2023: Six Years Later

It’s been a long time since I sat down at a keyboard and wrote a proper blog post.

It’s 2023 now, and my last post was from 2017. In those six years I moved from Tucson to Fremont, and I’ve more or less settled here. I also went from living alone to a family of three. That’s right, I have a daughter now. Her name is Aurora.

The reason I suddenly thought of writing on my blog again is that sometimes the sadness has nowhere else to go. Last October I was laid off, when my daughter was only just over a month old. It came out of nowhere. We had no parents around to help with the baby, so it was just my wife and me raising her while I ground through coding problems, filled in the gaps in my knowledge and prepared for interviews. I remember feeling barely human back then. Luckily I held on for three months and got my first offer, then pulled through and got a second one, and things have finally stabilized.

Speaking of being a parent: because of visa issues I’m not going back to China this year, so my wife took our daughter back on her own for three months, a chance for her to rest after a year this exhausting. But lately my mother keeps sending me snide, passive-aggressive messages. What she means is that looking after the baby has worn her out and I haven’t said anything nice to her. Honestly, sometimes I find it hard to believe. Last year, when I’d lost my job and felt like I was barely surviving, she never said one kind word either. It was my wife and me holding things together on our own, and she still kept telling us how tired she was and how hard she had it. It feels like she’s trying to guilt-trip and manipulate me. So I’ve decided that after this trip, I won’t send them back again. If she wants to see her granddaughter, she can come here.

I only just turned 30 this year, and I’m only now discovering what growing up means: there’s so much to worry about. The car loan, the mortgage, work, and so on. It’s like being a machine that doesn’t know when it will stop. I don’t know when I’ll stop either, but I know I’ll keep going until I do. Maybe it’s time to take a break this winter, and we have in fact already planned a trip.

Six years have gone by, but I still feel like the same person, and my dreams haven’t changed. After all these years of hard work, I haven’t stood still. I don’t know what the future will look like, but I keep going, so I can give my family a beautiful future.