Windows and Walls

A Life Across China’s Forty Years (1985–2025)

What does China look like from the inside—when you live through its rise, rather than study it from afar?

Windows and Walls is a personal, clear-eyed memoir of growing up alongside modern China, written by someone who has crossed villages and megacities, classrooms and boardrooms, China and the world.

Born in 1985, the author's life traces four decades of China’s transformation:
from rural childhood and exam pressure,
to Beijing universities and early entrepreneurship,
to building a research company during China’s startup boom,
and finally to navigating globalization, decoupling, and identity in a divided world.

This is not a political manifesto, nor a celebration of “China’s miracle.”
It is a human story—about opportunity and constraint, ambition and doubt, movement and friction.

Throughout the book, two ideas quietly run in parallel:

Windows — moments of opening: education, mobility, global exchange, individual choice.
Walls — forces that restrict: systems, expectations, borders, class ceilings, and history itself.

By placing lived experience next to broader social change, Windows and Walls offers readers something rare:
a way to understand China not through slogans or statistics, but through the texture of an ordinary life shaped by extraordinary times.

This book is for readers who:
• want to understand how China’s rise feels from the inside
• are curious about ambition, class mobility, and pressure in modern societies
• are navigating their own questions of identity, direction, and belonging in a changing world
• believe that the most honest insights come from lived experience, not ideology

Written in a calm, accessible voice, Windows and Walls does not tell readers what to think about China.
It invites them to see—through one life—how a society opens doors, builds walls, and asks its people to move forward anyway.