This afternoon, when I dropped off the last box of luggage at the shipping station, I looked up at the sky. A wall of dark clouds was advancing across half the horizon, as if it were announcing something. I quickly told my partner to go back and get an umbrella. I had barely arrived when the rain started.
In the two years before deciding to go to Chongqing, a great deal happened—enough to be written down. In a world this large, these fragments of a life may amount to very little. But recording life was always the point of this blog, and also a way of giving my future self an account of who I once was. One day, looking back, I want to be able to see clearly the person who truly existed here.
One thing I used to be proud of was my ability to plan my own life. From internships before graduation to the year before becoming an independent lawyer, my entire career had unfolded more or less within expectations. The last salaried position I took as a lawyer was where things began to go off track.
I still remember the moment I gave up the idea of working as a front-end developer in the internet industry and chose law instead. I had read an exceptional defense brief. Its reasoning moved me, but so did its humanity. To spend a lifetime fighting for fairness and justice, to become someone genuinely useful—wasn’t that the ideal I had been looking for? So I committed myself to becoming a lawyer.
The years in Shenzhen
By the time I arrived in Shenzhen, I had already made it through the hardest stage of becoming a lawyer and had obtained my license to practice. I deliberately chose a law firm with a heavy caseload because I wanted real courtroom experience, not a polished title. On average, I had to appear in court three or four times a week. Only people in the profession really understand what that kind of pace means. It was exhausting, but it sharpened me quickly. My litigation experience grew at an almost exponential rate.
Later, I joined a team focused mainly on criminal cases. The stream of litigation seemed endless. There were moments of fatigue, of course, but inwardly I felt full—busy, tested, and alive. During that time, I also had some results I was genuinely proud of.
As I watched myself move a little closer to the ideal I had once chosen, I felt no small amount of happiness. But the world is harsh. Because of the economic climate, my boss also began to worry about where cases would come from, and eventually I was assigned to work at a government unit.
As work, it was not bad at all. My boss treated me very well. The leaders and colleagues at the government unit were kind. The salary was more than satisfactory. But from the standpoint of my own professional development, that period was close to being lost time. Later, my boss’s caseload began to recover, and I had even less time of my own than before. In the end, I chose to leave the job I had once called my ideal position. Life has a cruel sense of irony.
By then, I had been practicing for almost three years. In February 2024, after weighing everything carefully, I decided to go independent.
The poverty of independence, and its luxury
The greatest lack after going independent was clients. As an ordinary person with no institutional backing, I was easy to overlook. Former clients might trust my professional ability and sense of responsibility, but strangers often preferred legal consulting companies—companies not bound by the same professional rules governing lawyers—or they turned to old personal connections they already trusted.
The one thing I had in abundance after going independent was time.
And in truth, there is something necessary, even meaningful, about allowing yourself to pause in the middle of striving. As long as that stretch of time is not wasted, then it is not a betrayal of one’s life.
Pulling teeth, and crossing smaller fears
In March, I had both wisdom teeth removed.
I had always resisted the idea of tooth extraction, and more than that, I was afraid of it. Thanks to my previous work experience at a health authority, I was able to choose a decent hospital. My partner took good care of me afterward, and I recovered long ago. It may seem like a small thing, but to me it meant getting past a psychological barrier that had been there for years.
My father’s case, and a lesson in what law should be
In April, my father told me that his company had withheld his year-end bonus.
It was the kind of thing that makes people angry, and rightly so. After helping him calm down, I decided to take a measured approach first. I had him speak with HR and ask for the payment to be made. As expected, HR repeated the usual polished excuses. Once that failed, the only remaining path was legal action, even though the process would be complicated and the cost substantial.
To say the handling cost of the case far exceeded the amount we were claiming is no exaggeration. But a line from the film Article 20 stayed with me: every right thing has a price, but that price is not a reason not to do it. Justice does not come easily in this world. Sometimes what a person is really fighting for is dignity, the refusal to swallow what should not be swallowed. The law cannot yield to wrongdoing.
So we went through the normal litigation process.
At the hearing, the company hired a lawyer and also sent people to observe. Lawyers, naturally, speak for their own clients; that in itself is nothing unusual. I do not enjoy judging others casually, especially colleagues in the same profession. But this opposing lawyer truly stunned me—and I record it here partly because I do not want conduct like his to stand in for what the profession actually is.
First, whether a case is big or small, once you accept representation, you should prepare seriously and, within the limits of the law, fight for the greatest possible benefit for your client. That is a matter of basic responsibility. From the way he handled the hearing, I could clearly tell he had either done very little preparation or was wildly overconfident. Either way, it struck me as irresponsible.
Second, a lawyer should at least possess a basic command of the profession. That is already a very low bar. Law is supposed to be serious, cautious, and professional—not glib.
There was one moment at trial that made this painfully clear. To prove that an internal company policy was genuine, the opposing lawyer produced a “Notice of Policy” signed by my father. The document contained only the title of the policy, not the policy itself. When I challenged the evidence, I denied its authenticity in the meaningful sense. My core argument was that it had formal authenticity but not substantive authenticity; it could not truly prove that the company had fulfilled its duty to disclose and publicize the policy. I will not go into all the legal details here.
What happened next was astonishing. The opposing lawyer immediately lost his temper and blurted out things like, “People should be honest,” “A person without integrity cannot stand,” and “We can apply for handwriting authentication,” before sliding into personal attacks. By the time the hearing reached that point, I was completely at ease. I knew where things stood.
Even so, my feelings were complicated. This was, after all, a lawyer with more than twenty years of practice. I would normally assume that someone with that level of seniority would be worth learning from, maybe even worth looking up to. But at the very end of the hearing, perhaps because he was genuinely angry and had lost all restraint, he walked up to me and flaunted his experience, mocking me with: “You’re just using your father’s case for practice, aren’t you?”
In terms of years in practice, of course I could not compare to him. But perhaps he knew nothing about my background and took me for a newly minted young lawyer with no real experience.
I do not know what he thought when the adverse ruling came down. I do not know whether, after the company’s funds were compulsorily enforced, he could still confidently explain himself to his client. But from the later application he submitted to the court, I could see clearly that he had finally recognized his own arrogance, ignorance, and lack of responsibility. By then it was too late. Many of the arguments he tried to raise afterward should have been made at the hearing. They might not have changed the outcome, but at least he could have faced the case—and himself—with a clear conscience.
What I want to say is that this lawyer was an exception, one of the very few like this I have encountered. Most lawyers, win or lose, are still professional and responsible. But psychologically, people often allow extreme cases to reshape their view of an entire group. Add to that the way legal consulting companies package salespeople in language that makes ordinary people think they are dealing with actual lawyers, and the result is a deeper confusion about the profession itself. Perhaps that, too, is a sadness of our times.
Writing code while life stood still
In the months that followed, I spent most of my time coding.
I refined and completed a mini app called “Couple’s Diary,” a lawyer profile website, a legal knowledge management site, and a OneBlog life-blog theme based on Typecho.
I have always believed writing matters.
In love, it preserves shared memories that are too precious to trust to time alone. In life, it leaves behind proof that I was truly here. In professional work, knowledge management and reflective review are what allow competence to deepen rather than stagnate.
The Surface Pro dispute
In November, I bought the latest Surface Pro from JD.com.
Personally, I have always preferred the openness of Windows, and there is a great deal of excellent software on that platform. A lightweight laptop is ideal for work. But after receiving the machine, I realized that the processor architecture was not x64 or x86, but Arm. That meant a lot of software and drivers could not be installed. For me, that was unacceptable.
So I applied for a return under the seven-day no-reason return policy, but JD.com refused, saying that once activated, returns were not supported unless there was a quality issue.
This, too, was something worth taking seriously.
In fact, it was plainly an unfair standard term. But dwelling on the abstract legality of the clause would not have solved the problem, especially when legal action is so costly. What matters most is resolving the issue.
Once JD.com had already rejected the return request under the “seven-day no-reason” basis, continuing to argue from that same ground no longer made sense unless I was prepared to sue—and immediate litigation was not the best way to solve it. So I went back and carefully reviewed every corner of the product page. Eventually I found the key issue.
At that point, I stopped requesting a return on the basis of no-reason return rights. Instead, I argued false advertising and product fraud, and I made it clear that if they refused to resolve the matter through negotiation, I would pursue a refund plus triple compensation. I also gave them a firm final deadline.
In the end, I got the result I wanted through a non-litigation approach.
Later, I saw many people online saying they had failed to return the product after activation, while others had resolved it only through a lawsuit. My partner later told me that a lawyer in her office, after hearing that I had successfully returned an activated device, specifically praised me for it. I was quietly pleased.
A diagnosis that changed everything
Then came February, just after the Spring Festival.
A new year had begun, and I was planning my next steps. But before any of that could take shape, my partner’s mother was diagnosed with cancer.
The moment we heard the news, it felt both deafening and completely silent. We had just returned to Shenzhen. The suitcases were not even unpacked before we immediately booked flights to Chongqing.
My partner once wrote about those days in words that captured them better than I can: in just a few days, it felt as though an entire lifetime had passed; one second we were in hell, and the next we felt as though we had reached heaven; may we both have strong enough hearts to withstand all the hardships life sends.
Leaving Shenzhen
March was the month I had already planned to leave Shenzhen.
My landlord was a good person. Whenever there was a problem, it was dealt with promptly, and when I moved out, my full deposit was returned without trouble. The hardest practical issue in changing cities is often luggage. Since there was a shipping station right outside the residential compound, I compared prices across several platforms and then went directly to negotiate in person. In the end, the owner agreed to give me an internal rate, roughly half the market price.
I still remember how I felt when I first arrived in Shenzhen: full of zeal, full of dreams. I had chatted with the freight driver that day, and he told me many people leave Shenzhen within three years. Those who manage to stay three full years, he said, are usually among the more capable ones—and often end up staying for good.
I remember thinking that I would work hard and try to become one of those people.
At graduation, my alma mater had wished us something like this: favored by heaven, destined for great things. Those words echoed in my heart back then.
This year, I hit the three-year mark exactly.
Life is full of irony, isn’t it?
When I left Shenzhen, it rained without stopping, and the weather was bitterly cold. A friend came all the way to the airport to see me off, and I was deeply moved. We smiled and said goodbye, even though we both knew the next meeting might be very far away.
That is true of friendship. It is true of ideals as well.
Between heaven and earth, a human life is like a traveler passing through on a long journey.