Unmasking Life

I remember the moment he stood on stage and said he felt nervous. He said it very directly, that standing there under the lights while everyone else sat in the dark made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t see anyone’s expressions or sense the mood in the room. Then, half-laughing at himself, he said he was a Taurus with type-B blood, someone with a people-pleasing personality who always wanted others to like him. He asked the audience if they could please give him a little applause first. He thanked them twice, saying “thank you, thank you,” and smiled, as if the applause itself could calm him.

He began to introduce himself. He said his name was Zhang Hang, and that was the name he used for work—he was the president of the Information Division at Enlight Media. The title sounded big, he said, but once you arrived at Enlight, you would realize there were four or five presidents. The company, he joked, was very good at giving people titles just so they wouldn’t quit. Then he mentioned another name—Ding Ding Zhang—which he said he liked more, because that was the name he used online. He said perhaps some people in the audience had come because they knew him from the internet, though maybe only two or three of them really knew who he was. Ding Ding Zhang, he explained, never talked about his job online, never mentioned work or business. As one of his colleagues had said, they liked the Ding Ding Zhang identity better because that version of him never gave orders, never set targets, never caused stress. They thought of him as a fun person who wandered around the internet. Using that name, he published a book called Life Needs to Be Exposed.

He said that recently people kept asking him, “Does life really need to be exposed?” His answer, he said, was absolutely yes—it needed to be exposed very much. He explained that too often people refused to face their own lives directly. It sounded like a grand statement, but he said it could start with small things. To expose life, he said, was meaningful, because once you really faced it you would discover simple ways of doing so. After saying this, he admitted again that he still felt nervous and hoped the audience would be a bit warmer, because being the first speaker of the day was always hard. He joked that if he asked for a volunteer to come stand beside him on stage, everyone’s eyes would probably dodge away, because deep down they would feel a kind of fear, a reluctance to interact, and that was the source of nervousness.

He recalled the most intense moment of nervousness he had ever experienced—when he interviewed Karen Mok. At that time, he said, he was just a very low-ranking director at Hebei TV, working on what was supposed to be a “fashion” program. He liked her very much, had listened to many of her songs. She sat across from him, two meters away. Her hair was beautiful, her teeth were white, the neckline of her dress was low. Looking at her, his mind suddenly went blank. The previous question had just finished, and as she looked at him, he blurted out the most regretful line of his life: “Do you have anything else you’d like to say?” Karen Mok, being gracious as always, simply said, “I’d like to talk about my concert,” and he replied, “Then please go ahead.” He said that interview remained burned into his memory.

Before he was thirty, he used to think nervousness had to do with appearance. He thought he wasn’t handsome enough. Then one day he met Ethan Juan at the company—someone he found handsome, someone he believed many girls adored—and he asked him privately, “Do you ever get nervous, looking like you do?” Ethan Juan said, “I get extremely nervous.” He said that when he first started doing Music Radio Awards interviews, he was very nervous too. So Zhang Hang concluded maybe nervousness had to do with not dressing well enough. At that time he was questioning everything in his life, so he later asked another person—Li Bingbing. He said she always wore brands like Montblanc, looking perfect. One day in a waiting room he asked her, “When you step onto an international stage or a red carpet, what are you thinking? Do you get nervous?” She said, “I get very nervous.”

He said that meant looking good and dressing well didn’t solve the problem. What mattered was confidence. And he realized that only after turning thirty. Before that, when people changed jobs or got promoted, they were desperate to make themselves look like their new title—to dress like a manager, to pin up their hair, to hide insecurity behind heavy makeup. But later, when you truly fit the role, he said, you could wear shorts and still close a multimillion-yuan deal. Overcoming nervousness, he said, was the biggest issue he solved before thirty.

He tried many methods: holding regular meetings with colleagues so that he could practice giving orders without feeling anxious; imagining death, asking himself if he would have regrets if he died tomorrow—pushing himself with such heavy thoughts to say goodbye to the timid, shy version of himself who didn’t dare speak to strangers.

He said there was one thing this year that left a deep impression on him, something he hadn’t told his colleagues. While he was preparing his book, a former coworker posted a long message online saying he was in the late stage of liver cancer. The man wrote, “I’m a child from a Heilongjiang farm. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I must now say goodbye.” He had only three months left, and he decided to return home to be with his parents. Zhang Hang said he felt very sad. He had never spoken to the man, maybe passed him twice in the hallway, yet it hurt to think that people always waited until things were beyond saving before truly facing their thoughts or their lives.

He asked, if we didn’t give ourselves such limits, would we ever treasure three months of time? Then he posed another question: how many days were left until December 21, 2012? He mentioned the many versions of the so-called end of the world, and recalled most vividly the one from 1999. On December 31 of that year, he said, in a small apartment in Shijiazhuang, there was a—he almost cursed—a very foolish kid who had taken a shower and lay in bed quietly waiting for the world to end. That kid, he said, was himself. He hadn’t dared tell his mother because he thought she wouldn’t understand. He had been a firm believer in doomsday, convinced it might really happen. But what came instead was the first sunrise of the year 2000. He realized then that the world could have many endings.

Now, he said, facing this 2012 version, some might look at the weather or the state of the world and think it possible. There were ninety-one days left. What could be done in ninety-one days? He said for his dying former colleague, it was barely enough time to walk slowly through those final days with his parents. Ninety-one days, he continued, could be spent watching one full season of The Voice of China, or ten episodes of The Variety Big Show, or attending several YiXi talks like this one, held once a week. Ninety-one days could also be enough to write a book—his own Life Needs to Be Exposed had taken exactly ninety-one days from planning to publication.

Then he asked again: if December 21 really were the end of the world, what would you most want to do? Everyone, he said, would have their own thoughts. His next question was: what desires do you still have unfulfilled? He said he deliberately used the word “desire” in bold red letters, big enough for even the back row to see. He refused to use words like “dream” or “wish,” because desire, he believed, was the most accurate word—it was what one had to face and fulfill. Dreams were too general. Everyone, he said, had dreams—just watch any talent show and you’d hear every contestant say they had a musical dream; watch any lifestyle program and every person would speak of a wish for a car or a house or some practical comfort. Desire, he argued, was more honest, closer to what people truly thought. So what was your desire?

He said the theme of his talk was precisely this—to talk about desire and how to face one’s life. The night before, he said, he had argued with Yan Dong, the first speaker of the day. Yan Dong told him he wasn’t nervous enough, that his slides weren’t polished enough, that his words might not perfectly match his visuals. Yan Dong, he said, was a perfectionist. But for him, the purpose wasn’t perfection—it was communication. If his simple ideas could bring even a small change to someone’s life, that would fulfill the meaning of a talk like this.

He repeated the question: if December 21 were real, what would you do? What would you want most? Most people, he said, would probably go blank. He said that was normal—he himself went blank too. It was like when someone asked, “Are you happy now?” and you had no idea how to answer.

He said desires could be divided into two kinds: the big ones, which he called dreams, and the small, concrete wishes. He had many big dreams—since childhood he had wanted to be a writer, and now he was finally getting closer to that. Just before going on stage, he said, he thought of introducing himself as a bestselling author, but realized that the host, Xiao Peng, sold even more books, so he settled for calling himself a writer—until he remembered that the next speaker, Zhuang Yu, was also a professional novelist whose work he admired. Big dreams, he said, everyone had them. As children, everyone in China wrote the same composition called My Ideal. He remembered collecting his classmates’ essays as the Chinese class monitor and seeing that most of them copied from the same textbook supplement—everyone wanted to be a scientist or a writer. Yet years later, all they had become were married adults, none of them achieving what they once dreamed of. So, he said, when looking at your own big dreams, you should ask what it is you really want to do.

He said that probably eighty percent of people couldn’t turn what they loved most into their work. And even if they could, once that love became work, it would soon become tedious, no longer what they imagined it to be. Still, he believed that everyone had dreams; no one was born only to be an office worker or a salaried employee. Everyone could live differently from what they once imagined. Big dreams, he said, were the essential part of desire, and he hoped the audience would think about what theirs truly was.

Then he spoke of the other kind—small wishes. These, he said, were simple and concrete: buying a new phone, eating a favorite meal, having a big scoop of ice cream during a diet. He said these little things mattered, and that he, as a Taurus, was a person full of material desires. “Not because I’m rich,” he explained, “but because I dare to spend—and I mostly spend small amounts.” Those small purchases, he said, gave him satisfaction. They made him feel that working every day was worth it, or that when he was typing late at night, at least he still felt alive, that his life had some value and meaning. “Don’t ever feel ashamed,” he said, “of saying you want to buy something or own something. It’s not ridiculous; it’s not shameful. It’s something you deserve to enjoy in your life.”

He said he had read a book called The Rational Optimist, and wanted to share it because he thought many people in the audience were literary youth—especially the women—who dreamed of pastoral lives. They imagined themselves in a distant mountain village, riding horses and herding sheep with someone they loved, waking to sunlight and affection, just as the earlier speaker, Xiao Peng, had described. But the book, he said, argued against that fantasy. If you lived in such a place, with no running water, unable to bathe, eating only what you grew, you would waste enormous amounts of time. The greatest gift of modern society, he said, was that we could share the fruits of others’ labor while contributing our own. That book taught him, he said, that we shouldn’t be afraid to pursue or enjoy what we love, because that’s what makes life richer. “That,” he smiled, “might just be the Taurus philosophy. Maybe other zodiac signs don’t see it that way.”

Then a slide appeared behind him. On it was written in delicate font: ‘Ah! When divided into parts, the world suddenly becomes specific!’ He laughed and said the slide was intentionally written in such a “flowery” way because by now some people in the audience might be getting sleepy. But what he meant, he said, was simple—when you don’t know what you want, divide it up. Break it down into smaller pieces, into twos, threes, fours, fives. Just like cutting a cake, once it’s divided, it becomes easier to choose.

He moved to the next part: what stops us from doing what we want to do? He said just yesterday a friend told him she really wanted to attend his talk, but she wasn’t there today. He didn’t know why, but he planned to ask later. He said he had already summarized the possible reasons using, again, the “Taurus classification method.”

The first reason: being afraid of trouble. Many people, he said, simply didn’t want to deal with inconvenience. Maybe they were bad with directions and couldn’t find the venue; maybe they lived far away and would have to transfer buses twice; maybe they didn’t know what to wear and worried about not looking as good as others. “But all that,” he said, “is just fear of trouble.” Everyone had such friends—the kind who were always the last to reply when you invited them out, and when they did reply, they asked a dozen questions: “Where? With whom? When will it end? Who else is coming? What will we talk about?” To those people, he said, he usually replied with just two words: “Get lost.” The audience laughed, and he added, “That’s why now, when I organize gatherings, no one comes.” The fear of trouble, he said, had cost him many good friends.

The second reason: fear of being called pretentious. “I think,” he said, “I might be the only one in all of YiXi talks who dares to put this word—yes, the one that starts with a ‘B’—right on a slide and say it out loud.” He said people were terrified of being labeled as trying too hard, but in truth, the threshold for being called that was absurdly low. “If I wear an inner layer and another jacket over it, someone will say, ‘Oh, you’re trying too hard.’ If I roll up my pant legs a little too high, someone will say it again. Even how I carry my bag, what books I read, sitting in a café with a laptop and a thirty-yuan coffee—someone will still say, ‘You’re so pretentious.’”

He said that fear of being labeled stopped people from doing many things. He had seen many beautiful girls who never showed their figures. He said he only discovered by accident that some of them were actually stunning, but they hid it because they were afraid. “You’re so young,” he said to the audience, “you’re blooming like flowers. Why not dress a little sexier? Why zip your dress all the way up when you go to a party? What’s there to hide?” The harm of fearing to be called pretentious, he said, was that people unconsciously shaped themselves into what others expected them to be.

He said that before thirty, his life had been very dark. If measured by a sixty-year life span, that was his darkest time. He cared too much about others’ opinions—what they thought, what they said behind his back, how it might affect him. He would spiral into those thoughts, wasting entire afternoons unable to work. “Luckily,” he said, “I didn’t stay like that too long.” Eventually, he decided to stop caring. If he wanted to wear something, he wore it. If he wanted to feel something, he felt it.

He mentioned how some girls avoided wearing black stockings because they feared the implication—it had become, he said, a taboo color because others joked that it looked “professional” in the wrong way. “But actually,” he said, “women who wear heels and black stockings are incredibly beautiful. You must recognize your strengths. Don’t deny them just because you’re afraid of what others say.”

Then came the third reason: waiting for the “right moment.” He said this was the type of person he disliked most, though they were everywhere—people whose lives were full of waiting, full of ceremonial “timing.” He gave examples. Some refused to buy nice things until after marriage—they wouldn’t get a big TV, a Blu-ray player, or new bedding until they had a wedding. “What if you never marry?” he asked. “What then?” Yet people clung to these milestones.

He mentioned renters who proudly refused to buy anything for their apartments, saying they wouldn’t give their landlords a single extra item. They’d live entirely with the landlord’s old bed, old quilt, old cushions, old sofa. “I can’t understand that,” he said. “It doesn’t cost much. If you work nine-to-five in a city, you can afford to make your space comfortable. Why wait until you buy a house to make it nice? By then, maybe you’ll be thirty-five—or sixty, the way prices are going—and maybe you’ll be living in Hebei.”

He paused, then summarized the three fears—fear of trouble, fear of being called pretentious, and fear that the right time hasn’t come—and said these had destroyed too many of people’s wishes, flattening their lives into monotony. “Then your life becomes two states,” he said, “working and sleeping, working and sleeping…” Weekends were just laundry days, maybe going out once, or staying home to binge-watch dramas. “You tell yourself you’re avoiding the pain of commuting,” he said, “but you just trap yourself indoors. If your apartment is small, you might not even see the sunlight.” All those external forces, he said, made people less brave, less willing to face their true desires. “What’s so shameful about desire?” he asked. “It’s like an eighteen-year-old boy wanting a girl—that’s something to be encouraged.”

He said that last year, he himself had lived in a two-thousand-yuan apartment. Back then, he was also someone who thought “the time isn’t right yet.” He kept imagining that someday he’d get a better place. Then his boss called him into the office and said seriously, “You need to improve your quality of life. It’s not that you can’t afford it. Why are you living in a place that gets forty-five minutes of slanted sunlight a day, with a dog that shares your misfortune?” His boss told him that while he went out negotiating million-yuan deals, his clients lived in luxury. “We’re not competing with them on houses,” his boss said, “but on how well we live.”

He said that conversation struck him deeply. Those three fears—trouble, judgment, and waiting—were really just self-made cages. “What are you afraid of?” he asked. “You’re afraid of yourself.” Those so-called troubles weren’t really that troublesome. “If something must be done, you’d do it.” As for worrying about being called pretentious, he laughed and said, “Who doesn’t call others pretentious? Everyone has someone they secretly think of as that annoying person—the colleague, the friend. But think about it—doesn’t that person have something you yourself don’t?”

He said he had one of those “annoying” people in his own life—his deputy, Liu Tong, now a vice president with a huge fan base. They’d worked together at Enlight for eight years, and for six of those, they had hated each other. He described himself as the hardworking one, like Zhen Huan in the palace drama—always risking his life for the emperor’s favor—while Liu Tong was the cheerful, carefree type, the “Little Swallow” who always got what he wanted without effort. For years they clashed. But in recent years, Zhang Hang said, he had grown more tolerant. He had come to admire Liu Tong, because Liu Tong had found his own path, his own rhythm, and excelled at it.

He said he respected that. On Career Up, when Liu Tong spoke confidently on screen, people thought he was naturally eloquent. But what they didn’t know was that he studied hard behind the scenes—reading psychology, memorizing key phrases—so that even in short cuts of footage, what he said would still be insightful and helpful to job seekers. “So,” he said, “being afraid of looking pretentious ends up stopping growth.”

He then shared a simple method, one he thought everyone probably already knew: imagine that everyone who judges you simply doesn’t matter. “At the West Railway Station,” he said, “when you’re rushing for a train, you don’t care what people think. You might be wearing a beret or look sloppy, but you don’t care, because those people aren’t your friends or your elders; they don’t affect your life.”

He said that in many ways, we could use this mindset to overcome the fear of ourselves—to gain choice. “Life,” he said, “must be acted on immediately.” He clarified he wasn’t preaching indulgence, not “live for the moment” in a reckless way. What he meant was that we must start now on what we really want to do.

He looked around the stage and said, “Before thirty, I never dared imagine that one day a light would shine down on me and I’d be speaking to so many people—and that you’d even laugh sometimes. That’s a huge pressure, but now I can do it.”

He said he’d agreed to go first on purpose, because if he had sat waiting, like Yao Yang—one of the later speakers—he’d have been too nervous. “Yao Yang,” he said, “is the fourth speaker today, and his topic is even better than mine. He’s a bit nervous, so please give him applause later.”

He admitted that his content was simple, not deep, but he wanted to end with something more concrete: “Before December 21,” he said, “I won’t force you to do something this afternoon, but set one big goal for yourself.”

He said it could be anything—changing jobs, proposing, even remarrying. “Because sometimes,” he said, “young colleagues come to me complaining. They say, ‘I hate my boss. My coworkers are awful. I can’t stand them.’ And I ask, ‘Then why don’t you quit?’ I’m someone who encourages resignation,” he said, smiling, “because time wasted is worse than starting over. Find a new job, and you might actually be happier.”

Big goals, he said, were precious—you could only truly complete one each year. “Our energy is limited,” he said. “I once thought I could publish Life Needs to Be Exposed 2, but then realized I couldn’t. You only have so much energy. One big goal a year is enough. If it’s proposing, getting married, having a child—then give it your all. Make it your life’s event.”

He told a story about one of his colleagues, also a company president. She came into his office one day looking troubled. He asked if her biggest goal for the year was reaching twenty million in performance. She said, “No, I want to have a baby.” He said he applauded her for that. “I encourage people to be ‘unprofessional’,” he said. “If this is your golden time to give birth, and you can have someone you’ll love for the rest of your life, why not now? Is work really that important?”

He said that once your big goal was set, go for it. It wasn’t as hard as it seemed. “I once thought publishing a book was impossible,” he said, “that breaking into publishing was too hard.” But he found an agent, wrote a summary and a preface, sent it off, and within three months the book was out—“a natural birth,” he joked.

“As for small goals,” he continued, “make a bunch of them.” Most people, he said, made their small goals too big. Buying a car, for example, might be out of reach. So break it down—into a good dinner, a small treat. “You can go to a stylish restaurant like Canghonghua,” he said, “and enjoy modern things without spending much. Those moments should come from impulse.”

He recalled an interview he did with an editor from Fashion & Health. During the conversation, she started to cry and said, “I think what you said is so right.” They had been talking about how people always delay doing what they want. The editor confessed she had always wanted to try the famous Wen Yu Cheesery in Nanluoguxiang, but it only opened for two hours a day and sold just fifty servings. She had never managed to go—mostly because she was afraid of trouble. “She thought,” he said, “if I go, I have to wear a dress, put on light makeup, carry a book, look like Lin Huiyin.” So she never went.

He told her, “Put down the interview and go tomorrow. Do it.” Because once she did, she would realize it wasn’t that special—“It’s not even that delicious,” he laughed. “There’s another cheesery right next door—I might go there later.”

He ended by saying, “Set lots of small goals. Finish them whenever you feel like it. That way, every day will feel full of momentum. Even for one meal, you can be happy for a long time. Trust me.” Then he paused, smiled faintly, and said, “Alright, my talk is over.”