My not-working stretch is finally coming to an end. The plan is to find a job and head back to the grind this month. Monday I sent out a few applications for jobs in other cities and got on the phone with some HR people. They asked this and asked that — the reason for leaving your last job, in the current climate, isn’t that something we all silently understand? I still had to dress it up with pretty language. Then came the next round of questions about my previous company’s size and brand name, like a household-registration check. In that moment, I felt like I didn’t have the energy to keep struggling. The plan to leave Shenzhen might be shelved again — I’m crying. 😭

A friend once shared something with me: If doing something feels too laborious, maybe it’s not right for me — the thing itself is wrong, and I should let it go. Applying for out-of-town jobs has been genuinely exhausting. After nearly two weeks of sending out applications I haven’t landed a single interview. So maybe in my current circumstances, this one needs to be let go.

Although this post was started on 2025/02/16, the rest below was tapped out on 2025/02/23:

1. Interview Notes (Grade-School Diary Edition)

These two weeks I’ve been running back and forth between interviews. I’m finally about to part ways with three months of unemployed-drifter life — tomorrow I go onboard at the new company. Honestly, I’m grateful for the last job, since it let me get to enough interviews in a short window. I interviewed at four companies and got verbal offers from three (not counting the one with the genuinely awful interview experience).

It feels like every time it’s Valentine’s Day or Qixi, some strange, dramatic, unforgettable thing happens to me. I can still pull up the night of Qixi in 2023 — I’d just arrived in Shenzhen — when a friend at the youth hostel and I broke off the faucet by accident, couldn’t find the main water shutoff for ages, and the place flooded. Water gushing nonstop, the loud splashing roar, a group of us flailing around with trash cans to catch the water, grabbing whatever was at hand to try to plug the column shooting out. The water pressure was too strong, my hair and clothes were drenched, and nothing we did made any difference. We asked the neighbors where the main valve was; nobody knew. After a long wait, the landlady-sister called maintenance to come shut it off. By then there was already a small river running through the apartment. A group of women from all over China — some of whom didn’t even really know each other — banded together on the night of Qixi 2023 to chase that river out of the room. I felt awful at the time for messing up, but nobody resented me or my friend. They just kept joking that this is definitely an unforgettable night while quietly sweeping water. I’ll probably remember it forever too.

February 14, 2025 was supposedly an unremarkable Friday — and yet so much went down in a single day. First, with only 15 minutes to go before my interview, I realized I’d shown up at the wrong place — and the wrong place was 11 kilometers away from the right one. How does a person make a mistake like this? I asked myself. I’d gone to the mall near the interview early to get lunch and give myself plenty of buffer. At T-minus 15 minutes, I confidently walked into the office tower lobby and asked the staff if this was Building B. She glanced at my appointment, looked puzzled, and said, No, this is Building A, not Building B. Then it was my turn to be stunned. I went back to the interview confirmation page, looked carefully — I lost it — I had genuinely come to the wrong place, and I’d only realized 15 minutes out. I called the interviewer to apologize and say I’d be half an hour late. Then I walked back out of the wrong building. There was a woman doing street promotion, pacing back and forth around the intersection looking for prospects. As I passed by, her bird-bright eyes locked onto me and she came straight over to pitch me a face mask. After hearing her out, I told her I was rushing to an interview and made to leave, and she suddenly produced a magenta-colored little flower from her bag and handed it to me, saying: Good luck with your interview. This flower — probably picked from a roadside somewhere — has since dried out and is sitting quietly on the corner of my desk.

By the time my Didi got me over to the correct Building B, half an hour had passed. After the interview, walking out of the office tower, my phone died and auto-shut down. So now I couldn’t even rent a power bank from the mall, couldn’t get home, couldn’t ride the subway. With no other options, I started eyeing the shops in the mall, wondering if any of them might let me charge my phone. I paced around and hesitated for a long time, then walked into a little kids’ art studio. Two sisters were running the place. I briefly explained my predicament, and they kindly took my phone, said of course I could charge it there — but the charging port didn’t match, so they suggested I try another shop and pointed me toward it. My sense of direction is so bad that I couldn’t find the shop they’d described, so I ended up walking into a mother-and-baby store. Two older sisters there as well, equally warm. They accepted my request without hesitation, charged my phone, and chatted with me for a while. When my phone finally booted back up, I bought two lollipops from them and took the subway home.

Honestly, sometimes you can be at peak bad luck and still receive an uncountable amount of kindness from strangers. I’ll put them in my star-pocket and take them out from time to time to look at. That whole unlucky day became less unlucky because of them. I’ll remember it forever.

The next day I fell sick. My normal body temperature runs a bit below average, so anything above 37°C makes me miserable, and I spent a full day lying in bed.

2. Meals and Movies with Friends

I think I’m one of those simultaneously-fickle-and-loyal types — how do I even describe it. If I’ve already got friends I really click with, who I can talk to on the same wavelength, then I’m not particularly hungry to make new ones, because I’ve already got what I need. When I have to get rid of old objects, my brain keeps looping — maybe don’t throw it away — because a lot of the things that have been with me for a long time feel like old friends. I’ve gotten attached to them, and I can’t quite let go or swap them out. Eventually I learned the trick of taking a photo as a memento before tossing them.

On February 11 I went out for hotpot with friends. Soon after eating, my stomach hurt, and we ended up sitting on the big mall staircase for ages talking about DeepSeek doing fortune-telling and what the zodiac signs in conflict with the year of Tai Sui should watch out for, talking and laughing until the mall went dark and closed. I’d been wanting to go to the bathroom but held it in the whole time. Since I started working, friends who click are genuinely rare.

On February 18 we met up again for a meal and a movie, catching up on each other’s lives and jobs. Everyone has their own thing they’re working hard toward now, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I told them about my interview situation — I’d wanted to leave Shenzhen, but now it looks like I’ll be sticking around being a workhorse here. Long sigh. Life really is hard to predict.

3. Workhorse Diary

The following was written on 2025/03/08, International Women’s Day. Time moves so fast — another month is almost gone. Two weeks into the new job, my life has become: wake up at 7:30, eat, cram into the subway, and stumble home at 8:30 PM, ravenous. Every night when I walk out of the office building a little after 7, dragging an exhausted body and an empty stomach toward the subway, looking at the office towers all lit up and the pitch-black sky outside — this rotted, godforsaken world, when is it going to just blow up — I haven’t seen a sunset in ages.

Because most of my day gets eaten by work, my reading time has migrated to the squeezed-into-the-subway part. Two weeks in, I’ve finished two books on WeChat Read on my phone during the commute. Whatever else is going on, I think you still have to carve out time for yourself each day to do the things you actually want to do. Work has already bought too much of our time. The first book was Good Morning, Monster — this psychology book almost made me cry pressed between strangers in the subway. The world has never lacked for grief. I’m not sure if I was moved by the protagonists’ resilience and gentleness, or if I was seeing myself reflected back in the pages. The second was a jushiu (narrative-deception) mystery novel, The Holy Mother. It’s short — I tore through it across two morning commutes — and by the end I had goosebumps all over.

Last Saturday I also stumbled into climbing a little hill in a tiny park, because I’d missed out on something else and went there instead. I hadn’t realized there was a small mountain inside, and so I ended up walking around in birdsong and insect-song and natural quiet. I don’t know if it’s age or what, but I feel like I care less about gains and losses now. I’m learning to look at things from a more constructive angle — when something doesn’t go the way I’d hoped, maybe I’ll end up seeing a more beautiful view than the one I was expecting, whether I made a mistake or took a longer route.

Books, Film, Music

Back in February while I was still living the unemployed life, I drew up a yearly plan and committed to reading 48 books this year. At first that felt daunting, but I just counted — I’ve already finished 12 books this year.