A BEAUTIFUL WEATHER IS ALWAYS BAD

 Last Thursday, when I was on my way to the bus stop for work, it started to drizzle. I regretted forgetting to bring an umbrella, worrying that the rain might get heavier. "The weather is cunning!" I complained, as it had been sunny when I left home. What was worse, the rain suddenly became much heavier while I was waiting for the traffic light to cross the street. By the time I reached the bus stop, the rain had nearly stopped. I raised my head and, to my surprise, saw a splendid rainbow stretching across the sky over Gympie Road. I couldn't help but turn on my mobile phone to capture a photo.

The other day, I woke up early in the morning. As usual, I started reading my e-book. I was reading a biography of the renowned British painter J.W.M. Turner. There was a chapter about Turner's travels to the European continent. In his mind, beautiful weather was always bad weather. From the perspective of an artist, he was always keen to pursue scenes that couldn't be seen in normal situations. Extreme or bad weather gave him a lot of insight for his artwork.

Since I picked up my paintbrush again, I no longer complain about the challenges and suffering of the past. They suddenly became my treasures, as they gave me a lot of inspiration to create art.

Thinking about the past, I have experienced too many unexpected incidents. The more I suffered, the more I understood life. Especially whenever I was in a dilemma, I received support from family, friends, or even strangers. In addition to my own endeavors, I have overcome challenges one after another. If I can apply what I have learned or been inspired by into my artworks, I will be able to fulfill them—giving them souls that can touch many people's hearts.

Abandoning Attachment

 The video clip I recorded and uploaded to social media a couple of days ago—showing me playing "Traces of the Monk in Cold Mountain" on a xiao—has received a lot of attention. This song is a typical example of a simple melody with a deep philosophy. It tells the story of a man climbing Cold Mountain to visit a monk and find answers to a puzzle of life. Unfortunately, he failed to meet the monk. However, as he was leaving, he was suddenly enlightened by the mountain view, realizing that his puzzle was actually caused by the attachment of his own mind.

I have never been to Cold Mountain. When I was playing the music, I was reminded of Yutai Temple on Guifeng Mountain in my hometown. I visited there almost every Lunar New Year when I was young. My most memorable experience was in 2008, a few months before I graduated with a bachelor's degree. I knelt before the statue of Guanyin Bodhisattva and shook the bamboo container holding the fortune sticks. It was a traditional practice to obtain guidance from the Bodhisattva by drawing a stick.

"Congratulations!" the staff member responsible for interpreting the stick told me. "This is a good stick. The story is about Shang Lu in ancient times. He took first place as the Zhuangyuan in the imperial examination. Are you a high school student who is going to take the university entrance examination?" he asked.

"No, I am already a university student, and I will graduate in July," I told him. "I asked Guanyin Bodhisattva for guidance on how to find a suitable job."

"If you're an undergraduate student graduating this year, then the Bodhisattva's instruction is likely to continue your studies for a postgraduate degree—preferably a PhD if you can. I think nowadays a bachelor's degree is very common and doesn't compare to being a Zhuangyuan in the old days. I think a PhD degree is a better match," he said.

While I was playing the music, I was recalling this past event while also reflecting on the story behind the music. I achieved an emotional depth in my playing that I normally couldn't produce. From the view count and the feedback from the audience, I know that I interpreted this piece of music well.

A Visit To EKKA

I knew it would be boring for me as I was not interested in any type of agricultural products, but I still planned to visit when the EKKA came around.

The EKKA venue was probably the most crowded place I have ever seen in Brisbane. It was especially crowded when we were pushing two prams; we could barely move in some directions inside the indoor locations, such as the area selling showbags. However, this was a place we couldn't skip due to the kids' desires.

I was not very interested in the amusement rides as many of them were too exciting for me. To satisfy the kids, I chose to ride the Ferris wheel once. Afterward, I asked my toddler whether he enjoyed sitting on the wheel. He said, "Yes, this is really a big fan." 

I was eager to go to the convention centre, where there was an art exhibition. I had participated in the drawing and painting competition. Though I already knew that I had failed to win a prize, I was still keen to see my artwork present in the exhibition. When we arrived at the art exhibition level, I looked around to find the location of the painting exhibition. "They are all beautiful!" My wife said, "It makes sense that you couldn't get a prize because all the paintings here are nice!"

"Look! That's my artwork!" I pointed to a painting hanging on the wall to my wife and children. We then moved closer. "I think mine is nice too, isn't it?" I said. "Yes," my boy responded. "Yumi, could you help me take a photo? I want to capture the scene while I am standing next to my painting," I asked my wife.

Then I walked closer to the picture and found a few red letters on the label. I checked it more clearly and said cheerfully to my family, "Oh, it's sold!" This was the first time that I had sold a piece of artwork! What an impressive encouragement this is to an amateur painter! After seeing my artwork sold, my heart was filled with joy. Everything at the EKKA had become much more interesting.

We tasted some street food, such as Dagwood dogs, potato tornadoes, and strawberry sundaes, before heading home.

My Lifelong Passion Is Nature

 After a couple of years of playing flutes made of metal or plastic, I eventually switched back to bamboo flutes. I feel that bamboo flutes have some earthy characteristics that cannot be matched by flutes made of other materials, despite they have their own challenges, such as that pitch accuracy is harder to be achieved due to the natural variations of bamboo. Those natural variations, from another perspective, give unique features to each individual instrument, as if filling the musical instrument with a soul.

I am always keen to enjoy nature in the countryside, even though I grew up mainly in an urban area. I like the fresh air, the green mountains, the rivers, the insects, the animals, and even the soil, which are hard to see or touch if you are living in a city. When I was at university, I once saw photos from a classmate who was from a village in northwestern China. There was a small cottage in a mountainous area, with a lot of corns and chili peppers on the wall outside. All of them attracted me, but I was most interested in a bull sitting in front of the house. "Have you ridden on it?" I asked with full curiosity. I envied those who grew up in rural or mountainous areas, despite people said life was not easy there.

Especially when I was living in the university dormitory, I had a roommate who was from Guizhou Province, and he told me that he had to swim across a river to school when he was young. I felt it a bit scary and dangerous, but in my deeper mind I felt it was also romantic and attractive.

Throughout my childhood, I could only experience much of the country life during school holidays with my maternal grandma, who lived in a quiet village before moving to Hong Kong. Every morning, Grandma would take me to the marketplace to buy food for lunch and dinner, as well as to have breakfast in a restaurant. When we arrived home, I used to play under the star fruit tree near the house. I favoured the evening most, with a stunning starry night and sounds by insects and frogs. Usually, there would be grandpas and grandmas living nearby coming to our home to play dominoes. If not, Grandma would tell me lots of stories of the old days of her own life.

Twenty years ago, I went to Hong Kong to visit Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma told me that, throughout her life, the happiest time was when she was living in her hometown village and I went to spend my school holidays there.

When I was young, I used to study painting from a book about Chinese Landscape Painting Techniques. There was a chapter about learning from nature. "Learning from nature" is still my principle of art practice, but it is not limited to painting. I applied it to music and literature too.

The opera The Peony Pavilion, written by Tang Xianzu is one of my favourite literature. In an episode, when the main character, Du Liniang, came to a garden in spring, she couldn't help but say, "My lifelong passion is nature!" And so is mine.

The First Splash

In 2009, when I first studied computer science in Australia after obtaining an undergraduate degree in telecommunications engineering, I felt a bit uneasy as the summer holiday was approaching. The summer holiday in Australia was too long, and it would be too boring if I couldn't find something interesting to do. 

Paul asked me whether I would like to continue a project about microphone arrays in his lab. I refused, and accepted Marcello's invitation to develop the process configuration component in YAWL — Yet Another Workflow Language. 

Marcello was a young lecturer in the Enterprise Software Architecture unit, which taught component software and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"Let me introduce you to my team." He led me to an office on Margrete Street. "Our team is called the Business Process Management Group, focusing on process-centric services. It is the largest team in this area in Australia." 

I had read quite a lot in this area, but this was the only time a teacher had linked Business Process Management with process-centric services in SOA, which was quite innovative. 

He introduced me to members there, such as Michael, Moe and Chun, and finally led me to meet Arthur, who led the group.

He gave me some documents and explained the basic concepts. "Please be aware that these documents include chapters from books that are ready to be published. Please do not share them with others." 

A few days later, when I arrived at the office, he asked me about my understanding of process configuration. 

"I think it is about generating simpler process models from a big model that includes everything, by blocking some gates," I said. 

"Basically correct," he said. "Yeah, I had some friends in China investigating how to strip driver components from a Linux operating system, and select only the driver software components that are required. I think the concept is quite similar!"

After I set up the development platform in Java, Marcello told me he would be traveling to Italy. 

"No worries if you encounter problems. Arthur and Michael will support you."

The first big problem I encountered was to find out which paths were affected when a user blocked a gate in YAWL. For each activity, it has input and output ports, and arcs connect output ports to input ports of the next activities. So to find the affected path, I had to trace the flow. 

Then I started thinking: if I blocked an output port, the arc that stretched from this port would be blocked, and it would not reach the input port it was connected to in the next activity. 

This pattern was familiar to me — it was the problem of finding dependencies in database design!

An output arc was always dependent on an output port, whereas an input port was always dependent on an input arc. The output arc for one port was always the input arc for another.

"Ah, I see. I should use the closure set algorithm from database design," I said to myself.

In the following weekly meeting of the research group, I consulted Arthur about this idea. 

"Yes. This is a way to solve the problem," Arthur responded immediately. "There are many similar applications. Some people call it the bounding box theory."

After Arthur confirmed it, I gained the confidence to start the development. Michael shared the YAWL architecture documents with me. Almost every day, I stayed in the office until 9 pm.

After the Christmas and New Year break, Marcello came back to Brisbane. I cheerfully showed him my work. 

"No. The OR-split should not be implemented like that." He corrected some of my mistakes, and I adjusted those errors in the source code.

After seeing that I had finished everything we discussed at the start of the project, Marcello asked me, "Do you want to co-author a paper with us?"

"A paper?" I couldn't believe I would have the opportunity to write a paper. 

"Yes!" I said firmly.

Then he printed out a draft of an article explaining that after configuration, a process model could contain deadlocks and livelocks, so we had to verify its correctness. He taught me the concept of Petri nets and explained what the idea in the paper was and what I should do.

Three weeks later, I gave a presentation to the team. When I finished, everyone kept silent. This continued for about a minute. Then one of them clapped. Soon all members were clapping loudly. 

"Your presentation is almost perfect!" Marcello said to me.

"I'm surprised that you've done so well!" Arthur walked to my desk and congratulated me. "Do you want to do another project in the coming semester?" he asked.

"No," I told him. "I'm applying for a scholarship in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, so I will be taking some subjects there."

"Our faculty has scholarships too!" Arthur said. 

"No. I tried before, but they said my undergraduate degree wasn't in computer science, so I can't qualify for a scholarship," I replied.

"I'm surprised you weren't studying computer science before. What you've done in two months is equivalent to what an average PhD student does in two years, and the quality is even higher!" Arthur said.

Do They Really Think The Swan Ugly

Eden Lake, located in the suburb of North Lakes, is a place my family often visits. It is a beautiful lake in a quiet area. 

We are used to leaning on the fence in front of a café and admiring the view that stretches to the distant mountains and forests. There is a lot of water-based wildlife, including ducks, tortoises, fish, and the most outstanding ones — swans. 

"Look! Swans! See the beautiful black swans!" Many children were cheering and bouncing on the lookout platform when they saw the swans. 

Suddenly I saw a few lonely, grey, duck-like animals following a big black swan in the water. 

"Ah, I see! They're baby swans!" I pointed to them and waved to my sons. "Look! We can see baby swans!" 

Then I expanded on the topic and said, "Do you know that once upon a time there was a baby swan hatched by a mother duck?" 

"Yes. That's the story of The Ugly Duckling," my son said. 

"But I think they're nice," I said. 

"Yes, they're cute," my elder son said. 

"So cute!" my younger son said.

I suddenly fell into contemplation. Why, in the story of The Ugly Duckling, did everyone say the little swan was ugly? Was he really ugly? Did they really believe he was ugly? 

The other little ducklings didn't know him to be a swan, which is quite understandable. However, hadn't the mother and the other grown-ups known he was a swan?

What is the definition of "ugly"? What is "beautiful"? 

These are the two most subjective terms. We only know what we think, but we can't really know what others think. We know what others say, but we can't know if they're telling the truth.

I think what happened on the farm was a bullying event. The Mother Duck should have already known the ugly duckling was not her child, and that was probably why she couldn't protect him. Or maybe she was unwilling to do so. She wanted to get rid of him but pretended to be nice. 

In that story, those animals who called the little swan ugly might not have really thought he was ugly. Some might have just followed others to bully him. Some might have thought he didn't belong to their group. Some thought he threatened their interests. What's more, some may have even envied him for being a swan.

I raised my head to look into the distance. A gleam of sunshine was reflecting on the lake. The group of swans had swum away, leaving the ducks playing near the edge. 

A black swan suddenly flew to the bank and stood near me, as if he was greeting me. 

"Thank you!" I said to him. 

People might be astonished if they heard what I said. But no one knows that I understood a lot through the swans — about the fairy tale, and about life!

Modern Literati Arts

Literati arts are very significant in China’s art history. From Tang Dynasty’s Wang Wei, literati paintings have gradually become the mainstream in China’s painting history. The techniques are still strongly influencing today’s painting practice in China. However, in today’s Chinese paintings, we can merely see the technical influence of historical literati paintings, but the spirit has been lost. This is similar for music. Folk instruments such as the guzheng and dizi have flourished with quite a number of modern repertoires, whereas instruments for literati music, mainly the guqin and dongxiao, have lost attention.

There are many reasons contributing to this. The influence of Western culture, of course, accounts for it to a great extent. However, the more direct reason is the way of modern life. Today literati are no longer a group that focuses on literature and social science. They also include scholars, academics, engineers, and officers from a large number of disciplines. Meanwhile, paintings and music are conducted by professional painters and musicians rather than literati who are not professional artists. They can easily inherit the techniques, but it is hard to inherit the inner spirit. 

This drives me to think of new approaches for literati arts. 

Yesterday, I painted a picture about an ibis eating crumbs on a dining table. The ibis was rendered with traditional Chinese expression painting skills, whereas other objects and the background were painted with Western watercolor skills. This combined approach to painting is my early attempt at modern literati painting.

Dream of Red Chamber and Its Author

 Yesterday, I played the music Frown in Vain, which was the theme song for Dream of the Red Chamber, on a xiao.

Dream of the Red Chamber is a great novel written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing dynasty. In the 20th century, some scholars argued that the last 40 chapters were written by someone else because the quality was not as good as the first 80 chapters. However, I cannot agree with them.

Just take a look at the title. "Dream of the Red Chamber" is much better than "The Story of a Stone," which was originally used. In addition, the poem at the end of the book matches the one at the start well, indicating that the writer of the ending must be at least as excellent as the writer of the beginning.

The scholars who said the last 40 chapters were written by another author also claimed that this second writer modified the end of the story, which had been set by the first writer. How ridiculous! For a great novel, the writer will not let readers know the ending just by reading the first few chapters, as they will try to attract them to keep reading.

The Beauty of Engineering

Recently, a Chinese mathematician, Hong Wang, was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal. Since then, an article entitled "The Beauty of Mathematics," which is said to have been written by her when she was sixteen, has become popular on the internet. This has driven me to write this article to express the beauty of engineering.

Engineering is how we solve practical problems, and thus engineers have to consider everything for the solution to be applied in the real world. It is strongly influenced by the developments of mathematics and natural science, but it has its own characteristics too. Any breakthrough in natural science can trigger significant changes in engineering, driving engineers to learn for life.  A typical example is that since the invention of optical fibre, theories and techniques in telecommunications engineering have been reshaped. 

Many engineering problems are complicated in scale. Engineers typically have to gain a broad knowledge to understand the whole system and its components. Since a lot of problems require repeatedly solving the same issue, reusability must be considered. In software engineering, this means separating functionalities into different functions, classes, or software components. Reusability is sometimes implemented by allowing configurations on a large component template. For example, C-YAWL, a component that I developed at QUT for the open-source YAWL project, provides a way to create simpler business process models through configurations of a large one.

Different from mathematics, where everything can be rigorously proved, an engineering problem can't be proved thoroughly, even though mathematics is often used as an approach to analyse it. 

Compressive sensing is a topic in signal processing which has strong mathematical foundations. Renowned mathematicians such as Terence Tao have made significant contributions. Theories have been proved that, under some conditions, an algorithm can be used to recover signals in a probability close to one, through random sensing. However, in practice it is still impossible to examine how closely the real signal sources fit the assumptions, while these assumptions will never be fully met. The result will be better if the input signals have characteristics closer to satisfying the conditions.

The approach to an engineering problem is very different from rigorous mathematical proofs. Sometimes we have to observe carefully and even use some imagination. I still remember that in a lecture on electronic circuits, the teacher presented his proof. In one step, the math function looked too complicated. Then he said, "It is impossible to solve this nonlinear function. But let me draw it." 

He then drew a curve on the blackboard, and said, "Just look at the curve of the function. If we only focus on this little region, the curve is smooth and we can approximate this part as a straight line. Thus, we can approximate it as a linear function like this, and then..." 

I am sure this type of approximation would never be allowed in pure maths but it is popular in every domain of engineering.

A engineering solution has to consider human behaviours too. For example, a software engineer has to keep in mind that there is some hacker wanting to break into the system they are developing.

Since not everything can be proved with maths or natural science laws, experimental evaluation is the only way to evaluate the performance of a method in engineering. 

I remember that one day I met a professor who was the director of a research group for speech, audio, image and video technologies. I told him that I had encountered a problem when training the Gaussian Mixture model. 

"The covariance matrix becomes singular after some iterations," I said. “Yes. This is a known issue for GMMs," he said. "Do you have an idea to solve it?"

I then explained what I wanted to do. "Do you think my method will work?" I asked. He smiled and said, "You can try and experiment. If it works, then you know it works. Otherwise, you will know it doesn’t.” 

Personality Of Art

 There are many times that I have seen people commenting on bamboo flute performances, saying things like "the pitch is not accurate." My understanding is that the pitch does not need to be accurate. In a lot of cases, this inaccuracy is intended, depending on the music that one is playing. We have all known that when you press a key on a piano, the pitch is unique. You can adjust the way you press the key to get different sound characteristics, but you can't get another pitch. To some extent, this is the piano's limitation. For bamboo flutes, we can always get a different pitch by adjusting either our embouchure or fingering, so that a special characteristic can be achieved.

Any instrument has its own strengths and weaknesses, and thus we can't use a single standard to rate them. The same applies to any musician or artist.

A few days ago, I told my wife that I would be successful in the arts eventually. My wife asked, "How do you know?" I explained, "Because I have a very special personality, which allows me to see everything with a special viewpoint." I then continued, "For example, if you want to write an article, and your viewpoint fits the majority of people, and your structures and languages fit standard aesthetical criteria—yes, you can get a good mark in exams. But this can't be considered an artwork in literature. A form of art will die once a set of standard criteria has been set."

A CLUSTER OF FLOWERS

 Yesterday, I finished painting a watercolour picture titled "A Cluster of Flowers". It features a cluster of yellow flowers that I saw in the City Botanic Gardens of Brisbane.

I used watercolour pencils to draw the outlines and applied the colours inside using pan-based watercolour pigments. However, I soon regretted using an orange pencil to draw the petals. I thought I could make them much lighter by wiping them with a brush dipped in clean water. Unfortunately, the result is that the edges are still too dark. I should have used a yellow pencil instead.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the flowers. The different layers of colours and green leaves are vivid. However, I am not happy with the background, meaning the soil on the ground and the bush in the far field. The light conditions of the background are also not well painted. I think in my next picture, I will try to apply just a single layer of very light, smooth colour for the background. A looser style will be better to make the foreground objects stand out.

Rest Yourself

 I was supervising my son practising the piano in the evening. He was playing a new song that he had just learned from his last lesson. At the beginning, he felt frustrated, but he continued to progress until he could play the whole song with few errors.

"Hooray!" I cheered with him.

He looked at me and asked, "Is it really good?"

I nodded my head. He then merrily rushed to the bedroom to tell his mum. His mum encouraged him to play it again.

However, he made some silly mistakes. Then he tried again, and then again and again. It was a pity that he couldn't play it as well as before.

"Why not take a rest?" I suggested. He then went to play with his toy cars for a little while.

"You've practised enough," I said to him. "Maybe you can try again tomorrow."

But he didn't listen to me and quickly sat on the piano bench. He tried to play the music, and it was even better than all his previous attempts. He then tried again, and it was almost perfect to my ears.

"Yeah, when you encounter a puzzle that you can't solve immediately, please take a rest and then try again. Resting is as important as practising. A good way to rest is to switch your focus to other activities," I told him.

About BUTTERFLY LOVERS

 Recently, the famous Chinese composer Chen Gang passed away. Chen Gang was mostly known as one of the two composers of the violin concerto "Butterfly Lovers", and thus yesterday I played this music on xiao to pay homage to him.

The story of the Butterfly Lovers is interesting, and it is even more interesting in modern society, where everything has to be labeled clearly. In the old days, only boys could be admitted to school. Therefore, a girl named Zhu Yingtai disguised herself as a boy to study in a college, where she built a good friendship with one of her classmates named Liang Shanbo. When Shanbo discovered Yingtai's true gender, he wanted to marry her, but Yingtai was already engaged to someone else through an arrangement by her parents. Eventually, both of them died for love and transformed into a pair of butterflies to live together.

This story, in modern society, can trigger a number of questions. Is Shanbo gay? When he studied together with Yingtai, Yingtai was dressed like a boy, but she was in fact a girl. This situation is somewhat similar to today's transgender people. Is this type of love classified as homosexual love? Is there any boundary between same-sex classmate friendship and the love of lovers? We can think about a lot of these aspects.

Then eventually, I believe most people will agree with the point that people in modern times consider too much. There is, in fact, little difference among different sentiments.

Sincerity and Hypocrisy (continued)

When July of 2008 came, I was thinking about whether to go to Shenzhen. Finally, I went there because I wanted to understand what would happen. I knew it was most likely that they would not keep their promise, but I was still keen to get a clear answer. 

Nevertheless, even if I stayed there for only a day, ZTE would have to pay me. As a fresh graduate, I could also stay in the company’s temporary accommodation for three weeks.

On the first day that I arrived at the office, I met Mr. Wang, who was the head of the department. For fresh graduates like me, there was training soon. Each graduate would be assigned a mentor. 

I clearly remember that when Mr. Wang led me to my mentor, he said, "This graduate had a very excellent academic performance at school. Please pay more attention to his training."

The department arranged lectures for us. Senior Engineers from ZTE Corporation were the lecturers. Each graduate received training materials, such as books, paper documents, and software installed on computers. 

The lecturers illustrated to us topics about wireless network planning and optimization. After each lecture, there would be time for us to read materials and practice on the simulation software platforms. 

Every day my mentor would ask me some questions. "Do you understand what the lectures are about?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, and explained my understanding.

"Can you tell me about the direction of antennas?" He asked me one day.

"Yes. There are two types of antennas," I said. "One of them is called omnidirectional antennas, and the other is directional antennas." 

Then I continued, "Omnidirectional antennas transmit power equally in all directions, while a directional antenna transmits signals with different power in different directions. But for analysis, we can view a directional antenna as an array of omnidirectional antennas, with certain configurations such as phase shifts and geometric allocations."

He smiled and asked another question, "How do you choose different types of antennas for network planning? Can you explain with examples?"

"For a straight road with few residential buildings on both sides, we can choose a single-direction antenna to focus more on the road, whereas for a village, we can put an omnidirectional antenna on top of a hill so that it can easily cover the whole area," I replied. He nodded his head while listening.

I also had discussions with peers in the graduate program. We shared our understanding of the techniques with each other and built friendships. When I had questions, I would ask my mentor. "Are the convolutional codes for CDMA fully orthogonal?" I asked my mentor one day.

"Not fully," he said.

Every morning the company arranged a shuttle bus to carry us to the office, and in the evening we arrived at the temporary accommodation by shuttle bus. I was living with three master’s graduates: one in the HR department, one in a software R&D position, and one in a hardware R&D position. We had majored in different fields, so we shared our knowledge and discussed a lot every evening. 

They were startled when they saw me reading books as thick as pillows, which I had borrowed from the ZTE library. 

"How can you read English books as fast as Chinese ones?" they asked. 

"Because I spent more than half of my effort learning English during my undergraduate course," I replied.

No one thought I would quit the job. I was afraid that I would lose the opportunity for training if I told any of them. At the end of the training program, I called Mr. Wang to say that I wanted to resign.

"What? How could you stay for just a few weeks? Which university did you graduate from?" he said angrily.

"We graduated from the same university," I told him. "Could you please help me? I am innocent..."

"Have you encountered something unhappy here?" He softened his voice and said, "When did you start wanting to leave?"

"I'm grateful that everyone has been nice to me. We've built friendships and I have really learned a lot. But I've wanted to break the contract for more than half a year..."

After I told my roommates, they were all shocked. They were concerned about me. They recommended me to the R&D department where they were working. They contacted their former classmates to see if they could help me, which touched me.

I left Shenzhen at the same time when the Beijing Olympics started. Before I left, two of my best friends from university had arrived in Shenzhen and we had dinner together. Last year when we signed contracts with ZTE together, we agreed with each other that if in the future any of us was appreciated by the boss, Mr. Hou, he should raise the salaries of the others after being promoted. They looked sad at dinner.

I told them I had got three weeks' salary and would like to pay for dinner. They refused and worried about my future.

Some years later, when I was in Brisbane, one of them settled in Hangzhou, and the other in Xi'an. In 2016, I visited Hangzhou and met my former colleague, together with two university friends.

At that time in my mind, they were three of my best friends at university. But they all said they had never believed I was their close friend. I was hurt. 

Almost at the same time, I met a university roommate in Shanghai. He said he had hoped that one day everyone from our dormitory could gather together again in Xi'an.

I dared not visit Xi'an again, because Xi'an was related to memories of the happiest past days and best friends. I know that Xi'an nowadays is very different from the city I once lived, and so are my best friends. Never visiting there again means I can keep those good memories forever in my mind.