This is a translation by Claude. The original Chinese version is below.
Some say a PhD is an endless summer of life. The loneliness of walking alone at the cognitive frontier of human civilization lets us feel the dignity and nobility of being “Homo sapiens.”
In my first semester of the PhD, I hadn’t yet felt that nobility, nor could I keep my dignity while racing to catch up on assignments. Maybe my solitary pace can no longer keep up with the development of computer science. Maybe I’m not Homo sapiens after all.
August. I left home in the Northeast, and for the last time before leaving the country, boarded a high-speed train, passing through Shanhaiguan to reach Beijing. Beijing is something like my second hometown—after seven years living there, I’m still stunned by its vastness. Beijing’s bigness isn’t just that everywhere you go from Haidian takes an hour on the subway—it’s even more so the city’s stillness, its depth, its indifference. That night I drove from Chaoyang Station up onto the elevated highway, half-lit buildings receding on either side, nothing in my ears but the rush of wind.
Beijing hasn’t changed at all since I first moved there seven years ago.
I felt small. In this city, the reckless shouts of my youth left no echo, and the ink I flung out with all my strength barely left a mark. I spent most of my youthful energy here, but Beijing was like a girl I chased shamelessly for years—when I left, she didn’t try to keep me for even a moment.
The flight went through Dubai, then landed in Chicago, and by the time I reached Champaign it was already late Sunday night. I couldn’t get my room key, so I slept on the apartment couch. Because of the time difference, I woke up again just a few hours later, the sky barely starting to gray.
September, my first month of the PhD. I sized up the school with curiosity. UIUC is jokingly called “the cornfield”—the campus straddles the two small towns of Champaign and Urbana, and a ten-minute drive out from the center of campus drops you straight into the endless cornfields of the American Midwest.
There are no museums here, no shopping malls or skyscrapers, none of the dazzling shelves of goods that neoliberals love to talk about. It feels more like a footnote to the age of globalization, planted in the middle of America—the campus buses carry signs in English, French, and Chinese, there are quite authentic Asian restaurants and Chinese barbershops, and even Zhang Liang and Yang Guofu malatang.
When our lab drove to Indiana for a conference, the cornstalks along the highway looked like a few drops of paint melted out of the sunset, staining the horizon a grayish yellow. I opened my eyes wide and marveled, “So there really is nothing out here.” A senior labmate added, “No, no—actually there are a lot of animal carcasses. Cows, deer, rabbits, they’re pretty common around here.” I felt a kind of disorientation, like the scene of Lei Jiayin arriving in Beijing and seeing an ostrich running down the street in the middle of the night. All I could do was sigh that this continent had its own peculiar flavor.
Newly arrived in America, I had to plug myself into this unfamiliar society—setting up a phone number, a social security account, a bank account, an employment contract, health insurance paperwork, and so on. Cards and letters kept arriving one after another; one of them had a Mickey Mouse design on it, and I loved it. These newly arriving objects kept reminding me that my story was slowly unfolding here.
October. International students often complain about how poor the service staff’s attitude can be. I ran into one myself.
I can’t bring myself to excuse this DMV employee with the thought that “maybe he’s got his own troubles.” When my number was called to register my driver’s license information, I walked up to the counter and waited, but he kept right on chatting with a coworker beside him as if I weren’t there. Then, unhurried, he turned his head, his gaze sweeping over the rim of his glasses up and down a female coworker walking past, licking his lips, making no effort at all to hide—if anything, flaunting—his lechery. As he registered my information his tone dripped with sarcasm; even as a non-native speaker, I could feel the mockery and contempt in his voice.
It struck me that the meaning of his job, to him, wasn’t serving residents at all—it was getting to flirt with a female coworker, lord it over the people who needed something from him, wring out a little pleasure, satisfy some appetite, and burn through another day.
Apart from that, the people I’ve met here have mostly been practical or warm. Whether in America or China, East or West, all ordinary people can really do is tend to their own lives.
November. I used the fall break to visit Chicago. I didn’t plan much of an itinerary—when I ran into parents with kids at a museum café, I’d sit a while longer, munching chips and listening to the little humans talk about dinosaurs and stick insects. I sat by Lake Michigan until the sky began to dim, then got up and walked across half the city, snapping photos of whatever caught my eye along the way.
I walked through a long tunnel, and only after going deep inside did I realize there were no pedestrians in it, only cars passing back and forth. In front of every vent blowing out warm air lay a homeless person; I couldn’t tell whether what covered them was a blue blanket or plastic sheeting from a construction site. Some of them smiled at me, and I smiled back.
What stuck with me most was a middle-aged man I met at a station. I’d overshot my stop on the bus to the Field Museum, and it turned out the bus went barreling down the highway for another eight minutes before it reached a transfer station. Another station worker there, hearing where I was trying to go, looked at me and laughed, “Hey, this guy’s trying to get to the Field!”
The reason I can only describe him as “a middle-aged man I met at a station” is that he was, like me, about as ordinary as a person gets—wearing a red work jacket, a backpack on his shoulders, no hat, no gloves.
He kept pointing at the stop not far off, telling me over and over which bus to take. “Make sure you pull the cord after the bus gets on the highway. Get off, walk east, cut through the park, and you’ll be at the Field.” After I got on, he stood by the front door and told the driver, “He’s headed to the Field—remember to call his stop.” I noticed his teeth weren’t quite straight, which in Western culture is a clear class marker.
As someone who can put away another bowl of rice just from smelling food, even when I’m not hungry, one of the main points of any trip for me is filling my stomach.
I ordered Chicago deep-dish pizza because of its reputation, but sadly, the classic recipe is just tomato and cheese—after two slices the sourness and grease were too much, and I had to box up the rest. Stepping outside, snow suddenly began drifting down between the buildings. I told my Lyft driver how lucky I felt to catch snow on my first trip to Chicago, but he couldn’t quite understand my excitement, and asked if I was from somewhere like Florida where it never snows.
I wanted so badly to tell him that my hometown gets plenty of heavy snow too, and that as a kid I used to lie down in snowbanks and slide down them again and again.
December. My first PhD semester came to an end. It hit me all at once that I hadn’t produced any results—the fairly simple project assigned at the start of the semester had barely moved forward. My advisor is cheerful, considerate, and respectful of her students; she rarely pushed me, and patiently explained her thinking to me instead.
It turned out my whole research methodology had problems, and I’d spent a whole semester muddling through without noticing. On some nights, anxiety crept over my body; walking home from the lab, I wanted to gulp down a little more cold air, but was afraid of wandering into an unsafe block, so with nowhere to go, I’d just stand by the roadside pretending to wait for a ride—a genuinely ridiculous sight.
I was constantly on edge. My schedule wasn’t as packed as it was in college, but mentally I was unusually busy—almost cluttered, really.
For a while, I stuffed every scrap of spare time with podcasts. I swapped my morning alarm for Apple News; the half hour of breakfast and walking to my desk, the hour of lunch and the after-lunch walk, the time at the gym in the evening—podcasts played through my earbuds the whole way. Healing content, comedy, philosophy, AI, politics—I listened to whatever, with no rhyme or reason.
I also bought some paperback books—they’re not common back home; the only ones I’d read were copies my high school English teacher, Laura, bought for the class. Back then we read Animal Farm and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and I mostly just flipped through them to get Laura’s assignments done. Looking back now, that feels like a real regret.
At school, I was lucky enough to find two Chinese-language book clubs, which have brought a little joy to life in the cornfield. One roams freely through essays and poetry—from Camus and The Matrix to a Street Fighter game adapted from a sci-fi novel, to food blogs dug up from some corner of the internet. The other engages actively with social reality—listening to Hsu Cho-yun talk about America, and discussing how the arrogance of meritocracy swept away the glittering promises of some golden age.
These lovable, earnest friends keep reminding me that the far-off world is always full of allure, but here in this quiet cornfield, even if we can’t throw our whole bodies into the turbulent times unfolding around us, we can still reach out and explore.
有人说，读博是人生的无尽夏。在人类文明的认知边缘踽踽独行的孤独感，让我们体会到作为“智人”的尊严和高贵。
读博的第一学期，我尚未感受到这份高贵，也未能在追赶作业时保持尊严。或许我独行的速度已追不上计算机科学的发展，或许我并非智人。
八月，我离开东北的家，出国前最后一次坐上高铁，穿越山海关来到北京。北京算是我的第二故乡，在这里生活七年后，我依然为它的广大所震撼。北京的大，不只是从海淀去哪里都要坐一个小时的地铁，更是它的沉静、深厚和冷漠。那晚，我开车从朝阳站出发走上高架，两旁半明半暗的建筑不断在视野里后退，耳边只剩呼呼的风声。
北京与七年前我第一次搬来时相比，没有任何变化。
我觉得自己渺小，在这座城市里，青春时肆无忌惮的呐喊没有回声，用力撒出的墨也没沾染下几点痕迹。我少年的气力消耗了大半，可北京就像是我死皮赖脸追的姑娘，我离开时，她没有一丝挽留。
飞机辗转到迪拜，再落地芝加哥，等到香槟镇时已经是周日的深夜。我没拿到房间钥匙，就在公寓沙发上睡了一夜。因为时差，几小时后我醒来时，天才蒙蒙亮。
九月，博士的第一个月，我揣着好奇打量学校。伊利诺伊香槟分校（UIUC）被人戏称为“玉米地”，学校横跨在香槟和厄巴纳两座小镇中间，从校园中心朝外开十分钟车，就会走进美国中部一望无际的玉米田中。
这里没有博物馆，没有购物中心和摩天大楼，没有新自由主义者口中琳琅满目的商品货架。它更像是全球化时代在美洲中部的一处注脚，校园巴士上印有英语、法语、中文三种提示，有相当地道的亚洲餐馆和华人理发店，还有张亮和杨国福麻辣烫。
课题组去印第安纳开会时，高速路旁的玉米杆子，像是从夕阳融化出的几滴颜料，把地平线染成了灰黄色。我睁大眼睛感慨：“原来这里真的什么都没有。”高年级师兄补充说，“不不，其实有很多动物尸体，牛啊、鹿啊、野兔啊，在这里很常见。”我当时有种“雷佳音刚到北京看到鸵鸟大半夜在街上跑”的错位感，只能感叹美洲大陆别有一番滋味。
初来美国，我需要把自己接入这个陌生的社会，建立电话号码、社保账号、银行账户、工作合同、医保协议等等档案。我陆续收到一些卡片和信件，其中一张印有米老鼠图案，我非常喜欢。这些新到来的物件不断提醒我，我的故事已慢慢在这里展开。
十月，留学生时常感叹服务人员态度很差，我也遇到了一个。
我无法从“他或许也有难处”的角度，为这位车管所工作人员开脱。登记驾照信息时，系统叫到了我的编号，我走到柜台前面等候，他却依然视若无睹地和旁边的同事聊天。再不慌不忙地扭过头，目光透过眼镜上沿，上下扫荡着走过的女同事，舔舔嘴唇，毫不掩饰甚至是袒露自己的淫荡。登记信息时阴阳怪气，我不是母语者，也能感受他语调里的嘲弄和不屑。
我感到，他工作的意义不是为居民提供服务，而是能与女同事搭讪，对有求于他的人施以欺压，赚取快感，满足欲望，然后消耗掉一天。
除此以外，我遇到的人们往往务实或热情，无论在美国还是中国，西方还是东方，普通人能做的只有经营生活。
十一月，我趁秋假去了芝加哥。我没有特地安排的行程，在博物馆餐吧遇到带着小孩的家长时，就多坐一会，边嚼薯片边听小人类讲恐龙和竹节虫。在密歇根湖畔坐到天色将暗，再起身步行穿过半座城市，随手拍拍身边的景色。
我穿过了一条长长的隧道，走进去很深才发现里面没有行人，只有来来往往的车。每个有暖气排放的风洞口前都躺着流浪汉，我分不清他们盖的是蓝色被子，还是建筑工地用的塑料包装。他们有的对我笑，我也回以微笑。
印象深刻的是一个车站遇到的中年人。我在去往菲尔德馆的车上坐过了头，谁知车子竟沿着公路狂飙八分钟，才来到一个枢纽站。另一位车站员工听说我要去的地方，看着我笑，“嘿，这家伙要去菲尔德！”
我之所以只能用“车站遇到的中年人”形容他，是因为他实在是和我一样的最普通人，披红色工作外套，背双肩包，没戴帽子和手套。
他反复指着不远处的车站，一遍遍叮嘱我要上哪辆车，“一定要在车子开上公路后拉绳子，下车后朝东走，穿过公园，就能到菲尔德。”在我上车后，他又站在前门口叮嘱司机，“他要去菲尔德，记得叫他下车。”我注意到他有不太整齐的牙齿，在西方文化里，这是鲜明的身份标签。
作为一个即使不饿、只要闻到食物气味、就能再吃下一碗米饭的人，我旅行的重点之一是填饱肚子。
慕名点了芝加哥深盘比萨，可惜经典配方只放番茄和芝士，我吞了两片后酸腻难忍，只好打包带走。出门时，大楼间突然飘出雪花，我和Lyft司机讲第一次来芝加哥能碰上雪真幸运，他却对我的兴奋摸不到头脑，问我是否来自从不下雪的佛罗里达。
我多想告诉他，我的家乡也有绵绵大雪，小时候总要躺在雪堆上一趟趟往下滑。
十二月，博士的第一学期结束了。我猛然意识到自己没有产出任何成果，学期初布置的很简单的课题，几乎没有任何进展。我的导师是开朗体贴、尊重学生的人，她很少催促我，还耐心地向我解释她的观点。
原来，我整套研究的方法论存在问题，而我却糊弄了一个学期。有几个夜晚焦虑爬上躯体，从实验室走回家的路上，我想多吸几口冷气，又怕走进危险街区，因此无处可去，只好在路边假装等车，样子实在滑稽。
我总处于一种慌张中，虽然日程安排不比本科时紧张，但精神上异常忙碌，甚至可以用杂乱来形容。
有段时间，我用播客塞满了所有碎片化的空闲。起床闹钟换成了Apple News，早餐和走路去工位的半小时、中午去食堂和饭后散步的一小时、晚上健身房的时间，都在耳机里放播客。疗愈、喜剧、哲学、AI、政治，杂乱无章地听。
我还买了些paperback装订书，它们在国内不常见，只有高中英语老师劳拉买给大家来读。那时读《动物农场》和《灿烂千阳》，我基本为了应付劳拉的任务来翻书，如今看来是一个遗憾。
在学校里，我幸运地找到两组中文读书会，为玉米地的生活觅得些许乐趣。一个天马行空地讲散文和诗歌，从加缪和黑客帝国，聊到科幻小说改编的街霸游戏，再聊到互联网角落里翻出的饮食博客。另一个积极关心社会现实，听许倬云说美国，又谈精英制的傲慢如何卷走了某个金色年代的辉煌承诺。
这些可爱又认真的朋友们不断提醒我，远方总是充满诱惑，但在这片宁静的玉米地，即使不能以肉身投入周边激荡的时代，我们仍能触摸和探索。