On Swallows Taking Flight

I have always hated my birthday, because it always falls during exams. This year is no exception.

As a child I was precociously aware of death: each birthday meant one step closer to the end, the candles on the cake a countdown rather than a celebration. I can’t say this made me morbid—it made me quite the opposite, actually: someone who makes decisions quickly, because time is visibly finite.

The 18th birthday is supposedly special. In China it is the threshold of legal adulthood; you can now sign contracts and be tried as an adult. In practice, I’ve been making my own decisions since I was old enough to have opinions, and my parents have broadly respected that—which I’m grateful for. So the formal threshold changes little.

What strikes me on reflection is how I’ve always lived like a mild Puritan: uncomfortable chairs preferred to comfortable ones (better for concentration), a Spartan room, a schedule I hold to. This is not austerity for its own sake but a kind of trust in structure—the Calvinist intuition that visible discipline is evidence of invisible election. I was immersed in Confucian classics from an early age, which are not entirely dissimilar: the junzi is defined by his practice, not his declaration.

Socially, I tend to be the Dongfang Shuo type: the person others come to for help, advice, or just to vent. I have usually been glad to help. The high school drama I helped edit—spending nights on the script—and then watched my name disappear from the credits. I was annoyed. But what I took from it was not bitterness but a clearer sense of what I will and won’t accept in future collaborations.

I discovered EVA only in the final year of high school, years after most people. Asuka Langley Soryu hit me with the force of a revelation: someone who insists on being herself even as everything conspires to break her, who would rather be a wreck than a puppet, who fights with the tools she has and demands to be met on her own terms. I found this electrifying. It remains so.

University is, I am told, the real beginning. The crossroads multiply; the coordinates I had—ranking, subjects, exam scores—no longer apply. The question “who am I?” is suddenly live. A classmate C asked me once: if a person is a function, how do you find the fixed point? I have been thinking about it ever since.

The Book of Songs says:

Swallows take flight, spreading their wings wide.
With clear direction and perseverance,
daily progress is certain.