This afternoon, I went to Grey, a tiny coffee shop in Zongbei that Xiao Huang had recommended.
Bare concrete, metal seats, and only the owner in the shop. He was a sincere young man, the same age as me, three or four years out of university. He once had the kind of job every graduate is supposed to look for, spending his days at the company staring through the window at the little squares outside.
His coworkers always talked about the harmless, ordinary concerns of ordinary people: where housing prices had fallen, which colleague was getting married, or who had just had a child. Even a terrible joke like “egg fried rice without the egg” would be ten thousand times more interesting. So he quit, and became a barista.
He told me he works three part-time jobs. During the day, he makes coffee at Grey. At night, he pours beer at a craft beer bar. From time to time, he helps roast beans at a roasting studio. Even so, he sometimes feels unable to see a future, as if extracting a good cup of coffee is already as far as he can go.
To borrow a phrase that has recently returned to view, young people who graduated only a few years ago—or who are about to graduate—have entered the Odyssey period of their lives. Uncle Li Boqing’s sixteen-character maxim goes: “Make money while having fun; have fun after making money; combine the two, with fun coming first.” A life with a one-hundred-percent chance of death, and a job with a one-percent chance of being loved.
June is graduation season again. University graduates scroll through Douyin, watching other graduates pose in caps and gowns. High school students enter their final week.
By coincidence, we graduated at the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one. Turbulence, change, and no answers: this is how the era opens.
The only part we can see clearly is AI. Everything related to AI is expensive, while everything unrelated to AI is being made to relate to it. On one side, the flag-waving fanfare of large AI models; on the other, ordinary people at a loss before the coming storm.
I was glad to have someone talk with me for a while.
It reminded me of a distant night in Medellín. From the low shadow beneath a streetlight, a hand reached out and pointed at the takeaway box I was carrying. Inside was the food I had not finished at lunch.
He did not say a word, but I understood. I handed him the box.
It was my first interaction with someone who did not have enough to eat or a place to live. That day was Christmas. The shops had closed early, as had the restaurants, and the streets were cold and empty.
It felt as though I had stumbled upon a scene from Andersen’s The Little Match Girl by the roadside. Only the little girl had become a homeless man, and the false hope kindled by the matches had become a meal he could only hope a passerby might give him.
Whenever I walked in Colombia, I walked fast, pretending to be a local who knew exactly where he was going. I kept both hands tucked into my trouser pockets or my jacket, so no one could tell whether I might have something else hidden there.
Next time, I need to bring naco a bag of nachos!