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Have You Had a Good Summer?

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2026.8.11–12

It started like this: the deepest, most grounding sleep I've had in six months surprisingly found me in this old Beijing dorm room, a place suffocating under its own heavily 1980s aura. Which exact year the building was constructed no longer has any real archaeological value (though out of curiosity I did look it up: rumor has it this place was a central hub for mainland Chinese campus folk music in the 1980s and 90s; whether the singing ever truly died out is hard to say, but the dorm itself remains impeccably preserved in its original state). The peeling wall paint, the furniture, the window frames, the air conditioner, and the smell of the corridor collectively forge a profoundly stubborn historical continuity. The AC, in particular—when you turn it on, it wheezes a few times before it starts violently clanking and vibrating, barely spitting out a breath of cool air, behaving like a temp worker well past retirement age with zero passion left for his labor. I am much the same. Having finally secured my degree after a delayed graduation, I should, by all logic, have shed my student identity. Instead, I am staying right here at the same university to keep studying. How many years that will take—two, three, or even longer—is impossible to say. The situation has become rather absurd: I haven't truly left, nor have I truly started over; I've simply morphed from a student into someone who graduated once but is somehow still stuck here. If this drags on, this campus might very well become the physical location where I've spent the longest chunk of my life, yet right now, I can't even predict which year will be my last. Staying the longest doesn't mean liking it the most; it merely proves that some things are far better at procrastinating than planning, and I just happen to be the one dragged along.

During the day, I can still perform the choreography of a structured life—reading, writing, replying to messages, hitting the cafeteria or ordering takeout, doing laundry, taking a shower—maintaining the superficial order expected of a normal young adult. But after midnight, that order begins to loosen. An unchaired, agenda-less meeting with no closing time convenes in my head with absolute punctuality: What exactly did I do today? What am I doing tomorrow? What happens after I get this degree? What's next? And after that? Where will the money come from? Where do I find a job? Which city will I live in? What about my parents? Do I actually have the capability to walk this path all the way to the end? Money, degrees, jobs, cities, parents, the future—these are inescapable, brute facts. None of them need to be elevated to the status of a "philosophical question" to warrant anxiety; they are the material bedrock of philosophical questions. After thinking all night to no avail, at 3 AM I have no choice but to climb out of bed and whip up a bucket of Cup Noodles. I drop two blocks of fermented bean curd into the bowl, as is my ritual. The salt, grease, and fermented stench rush up together, and my attention finally descends from unsolvable life crises back to the surface of the soup—at least, in this exact moment, the next confirmed step is to finish the food (though the black-packaged Red Tonkotsu broth always tastes a bit off). Meanwhile, others are likely living out their own summers: some doing fieldwork, some interning at corporations, some meeting with advisors or bosses. Some have already begun processing their summer vacation into a resume—projects, conferences, surveys, volunteer work, neatly stacked line by line—so that when the fall semester begins, they can proudly declare they weren't idle, channeling that classic line: "Sweet highs, crisp mids, deep lows—in a word, total transparency." I have no grounds to criticize this. People have to make a living, and making a living has never been a shameful thing. It's just that I personally don't have that much raw material to process, so I simply stare at the blank document on my computer, watching the cursor flash patiently. It's quite fair, really. It never asks about my career plans, nor does it inquire about the status of my applications; it just sits there blinking, reminding me that the page is still blank.

I eventually fell asleep, but the dream shipped me straight back to my hometown. In the dream, I was still a teenager studying in the city, only returning for the holidays, jolting along in a three-wheeler across the muddy roads of the Yellow River floodplains—jolting so hard it numbed the bones—clutching a stack of unfinished exam papers. The relative sitting next to me had already aged into the man he is today (upon waking, I realized no such specific relative actually exists, yet he felt vividly real in the dream). The smell of his cheap tobacco was the same; his way of speaking was the same. He was still tirelessly urging me toward a stable future: best to get into the system, best to secure a respectable identity, best to become an official. I don't know why the dream had to specify becoming a "county magistrate," but that was the gist of it: read all the books you want, but eventually, you have to land somewhere that gives the family face. In the dream, I didn't even argue. Instead, I listened intently, as if I were waiting for this man to grade my paper, to tell me whether all these years of testing, advancing, leaving, and leaving again had been a mistake. Outside the window, it was raining endlessly. The apple orchards were soaked in standing water, the muddy water in the ditches blending seamlessly into the fields, the tires endlessly skidding. After waking up, I thought about it for a long time. What was truly unsettling wasn't the relative himself, but the fact that, even now, I take these questions so seriously in my dreams. It turns out you can leave a place, but you might never graduate from its metric of judgment. What a hometown truly leaves you with isn't just poverty or an insular society of acquaintances; it's an entire, ingrained system of risk calculation: Is the job stable? Is the money enough? What if you fail? What if you go out and can't come back? What happens when your parents get old? If all plans go to hell, do you even have a place to retreat to? These things do not automatically vanish just because your train pulled out of the county station. You change cities, they are still there; you change degrees, they are still there. Even when you start discussing overseas PhDs and the "academic job market," they just squat there in the background, reminding you to first factor in rent, income, and your exit strategy.

But I rarely go back now—two or three days during the holidays, sometimes arriving and leaving on the exact same day. Calling it a "return to the hometown" feels exaggerated; it's more like a short-term visiting scholar gig. I recognize what many streets used to look like, but I have no idea why they look the way they do now. Whose child has grown up, whose shop has closed, where someone's elderly parents have moved—I have to ask my relatives to re-map it all for me. When I was a kid, I thought that place was the whole world. I went out and realized it was just a tiny sliver of the world. Now, returning, I realize I need to get to know even this tiny sliver all over again. Yet, during the New Year, there are always these very strange afternoons. The village elders finish lunch and sit in the courtyard. The winter sun is weak. On the table, there is tea, sunflower seeds, and cigarettes. Someone hands me a smoke, and I take it. The chat usually starts with whether it's cold this year, how the harvest was, or whose kid has found a job. But somehow, as they talk, the conversation inevitably loops around to domestic politics. Because I usually use a VPN to watch YouTube, I'm exposed to plenty of gossip about national politics and officialdom. I don't treat it as serious research; mostly, it's sheer morbid curiosity—seeing what bizarre thing happened where, who made the news recently, how some official fell from grace, or what absurd story leaked from a certain department. It's a bit like a sexually repressed man watching porn: you don't necessarily believe it, nor do you genuinely care about the truth, you just watch it for the spectacle. But when I return home for the Spring Festival, this content I consume for mere entertainment suddenly finds a new utility. These old men aren't going to jump the firewall to watch YouTube themselves, so they listen to my secondhand political gossip. I tell a story, and they start guessing: Is this guy going to get purged? Is that place doomed? Why did this leader do that? What on earth is that country up to? The information isn't reliable, of course—barely three out of ten stories could pass a fact-check—but the old men listen with a mix of fear and fascination, and I get more excited the more I talk. The smoke gathers above our heads, and when I hit the climax of a story, my hands start gesturing wildly (they say Italy and China are remarkably alike, and perhaps that's true). It feels less like I'm telling internet rumors to a few village elders in a courtyard, and more like I'm delivering a lecture to students in a dilapidated classroom. I reach a particularly absurd detail, everyone laughs, and I press on. After finishing the final segment, I flick my cigarette butt—burned down to the filter—into the dry winter mud beside the yard. The gesture actually carries the flair of a university professor tossing a piece of chalk back into the tray after finishing a lecture. In that fleeting moment, a bizarre sense of shared glory emerges. It feels as if some version of the 1980s—an era I never actually lived through—has been briefly resurrected on that table. Ordinary people, having finished their meal, can sit around and earnestly discuss the affairs of state, worry about a distant war, critique an official who doesn't even know they exist, and speculate on the next decade. It's as if the world, though vastly beyond any individual's control, still has enough room for everyone to sit down and offer a few opinions. "It's my duty!" It turns out that over all these years, I've simply grown accustomed to wrapping these matters in academic jargon. The form of knowledge has become more complex, but it doesn't mean a person is any closer to the truth of the world. Sometimes I even feel that an old man's crude remark is far more honest than my so-called theoretical analysis. And precisely because of this, I've become increasingly reluctant to write off my hometown simply as a low-lying swamp that must be escaped. Of course it is a place I want to leave—for many years, my strongest desire was simply to get as far away from it as possible—but on those absurd afternoons, it also gave me a genuine sense of participation. At that dinner table, it allowed me to temporarily feel that I was fundamentally no different from these people; at the very least, we all felt we had the right to say a few words about the world.

My trip to Dazexiang early this year passed with this exact, somewhat suspect sense of participation. The event itself carried zero historical nostalgia. During the Spring Festival, my relative brought along a friend who supposedly had some clout in the local public security system, and a whole group of us went to take a look. Today, it's a standard tourist trap. The wild grass grows well, the tourists are highly cooperative, and the ground is strewn with the bamboo skewers of starch-sausages, crushed water bottles, and assorted wrappers. A speaker in the distance blasts overly loud DJ tracks, and right next to it stands a brightly colored propaganda board touting construction and development. The late Qin peasant uprising and modern cultural tourism coexist here in perfect harmony. Standing to the side, my relative enthusiastically explained that if I could get into the system, getting things done for the family would be much easier, and everyone could bask a bit in my reflected glory. I nodded, of course, but in my head, I remembered that the first great act of the famous young men who made this place historical wasn't building a "Beautiful Dazexiang," but slaughtering the county magistrate. Naturally, I couldn't say that out loud. If I did, a normal Spring Festival outing would instantly devolve into a Confucian-Legalist debate, and likely ruin everyone's appetite. History has indeed progressed to this day. When the ancients were driven to a dead end, they raised their banners in armed rebellion; when modern youth are driven to a dead end, they open a registration website, upload their documents, revise their CVs, prepare for an interview, and draft a three-to-five-year career plan to prove to themselves that there is still a way forward. The ancients took up swords; moderns take up Excel. Let's put aside how much more "civilized" the tools are—at the very least, there are far more spreadsheets. If I actually went in the direction my relative hopes for, I probably wouldn't instantly turn into some cartoon villain. Ordinary people usually lack that much dramatic flair. Most of the time, they just slowly learn highly "normal" things: what to say to whom at the dinner table, when to offer a toast, when to shut up, how to reframe personal interest as the collective good, how to package dissatisfaction as "constructive feedback," and how to tell yourself there's no point making a fuss even when you know something is deeply wrong. You cede five cities today, ten cities tomorrow. One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization. You look back a few years later, and usually, no major, recordable event has taken place. It's just that the things you once found unacceptable have become reality; the things you once found shameful have become your job; and the person you never wanted to be can now naturally explain why they had no choice but to be exactly this way. A person doesn't seem to need a definitive moment of corruption—most of the time, all it takes is a few dozen un-audited micro-decisions.

Summer is almost over, and my peers are gradually taking their places. Some have entered the system, some are continuing to take exams, some have started working, some are taking a gap year to apply, and some are cultivating a different, exceptionally strict hierarchy in Honor of Kings ranked matches. Nowadays, very few people flee into the mountains overnight because they were wronged. Modern escapes require paperwork: you must give notice before quitting, apply for a visa before going abroad, prepare a writing sample for a PhD application, and calculate rent and deposits before leaving a city. Even failure now demands a standard format—best packaged as an explainable gap in your professional history rather than an unprofitable flight. Yet I am still left here at this university, and whether the next chapter will be two years, three years, or longer, I still do not know. When you stay in a place this long, the classrooms, the dorms, the cafeterias, the library, the roads by the school gates, the people you knew and subsequently lost touch with—they all begin to form a secret geography known only to you. It is no longer just a school, nor is it the campus folk songs of the 80s and 90s or the youthful melo-artistic angst of the 2010s; it feels more like a stage that was never properly dismantled after the song-and-dance performance ended. Just like the dorm I am currently in: when I moved in a month ago, I was told it would be renovated a year later, at which point I'd have to pack up and move somewhere else. Counting down the arrival of the deadline on my fingers, I've gradually come to feel that this entire year's stay has, oddly enough, gained an even richer flavor because of it. A victory for negativity; a victory for dialectics.

And so, ultimately, I return to the dorm. The instant noodles I cooked at 3 AM are gone, but the smell of fermented bean curd still lingers by the desk. The document on the screen remains largely blank. After all that tossing and turning, I finally fell asleep, waking up well past noon as the sun slanted through the gap in the curtains. I washed my face, felt a craving for a cigarette, and wanted to wander out for a smoke or two, so I went downstairs to buy a pack. The cigarette shop is south of campus, and to get there you have to cut through a shantytown-like family quarter—rumor has it that Chen Yinke also once lived here back when it was an old courtyard compound. Now it's just a few rows of old buildings, narrow alleys, underwear and trousers hanging off airborne power cables, and junk piled against the walls. Passing through a little-known side gate brings you to a residential complex where many of today's professors and university leaders supposedly live, its name carrying a rather distinct air of old Manchu nobility. Finishing this fixed smoke-buying route and heading back, I found the mud from last night's rain hadn't completely dried. My soles stepped into the muck, pulled out, walked a few paces, and sank in again. The mud wasn't actually deep, but every time I pulled my foot up, the edges of my shoes took some of the wet earth with it. The sun had shifted a bit. There was hardly anyone in the family quarter, save for an occasional bicycle gliding past with a gentle clinking of its bell. I tore open the cigarette pack, lighting one after another, smoking until I was almost at the entrance of my dorm building before looking down and realizing the soles of my shoes were an absolute mess. So I squatted on the edge of the curb, using a wooden stick to meticulously scrape the mud out of the grooves. Suddenly, it occurred to me that for all these years, my actions have amounted to little more than this: yanking my feet out of the exact same mud pit, over and over, then looking down, and wondering if I can still keep walking.

Written from midnight on 2026.8.11 to the afternoon of 8.12, Graduate Dormitory, South Campus Building 26

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