It was in 2002 that I truly realized the world was not an abstract idea, but a system capable of intervening directly in an individual life.
I graduated that year without much real anxiety about finding work. Job hunting felt like a collective initiation conducted in person. Each weekend, familiar convention centers, sports halls and recruitment markets filled with crowds. You carried a backpack packed with freshly photocopied résumés, still smelling of ink, their corners curling in the crush. Moving past red banners and temporary booths, you heard less about dreams than about pay, household registration, social insurance, housing funds, training and business travel.
The job market did not demand an exact life plan. Prepare a presentable résumé, arrange your degree, internships and campus experience convincingly, submit a dozen copies, and several interview calls were likely. Options were not scarce, and the direction was not obscure.
In hindsight, this was the experience of a rising water level. Opportunity did not strike one person with precision; it lifted many people willing to move forward. Keep your footing in the channel and avoid being thrown out, and the current would carry you.
I joined LG Electronics. For a new graduate then, LG represented more than an employer. It symbolized modern life: international, technically oriented and organizationally mature. Korean popular culture was rising, manufacturing was expanding, and Korean screens, phones and appliances were entering Chinese homes. Joining LG felt like connecting to a more advanced system. Secure your place, and the system would naturally take you forward.
After joining, I felt the radius of my life expand for the first time.
It was concrete rather than abstract. An administrator handed you a paper airline ticket with a flight number, date and seat. Slipping it into your folder felt like putting away a new identity. Life was no longer confined to journeys between school, office and rented room. You had entered a multinational system.
The trip to Korea did not happen immediately. There was training, paperwork and waiting. The company invested in bringing you into alignment with an international organization. It felt like a quiet initiation. You repeatedly examined your new passport, realizing that beyond your national identity card, another document could make you recognizable to the world.
Upon arrival, reality was more immediate than imagination.
This was Korea’s capital around 2002, then generally called Hancheng in Chinese. In 2005, its city government announced the Chinese name Shou’er for Seoul. At the time, I noticed little beyond a changed term in the news. Years later, it seemed a quiet reminder that the world is not static: it renames and repositions itself.
Seoul’s winter gave me a bodily understanding of difference. Growing up in southern China, I had never before seen real snow beneath my feet. The cold entered without ceremony; the air seemed to have weight. Discomfort brought a peculiar clarity, as though my body had recognized another world before my mind did.
The city had a strong industrial character. Streets were clean and orderly, the subway dense and efficient, and the warm light of cafés felt especially steady in winter. Local brands circulated everywhere. Modernization was not an abstract national quality; it lived in countless details of daily operation.
I was assigned to LG Academy, the corporate university in Gumi. Unlike Seoul, it felt less like a metropolitan center than a vast manufacturing organ. The air carried the presence of factories, and the city’s rhythm revolved around industry. For the first time, national competitiveness became visibly the accumulated result of organization, discipline, engineering and sustained investment.
LG Academy astonished me. It was neither loosely organized like school nor perfunctory like ordinary training. Courses, discussion, evaluation and feedback formed a coherent system, repeating one message: learning was not decoration. It was part of productivity.
The Talent Campus I attended was a miniature world. Colleagues from Taiwan, Europe, North America and South America arrived carrying their own cultures. Each region understood rules, hierarchy, expression and confidence differently. The world was not abstract. It stood in front of you, speaking English in different accents.
During that period, I felt a powerful sense of confirmation. My parents’ belief that education could change a life was repeatedly validated. Language, learning, effort and entry into a larger system really were expanding the reach of an ordinary person.
Yet almost simultaneously, a less visible gap began to appear.
I remember a Korean colleague who had returned from studying in America and earned several times my salary. To me, this was not simply a difference in individual ability. It revealed how regional pay systems and labor markets shaped income. GDP per person provides context, but cannot alone explain two colleagues’ salaries. The world was connected, yet the connection was never symmetrical.
The feeling was not dramatic, but it left a mark. Less a blow than a grain of sand: not painful immediately, yet a recurring reminder that structures existed.
In 2004, I left Korea for Shanghai. The city was still ascending rapidly, multinationals were expanding and opportunities were dense. I joined Thyssenkrupp through an undramatic hiring process. My income rose quickly, and improvements in life felt linear and predictable.
Housing prices then still occupied a range I could make sense of. It was easy to imagine that simply continuing forward would allow life to unfold as expected.
In 2005, I bought my first car, a Mazda 3 costing about RMB 150,000—slightly more than half a year’s income. Looking back, that itself marks another era: spending six months’ pay on a car did not feel like a monumental gamble.
When the financial crisis struck in 2008, my life did not immediately collapse. The company kept operating, orders continued and national infrastructure investment cushioned many households. The crisis seemed to be happening elsewhere, while opportunity remained here.
More subtle changes, however, accumulated inwardly.
Colleagues began discussing stocks and quick wealth. The office mood grew restless. Some resigned to enter the markets; others were rapidly wiped out after buying at the peak. Looking back several years later, few had truly walked away with gains.
Some colleagues from other cities and I, lacking secure housing, preferred to put savings into homes. Buying my first apartment nearly emptied my resources and required help from my parents. It was less a rational calculation than an instinctive search for somewhere to stand.
Only years later did I understand that lives often diverge not during crises, but when you feel most free and believe you have the most choices.
During years of rising water, going with the current needs no explanation. Avoid swimming against it, and it carries you somewhere that seems secure.
Within that easy movement, we barely noticed that the channel itself would become visible only when the water stopped rising—or began to fall. We did not yet understand that what shapes a life is often not how hard you swim, but whether the water is still lifting you.