FREEDOM GRANTED. FREEDOM EARNED.
September 2020

Freedom isn’t a human right conferred by mythical forces. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth.


The Sunday that Wechat was supposed to get banned feels callously beautiful. Instead of cars, it’s the runners and cyclists that are setting the pace for the movement in lower Manhattan. It’s the weekend of Rosh Hashanah. Friends are transiting in and out of the city to reunite with family.

My parents in China messaged me “good morning” before I left my apartment this morning. For the past weeks, they have been sending “good morning” every day just to test if they could still reach me. The Western education that I owe my entire identity to, granted me the problem-solving capability to come up with plan B and plan C. Setting up Telegram took around five minutes. Setting up a VPN took about another five.

“I haven’t dreamt about you for two years. Sometimes I don’t remember what your face looks like anymore.”

My dad sent me a message when I was helping them create accounts for the lifelines of our communications. I asked them to pick their profile photos. They both picked a picture with me, the only child of the family, taken a year ago, the last time we were all physically together.

The U.S. and China relations have been an esoteric issue, like one of the morsels to appear smart at a dinner party. It’s the kind of topic that you are privately obsessed over but never find worthy to kill the mood of an otherwise lighthearted event.

“I never knew you were from China!”

This revelation caught J by surprise as we were dissecting the grilled salmon on our plates. I asked if that came across as a surprise. J said I didn’t give off a Chinese vibe as other Chinese he knew from college. I couldn’t find a proper response, so I commented on the tenderness of the salmon, a commonality that we definitely share that will naturally transition to other commonalities, like the desire to start something of our own one day, the metric of success by which our industry measures us, the sneaker brands we wear, the Peloton instructors that put fire in our core. The conversation can then go on for hours.

On the surface, we may be interchangeable individuals: well-mannered professionals with a healthy dose of dark humor that fails to dim the dazzling optimism towards technologies and innovation. Or future-oriented liberals that take pride in having no ideologies but only form cults that are rational, well-reasoned, supported by historical data and forward-looking views. Or we both speak Chinese. After spending a summer in Beijing, J’s Chinese acquired a hint of Beijing Tone(京腔), which makes him just that much more impressive when flirting with Chinese ladies.

Yet it doesn’t take much but an awakening from a child’s dream to recognize the difference between me and J. To him, it may simply be that I’m Chinese and he’s white and his family has been living in the city for generations. To him, being an entrepreneur may be a choice of ambition, vision, opportunities, but for as far as I can remember, being entrepreneurial feels much more like a necessity, or the only way I know how to live and operate.

The freedom of America, the enterprising spirit that transcends boundaries, the mythical tales of the ever-expanding frontier, translated into pieces of paper a decade ago that granted me the honor to leave home. The departure from home means an invention of a new identity. When I was on the plane flying to the East Coast, where I spent eight years for my education, I wrote on a piece of airplane napkin: “don’t let the past define you, but the present and the future you get to create.”

I don’t know if any of these thoughts crossed my dad’s mind when he departed from his small town where people were starving. As a first-generation college student, he was made to believe that he would be someone special because he was born in the Year of the Dragon. Dragons tend to be the guardians of the families, and my grandma told me that the year my dad was born, the soil was the darkest and the richest.

With such blessing, my dad spent his entire working life sleeping around four hours a day. He did become the youngest MD in China, and that reputation alone helped his entire family—his parents, and the families of his three siblings, a total of a dozen people— live the kind of city life that I once thought reflected the entire world. He was never the beneficiary of his hard work. I barely saw him during the day, as he would be resting from the previous night of operations, and at night, I could hear him leaving home either for work in my sleep. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if the sound of the door closing was part of my dream or it was reality.

Even when he achieved everything he wanted, he was looking for something more, as if he’s staying up all night searching for something that doens’t exist in the material world. I learned from him that freedom isn’t a human right conferred by Heaven or the mythical forces that my grandma assembled. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth. When you live in a country where freedom is nothing but a manicured prescription, the only way to survive is by standing with power, not truth. To attain truth is to play with fire, yet the truth is the only path to freedom. He once said: “freedom is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended.” After navigating the murky water through his entire career, he was more assured that an individual’s freedom to create might be the only thing that matters.

Something clicked as Wechat was about to get banned. Our exchanges on Wechat in the past decade became somewhat of a spiritual witness of our respective becoming. At the beginning of his adult life, the battle was one for survival but afterward has become a search for truth. Every time he called he was inquiring something about what I see, what I hear, and he commented on the difference between my account and what’s portrayed in the news. His dignity to stand with truth in murky water is currently hindering his latest scientific breakthrough from getting the support it deserves. When I first told him about the upcoming ban of Wechat, he was so undisturbed as he saw it coming. That’s when it became clear that the constant loss of agency is the kind of reality that he, and everyone under any authoritarian design, lives with on a daily basis.

My phone buzzed again as I was walking on West Broadway, trying to get to the Pace office, I was told that the Trump administration’s curbs on WeChat were put on hold by a judge. The heroine is Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco, who issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday at the request of the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance. They had argued that prohibitions on the app would violate the free-speech rights of millions of Chinese-speaking Americans who primarily rely on WeChat for their communications.

I put down my phone and start to internalize what it means to operate with two truths at the same time -- the best and the worst, the freedom that’s granted and the freedom that’s earned. I can’t keep all the thoughts in one piece of writing. But perhaps if the details are put together over time, a pulse will emerge, and the integrity of digital construction which attempt to replicate what was once the journey of the American Dream can be recreated in full, no matter how long it takes.