I grew up in Tianmen, spent years in Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Berlin, and came back to Hangzhou — and the country I returned to was moving faster than the one I’d left.
That gap is what this website is trying to look at carefully. Not as policy, not as macro-commentary, but as landscape, food, architecture, trains, small towns, and the texture of ordinary afternoons.
I was born and raised in Tianmen (天门), a small city on the Jianghan Plain in Hubei: flat river country, deep farming roots, old cultural memory, the hometown of Lu Yu, and not far from the Shijiahe archaeological site. I grew up poor and without much support, so movement always felt less romantic to me than necessary.
I spent two years at Alipay in Hangzhou, then three years in Shanghai working independently as a solo developer, and then another three years in Berlin at Klarna. The software years were real work, and good work. I didn’t leave them because that road was closed to me. I started leaning toward writing, film, and fieldwork because they gave me a wider way to pay attention.
Coming back also changed how I saw Tianmen itself. The place I grew up in used to feel poor, overlooked, and short on options. Now it feels tied into the larger speed of a fast-growing China: better roads, city renewal, new public spaces, faster links to Wuhan and the wider region, and a hometown that no longer looks frozen in the version I left. That shift matters to me. Part of what I’m writing toward is how a place, and a person, both change when the ground under them starts moving.