2025: A Noisy Year
A phrase circulated around the 2026 New Year, “2026 will be the summer of a century.” It resonated with me. I grew up in Changsha and spent my undergraduate years in Beijing. On August 19, 2024, I wrapped up an internship in Beijing and moved to Hangzhou. In 2025, I lived in Hangzhou for a full year. Looking back, Hangzhou feels like an unlikely blend of Changsha’s temperament and Beijing’s pace of development. Even more coincidentally, its climate also seems like an average of the two. It is neither persistently humid like Changsha nor aggressively dry like Beijing. It does rain, but rarely in a way that makes your mood start to mildew. ...