moving train. Past the brick wall, we finally saw the Heilongjiang — the Amur. The river’s surface was extremely wide. I had expected barbed wire or something, but there were even people swimming in it. I stuck out my tongue, walked closer, closer, until I reached the riverbank. I reached out my hand — the water was cool. So, this is the Heilongjiang. Throughout history, how many stories have been in the Heilongjiang’s surging waves. From ancient times to now, from ancient nomads to modern settlers, everyone has had to deal with it. A river so full of stories, right now beneath my feet. Suddenly it all felt a little unreal. Just now, I had, in a sense, touched the “border” itself. No barbed wire, no soldiers standing guard, only the river gently lapping the shore. The river breeze blew softly, carrying a distinctive moist coolness, caressing my cheeks. Those ancient boat songs, the hoofbeats of nomadic tribes, the cries of passing caravans, the shouts of border struggles — all had melted into this surging water. The sand underfoot was soft and fine, bearing the river’s wash marks. Here and there a few round pebbles lay quietly. I picked one up — ice-cold and smooth. I don’t know why, but I took a photo of it. </a>Chapter Eight | The Cradle</h3>Back in the city, she and I first found a coffee shop, an iced latte each. The price was reasonable enough — this is Europe after all, I thought to myself, a world where coffee is a necessity. Not much farther on, we came to a shopping mall. It was a square little building, three stories, not large, with only two or three shops per floor. We started browsing from the first floor; only one “goods store” was open. Wait, a goods store? I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, I knew anime culture had spread widely in Eastern Europe. I glanced over — most of the merchandise bore Chinese rather than Japanese, like Naruto doujin magazines, and an entire wall of Russian-language manga. Continuing up, the second floor was an Uzbek restaurant. We ordered fried rice; she said this kind of Central Asian fried rice was a great deal in Russia, like kebabs — a fine choice for filling your stomach. Soon we would be leaving the city, headed for a small town called Birobidzhan. For such a short distance, the train would actually take a whole night, arriving only the next morning. After checking out of the hotel, we sat in the café a while longer, then set off for the train station to wait. The station was tiny, with no platform — we climbed the stairs up into the train straight from the ground. Truly “Russian” style. We walked to the track where the train stood; it was already waiting for us. With experience riding sleeper trains in China, we had bought snacks and drinks in advance, just waiting to board and feast. Entering the carriage, I was a bit shocked. Two levels of bunks! Two! In China there are three. And I peeked at the toilet: clean and tidy, with a proper toilet bowl. I couldn’t help envying this setup. This is Europe after all: Europe’s floor is Asia’s ceiling. That’s how I consoled myself. Once aboard, I opened a drink and started eating sunflower seeds — Russians especially love sunflower seeds; no wonder the Northeast calls them “maoke,” meaning “what the Russkies crack.” When bedtime came, I climbed into my bunk, took the sleeping pill I take every night, and pulled the thin quilt over me. The carriage was very quiet. No one made loud noise, no one played videos out loud; someone read quietly, someone sipped coffee. How nice — so much like home. I curled up on the bunk, smiling. Slowly, amid the clatter-clatter, I fell asleep. </a>Chapter Nine | City of the Conqueror · One</h3>After a night of lullaby, the green-skinned train delivered us to a brand-new morning. Khabarovsk. This is the UTC+10 time zone; the sun rises two hours earlier than back home, as if in a hurry to show off how different this city is. We dragged our suitcases through the faint morning light and found the hotel we had booked. Once everything was settled, on the following day our exploration of the city officially began. Unlike Blagoveshchensk’s time-frozen stillness, everything in Khabarovsk exuded the air of a “big city.” We walked into a park; almost all its facilities were brand new. Orange benches gleamed brightly in the sunlight, like seats prepared especially for us at this moment. In the flowerbeds, buds ready to bloom crowded together in swathes, awaiting the order to blossom. Meticulously trimmed lawns, carefully designed shrubbery… everything carried a planned, modern refinement. Coming out of a little supermarket with a “Минимаркет” sign, I clutched my empty drink bottle, instinctively looking for a trash can. Back home, this often requires me to walk quite a stretch. Yet after only a few steps, I saw one. A few more steps, another. They were everywhere, standing quietly by the roadside, like this city’s most faithful servants. “As expected of Soviet heritage.” I couldn’t help sighing softly. This kind of ubiquitous public facility, with its bold, rough-and-ready convenience, makes one feel at ease. We crossed the park, the view opened up ahead, and there was another square. Like all the Russian squares we’d seen, this was a kingdom of pigeons. They cooed, strolled swaggeringly on the ground, utterly unafraid of people. A man in a tracksuit jogged past leading a huge Alaskan Malamute. The dog excitedly lolled its tongue, its tail wagging like a propeller. Wuwu… I truly love so much every blade of grass and every tree here. Whether Blagoveshchensk’s unpolished roughness or Khabarovsk’s modern tidiness, both made my heart pound. At the end of the square, we met again that familiar old friend — Lenin. We took a photo from afar and didn’t go closer. After all, Lenin Squares all look about the same. And… hehe, Ame secretly thought to herself, the Lenin statue here somehow doesn’t look as imposing as the one in her city! In the center of the square stood a huge fountain; though it wasn’t running, the ground around it was inscribed with this city’s history. My gaze fell upon that name — Khabarov. Yes, Khabarovsk is named after the explorer Yerofey Pavlovich Khabarov. My heart was suddenly gripped by something. One nation’s hero is another nation’s invader. This name, to the Russians standing on this land, represents pioneering, courage, and glory. But to us on the other side of the river, it is bound tightly to blood and tears, to cession, and to humiliation. I turned my head to look at her. She too was gazing at the inscriptions, her eyes calm, no ripple to be seen. All these names, boundaries, stories, cold and heat, seep along the flagstones beneath our feet into this once-contested land. And the distant Amur River (Heilongjiang) simply surges on in silence, witnessing everything, and washing everything away. We stood in this conqueror’s city, two tiny, rootless girls, feeling the complicated echoes history left behind. The wind blew across the square, bringing the cooing of pigeons. Gently, quietly, I took her hand. </a>Chapter Ten | City of the Conqueror · Two</h3>We walked on and on along a street full of European charm. The road wasn’t wide; on both sides were compact, elegant European-style buildings, the sunlight casting pretty light and shadow on the walls. I couldn’t help photographing as I walked. This place looked exactly like the European cities of my imagination. Tired from walking, we decided to have a meal of the most common people’s Russian food. That place was rather like a Chinese university canteen. We took trays and moved along with the line. First side dishes, then the staple — a few slices of dark, hard bread. Then soup, and finally a cutlet. Looking at the food on my plate, I suddenly remembered the Tom and Jerry cartoons I watched as a child. When Tom feasted, on his plate was exactly that kind of cutlet-and-rice doused in thick sauce. Full of anticipation, I took a bite. As for the taste — I wouldn’t call it bad, but… if I had to eat this every day, I might rather die. In the following days, we tried a few more times. But each time deepened my despair. In the end, whenever the two of us saw such a canteen, we took a detour. I even began letting my thoughts wander: the people exiled to Siberia back then probably ate… more or less this… After finishing this “exile meal,” we continued strolling along the riverbank. We checked in at that church seen countless times on postcards, its golden onion domes glittering in the sunlight. We also checked in at the statue belonging to this city — Khabarov. He sits on horseback, gazing firmly into the distance. Passing a tea-drink shop, we ducked in. Ordered a sweet strawberry drink, and only then felt ourselves come back to life. Next door was a souvenir shop; we went in and browsed. I picked up a fridge magnet, exquisitely made, just my taste. Happily I took it to the register. And then… it actually cost me nearly sixty yuan. Profiteer. What a profiteer. Indignant, I stuck it on the fridge in our hotel room. Hmph, just consider it the “IQ tax” paid for this journey. </a>Chapter Eleven | City of the Conqueror · Three</h3>She suddenly proposed taking me to see the most modern MALL here. I gladly agreed. We called a car and drove toward the suburbs. That mall was huge, so huge it made me a little dazed. It was no different from those gleaming shopping centers in any Chinese city of the same tier. In that instant I even wondered whether I had gone home. An Apple store, a Xiaomi store, all kinds of clothing brands, chain coffee shops, even a Burger King! Everything glittered. If “Russian modern life” needed a showroom, this would surely be it. She scratched her head and said softly that in her hometown Blagoveshchensk there was no mall this new, this big. We walked in and wandered aimlessly, finally sitting down in a coffee shop and ordering an Americano each. Sitting across from us was an elderly lady with white-streaked blonde hair. She looked elegant, quietly drinking her coffee. I took out my laptop and started writing my blog. The tapping of the keyboard sounded especially clear against the café’s background noise. Perhaps my focus aroused her curiosity. The old lady’s gaze fell upon my screen. A little embarrassed, I nonetheless explained to her that I was writing a travelogue of this trip to Russia. I turned on the webpage’s translation feature, converted the page to Russian, and turned the laptop toward her. She leaned in a bit and read earnestly. Her finger slowly slid across the screen. When she finished reading, she raised her head, a gentle smile on her face. She praised my writing. My heart was suddenly filled by a warm current. Even though these words had passed through machine translation and lost their original flavor, that feeling, that sentiment, could actually cross the barrier of language and be understood and affirmed by a stranger from a foreign land. I was really… so moved. </a>Chapter Twelve | The City in the Forest</h3>The train started again, carrying us toward the next destination. After a day and a night, we arrived at Komsomolsk-on-Amur. When I first saw this name on the map of Russia, a seed of curiosity was planted in my heart. Komsomolsk — a city built by Komsomol members, right? Sure enough, the moment I got off the train, I felt that grandeur and desolation of something risen out of the forest. Desolate, because before the station there were almost no tall buildings; it looked empty and forlorn. Grand, because the station’s own scale, and the Soviet state emblem atop it, still bright red, silently told of the fanfare of its construction back then. Then came our traditional reserved program — going to the square to watch pigeons. After watching pigeons and killing some time, we dragged our luggage and checked into the hotel. It was a hotel converted from a Soviet-era resort. The room was big, big to the point of emptiness, and the decor retained that era’s distinctive style. Once settled in, a wave of boredom hit. So we decided to order delivery. Russia’s delivery app is called Yandex Go, integrating errands, taxis, food delivery, and more. We ordered a meat-sauce pizza. When ordering, we worried one wouldn’t be enough. But when the delivery arrived — Goodness. The thickness of that meat sauce was beyond anything imaginable in China. So generous. As expected of Russia — this was truly… so Russian. We continued out for a stroll. You could clearly feel this was a city wrapped in forest. The pedestrian roads were built wide, and on both sides were great stretches of weeds and freely growing shrubs. They say an eighth of this city’s area is parkland. Though rather than parks, it’s more like preserved primeval woods and dirt paths. We wandered aimlessly through the woods. Sunlight came through layer upon layer of leaves, scattering dappled spots of light. All around was quiet, only wind and birdsong. Coming to an empty clearing, she stopped and turned to look at me. And then, secretly, we kissed. Russian little supermarkets aren’t like convenience stores; they’re more like the corner shops of our childhood. Maps label them “Минимаркет.” We walked into a random one and found grain and oil, daily necessities, snacks and drinks — everything. Like a full-category miniature supermarket. We grabbed a few bottles of drinks and went back to the hotel. You ask me what we did back at the hotel? Mm… probably… sex, or, scrolling on our phones. </a>Chapter Thirteen | White</h3>At noon the next day, I broke down. My emotions were like a burst flood, smashing through all my reason. I swallowed more than fifty Guaifenesin-Dextromethorphan tablets and ten Stilnox. Memory breaks off here. I only remember walking crookedly out of the hotel. When I woke again, I was lying in a hospital. Naked, with all kinds of tubes stuck in me. So terrifying. Really. No common language; nurses shouted something at me loudly. The way the doctor looked at me had thorns in it. It was a nightmare. A nightmare you can never break free of. I had even already forgotten why I did it, forgotten who had angered me. Those triggers were all told to me afterward by others. So hard to endure. I looked out the window as the sky went from pitch-black early morning, to the faint light of dawn, to a bright morning. Time passed so slowly. Finally, a doctor came over, handed me a sheet of paper, and motioned for me to sign. I couldn’t read what it said. But I had no choice. My personal freedom was confined to this hospital bed. Ha. Thinking of it now, I suddenly feel… it’s kind of erotic. Bondage, doctor play… the feeling of being unable to resist is the best, right? Numbly, I signed. Soon, I was wheeled out of the ward and transferred into a vehicle. She waited anxiously for me outside. Her face was full of worry. I didn’t cry. Or rather, part of my emotions had sunk to a depth even I could no longer reach. In the interval of being carried onto the vehicle, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed this hospital. A plain three-story building. As expected of the Soviet Union. I couldn’t help marveling in my heart. Even lying on a hospital bed, treated as a nuisance, I still couldn’t help appreciating this rough-hewn beauty. What happened afterward I’ve told others too many times; I don’t much want to tell it again. I was transferred to another children’s hospital, then processed for discharge. She stayed with me the whole time, negotiating with everyone in Russian for me. I had wanted to pick a fight with her, to vent all my resentment on her. But watching her bustling figure, my heart softened again. I finally changed back into my own clothes. We called a car and returned to the hotel. Not long after, the police knocked on our door, saying they needed to take a statement. Once again she stood in front of me, explaining to them in a language I couldn’t understand. When the negotiation ended, the officer looked at me and said a sentence she translated for me: “You’re a minor — how did you enter Russia?” “You must have your friend prove she has guardianship capacity, or we cannot let you continue traveling.” A bolt from the blue. But my brain no longer had the strength to think. I just wanted to take pills. Just wanted to sleep. What tomorrow would bring — who cares. </a>Chapter Fourteen | “Legal”</h3>“Temporary guardianship certificate.” Those few words were like a heavy shackle. In that instant, we were travelers no longer, but had become prisoners by the Amur River. That night, I had insomnia. I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning, past nine, she woke up. My parents’ phone call came right on time. She began bustling about, contacting the notary office, handling the tedious paperwork. Watching her exhausted profile, at some moment I finally couldn’t hold on and sank into heavy sleep. In my fitful sleep I heard she needed me to photograph my passport, photograph my birth certificate… She sighed and said to me: “That’s Russia for you. Bureaucracy.” In my heart I echoed with a sigh: as expected of the Soviet Union — so Soviet. And then came the endless running of errands. The police station. The hospital. The hotel. The hotel feared we would keep causing trouble, and tactfully indicated they’d rather we didn’t stay on. But they agreed to help us contact a new one. We dragged our luggage from one place to another. We were both so tired we were about to fall apart. Yet the notarization business still wasn’t finished. She forced her body to keep going, kept making phone calls. I handed her an energy drink, hoping to give her a little bit of strength. I don’t know how much time passed. In the middle of her negotiations with the police, a phone call suddenly came in. She listened for a while, hung up, turned to look at me, her expression complicated. She said they had discussed it internally, and that certificate was no longer needed. That invisible shackle, with this phone call, with a “click,” was opened again. The prisoners by the Amur River had been, with the powerful’s casual stroke of the pen, pardoned. Sigh. Sigh… Sigh… What we felt in that moment is hard to put into words. Like being flung high by a giant wave, then slammed back down. Absurd, exhausted, and slightly relieved. But thankfully, it was fine now. We were “legal” again. Only at this moment did I truly, viscerally experience the tyranny of state power. A single sentence from it can make a person lose their freedom, fall into a desperate situation. How terrifying. But thankfully, we were still together. We could embrace, we could still kiss. We were really, so tired. We fell onto the bed together and sank into deep sleep. When we woke, the sunlight outside the window had already slanted west. It was noon. Neither of us had the heart to go out for food. We ordered sushi delivery. Before long, the courier brought the box. Opening it, sure enough, it was that kind of California roll piled with mayo and fish roe. It suddenly occurred to me that Russians seem to especially love sushi. This is probably the result of Japanese culture’s forceful influx in the nineties, when the Soviet Union collapsed. So strange. The tides of history just like that, silently, change people’s dinner plates. I also noticed that many Russian delivery couriers deliver on foot. Even their app’s icon is a person walking with a delivery box on their back. Perhaps this has to do with the scale of Russian cities. Looking back, all the places we’d rushed between these past days — the police station, the hospital, the hotels — were actually all within a three-kilometer radius. A city, just like that, had enclosed our rushing and struggling within a range reachable on foot. </a>Chapter Fifteen | The Big City</h3>Neither of us had any heart to continue the journey. We just wanted to get home quickly, to get back quickly to a place where I could act “legally.” Ha. Thinking of it, a sentence suddenly popped into my head: Asia’s ceiling, Europe’s floor. Yet on the oppression of minors, the two agree so perfectly. In Japan it’s illegal for a minor to stay out overnight; in Russia energy drinks require you to be 18. The state, the organs of violence — how laughable. Another day and night of train. We arrived in Vladivostok. Haishenwai. Walking this city’s streets, the deepest impression was — internationalization. This place truly deserves to be called the “capital of the Far East.” In a single Burger King you can simultaneously see Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, English — five languages. At a street corner we saw a stone stele. Looking closer, it was a monument to the ethnic Koreans who settled here. My heart instantly grew heavy. I thought again of that small town north of Blagoveshchensk called “Svobodny” — the Free City. Its name, it’s said, was given by Koreans exiled here. Thinking of the peninsula still divided to this day, I couldn’t help but sigh. Everywhere on the streets, besides the many languages, were Japanese and Korean restaurants. Though according to her, the Japanese food here isn’t very authentic; it’s “Russian-style Japanese food” full of mayo and cheese. As we walked, we marveled. Haishenwai really is a big city. Elevated bridges, trams, everything a modern metropolis has — all present and ready here. The streets are narrow, flanked by tall, ornate European-style buildings. Some people say Shenzhen is Beijing’s exclave in the south. Then I’d say this place is Moscow’s exclave in the Far East. These buildings might even be more “European” than Moscow’s. This is probably a kind of convert’s zeal. The bay here is called the Golden Horn. It is the home port of the Pacific Fleet. This name was given by Muravyov. That figure printed on the 5,000-ruble banknote, whom we call “the Butcher.” He was paying homage to Constantinople’s other Golden Horn. We took a taxi along the bay to the cape at its southernmost tip. The sea wind was strong, stinging my face. We spread our arms wide, meeting Haishenwai’s wind and waves, watching the white lighthouse in the distance standing quietly between sea and sky. </a>Chapter Sixteen | Goodbye, Russia</h3>The wind was still strong. Besides us, most of those who came here were Chinese tour groups carrying little flags. How much would they know of this place’s history? And after coming, what insights would they take away? I couldn’t help a wry smile. After all, I am Ame — a misfit, a fugitive. I didn’t linger any longer. The next evening I called a car and went to the airport alone. The airport was tiny, and there was nothing much to buy in the duty-free shop. Everything seemed so ordinary. And so, just like that, I left Haishenwai, left the Russia I love, and left behind the only accomplice in my escape — the her who kept me company for fourteen days. Yes, I love Russia. I love its culture, love every blade of its grass and every tree. I love its sea wind and mountain forests, love in its literature and music that deep, boundless soul. What I love is not Putin’s government, nor the Tsar’s palaces. Still less the gendarmes and rifles. I also love her. Before parting at the airport, we kissed one last kiss. I turned around and didn’t look back, but I could feel her gaze following me all the way, until I disappeared around the corner at the security checkpoint. Only I remained, still fleeing. Boarding. I sat by the window. The plane taxied slowly, then accelerated, and rose into the air. I watched out the window as that stretch of Haishenwai’s lights gradually shrank in the night, became a blurred patch of light, and finally melted entirely into darkness. Amid the roar of the engines, I fell into a deep sleep. In my dream I was free, no longer needing pardon. We were simply by the Amur River, in that empty stretch of woods, over and over again, secretly kissing. Goodbye, Russia. I will come again. In the name of a traveler. Orphans of the Windy Island 2025-05-25T16:00:57.000Z </a>title: Orphans of the Windy Island excerpt: “The earth has bared her blood, and no longer covers her slain.” translation_key: posts/orphans-of-the-windy-island</h2>It is as if every continent in the world, at its southeastern windward edge, has broken off an island. Eurasia dropped one, called Taiwan; Africa’s piece became Madagascar; beside the Australian continent, the waves carved out Tasmania; and off the Indian subcontinent fell a grain called Ceylon. And at the tail end of the Korean Peninsula, at the far reach of the East Sea and the Yellow Sea, the wind shook loose a small island. Her name is Jeju. —— Epigraph </a>Prologue | The Spring of 1948</h3>I don’t know when I first heard of Jeju Island. Maybe it was a glimpse of that flat little dot beside the map of China; maybe a notice board about visa-free entry, or a line in some K-drama; maybe a few hurried lines in a travel guide I happened to open. But ever since the first time I looked at a map, she was there. Quietly, indisputably there. The last time Jeju Island came up was because of a Jeju Air accident. After a brief mourning, the topic was replaced by the next trending hashtag. She sank into the deep sea beneath public opinion, sank down. Without a sound. There’s a saying that Jeju has much wind and many women. Better to say, Jeju Island is the daughter of the wind. The wind beat at the hem of my clothes, telling its story. It told me that an unspeakable memory is buried here. Burnt villages are buried here, a massacre deliberately left blank in the newspaper headlines is buried here. The wind comes and goes, but it cannot blow away the white bones beneath Hallasan. This wind is so salty, as if something were mixed into it. Not seawater. It is blood, the blood that began to flow on April 3, 1948. The blood of thirty thousand people. Boiling blood. Why come to Jeju Island? Not for a vacation, not to check in, not for a whirlwind “special forces” tour. Because she took me in. She took in a minor who had no time to get a visa; she took in a child who would sit on a park bench at midnight, crying. Just as she once sheltered those who hid in the caves. Just as this island took in the civilians who hid in the caves of Hallasan, took in the souls trying to flee the White Terror, however insignificant, however brief the reprieve. Even though, in the end, none of them came back alive. And so I wondered, could I, with my pen, gently call out their names? No — wake them from their silence. Wake thirty thousand furious souls; until I hear the cries drowned out in the wind, the cries that defied the order of things. Windy island, windy island, do you still remember those who died upon you? Those fugitives just like me, those nameless gravestones and blanked-out newspapers, those wronged souls who were never forgiven. Write down their names, so that the flag raised high on April 3, the flag dyed red with blood, will never fall. And so, Ame writes the first stroke. May the wind remember, may the land remember, may the people silent at this moment finally awaken. </a>Chapter One | Lie Down, Snuggle Close</h3>The moment the plane touched down, I almost cried. Not from excitement — the kind of crying of a fugitive stepping onto safe ground. Even if I had to shoulder my pack and set out again the next second, at least for now I no longer had to wander. As we landed, a gust of wind shook the fuselage gently. The moment I stepped out of the cabin door and into Jeju International Airport, my first impression was — so small. The terminal was as narrow as a bus station waiting hall. At second glance, I naturally noticed the most prominent feature around me —— the signs and posters were covered in unfamiliar Hangul. My eyes instinctively searched among these symbols for a familiar Chinese character, the shapes that in Japanese I could still occasionally lean on, but now there was nowhere at all to set foot. I shivered, realizing: I had walked out of the safe zone. The shop signs on the street, the storefront windows, the airport diagrams — every letter was utterly strange, every sentence proclaimed my helplessness. It felt like swimming where your toes can’t touch the bottom — panicked, lost, yet perfectly lucid. I took a hard breath, and my heartbeat gradually steadied — this is Jeju Island, a foreign land; I have finally set foot on an utterly unfamiliar island. From this moment on, I could only rely on myself. Even if it was only ten short days, I had truly landed somewhere new. Fresh off the plane, I was a little smug. “I’ve been to Japan and Hong Kong; Korea can’t be that different.” That’s what I told myself. Hotels in Japan mostly go like this: unless you look far too young or are buying alcohol, nobody asks your age. Let alone now, dressed as “harmless” as I was. But the night before my departure, I scrolled onto a Xiaohongshu post. Its title stabbed straight into my heart: “In Korea, under-19s cannot check into a hotel alone — not even with a parental consent letter!” I froze, and hurriedly opened Ctrip, Agoda, Booking, checking one by one. The pages spelled it out plainly: Check-in age requirement: must be 19 or older. Every single one said it. No exceptions, no “negotiable,” no “special consideration.” My heart went hollow. What had seemed an ordinary trip suddenly turned into the possibility of being stranded on a foreign street. No — if I didn’t solve this, I really might end up on the street. I began frantically searching for guesthouses, looking for hotels with self-check-in, combing through review sections, desperately hunting for comments from fellow minors who had managed to check in. The more I searched, the colder and more panicked I felt. Like standing at the end of a long, dark corridor, trying to push open door after door, only to find every one of them posted with “No Admittance.” My hands began to shake; the words on my phone screen gradually blurred; I could barely see the keywords I was typing. I had never felt so clearly how hostile this world is — not toward criminals, not toward dangerous people, but toward “unrecognized” people like me. This is the true face of state violence — expulsion, suppression, surveillance, isolation. Using rules to manufacture an ice-cold “you are outside the scope of our consideration,” letting you hit the wall yourself, break down yourself, cry yourself. No tenderness, no negotiation, no explanation. Just a logic that negates your existence, forcing you to give up, forcing you to realize you were shut out long ago. For a moment I even wondered: “Maybe I… shouldn’t have come here?” I opened Xiaohongshu, my fingers trembling as I typed: “Places to spend the night in Jeju Island.” Post after post popped up: “You can sit in a convenience store overnight, just buy something.” “24-hour McDonald’s — buy a Coke and you can last the night, but don’t fall asleep, they’ll kick you out.” “PC bangs won’t work; minors can’t get in at all. Saunas don’t take minors either.” The further I scrolled, the colder my heart grew. “If it really doesn’t work out, sit in a park overnight — but watch out for the police!” I snapped the phone screen off. My whole body went rigid, unable to move. I never imagined I would fall to this point, never imagined I’d be searching questions like “can you sit in a convenience store overnight.” Like a madwoman, I opened the guesthouse app again, like a drowning person struggling to grab every piece of driftwood, desperately and stubbornly searching for that last thread of hope. In the end, I bet on the right one. The host’s reply was simple and clear: “Self-check-in. I’ll send you the room number and passcode in advance.” Like someone who had just escaped the execution ground, I tapped “book.” 170 yuan a night. Not a youth hostel, not a bunk in a ten-person dorm. A real double room, one bed, belonging only to me. But the price was — my room was on the fourth floor, with no elevator. I had to carry my pack up, step by step. Every step felt like stepping on a mousetrap. Reaching the fourth floor, I slid the key in and turned — it wouldn’t open; wrong direction. Turned the other way. Click. The moment the door opened, I almost burst into tears. Not from happiness, but from the powerlessness left over after facing systemic violence head-on. Like a lamplit cabin on a rainy night. You fell, you’re soaked — it doesn’t matter. Inside, a bed and a kettle of hot water are waiting for you. The room was surprisingly large, two or three times the hotel I stayed at in Osaka. Pale mint wallpaper on the walls; a few photos of Jeju scenery looked oddly out of place, like some barely cobbled-together “respectability, best effort.” I sat on the bed and looked back out the window: a row of low two- or three-story buildings, no neon on the street, none of the collage posters I’d seen in Japan — only sea wind and scattered lights. The wind drifted in through the window, like an invisible hand gently patting my head. I lay down and nuzzled the corner of the pillow. No one knew who I was, but this bed did not push me away. Soft, as if it could wrap me up entirely. I smiled faintly. As if the world had, at last, quietly caught me. </a>Chapter Two | The Wind Will Remember You Came</h3>Walking into the convenience store, my first reaction was: “Huh? Why is it so empty?” A few kinds of lunch boxes and rice balls scattered on the shelves — nothing like the dazzling “sense of order” of a Japanese convenience store. I wanted an ATM to withdraw cash, wanted a printer to print a map, and found there was nothing here at all. Some stores even close at midnight. I stood frozen in front of the freezer — in Japan, such a thing is unimaginable. Convenience stores are 24-hour, the undying lamp of the deep night, the shelter at the farthest end of modernity. But here, the cashier sat behind the counter wearing earphones, watching a drama. Only when a customer walked in did she slowly take them off, take the money, and immediately return to her screen. I understood at once. That was not laziness. —— It was freedom. A crack accidentally left loose, a breath long sealed up in the city. The scene was strange yet familiar, and something in my heart softened — so this island, too, is part of the margins. It is like a nerve ending: by the time modernity’s current is conducted here, it has begun to jump, flicker, even occasionally go out. You can feel the rhythm transmitted all the way from Seoul, but by the time it arrives here, it is tired, slowed, broken. Like a person in a suit, trouser cuffs frayed, soles coming loose, still wearing a persevering smile. Half-renewed cement by the roadside, untrimmed grass outside the coffee shop, the bus stop’s LED screen flickering. This is not backwardness, but still striving to keep up appearances where strength runs short. An anxiety of desperately imitating the capital’s rhythm, and a fatalism of “knowing you can’t catch up but not allowed to stop,” tied a knot on this island, knotting into some unique way of life. Not chaos, not savagery — just too far, too far for the state to bother; too lonely, so lonely that ideals blur into shadows here. Like China’s second-tier cities, like the new towns of Hong Kong’s New Territories, like the shabby little county town of my hometown in memory — we have never been at the center, but none of us will give up dressing the facade. And so I understood why it didn’t feel strange. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a place; it was the first time I realized I came from such a place. I too was a product of that kind of life: unseen, unhelped, but still cheering myself on, still maintaining that little bit of dignity. So at this moment I am not a tourist, not a sightseer, but one of their own, come to seek refuge, quietly caught in the wind. No suitcase, no ID documents, like a kitten tired from running in the rain, I threw myself headfirst into this little fourth-floor room, softly, quietly, curling up in the corner of the world. No one recognized who I was, but this bed did not push me away. Nor did the wind. I nuzzled the corner of the pillow ever so softly, and the wind at my ear seemed to smile too. “You’re still here.” I held myself tight and whispered: “I really, really made it.” </a>Chapter Three | Falling, Caught</h3>I woke up late. The room was still dark; the wind had stopped. I opened my eyes and pulled out my phone — eleven o’clock sharp. “Can’t waste any more time,” I muttered under my breath. Not because of a tight itinerary, but because I knew this day belonged to me. I had to spend it well, spend it melting into this island. Not ticking off sights, checking in, taking photos — but living into it, becoming part of the island’s life. I didn’t go to any “must-see attractions.” Instead I turned the corner and walked into a nearby café. An orange cat stood at the door; with a flick of its tail it slipped into the bushes, like a greeting to me, the “temporary islander.” Cafés really are everywhere in Korea. As I ordered, I thought: the spread of this culture probably has something to do with the American military. Coffee — they brought it; but now it belongs to no one anymore. It has become the island’s air, water, and light. I ordered an Americano for only 2,000 won. About Luckin’s promotional price — but Luckin isn’t cheap every day. I couldn’t help sighing to myself: “Here, coffee has become something like water.” I found a seat by the window, opened my notebook, and started writing a blog post. My typing rhythm was slow; I wrote and drifted off by turns, my thoughts wandering now to this island’s history, to Korean politics, now back to this cup of still-steaming coffee — like a soul roaming the island that had found a brief foothold. An afternoon passed just like that. When I came back to myself, it was past six. I wasn’t very hungry, but I couldn’t skip eating. Too lazy to choose, I ducked into a random Korean restaurant. Pushing the door open, the server said hello in Korean. I couldn’t help smiling wryly — that was probably the only Korean word I knew. Summoning my courage, I walked to the counter and said to the server in English: “One person.” </blockquote> She nodded and led me to a corner seat. I pointed at a picture on the menu and said: “I would like this one.” It was bibimbap, the signature dish. </blockquote> Before long, the server first brought out a few side dishes — kimchi, bean sprouts, pickled radish, seasoned spinach… Looking at these faintly colored little dishes, I suddenly remembered the prejudice some people back home hold against Korean food. They say it has “no flavor,” “no culture,” that “it’s all the same.” A small sadness welled up in me. Neighbors separated by only a strip of water — why can’t we properly understand each other? The bibimbap arrived. The stone pot was still sizzling. I earnestly picked up the side dishes and ate them with the rice, bite by bite. The flavor was very mild — a taste I had never sampled before. But I liked it. I like this plain, warm, unassuming flavor, just like the island itself. After dinner, I walked alone to the seaside; the guesthouse was not far from the shore. Five minutes on foot, and I leaned against the railing by the sea, watching the sun sink little by little. The golden afterglow spilled across the water, like scattered gold leaf, like shattered candy wrappers, glittering with today’s last light. I quietly took my photos and stood there still. The sea wind chilled me a little, but I couldn’t bear to leave. I began to recall the people I’d met today — the convenience store cashier, the young woman wiping tables at the café, the server at the Korean restaurant, and the neighbor lady who smiled and nodded at me. None of them asked questions, doubted, or were cold. They were just ordinarily, briefly kind to me. But it was exactly that ordinariness that warmed my heart. Bad people may truly be the minority; most people carry a simple goodness inside. How wonderful. Back in my room, I opened a bottle of beer. Bubbles leapt at the bottle’s mouth; I took a sip and felt a gentle sting on my tongue. I hugged my pillow and burrowed into the soft bedding. Today held no surprises, no waves, only being quietly caught by the world, a few times over. Silently, in my heart, I thought a sentence — didn’t say it aloud, just smiled softly — “If the world is like this… then it’s alright to stay a little longer.” </a>Chapter Four | The Attempt That Failed</h3>I woke very early. To be precise, at 6:32. The sunlight had not yet fully climbed onto the windowsill, but the wind had already begun to stroke my cheek, cool, like that VOCALOID song by the producer MIMI. I rarely sleep this well. Maybe because — last night I drank a bottled beverage. A soft bottle, labeled with a line of purple English letters: Better Rest. </blockquote> As I unscrewed the toothpaste cap, thinking back, I suddenly remembered: beside it had stood a row of brightly colored drinks. Bearing words as if beyond question: “Relieves fatigue” “Boosts memory” “Reduces stress” </blockquote> I couldn’t help but shudder. Why did I drink it? Don’t all those travel guides say it: “Top 5 must-buys at Korean convenience stores!” “Tired from traveling? Drink this!” </blockquote> But I began to doubt… is this good for me, or good for someone else? The convenience store lights stung my eyes. Piles of snacks on the shelves, every package screaming: “Eat me!” I glanced at the calorie counts, each number higher than the last. Suddenly I remembered the book Han Kang wrote, The Vegetarian. She doesn’t eat meat. She is refusing a system. With her body. With silence. </blockquote> Could I do that? I cannot. I’m not qualified. I’m no vegetarian. I abuse pills printed with prescription warnings. I know perfectly well they’re poisoning me, yet I pretend they love me. I… am not even worthy of the three words “one who resists.” The convenience store’s air conditioning whooshed over me; I shrank a little. In the end, I took a pack of sugar-free gum. “This one should be fine, right?” I said softly in my heart. At the register, I forced a relaxed smile, but my chest still felt blocked. Even sugar-free, it held no answer. I just wanted to try… to bite down on something with my mouth, against the whole world that devours everything. But does it really help? I don’t know. I only know that this morning I woke very early. 6:32. </a>Chapter Five | Falling into the Abyss</h3>I rolled over against the sheets, the last trace of last night’s smile still on my lips. So sleepy… so soft… The wind gently stirred the curtains; I curled up my knees like a kitten. But in truth I was wide awake. Awake to excess. As if my body had long been ready to do something bad. From the gap in the nightstand I took out a few blister packs of pills. Yellow-and-white capsules rolled in my palm; I stared at them for a while — Pregabalin, 24 capsules. A bit much, right? But I still popped them out, one by one, as if counting my sins. As I swallowed, I gulped down air, afraid I’d throw up. Empty stomach — only then can you feel the numbness arrive most completely. I wanted to go soft, to not think about any lofty questions. I didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to dissect everything clean. When the drug took effect, it started from the soles of my feet. A warm tide slowly floated up, along my calves, knees, thighs, flooding up bit by bit. I held myself and stuffed my whole body into the quilt. The world before my eyes began to warp, warping like ocean waves. Suddenly I wanted so badly to have company, to say something. So I picked up my phone and opened Discord. I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, I just… didn’t want to be alone. I tapped on someone’s avatar — a group friend who works as a programmer; we’d chatted about technical questions a few times. I hesitated, then typed: “Baobei~” “I like you🥺❤️” </blockquote> Discord’s notification chimed. “Thanks, I like you too” </blockquote> I smiled. Truly that shy, timid kind of smile. But as I smiled, the corners of my eyes grew wet. Then came sobbing, and pain like a knife drawn across my heart. “like you like you like you like you like you like you” “Do you want to shock me… the remote-control kind” </blockquote> These words crawled out of my fingertips one by one, like syrup, like poison. No one forced me; no one held a knife to me. It was me. The me sliding down inside the drugs, spitting out these words of my own accord. I licked them. Fell. I really started panting. Typing while clamping my legs together. I curled up, my whole body shrinking into the corner of the quilt. The drug wrapped me into a ball of something warm and shameful. My consciousness slowly drifted away, yet as if tethered by a thread, stayed in place. As I typed those words, my face was red — not with shyness, but with a guilt deep enough to nauseate. By day I was still saying: “Everything in the world should be held in common!” I spoke of Rosa Luxemburg, of democracy as the soul of communism, of that anarchist utopia without oppression. </blockquote> I believed it too. I said that one day, the thousand-year kingdom would come. But at night I huddled under the quilt with my legs clamped, crying while saying to someone a thousand miles away: “I want to be your toy❤” </blockquote> I gripped the phone tightly, like a kitten afraid of being thrown away. Not from desire, but from longing. Longing to be liked, longing to be held onto, even as my dignity lay shattered on the floor. Reality is too dark. No utopia — only a Discord DM window at midnight, messages answered on and off, Sometimes, the drug would knock me out. The curtains blocked all light; I couldn’t tell day from night. The first thing I did was grab my phone. Three in the morning. The other person had long gone offline. The screen still rested on our chat window. I had said so many “baobei,” “I’m your kitten,” “I really miss you so much”… while they only tossed back an emoji or two, then vanished into the early-morning timeline. They didn’t even ask me: Are you okay? Did you just pass out all of a sudden? </blockquote> I stared at the screen, dazed, for a while. Then, as if slashed by a knife, I suddenly clutched the quilt tight, curled into a ball, and began to cry. Not wailing — the kind of sob pressed out from deep in the throat, as if my whole body was asking — Why… is it like this? Why, when I only wanted to be liked a little, am I treated this way? Am I really this not worth caring about? </blockquote> I buried my head in the quilt. The residual warmth of the drug still glowed like evidence of a crime, yet I only felt cold. Cold enough to shiver. I didn’t betray my faith; reality simply never gave me the right to stand. Like an apostle fallen to earth, still trying to shield something with broken wings. But I was too lonely. So lonely that even if the other person hated my views, I still wanted to be glanced at by him. I didn’t betray my faith — I just wanted someone… to hold me. Tell me, can the divine truly forgive me? “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” —— Romans 7:19 </blockquote> “I’m not clean, not perfect, and certainly no angel.” “Can you still accept me?” Suddenly I wanted very much to cry. I don’t know why; I just wanted to cry. I tossed the phone aside and pressed the pillow against my face. “How could I… how could I say such things…” “Why do I keep troubling other people…” “Will he hate me…” </blockquote> I really cried, like a child who had committed an unforgivable wrong. I had clearly said I was an “angel.” The Ame who believed in freedom, in resistance, in ideals. But the me of now, naked, soft, burning, is the one who spreads her legs of her own accord, sinking into the muddy abyss. I wasn’t pushed down. I slid down willingly. It’s me — the Ame who, while saying “please command me,” longed to be discarded. A little morning light seeped through the gap in the curtains. Dawn was coming; a new day was about to begin. But I’m so tired, truly so tired. I hugged the pillow, pressing against it like the last remaining tenderness. Then, to the blackened phone screen, I said in the smallest voice: “I’m not worth it…” </blockquote> “They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” —— Psalm 14:3 </blockquote> I just lay there in the darkness, crying, feverish, limp, together with all the fallen children, quietly sinking into this world’s deepest, softest, most unforgivable corner. </a>Chapter Six | Daughter of the Wind</h3> “He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever.” —— 2 Samuel 7:13 </blockquote> That morning, the sky had not fully brightened, but the wind was already awake. The wind skimmed lightly over the reeds by the inn’s entrance, leading me toward the cliffs. I shouldered my backpack and set out to see a place called “Oedolgae” — the Lonely Rock. At first, I thought it was a symbol commemorating the Korean independence movement, perhaps a stone stele for the martyrs, perhaps a memorial tower of resistance on the cliffs. But up close I learned it was nothing more than a huge rock, standing alone by the sea. The name means: “the rock that stands alone here.” A little disappointed. I gazed at it for a long time, feeling something was off. Until my eyes were drawn to a strange statue beside it. It was a stone statue, cylindrical, carved with an old man’s face, wearing a hat on its head. Crude, yet carrying an eerie warmth, like some kind of gaze. I frowned and opened my phone to look it up. A few words jumped onto the page, and my fingertips paused gently. “Dol Hareubang (돌하르방), the guardian deity of Jeju Island’s indigenous culture, symbolizing fertility and procreation; some scholars consider it a symbol of male phallic worship.” My heart suddenly sank. Not shock, but that kind of — “of course” — weariness. I didn’t know what to say. Again and again in my mind rang the words I had said before: Jeju Island is the daughter of the wind. But now, standing before this stone, I found that this “daughter” was surrounded by stone phalluses, one after another. The “daughter of the wind” lives on an island constructed of phalluses; the statues stand at crossroads, guard temple gates, as if the whole island were watched over by these “grandfathers.” They don’t speak, but they watch you — like the “everywhere-present men” of Korean society, not necessarily any concrete person, but rather that: patriarchal structure itself, which may be touched, worshipped, and certified as bringing good fortune. People say that touching the grandfather’s “hat” brings good luck. I stood there, watching helplessly as several tourists queued up, laughing as they reached out to touch the top of the stone. I couldn’t laugh at all. This is not culture made cute for show; this is an outright “ritual of sexualization.” I looked again at Oedolgae, that giant rock standing isolated by the sea, just as stiffly erect. Just like this country’s order. I sighed. Not from tiredness, but… guilt. A strange, unspeakable guilt. My fingers slowly clenched. The wind blew over from beyond the hill, whipping my hair across my eyes; I didn’t dodge. I lowered my head, put my phone away, took no photo, and did not touch that hat. That “lucky hat” was not prepared for me. I raised my head once more to look at the stone statue; its expression was blurred beyond reading. Perhaps it never had a true face at all. As long as it is hard enough, stable enough, it is a god. I sighed — not from exhaustion, but a faint loss that had no way to be spoken. Not anger, not protest. Only: the wind was cold, the stone was heavy, and the whole island seemed sunk in a thick silence. I turned and left, without looking back. The wind tugged at the hem of my clothes, as if urging me to stay, or urging me on. I walked slowly, but every step was light. Like the daughter of the wind, passing silently beside the stones, disturbing no one, leaving no trace. </a>Chapter Seven | The Wind Blows Over the Names on the Stele</h3> At the far reach of the East Sea and the Yellow Sea, the wind shook loose a small island… </blockquote> As I stood at the entrance of the Jeju 4·3 Peace Memorial, this passage was in my mind. It was written at the opening of my travelogue’s prologue, only a scene I had imagined. But now, this island is no longer only the one in my imagination; she has a name, has blood, has gravestones. The ride from Jeju City took nearly an hour; the scenery outside the window gradually grew open and deep green. The city’s buildings slowly receded, replaced by stretches of fields and low hills. The wind blew across the farmland, lifting small puffs of dust; the sunlight slanted onto the road at the mountain’s foot, glinting. Leaning against the window, watching the passing shadows of trees, I silently counted the time. The bus was quiet; only the announcement murmured station names in Korean, like a distant sea speaking softly. Suddenly I felt a little nervous. Not afraid of seeing pain, but afraid — afraid I wasn’t qualified, afraid I was merely someone who came too late. Afraid I was too small, too weightless, to bear the weight of those names, to answer the silent summons beneath the stele. But the wind kept blowing, as if someone were gently pushing me forward. I pulled my backpack straps tighter, took a deep breath, and said quietly to myself: “No matter what, I’m going in.” Getting off the bus, the memorial hall came into view first — a low gray building, like a stele embedded in the ground. It carried silence, as if time had sunk it down. I approached it with careful breath. Inside the exhibition hall there was no clamor. Only photographs, recordings, testimonies. One after another, the names of the “nameless”; one after another, the portraits of the “ordinary.” They were not soldiers, not generals, not heroes, only farmers, teachers, mothers, children, who, one spring, had the muzzles of the state turned on them. I walked very slowly, afraid of disturbing them. When I finally reached the memorial, the stele was an entire wall engraved with names. I froze. They were not “Martyr So-and-so,” not “General So-and-so,” but the full names of civilians. Men, women, infants, the elderly, one by one chiseled into the stone, steadfastly resisting time. Facing the stele, I bowed deeply. It was a bow carrying shame. As if it were not I who had come to commemorate them, but they who permitted me to stand a while on this blood-soaked land. Suddenly I remembered the first day of my trip, the me who had walked alone past the convenience store, trembling at age limits and state institutions. Back then I felt I had “almost ended up on the street,” but these people were thrown into the earth by the entire state. And never came back. “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.” —— Psalm 118:22 </blockquote> I sat on the bench before the stele. The wind blew over, carrying the salt of the sea. I lowered my head, my fingers brushing across those names. Name after name — not epitaphs, but unfulfilled vows. In that moment I understood: they are not buried here; they are waiting for us here — waiting for us to no longer merely “remember,” but to answer. To answer their unfinished struggle, to answer their final cry before death: “We are not traitors! Not rioters! We are people who wanted to live!” Yes — even though more than seventy years have passed, even though this world has grown more refined, more indifferent, I believe: as long as someone is still willing to take their names as a spark, the thousand-year kingdom will surely come, and the oppressors’ monuments will one day crumble to dust. I closed my eyes. In my ears were the wind, and the whispers beneath the stele. They were once discarded in the dark of night; now they are buried in this land, quietly waiting for us. “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —— Dinos Christianopoulos </blockquote> But I know I cannot stay here forever, cannot keep lying against this stele for warmth. I came to flee, to hide in the wind, to catch a breath. I am not their descendant, nor their successor, just a child who nearly slept in the corner of a convenience store, a person carrying a backpack, searching for a foothold at the edge of the map. Yet this island, this stele, this wind, as if understanding everything, quietly caught me. It didn’t ask who I was, didn’t make me prove anything, only left a bed, a gust of wind, a stretch of names, letting me be, briefly, a little less lonely. I stood up and put my backpack on again. The wind lifted the ends of my hair, like a farewell, and like a gentle whisper: “Keep walking forward.” And so I walked — not leaving, but taking them with me. Taking thirty thousand unfinished names, continuing to flee, continuing to write, continuing to search for that world not yet realized. Like a seed lifted by the wind, not to take root where it lands, but to fly farther — for those who died in the wind, and for those still living in the wind. Half a Month in Naniwa 2025-05-23T11:28:52.000Z </a>Prologue | You Said You Came from Osaka</h3>I went to Osaka because of the Expo. To be honest, because its mascot was so strange. Red and blue, a misshapen body with a dozen eyes: the first time I saw it, I genuinely thought it was a parody. It turned out to be the official mascot. I can’t quite explain the feeling. Not “how cute” or “how bizarre,” but the unease of laughing at something until you suddenly realize it isn’t a joke. It’s real. So I looked up Expo 2025 Osaka: aerial photographs of the construction site, news of exploding budgets, the Grand Roof Ring the internet had almost memed to death. Suddenly, I wanted very badly to go. Not because I had illusions about world expos in globalization’s late age. I wanted to see how a supposedly proper event, entrusted to some of humanity’s finest elites, actually worked. Or whether it could still work at all. Or whether it would quietly die in full view of everyone. I had heard “Osaka” countless times without trying to understand it. Tokyo, Osaka. Tokyo, Osaka. Yes, Osaka could only follow Tokyo. A city gazed upon from above, defined, packaged, consumed. “Osaka people are funny! They make takoyaki, and there are lots of comedians.” “Shinsaibashi is great for shopping. The takoyaki is good, and it’s a little cheaper than Tokyo.” “Osaka people are friendly. They’ll offer you directions.” </blockquote> I grew up hearing this. As though the state had issued a standard personality to everyone in Osaka. Like all subordinates, they live within an identity script for others to watch and consume: friendly, warm, unpretentious, funny. Because they aren’t Tokyo people. Tokyo doesn’t need a disobedient Osaka. Tokyo never needs to be warm. It is aloof, standardized, indifferent without apology. It needn’t please anyone. It represents Japan itself. And Osaka? Who cares? Sometimes I think of Tianjin. Not Beijing, not Shanghai. Another port city with a history of finance, foreign concessions, and modern urban prosperity. More importantly, another supporting character beside the capital. Who remembers the old glory of the industrial trio Shanghai, Qingdao, and Tianjin? Mention Tianjin now and people say its residents talk funny, its comedians perform xiangsheng, its old men dive into rivers. There is almost no essential difference between that and Osaka’s humor and takoyaki. Turning a city into a joke is a process of stripping away politics and history. The dominant city gazes at you, names you, incorporates you. You become a vessel for ease, friendliness, entertainment. Your agency disappears; your blade grows dull. Nobody will remember you. Tokyo looks at Osaka as Beijing looks at Tianjin: not as a city, but as a functional presence. You must be funny, warm, proactive, plain, harmless, smiling. If you aren’t funny, who will play the capital’s foil? Who will cover up the naked violence? One passage from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window stayed with me from childhood: “I came from Osaka.” “Osaka?” Totto-chan repeated, her voice especially high. Her uncle lifted her up. “Let me show you Osaka.” She blinked and strained to see, but never did. </blockquote> Only later did I learn that Tetsuko Kuroyanagi was from Tokyo. However hard Totto-chan blinked, she couldn’t see it. Readers wouldn’t really ask where that city was either. A strange thought came to me. If I hadn’t looked up the mascot, if I hadn’t been unable to sleep that day… if it hadn’t had so many eyes… Perhaps I too could have gone on pretending I saw nothing. I didn’t know what I’d come for. Tourism? To see the mascot’s absurdity firsthand? Or simply to see what a city really looked like? Not in a variety show, a tweet, or a travel guide. By walking into it with my body, looking with my eyes, sitting on its subway, eating rice balls outside a convenience store. To know this wasn’t a symbol or a template, some hollow sign, but a real, chaotic Osaka where people lived. </a>I | Landing Outside the Map</h3>Before landing, I kept savoring the sound of an old name: Naniwa. Osaka’s ancient name, written with characters for waves and flowers, waves and speed, or the difficult bay. Different spellings, the same sound. Naniwa. Naniwazu ni Saku ya kono hana Fuyugomori Ima wa harube to Saku ya kono hana </blockquote> At Naniwa harbor, These flowers bloom— After winter’s shelter, Now that spring has come, These flowers bloom. </blockquote> Unfortunately, I had come at the wrong time. Spring’s flowers had already faded. Beside the window, I watched the dense containers, runways, and jet bridges amid the sea below. Watched Osaka descend from the air onto paper. Then the plane landed at Kansai International Airport. Standing in the long immigration corridor, I smelled a little disinfectant, as though it were covering something that shouldn’t be there. The airport wasn’t on the mainland, but on an artificial island in Osaka Bay. I’d read about it: it was built offshore not for technological innovation, but to “avoid social conflict.” More plainly: to avoid another Narita Airport. I remember first seeing “Narita Airport struggle” on Wikipedia. I clicked through to blurry black-and-white photographs. The people looked less like protesters than neighbors, old women from the fields, uncles in work clothes. They held banners in forceful Chinese characters: STOP THE AIRPORT. Behind them were dense ranks of riot police and a row of bulldozers. Later, while casually searching for sights near Narita, I was recommended a “Memorial to Police Officers Killed in the Line of Duty.” The map showed it really was near the airport. My scalp suddenly prickled. This wasn’t metaphor, literature, structural analysis, or something the phrase “machinery of violence” could contain. Those who died on this flight path weren’t only police officers. Not only the heroes whose polished stones read “killed in the line of duty.” People had really died, and never returned. Their blood entered the runway asphalt, flattened and compacted with their bones. The rice they planted and houses they built had been declared obstacles to modernization and cut away in one stroke. After they vanished, the country kept taking off as if every sacrifice made perfect sense. Ah, modernity is always so efficient. </blockquote> They died without names, were broken without monuments. The state machine swallowed their bodies; development’s concrete buried them. Even GPS couldn’t find their locations. “Your name is unknown. Your deed is immortal.” </blockquote> Really? If only it were true. Perhaps even spring has forgotten where the flowers that never bloomed once grew. </a>II | If You Are Innocent, Why Must You Prove It?</h3> “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” —Romans 3:20 </blockquote> I handed over my passport. An identity code appeared on the screen: “C.” I joined the C line. A middle-aged man was told to remove his mask and retake his photograph. A Korean girl was questioned repeatedly because she’d changed her hairstyle. Everyone surrendered fingerprints, pressed their hands down. Nobody argued or protested. Everything looked orderly. Everyone obeyed the order. Foucault once said: “People are much freer than they feel.” </blockquote> Reversed, it seems more accurate: People have been tamed into obedience far earlier than they realize. </blockquote> Is this really how it should be? I remember clearly: passports have not always existed. They became a true institution after 1914. In the aftermath of the First World War, countries began restricting borders and requiring permits. The Paris Passport Conference of 1920 even specified thirty-two pages and printing in at least two official languages, fitting a new global order: unregulated cross-border movement would be considered dangerous. Sadly, the design made in the name of order did not end with war. After World War I, borders and standardized passports controlled refugees and non-citizens. After World War II, the new order firmly entrenched them. But in practice? Not everyone can move. Not every passport works. Globalization isn’t about where you can go, but what you must accept. Can you travel abroad? Yes. But you need English, a visa, access to ways of seeing the world. You must be a pillar of society: a suited office worker, middle class, with a tax number, education, savings, and spending potential. You mustn’t be too poor or have nothing to do. You mustn’t carry a Quixotic dream of beginning a new life. Before them, all you can do is prove your innocence. The airport becomes a filter. Refugees in worn clothing with nowhere to go are stopped. People from “sensitive countries” are questioned separately. People who opposed a country’s policies online enter watchlists. And we think this is normal. We say: “It’s fine. We are going abroad, after all.” </blockquote> We say: “As long as we get through.” </blockquote> We say: “They have their difficulties too.” </blockquote> Whose safety? Whose country? Who defines normal? We have lived in the dream so long that we believe a room which can expel us at any moment embodies civilization. Like the campus rules of that later “special period”: no nonessential outings, comprehensive silence, travel-code and health-code checks. Every phrase sounded reasonable and gentle, as if taking responsibility for your life. That was when I truly felt afraid. Not because I couldn’t leave campus, but because leaving required a reason, walking required an application, breathing required gratitude. You queue, give fingerprints, accept sorting. Finally you say: “At least I can travel abroad. I’m lucky.” </blockquote> I finally stepped through the door. I knew this wasn’t freedom. Still, we had come in. I looked down at the landing-permission sticker: 15 Days </blockquote> I had not been chosen by God. I was a temporarily exempted sinner, belonging nowhere here, only tolerated for a while. I lowered my head and surrendered my eyes, voice, and past movements as if receiving pardon. Really, I simply hadn’t been exiled yet. “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.” —Revelation 13:16 </blockquote> </a>III | Beneath the Wheels</h3>I boarded the subway and traveled south on the Midosuji Line. Few passengers were beside me. Everyone looked down at a phone, no different from any afternoon in Tokyo, Beijing, or Shanghai. The announcement said “Nishinakajima-Minamigata.” A mouthful, though that wasn’t what interested me. I was thinking about the weathered traces at the entrance. This station was built in 1964. That same year, something much larger quietly happened: The Shinkansen opened. Shinji Sogō, president of Japanese National Railways. Nobody mentions that name anymore. Construction formally began on April 20, 1959. They said: make the trains run. They didn’t say what it would cost. By 1963, the money was gone and the railway only half built. Parliament was furious; the Finance Ministry scrutinized the budget. He acted as though nothing was wrong, knowing that admitting it would end everything. He lied and was forced to resign. The project barely held at history’s cliff edge. Then politics took over. Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, who had announced the Income Doubling Plan, understood that this was not a railway but the nation’s fate. Stopping would collapse Japan’s credibility. The government gritted its teeth, found extra funds, and pushed this national artery all the way to Tokyo. Sogō wasn’t invited to opening day. He had been asked to leave. At home, he watched television images of trains racing at 210 kilometers per hour. He died of pneumonia in 1981 at a JNR hospital in Shibuya, aged ninety-seven, reaching his destination more slowly than any train. Who cares about a forgotten man? The media celebrated. The people cheered. The future seemed to lie beneath their feet. Tokyo Olympics, 1964. Osaka Expo, 1970. People genuinely believed technology was justice and concrete could save a nation. Shinkansen, highways, mountains cut open: newspapers printed “economic miracle.” GDP was national dignity; development was the hard truth. Haven’t you heard those slogans in another country? In 1980, Deng Xiaoping visited Japan. As staff carefully described the high-speed railway’s miracle aboard the Shinkansen, the old man with the Sichuan accent said only: “All I felt was speed, as if something were urging us to run.” </a>Fast.</h4>One simple word. From that moment, it became China’s national incantation for the next half-century. We must be fast too! We must not fall behind! Fast meant Shenzhen speed, the infrastructure-building machine, Beijing to Shanghai in only four hours. Fast meant the Liu Zhijun era, high-speed rail climbing from drawings onto the land overnight, and the slogan: “Achieve leapfrog development of the railways.” The rails climbed mountains, crossed rivers and deserts, bored through frozen earth. The Railway Ministry became the country’s largest asset holder. Wherever rails went, GDP soared. For those years, China’s annual growth stayed in double digits. Ten, eleven, twelve percent. Growth was an addiction. Slow down and die. A vast country ran as though possessed. But it ran too fast. In 2011, a high-speed train collision in Wenzhou killed forty people. Liu Zhijun fell, charged with corruption. Yet it wasn’t he who was crushed. It was the workers who could never speak again. The rail lines forced to slow. The maglev dream that died halfway. Millions of railway employees whose silence paid for restructuring. Migrant workers became expendable bricks and tiles. Cities became exhibitions of glass facades and property advertisements. Ordinary people became domestic demand waiting to expand. Nobody asked why we were building, for whom, or where it would end. We knew only that failing to build meant falling behind, and falling behind meant being beaten. So we built and built, constructing a country to display to ourselves as a dream. I sat on the Midosuji Line watching stations recede: Shin-Osaka, Umeda, Shinsaibashi, Namba… Like strata of time. I was an archaeologist digging out modernity’s bones. This was more than transport. It was the logic of the state, the circuitry of power, a road that had swallowed millions of bodies, desires, and futures. We thought we were taking a train. Really, the state was carrying us, running its faith in speed on our lives. Who slowed down? Who died? Who was pinned beneath the tracks and never rose? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the train cannot stop. Look, it really is running. But are you still aboard? </a>IV | Beneath the Tower, No New World</h3>I got off at Dōbutsuen-mae, “in front of the zoo.” A station name out of a picture book, but Shinsekai above ground felt nothing like a fantasy. “New World.” A name so confident it was almost excessive. One glance told you it was no longer new. Instead, it had a peculiar Showa feeling: takoyaki, souvenir shops, nothing that interested me. Everything seemed copied from travel brochures around the country, a nation repeatedly performing its imagined common people’s culture. Walking along, I looked up and saw the tower. Tsūtenkaku. It stood abruptly, like a stiff nail driven into the city’s flesh. Neither imposing nor magnificent, but inexplicably odd. Something dropped in my stomach. It shouldn’t be here. Yet there it stood, unyieldingly rigid. I read about it afterward. The first Tsūtenkaku, built in 1912, imitated the Eiffel Tower, with an Arc de Triomphe-like base and a whole Westernized district around it. A product of Taisho romanticism, an urban fantasy following imperial victory. It was destroyed in wartime fire. Rebuilt after the war, it became taller, straighter, rougher. A symbol of economic revival, a defeated nation’s monument to getting an erection again. It was never merely an observation tower for residents, but an instrument of symbolism, a monument to unfinished ambition. Something thrust above a poor district, sealing tragedy away in the name of hope. Beneath it I saw a familiar, unfamiliar figure. Billiken. That strange god of good luck. Bald head, smiling face, enormous ears and feet. Sitting like some cartoon alien while tourists gathered to rub his soles for luck. A chill passed through me. Rubbing his feet seemed harmless, funny, relaxed. Yet I saw a nakedly sexualized ritual: bowing your head and waist, approaching the margins of his body. Not his eyes or hands, but his soles. Caring nothing for who he was, only whether you could extract good fortune. He didn’t speak or refuse. But he kept looking, enjoying your submission. And then? The Great Hanshin Earthquake came in 1995. Kobe’s port was paralyzed. Highways collapsed. The bubble burst, banks failed, factories laid off workers, foreign capital fled. Would stagnation last only thirty years? Nobody could say. And Tsūtenkaku? It did nothing. It could do nothing. It was no lighthouse, power pylon, shelter, or broadcasting facility. Only a pillar unable to become hard or soft, standing while the city collapsed and people died. It saved nobody, said nothing, brought no luck. It left only a ridiculous open-mouthed smile and soles rubbed bare by tourists. That was its true face. Standing below the tower and those polished feet, I suddenly wanted to laugh. Not because it was funny, but because it was absurd. A symbol cannot support suffering. A nation’s illusion can be stripped bare by one earthquake. A few steps farther south lies Nishinari, the city’s real underbelly. Beneath blue tarps is a street kingdom of homeless people. Unemployed old men linger outside bento shops. No tower, no god, no luck. Only two-hundred-yen udon and the cries of fried-skewer vendors. Before reality, Tsūtenkaku had already lost completely. But they wouldn’t admit it. So they said: this is the New World. </a>V | Modernity in Ruins</h3>I went to Kobe, first to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial. Before entering, we silently queued at ticket machines. Uniformed staff nearby looked like student volunteers just out of class. The first film showed streets on the morning after the quake: derailed trains, shattered roof tiles, smoking roads, residents wrapped in quilts warming themselves beside burning barrels. No narration, only wind through rubble. I stood motionless while a corner of something inside me collapsed. Not war or an external enemy, but the city’s own fracture. A sudden shaking of earth and sky tore apart people’s faith in the metropolis. Another film showed orderly tents, signs reading “Rebuilding Lives,” and a soothing male NHK voice, as if speaking for the rationality of the state. Could rationality rebuild every fallen house? I didn’t know. Leaving the memorial, I headed north up the slope to Kitano’s foreign residences. Foreigners had settled here after the Meiji Restoration: red-brick Western houses, little clock towers, European railings. In the imagination of the 1920s, Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto formed a whole, among Japan’s first regions to encounter capitalism, industrialization, and colonial networks. A model of East Asian modernity: trams, electric lights, running water, banks, trading houses, Western clothes, dance halls, Ashiya villas, Semba spinning mills, Umeda department stores. Japan had just endured the Great Kanto Earthquake. Tokyo burned to ash; Kansai rose. Osaka briefly became Japan’s largest city, surpassing Tokyo in port traffic, industrial output, and population. They called it the Greater Osaka era. In Greater Osaka’s dream, Kobe was the port, the gateway, the future. Modernity here wasn’t simply physical speed, order, and progress, but an emotional structure. It promised prosperity, safety, cleanliness, efficiency—if you submitted, if you believed. At 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, none of it held. The city collapsed. Roads broke, water stopped, fires burned all day. Central Kobe was almost destroyed. More than six thousand people died beneath their own homes. That was not simply a natural disaster. Earthquakes are indiscriminate. Death is sociological. One tremor shattered modernity’s illusion. I remembered the twisted train cab displayed at the memorial, once among Hanshin Electric Railway’s most advanced models. Now it lay like bent sheet metal behind glass, with photographs of collapsed highway bridges behind it. Things that had symbolized progress were left silent. Cities have no power to heal themselves. Generations of hands must slowly smooth the rubble, fill the roads, swallow the pain. Our lives continue from such worlds, forcibly restarted. If an earthquake can destroy modernity, what about a pandemic? I remember a story. She was trapped at Shanghai Pudong Airport for fifty-six days. No hotel would take her; flights were suspended; no transport could bring her home. She lived on convenience-store instant noodles, sat in the terminal by day, and slept in a corner of the restroom at night. She said it wasn’t being stranded. It was a legal expulsion. The state did not drive you out, but offered no place to remain. She became a by-product of modernity running idle, an unclassified existence: neither passenger nor resident, patient nor suspect. Only an undefined body. Another person walked twenty-three kilometers for a PCR test before his green health code expired because no ride-hailing driver would take him. Drivers feared receiving yellow codes and being unable to return home themselves. Every technical network—health codes, appointments, travel records, district lockdowns—served not people, but control over people. A few days later came a stranger story. Shut outside a checkpoint at the city’s edge, someone walked around Taihu Lake to get home. Seven hundred kilometers, like bodily penance. They sound like fables, but they happened. The year was 2022. The places were streets familiar to you and me. Was the earthquake the exception? No. The pandemic was modernity’s true earthquake: invisible, normalized, administered through technology. It destroyed not houses, but our faith in order. Convenience stores, subways, food deliveries, parcels, hospitals, schools, social platforms: what you thought were freedom’s infrastructure became boundaries, filters, invisible barbed wire. You queued, scanned, had your temperature taken, surrendered test results, travel histories, facial features, addresses, identity numbers. Then asked: who am I? Passports, visas, IDs, health codes had all been for your own good. That day, you understood: you were no longer a person, but a movable unit, a number judged worthy or unworthy of passage, a risk-bearing body graded by technology. A pandemic could take your freedom, and you still had to give thanks. A yellow code could keep you from home, and you still had to express understanding. Still you believed it was for everyone. I watched the train enter Osaka. Tracks lengthened beneath me; the city expanded ahead. Yet everything seemed to contract. Not bodies, but the boundaries of being human. Not national borders, but the thin membrane of trust between us and institutions. It had broken. Convenience stores remained open. High-speed trains kept running. Subway announcements still said Nishinakajima-Minamigata. Billiken still sat beneath Tsūtenkaku, smiling at everyone who rubbed his feet. But I knew it all operated not for us, but to preserve an already hollow shell. Modernity had collapsed. We remained inside it, living on like ghosts. </blockquote> </a>VI | You Are What You Eat</h3>At the Expo souvenir shop, I stared at an excessively cute little box. A cat’s back was printed on it, with the words: Nyanko Baum in KANAZAWA Noto salted caramel flavor, made with Wajima sea salt </blockquote> At first I only thought it cute. Then my eyes caught Noto salt and Wajima sea salt, and stopped. Noto: the place just struck by an earthquake, swallowed by seawater, a wound whose numbers kept changing in news alerts. But it wasn’t treated as a wound. It became a flavor, a marketing phrase beside a cat’s tail. Where did that salt come from? Who dried it? </blockquote> Which fisherman, which salt field, which reconstruction recovered it? Nobody told me. What I swallowed wasn’t caramel or sea salt. It was the illusion the state offered: “This is good.” “This is regional revitalization.” “This supports the disaster area.” </blockquote> I began noticing it everywhere. “Domestic rice” in every Yoshinoya window. “Domestic tea leaves” on drink bottles. “Direct from local producers” in the supermarket’s most prominent spot. As if local production alone deserved confidence, pride, trust. Who decided domestic meant trustworthy? Japan’s local-production-for-local-consumption policies have run for decades. School lunches, workplace cafeterias, convenience-store bentos all label their origins. This isn’t transparency, but cultural governance. It tells you: your body belongs to this country. You should eat what this country raises. You think you are choosing food. You are choosing belonging. No different from Korea’s sinto buri, the inseparability of body and soil, or slogans familiar to us: domestic means healthy; foreign food means unpatriotic; imports mean worshiping foreigners. Boycott American beef, oppose ractopamine pork, beware GM crops… Like that cat-shaped treat, you buy it smiling, thinking you support disaster survivors. Really, you join a silent ritual: bowing to the state’s illusion of redistribution, accepting that happiness can be built by eating local specialties, believing the country still has ability, plans, residual warmth. But what about Wajima’s salt? Did it really come from that devastated place? Can those who lost homes rebuild because you ate this cake? We stopped believing in the state long ago, yet still eat the illusions it feeds us. Cat desserts, domestic rice, domestic chips: every commodity wrapped in national symbols is a gentle command. It isn’t fierce like police or hard like institutions. It is sweet, cute, reassuring: “Eat. It’s fine. You don’t have to do that other thing.” It never asks whether you’re hungry. It only fears you’ll wake up. Looking at the cat treat, I suddenly shivered. It smiles and meows while you chew and savor it, making you forget that violence originally tasted of sea, salt, pain. Not caramel. Not tender words. An undisguised knife. Should I eat it? For a moment, I had no answer. </a>VII | Not in My Name</h3>I saw the stamp cabinet in a tourist souvenir shop. “Can you find your name?” announced the sign. Neat compartments held English-name stamps rendered in kanji: Emily, Tom, Ann, Alex… Beneath each were three or four red characters. Emily: 利恵美. Tom: 富夢. Alex: 悠久太寿. I stared for a long time. Not amused, but sad. This wasn’t translation, naming, or writing. It was encoding: stuffing living names from different cultures into the gaps of another system, fitting superficial syllables into meaningless packaging. Like speech recognition hearing “home” and writing 喉母, “throat-mother.” Almost right, entirely wrong. I thought of Anglo-American culture’s strange fascinations with the East. Hippies in patterned shawls, taking LSD, chanting mispronounced Sanskrit through hallucinations, speaking of Eastern spirituality and Himalayan mystery. Had they truly understood anything? They needed exotic material, a fantasy to replace capitalism’s emptiness. A sticker over the hole in their souls. The East was a sticker collection to tear from at will. More ironically, the ethnic-minority performances I watched as a child were the same thing. People photographed Miao girls singing and smiled at Dai dances. The performers had to dance, smile, perform ethnicity, never tire, complain, or feel anything real. Their purpose was to please the mainstream and fulfill a national picture of harmonious diversity. It wasn’t their dance. It was movement assigned by the state. Looking at those stamped names, I remembered a museum panel in Osaka listing ancient imperial names. Not modern names like Akihito or Naruhito, but fragments of incantations stripped of meaning and even reliable pronunciation: 天之冬衣開斗隅命, 彥火火出見尊, 饒速日命, 宇摩志麻遅命… </blockquote> Before that wall, I felt fear down to my bones. Neither Japanese nor Chinese, but remains of a long-extinct sound system. Perhaps indigenous Kyushu voices, distant Ainu kin, Northeast Asian ancestors vanished into ice and snow. And now? Wrapped in Chinese characters, edited by the imperial system into mythology, made part of the Age of the Gods. Cultural remains we can look at but no longer speak. That sense of a language extinguished beyond retelling hurts most deeply. Like Hokkaido’s place names: Tomakomai, Kushiro, Noboribetsu. Not Japanese in origin, but Ainu. I thought too of names farther west: Xuyi, Suqian, Pizhou, Junan, Jurong… Their characters look antique and elegant, yet are fragments of Dongyi languages roughly transcribed into Chinese. Wuxi doesn’t simply mean “no tin.” Gusu isn’t merely a rearrangement of familiar Chinese words. When civilization’s conquerors arrived, they declared the words too barbarous, not elegant enough, in need of meaningful characters. Sounds were bent; meanings refined. We call it cultural fusion. It is language murder. Not translation, but replacement. Standing there, I almost cried. We had lost more than a language. We had lost another possibility. Their words, gods, mother tongues, grammar, rhythms, spells were swallowed by civilization, along with their faces, epics, refusals. Nobody knows their language family, deities, sentence structures. They died so completely that even their names no longer belonged to them. I thought of Babel. Humanity spoke different tongues, civilizations developed separately. But some never gave up. “We will rebuild the Tower of Babel!” How? By wrenching letters from European phonetic systems, tearing languages apart and kneading them together, calling it internationalism, fashion, progress. Whose language was it, finally? A language of European Latin letters. Is the world only the land west of the Dnieper? “Not in my name,” they say: American Jews answering Israel’s killing, drawing a fracture between ethnic identity and state violence. I think it is what every replaced language would say: Not in my name. </blockquote> Don’t stamp with my name or speak with my voice. Don’t build cities from my bones or rename me after death as part of you. They aren’t 利恵美, 富夢, or 悠久太寿. They have their own languages. You simply won’t listen. Looking at the stamps, I cried inwardly: Not in my name. </blockquote> </a>VIII | A Bus That Will Not Come</h3>I first saw “Tokushima” in the Expo’s Kansai pavilion. Not in news or history, but in a corner of a colorful folding map: Tokushima—beside the Seto Inland Sea, home to the world’s largest whirlpools. </blockquote> I stared at the name. Tokushima? Never heard of it. Beside the polished familiarity of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, it seemed unfamiliar, blurred, peripheral. Back at the hotel, I learned something: Tokushima had no electrified railway. It struck like an electric shock. A place marked as a city on the map didn’t even have electric trains. Could such a place count as modern? Carrying that prejudice, I bought a ticket and forced myself onto a bus to Tokushima. I arrived. At dusk, backpack on, I stepped into the empty station. No electric trains, no flashing LED transfer screens. Only a small station building and a bus that had just left. Without checking the timetable, I sat beneath the stop sign and drifted. Only when the cold wind made me hunch my shoulders did I realize the next bus was thirty minutes away. Those thirty minutes felt less like waiting than a reckoning. In Tokyo, missing a train never feels like the world has paused. In Tokushima, each missed bus feels like abandonment. No alternative, no plan B, only an empty platform and the darkening sky. At that moment, I understood: I had never truly possessed the night. In Tokyo I could cross Shibuya late, buy a hot drink, run for Shinjuku’s last train. In Osaka I could stare beneath Tsūtenkaku, wander Namba’s underground passages, eat udon outside a station. But in this city without electrified railways, I was a minor, a girl, an outsider, a slight body. No car, no guardian, no internet cafe that would admit me, no karaoke room where I could sleep. Night meant full hotels, silent streets, no public transport. It wasn’t that I had nowhere to go. I had nowhere I was allowed to go. Night wasn’t an absence of lights, but an absence of destinations. Not an absence of sound, but an absence of response. The whole society quietly told me: You should leave. I sat in a gap in an institutional calculation. It wasn’t insufficiently modern. Modernity was precisely this: adult, car-owning, wealthy, with family, and you are free. A girl, alone, young, without spending power, and you shouldn’t appear at night. The city said it meant no harm. But exclusion without response is more hopeless than malicious refusal. It doesn’t tell you you’re wrong. It simply leaves you no way to exist. </a>Epilogue | The Night I Never Owned</h3>I remembered the C on the immigration screen, the queue, the fifteen-day permission. I had thought those were merely border rules. Only in Tokushima’s night did I understand: from the beginning, my existence wasn’t legitimate, only tolerated. Neither guest nor traveler, only a temporarily pardoned sinner. That night I stayed nowhere. I sat on the little slope behind the bus stop until dawn. At daybreak I remembered the cat-shaped sweets labeled Noto sea salt still in my bag. I took one out and bit it. As salt rushed into my mouth, I felt I had bitten through something. Not sugar, not caramel, but the system wrapped in cuteness, the voice saying, “Eat. This is what safety means.” I suddenly wanted to cry. Not because it was salty, but because it sugar-coated a knife and described it with lies. As I said at the beginning, the nights of this land had never truly belonged to me. It was time to go. Using the Claude API to build a dataset and a Claude-like model 2024-05-04T14:21:27.000Z </a>Introduction</h1>I finally got the free AWS 32V account sorted out! Claude 3 Sonnet is available in ap-south-1 (Mumbai). To request access to Claude: Open this page</a>.</li> Click to request access and enter a real company whose location matches the IP address.</li> Approval usually takes anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute.</li> </ol> Here is what I have gathered so far: Opus is unavailable, perhaps because its compute requirements are too high.</li> A 400 Method Not Allowed error means the account is restricted in that region. Switch regions and request access again.</li> </ol> </a>Dataset</h1>Next, I tried extracting prompts from real conversation datasets such as WildChat and LMSYS to build a dataset. The strategy: Filter out all responses that have been censored or had personal information redacted.</li> Randomly sample 5,000 examples from what remains.</li> Remove unused fields such as hashes.</li> </ol> The source datasets use ShareGPT format. I just replace all assistant/GPT turns with outputs from Claude 3 Sonnet. After generating and gathering data, I ended up with: Model</th> Dataset size</th> </tr> </thead> Claude 3 Sonnet</td> 10k</td> </tr> Claude 3 Opus</td> 10k</td> </tr> </tbody></table> These are all multi-turn conversations with real user inputs, so the resulting model might have strong long-context abilities! </a>Training</h1>I chose the base Llama-3-8B model and stayed with Llama Factory as the framework. One pitfall: selecting another prompt template for Llama-3-8B caused a device-side assertion error. The solutions: Enable vocabulary expansion, although this cannot be used with QLoRA.</li> Or use the Llama3 prompt template. The drawback is that uninitialized special tokens may affect the results…</li> </ol> Deduplicating Data with Clustering and Similarity 2024-04-30T17:29:54.000Z I’ve been preparing a conversation dataset lately and found quite a few similar examples in the base data. Time to get rid of those duplicates. First, I converted every example into a vector using the BGE-M3 embedding model. You can read about the selection here</a>. The main reason was that BGE-M3 was the only embedding model I could find at the time that supported multiple languages, including Chinese. Next, I used DBSCAN to gather similar examples into the same cluster. For each cluster, I calculated the pairwise cosine similarity between all its examples. If an example’s highest similarity to another example exceeded the threshold, I removed it. That way, the remaining examples would have relatively low similarity to one another. Finally, I saved the cleaned data to a new file for later use. I also made a few optimizations, such as asynchronous requests and multiprocessing, to speed things up. Progress bars and logging made the output easier to follow, too. I’ll release this as part of a dataset toolchain! GitHub: https://github.com/Ce-daros/Collider</a> </a>Code snippets</h2> Read the input data and concatenate the system message and conversation:</li> </ol> 读取数据并拼接 system 和 conversation logging.info("Reading and concatenating data...") all_texts = [] with open(input_file, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f: data = json.load(f) logging.info(f"Loaded {len(data)} entries from {input_file}") for entry in data: system = entry.get("system", "") conversation = entry.get("conversations", []) if conversation: value = conversation[0].get("value", "") text = system + value all_texts.append(text)</code></pre> Calculate embeddings:</li> </ol> logging.info("Calculating embeddings...") all_embeddings = [] batch_count = 0 with torch.no_grad(): for i in tqdm(range(0, len(all_texts), batch_size), desc="Batches"): batch = all_texts[i:i+batch_size] # 使用模型计算嵌入向量 inputs = tokenizer(batch, padding=True, truncation=True, return_tensors="pt").to(device) output = model(**inputs, return_dict=True) dense_output = output.dense_output embeddings = dense_output.cpu().numpy() all_embeddings.append(embeddings)</code></pre> DBSCAN clustering and similarity filtering:</li> </ol> 执行 DBSCAN 聚类 logging.info("Performing DBSCAN clustering...") clustering = DBSCAN(eps=eps, min_samples=min_samples, metric='cosine') cluster_labels = clustering.fit_predict(list(tqdm(all_embeddings, desc="DBSCAN input"))) # 将 tqdm 迭代器转换为列表 # 移除高相似度对 if True: logging.info("Removing similar vectors using DBSCAN clustering and similarity threshold...") unique_data = [] discarded_vectors = set() # 存储已舍弃的向量(字符串形式) for label in np.unique(cluster_labels): if label != -1: # 对于每个簇 cluster_indices = np.where(cluster_labels == label)[0] cluster_embeddings = all_embeddings[cluster_indices] cluster_data = [data[i] for i in cluster_indices] # 计算簇内相似度矩阵 similarity_matrix = cosine_similarity(cluster_embeddings) # 根据相似度阈值选择代表 representatives = [] for i in range(len(cluster_data)): similar_indices = np.where(similarity_matrix[i] > similarity_threshold)[0] if len(similar_indices) == 1: # 只有一个相似向量, 保留该向量 vector_str = str(cluster_data[i]) if vector_str not in discarded_vectors: representatives.append(cluster_data[i]) else: discarded_vectors.add(vector_str) else: # 有多个相似向量, 选择第一个作为代表 representative_index = similar_indices[0] if i == representative_index: vector_str = str(cluster_data[i]) if vector_str not in discarded_vectors: representatives.append(cluster_data[i]) else: discarded_vectors.add(str(cluster_data[i])) unique_data.extend(representatives) else: # 对于噪声点直接保留 noise_indices = np.where(cluster_labels == -1)[0] unique_data.extend([data[i] for i in noise_indices if str(data[i]) not in discarded_vectors]) logging.info(f"Saving {len(unique_data)} entries to {output_file}") with open(output_file, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f: json.dump(unique_data, f, ensure_ascii=False, indent=4) logging.info(f"After removing: {len(unique_data)}. Before removing: {len(data)}.") </code></pre> An entire afternoon of wrestling with AI, plus a whole night… and the first module is finally done. Here’s the rough dataset-generation workflow: Added Valine comments! 2024-04-28T08:08:04.000Z It was pretty straightforward, although this theme is too old to have official Valine support. I used an HTML snippet: <div id="vcomments"></div></code></pre> new Valine({ el: "#vcomments", appId: "RheH6...kVK-gzGzoHsz", placeholder: "Meow meow meow?", appKey: "tVevphD...UhsHLk", emojiCDN: "...", emojiMaps: {...}, });</code></pre> I made a few adjustments to fit the theme and used the custom emoji feature to add some Tangtang reaction images. Look! If you spot a bug, please let me know anytime.