United States

2012

The story has to begin with the 2012 regional contest. The fact that I entered at all was something of an accident.

I had started competitive programming in high school, also by chance. A teacher came to promote it to our class with stories of exceptional students who competed internationally, earned full scholarships worth tens of thousands of dollars, and were admitted to Princeton. Our provincial contest cost about 30 yuan to enter. He reduced the proposition to one memorable line: pay thirty yuan, earn three hundred thousand.

So I signed up, became absorbed in it, won a silver medal at the national competition, and secured admission to Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I knew what caliber of student attended SJTU; many were far stronger than I was. Its ICPC team was stronger still, with several world championships behind it. I therefore entered university with no intention of continuing. I clearly had no chance.

That changed when I arrived in the United States in 2012. I was in a 2+2 program: two years at SJTU, two at the University of Michigan, and degrees from both. I came to Michigan as a junior. Michigan had just placed second and won gold at the 2011 World Finals, the best result in school history, and the department displayed the achievement prominently in its main building.

I noticed it and moved on. My roommate saw an opportunity. SJTU was formidable, he reasoned, but perhaps Michigan was not. He investigated and discovered that the 2011 team—qualified through the 2010 regional—had depended on two extraordinary contestants: one later retired and became our student coach, while the other was a one-semester exchange student and former member of China’s IOI team. Neither remained eligible afterward. Without them, the program collapsed and did not even reach the 2012 World Finals.

My roommate read the 2011 regional problems, studied the standings, and reached a simple conclusion: he could do this too.

The contest required teams of three, so he approached me with the one line that worked: “Don’t you want another chance at that dream?”

He produced the 2011 problem set. This one was trivial, he said. So was the next. We examined six problems, all apparently easy. “See?” he said. “That’s qualification right there.”

I joined him.

Our team selection that year took several turns, then broke altogether.

Before the internal qualifier, we asked the coach how teams would be formed. Could the two of us lock ourselves into one team? No, he said. For fairness, the top three would form Team One, the next three Team Two, and so forth. Did that mean we had to manipulate our scores?

In practice there seemed little reason. We had placed first and second in every practice contest before the qualifier.

Then the qualifier went badly. My roommate had grown overconfident and spent too long on a difficult problem, leaving several easy ones untouched. Worse, the qualifier ran on two days over a weekend, and contestants could choose either day. We both competed on day one. Even after his mistakes he remained second, so all seemed well. On day two, however, two unexpected contenders appeared. Neither had attended any practice, so we had not known they existed. Both passed him easily.

The plan fell apart. I would apparently team with those two, both Chinese international students. I did not particularly mind, but for my roommate it was the familiar story of asking a friend to accompany you to an audition, only to watch the friend get the part.

I finished first with 7 problems, the next two solved 6 each, and my roommate solved 4. The gap was too large to challenge unless one of the others withdrew voluntarily.

Neither did. I joined them instead. I will call them my problem-reading teammate and my passenger teammate. The first would become the teammate who concentrated on analyzing problems during our two World Finals appearances, although at this point he still did plenty of implementation.

The passenger teammate supposedly had a considerable reputation in high school and was once spoken of alongside Cao Qinxiang, winner of China’s 2008 National Olympiad in Informatics. That sounded formidable.

He then let us down on a truly impressive scale.

Before the regional, we heard that our region would receive a wildcard. We believed it normally sent three teams and would therefore send four. Its three leading programs—Carnegie Mellon, Waterloo, and Toronto—were exceptionally strong. The first two regularly approached the World Finals medal positions; Toronto, we heard, had a former national IOI team member that year.

Those three were elite not merely within the region but throughout North America. Waterloo and CMU frequently finished as the top North American school at the World Finals. The balance changed only later, when MIT attracted a number of strong Chinese contestants.

Judging from World Finals results in those years, North America was a comparatively weak region: stronger than Africa, the Arab region, and South America, but well behind Europe and Asia on average. Within that weaker region, ours was among the strongest.

We thought the wildcard solved everything. Remove the three established powers and we were the obvious next choice; the other schools that year did not appear competitive.

We were relaxed, concerned only with preserving fourth place. We did some university-organized practice but nothing extra. I barely knew my new teammates.

Contest day brought nine problems, of which the first eight were straightforward. They still required some code. By World Finals standards the implementation was negligible, but our coding was ordinary then, and we spent considerable time on those easy problems. CMU solved the first six in ninety minutes and reached eight around the three-hour mark, finishing everything before the scoreboard freeze.

My problem-reading teammate and I needed more than four hours to implement and debug six. Meanwhile, the passenger teammate began with the final—and hardest—problem. Problems are not normally arranged by difficulty; by coincidence the last one was hardest, and by coincidence he read in reverse order.

It was geometry. With any experience, we would have recognized it as the sort of deliberately formidable regional problem meant to keep the strongest teams occupied. Our teammate was extremely confident, declared it manageable, and began coding. He produced a program of just over 60 lines near the start and failed to debug it for the rest of the contest. No surprise: the official solution required more than 200 lines of case analysis. Sixty lines were unlikely to cover it.

It consumed much of our early computer time. Midway through, he abandoned geometry and moved to Problem 7, another easy one involving currency conversion and shortest paths. The catch was that floating-point arithmetic introduced too much error; fractions had to be maintained with 64-bit integers. He used floating point and failed again.

An hour later, the problem-reading teammate recognized the issue and rewrote it with fractions. It still failed. We solved neither problem. Afterward we discovered that one array had simply never been initialized. Set it to zero and the solution passed.

Problem 8, the only one I never even read, was basic network flow. I could have solved it. The contest never gave me the chance: all our computer time went into debugging the other two.

We finished with 6. CMU completed the set; Waterloo and Toronto reached 8 around three hours but did not finish everything.

In the postmortem, the passenger teammate suddenly realized he had effectively contributed nothing: two attempted problems, neither accepted, zero additions to the score, and a great deal of computer time consumed.

My roommate competed on Team Two and had an even worse day. One teammate was an American whose name, rendered phonetically in Chinese, sounded rather unintelligent. We had thought little of it beforehand. After the contest my roommate was furious, and the unfortunate implication of the name became the man’s permanent nickname in our stories.

My roommate knew his team was essentially along for the ride, so he did not take the contest very seriously and spent much of it coaxing this teammate through code. The experience was startling: algorithms went unexplained and implementations went unwritten, painful to watch at every turn.

We placed eighth overall, behind four CMU teams, two Waterloo teams, and one Toronto team. Looking at that list, qualifying might itself have been awkward.

After a month of waiting, we learned that we had not qualified. Our region did not normally have three places after all; it had two, and the third was already the wildcard it regularly received for being strong. There would be no fourth.

Misfortune can conceal good fortune. In retrospect, not qualifying spared us a World Finals appearance in which we would merely have made up the numbers. The passenger teammate was no longer eligible after that season. The problem-reading teammate, my roommate—now the mathematics teammate—and I decided to train properly, compete seriously, and stop treating the World Finals as merely a vacation.

This was alarming. We had only wanted a trip. How had we suddenly acquired ambition?

I could not have imagined how much further my relationship with the World Finals would extend.

In early 2013, the latter half of that season, the three of us trained frequently with others from Michigan. CMU’s student coach and ours were friends and both served on the USACO committee, so we often trained at CMU, occasionally alongside members of the U.S. IOI team, who demolished us. We had entered no official contest as a trio, though we had done many informal ones. The difficulty with informal practice was that our roles remained casual: whoever felt like coding did so. We had not yet settled into the roles that would later define our problem-reading and mathematics teammates.

Searching through emails more than a decade later, I found this ancient photograph sent by our assistant coach.

2013

By 2013, it was time to contemplate score management again. After more than half a year of serious, if hardly relentless, training, our fundamentals were vastly stronger.

Would unexpected rivals appear? We did not know. None did, and given what we knew of the school, none should have. All three of us had earned first prizes in Chinese provincial informatics competitions. Against students who began programming at university, there was little reason for us to lose.

We passed the internal qualifier safely in the top three. One newcomer with astonishing typing speed stood out: he implemented 3 of 7 problems faster than either teammate. But speed was his limit. He finished with 4 while each of us solved at least 5.

At the regional, our goal was qualification; our coach’s was beating Waterloo. Michigan had once taken World Finals silver ahead of Waterloo but had never beaten it at the regional, and Waterloo was consistently strong. The coach had made this a longstanding objective.

We still allocated implementation almost at random. The problem-reading teammate coded at least two solutions and, after finding his own disastrous bug, passed a simulation problem. The mathematics teammate stared at the final problem, I, an easy one, wondering whether intermediate values could exceed 18 digits and require big integers. When another Michigan team passed it, we knew big integers were unnecessary: we knew their level, and they certainly could not implement them. He took over and passed almost immediately.

We discarded Problem G, a geometry problem, on sight. Was this meant for human beings? That was the correct decision. The judges’ implementation was nearly 300 lines. The contest later appeared on Codeforces for the world’s strongest contestants to attempt; ten years later, nobody had solved it within five hours.

The main drama was Problem E, a network-flow problem whose modeling was already difficult. When the problem-reading teammate and I found the formulation, it was deeply satisfying. We coded it, submitted, and timed out. We replaced the initial linear search with binary search, submitted again, and still timed out.

The margin seemed substantial. Each submission took five minutes to return, suggesting a genuinely long run.

We ran out of ideas. With linear search, we knew in theory that the graph need not be rebuilt each time; one could continue augmenting the existing graph. We did not know how to implement that, though it was probably the intended solution.

With 12 minutes left, we tried speculative and constant-factor optimizations and submitted frantically. Judging was so slow that every submission remained queued.

About five minutes before the end, one passed—the submission from seven minutes earlier. By then, countless later attempts were stuck in the judging system. When the acceptance appeared, all three of us shouted loudly enough for the room to hear. Someone applauded, then others joined, and soon contestants across the hall were applauding us.

It was a remarkably friendly response. They did not even know what had happened; accepted submissions after the scoreboard freeze were not displayed.

We qualified in second with 7 problems, tied with first on solved count. We also beat Waterloo—and pushed them into fourth, out of the World Finals entirely. Later we learned that even without the final acceptance, we would still have qualified and remained second in the school standings, which rank only each school’s best team. We had been safer than we realized.

Training that year remained much like the previous year: team sessions when schedules allowed and individual work otherwise. The problem-reading teammate and I took a graduate algorithms course, one of the hardest courses most students encountered. I later spent five years as its teaching assistant during my PhD and came to understand that very well.

At the time, however, we treated it as an easy elective. We sat at the back discussing World Finals problems, barely listened, and both earned A+ grades.

We also entered NAIPC, the North American Invitational Programming Contest. Its predecessor was the University of Chicago invitational the previous year; now renamed, it invited North America’s World Finals qualifiers to compete. It was not an official qualifier. After North America’s contest structure was reorganized, it gradually evolved into NAC and entered the formal qualification system.

That year’s NAIPC was lavish. The venue was a grand library reading room that looked remarkably like Hogwarts. Competing together in person was excellent, and the prize pool aspired to World Finals scale: $12,000 for the champion, $6,000 for second, and $3,000 for teams in the silver award tier.

We placed fourth, received a silver award, and collected $3,000—the first and only prize money of my competitive career. Our timing was fortunate. The prize pool collapsed over the next few years, eventually becoming a $250 Amazon gift card for a gold award. Apparently the first year had consumed the next decade’s budget.

There were 21 teams. Our region’s three World Finals qualifiers placed third, fourth, and sixth. Within North America, our region really was exceptionally strong.

I remember little of the contest itself beyond passing our last problem around three hours and then knowing nothing else for the remaining two.

Before the World Finals, I returned to SJTU to graduate while both teammates stayed in America. That was the end of organized preparation; we did no serious training.

2014

A new season began. Having learned from the previous World Finals, we had to train properly. We had been far too casual.

How had this become more serious every year?

Human appetite is endless. Once something is attained, one wants more. We began merely hoping to travel to the World Finals; now we wanted a medal.

Team selection brought a new complication. I had graduated and begun a PhD. Many strong classmates from SJTU also came to Michigan for graduate study. More worrying, the mathematics teammate discovered that a graduate student from National Taiwan University had won World Finals gold and was Codeforces red-rated—among the platform’s elite. We called him the red-rated star.

If he competed, one of us would certainly lose a place.

Fortunately, we met him at the information session and learned that he was no longer eligible. We relaxed.

None of the other strong arrivals from SJTU entered either. The three of us again swept the top positions and stayed together.

The regional was anything but calm, though the result was never seriously in doubt. After its Waterloo the previous year—apparently ending a very long streak of World Finals appearances—the University of Waterloo returned seeking revenge and won with 8. Two schools followed with 7; the next had only 5. The top three schools were far ahead.

The contest itself was unnerving. Perhaps the problem setters had imitated the previous World Finals’ extreme difficulty. For the opening 20 minutes, the room was silent and nobody solved anything—abnormal even at the World Finals. Waterloo’s winning team recorded its first acceptance at 42 minutes; the runner-up and our team did not score until after an hour. The set began at medium difficulty, with no easy entry problem. Teams below 22nd solved only one, and those below 42nd solved none. For ordinary contestants, it must have been miserable.

No problem particularly stayed with me at the time. Only later did I revisit Problem I and appreciate how good it was: computational geometry preprocessing followed by network flow, genuinely World Finals caliber. We discarded it immediately. Waterloo solved it after the freeze, fully deserving the title.

We finished third and grew slightly nervous. Strictly speaking our region still had only two guaranteed places; third depended on a wildcard. Given these results, surely the wildcard would come to us.

It did, and we qualified without further drama.

We again entered NAIPC and placed sixth for a silver award. The prize was already incomparable to the previous year: a $150 Amazon gift card per person. Had the contest gone bankrupt after one edition?

We trained a great deal that year, hoping for a strong World Finals result.

2016

I did not participate the previous year because our student coach was still in place. In 2016, during the fifth year of his PhD, this exceptional competitor simply left the program to start a company.

I was astonished. From the Chinese perspective I knew, leaving in year five was almost incomprehensible. Graduation was close; why abandon that investment rather than endure a little longer?

Americans, however, often made such decisions more freely. He wanted to found a company, so he did.

Michigan was left with a vacuum. The faculty coaches generally did not manage student training; the student coach did. When he departed, I stepped in, feeling as though I had been summoned in an emergency.

I worried over every aspect of the program, beginning with recruitment. All three of us had retired the previous year, and Michigan’s regional results had predictably collapsed. Team Two did best in 12th, followed by Teams Three and Four, while Team One fell below 30th. So much for a qualifier that supposedly assigned teams strictly by rank.

Knowing the talent pool was empty, I recruited personally. That summer I assisted an introductory algorithms course and invited every high-finishing student to compete. They did not look strong enough to qualify, but they were better than nobody.

At the start of term I prepared practice contests, contacted the leading students one by one, and found a younger student from SJTU with contest experience. After considerable persuasion, he agreed to enter.

Eventually I found three contestants who had each earned first prizes at Chinese provincial competitions. That ought to have been enough for qualification.

Reality disagreed. Their weak implementation prevented them from qualifying—and they did not even survive our internal team selection intact.

They had consistently occupied the top three in practice, so I relaxed. Then the official qualifier produced another surprise.

Two American contestants who really were brothers—the older and younger brothers—finished first and third. Unlike our 2012 surprise arrivals, they had attended practice and performed reasonably, but never this well. Apparently they had chosen the right moment to peak.

My three recruits landed second, fourth, and fifth. Team formation became awkward. They naturally wanted to stay together, particularly because one spoke very poor English and pairing him with Americans would have made everyone uncomfortable.

I entered a prolonged argument with the faculty coach, who insisted that the top three form Team One. I urged him to consider the contestants’ preferences. After several rounds, he agreed if the two brothers consented.

They did. My impression was that they had no strong preference; merely placing this high was unexpected, and qualification for the World Finals probably had not entered their minds.

Ranks 1, 3, and 6 formed Team One; ranks 2, 4, and 5 formed Team Two.

The sixth-place contestant now entered the story. I called him the Hong Kong Correspondent. He was Chinese, studied in Hong Kong, and was at Michigan for a single exchange semester. He was not a journalist; the nickname reflected his extraordinary command of contest gossip. Ask him anything and he knew it, living up to the old joke about reporters who somehow reach every corner of the world before their Western counterparts.

After selection, he asked about training and essential algorithms. He had begun programming at university and competitive programming only that semester, so his foundation was thin. I did know one shortcut. After years in this regional, I knew its style: nearly every contest included network flow, and the flow problems had grown easier. I had even placed two in the internal qualifier specifically to identify contestants who could solve them.

I told him to ignore everything else and concentrate entirely on network flow.

That advice proved invaluable. Neither brother knew flow. The Correspondent solved the regional’s flow problem, giving the team enough solved problems to surge into second place in the final 10 minutes and qualify. Otherwise they likely would have finished outside the top ten.

At the time, however, I devoted more attention to Team Two. They were easier to summon informally and always came when asked; Team One generally appeared only for official practice.

The three recruits’ implementation ability stunned me. Once, nobody attended my office hour, so I brought them in to practice a basic single-source shortest-path problem. I came apart watching three provincial first-prize winners fail to code it in ninety minutes. Had I really been this weak in my first season?

They continued failing to debug easy practice problems. At the regional, weak coding again cost them straightforward problems, and Team One completely outclassed them.

The older American was an exceptional implementer, both fast and disciplined. According to the Correspondent, he followed OOP rigorously, defining classes rather than relying on loose functions and global variables. That was rare in contests because it increased code volume and usually reduced speed. Its benefit was equally clear: when something failed, his structured code was much easier to debug.

Team One qualified, and I was delighted: another World Finals trip. Then we learned it would be held in the United States, and I was disappointed.

The Correspondent returned to Hong Kong after the semester, and the team barely practiced together. I later heard they did some online training, but we all know how effective that tends to be. At SJTU, we too had claimed to practice online.

Everyone else remained. Their algorithmic foundations were so weak—or nonexistent—that I began an informal class.

It was entirely volunteer work. I mainly wanted the two brothers to learn the standard algorithms before appearing at the World Finals.

Then another contestant came into focus: a different American whom I will call American Two. He had finished seventh in the qualifier, led Team Three, and was clearly dissatisfied with that outcome.

The brothers attended perhaps 60 percent of the class. American Two came every time. I taught extremely quickly because time was short and the syllabus broad; within three or four weeks attendance had nearly vanished. Once, he was the only person there, and I delivered the entire session to an audience of one.

Over the semester I felt I had passed everything I knew to him. How much he absorbed remained unclear.

2017

Another season arrived.

I again recruited everywhere, though I now had some confidence in the American contestants, particularly after American Two had learned many algorithms and the older American had reportedly become even faster.

At the information session I met two Peking University graduates beginning graduate study at Michigan. Unlike the previous year’s three recruits, both had competed on Peking University’s ICPC teams—perhaps not Team One, but Teams Two, Three, or Four. They possessed genuine ICPC experience and should at least have reliable implementation. I was excited. I probably could not have made SJTU’s fourth team; surely someone from Peking’s second could handle a regional without my help.

So I gave them none.

Both underperformed in team selection. I thought the contest itself was excellent: every problem was solved by at least two people, nobody solved all 12, and the winner finished with 9—the most balanced outcome I could imagine.

My one regret was a mathematics problem whose derivation seemed wonderfully elegant. In practice, contestants either knew the result and solved it immediately or had no avenue to derive it during the contest. That was poor design.

With enough problems and separation, the qualifier remained dramatic to the end. I invited my former mathematics teammate to watch online. The final 30 minutes brought repeated reversals: American Two used his solid algorithms to reach first with 9 at 15 minutes remaining; then, with four minutes left, the older American found the mathematical result and jumped to second with 8. Until then we had blamed that problem for potentially excluding him from Team One. He rescued himself on merit.

The top three became the older American, American Two, and an unfamiliar American I will call American Three. The two Peking graduates finished fourth and fifth, hurt chiefly by penalty time and perhaps by my mathematics problem. The Americans seemed to know the result; neither Peking contestant did. Without it, both might have reached Team One.

I liked the resulting structure. With the older American and American Two anchoring Team One, regional-level strength was secure; who the newcomer was scarcely mattered. The two Peking contestants made Team Two so strong that, as a joke, its third member almost seemed optional. The top five were far ahead: fifth solved 8, sixth only 5.

At the regional, Team One justified that confidence. The older American was extraordinary. Others read the problems, but he wrote every solution, coding 6 accepted problems in 1 hour 14 minutes and taking the lead. Progress slowed afterward, but they added two more and qualified as the region’s second-ranked school.

Team Two matched their solved count with more penalty. Without Team One, their third-place school position would probably also have qualified.

Nothing more was needed that year. Both Peking contestants planned to return, so the next season looked secure.

Then I learned the World Finals would be in China. So much for free international travel; I would treat it as a university-funded trip home.

2018

Another season began.

Both Peking contestants returned. We seriously discussed whether they were still eligible. People generally believed students more than five years into university could not compete. Reading the rules closely, however, we understood the two conditions to be alternatives: either the enrollment-year requirement or the birth-date requirement might establish eligibility. That was our understanding at the time.

While serving as a teaching assistant for algorithms, I recruited one more contestant: a fellow SJTU alumnus who was now a PhD student, with contest experience but none in ICPC. That seemed fine. The Peking pair could implement; he could concentrate on analysis. After considerable persuasion, I had another all-Chinese trio. The World Finals location was already known to be Portugal, so the four of us created a chat called the “Portugal Tour Group.” Results there hardly mattered; qualification was enough to secure the trip.

Team selection ruined the plan. The first Peking contestant, the SJTU contestant, and the second Peking contestant solved 8, 5, and 4, placing first, third, and fifth. Pulling fifth into Team One would be difficult. Second place belonged to American Three, with 6. In short, first was far ahead and everyone else occupied supporting roles.

The fifth-place contestant had only himself to blame. A little over an hour in, he attacked the hardest problem and remained stuck until the end, at one point questioning the data. When I explained the solution afterward, he realized his approach was wrong. Who plays a contest like that?

The second Peking contestant withdrew from consideration. The first Peking contestant, the SJTU contestant, and American Three formed Team One. Our Portugal Tour Group officially disbanded.

With reasonable execution, this team could still have reached the Finals. Instead, at the regional, they again failed to implement easy problems. They did finish as the region’s third-ranked school, but first solved 9, second 8, and they solved 5; no wildcard was awarded.

It was frustrating because their only opponent seemed to be themselves. They were going to finish third regardless; a marginally better performance might have secured the wildcard.

The Portugal Tour Group was formally dissolved.

My coaching career ended there. Across six visits to the same regional site, I qualified twice as a contestant and coached two more qualifying teams. It had, on balance, been a distinguished run.

I did not yet know that an entirely new chapter of the World Finals was about to begin for me.

The trip itself was fairly uneventful, but it contained a remarkable number of firsts: my first career fair, my first time flying alone in the United States, my first hotel stay on my own, my first onsite interview, and so on.

It began with submitting résumés at my university’s career fair in search of a summer internship. I was in a 2+2 undergraduate program, and this was my first year in the United States. However strong my grades had been in China, I had no GPA from my new university yet. In that situation, most résumés went nowhere unless the employer already knew the program and understood what those grades from China represented.

So off I went. I wore a proper suit and managed to look unusually respectable, while a new pair of dress shoes spent the entire day trying to destroy the backs of my ankles. Most of my classmates were dressed much the same way. Computer science was not yet as crowded a field, and students interviewing in other disciplines faced even stricter expectations about clothing. Later, as companies began hiring far more programmers, more and more people started showing up to career fairs in tank tops and shorts.

Predictably, nearly all my applications disappeared without a trace. Epic was the company that picked mine out of the pile. Two days after the career fair, I heard from them and had an interview.

I was extremely confident at the time. My background was in competitive programming, so I believed the hard part was getting an interview at all. Once someone gave me one, the coding questions would simply be easy problems I could tear through. This interview had come so readily that I mistakenly assumed many more would follow.

The first round was a phone interview. I remember nothing about it, except that I passed.

The second round was more entertaining. They asked me to go to a testing center, which I remember because I got lost on the way. On the map, it sat beside an S-shaped road. I thought I recognized the road, so I took a bus there, searched for quite a while, and found nothing. It turned out there were two nearly parallel S-shaped roads only a few hundred meters apart, and I had chosen the wrong one. I hurried over to the other road. Fortunately, I had left early and made it in time. I should have checked the address properly instead of treating the shape on the map as sufficient evidence.

Then came two hours of programming problems. I no longer remember exactly how many there were. What I do remember is that, with my competitive programming background at the time, none of them struck me as particularly difficult, and I finished them pretty quickly.

I passed the second round without any suspense.

Then came the onsite interview—my first. I would fly from school to the city where Epic was headquartered, stay overnight, interview the next day, and fly back. The company covered everything.

To be honest, I was a little nervous. In the United States, I had never taken a bus to the airport by myself, flown alone, or stayed in a hotel on my own. I was afraid I would have no idea what I was doing.

That fear was not entirely misplaced. The most alarming part came at the Madison airport, where the company had sent a driver to take me to the hotel. It was a minor miracle that I found him. I made a circuit of the airport, became convinced that I was lost, and started to panic, only to find him somehow waiting near the entrance after all.

I eventually reached the hotel without incident. I handed my passport to the front desk, and apparently that completed everything required of me.

That evening, there was a dinner with company employees. The email said attendance was optional, but that other people might be going. What was that supposed to mean? It sounded very much like a strong suggestion that I had better attend. But then there was the matter of my English.

Sure enough, at dinner I could not even understand the menu. I picked the first burger more or less at random, reasoning that a burger was unlikely to go disastrously wrong. Everyone around me chatted and laughed while I could contribute nothing. I just wanted to return to the hotel and sleep.

The next day, I arrived for the onsite interview. The campus was beautiful and certainly impressed the very inexperienced version of me. People there kept talking about how spectacular it was. Only much later did I discover that, judging by what I saw afterward, nearly every large company in the Bay Area seemed to have a spectacular campus.

I remember nothing about the actual interviews except one especially memorable answer. In the final behavioral round, the interviewer asked, “Why do you want to work here?” A perfectly ordinary question. I answered, without hesitation, “Because you hire international students.” An admirably unvarnished answer.

At the time, I saw nothing wrong with it. I was far too relaxed because I had never particularly intended to join the company. After that, Epic vanished into silence. More than a decade later, I still haven’t received a rejection from them.

The answer had seemed perfectly fine to me then. It was only many years later, looking back, that I understood just how inappropriate it had been. For all I know, the interviewer may have wanted to show me the door on the spot.

And so my first onsite interview concluded with precisely nothing.

That spring break, I went to Alaska with several friends to see the northern lights. It was the same group from the earlier Mexico trip, and we maintained our usual standard of questionable planning.

We first spent a few days in Anchorage. This was so long ago that I have completely forgotten what happened there. I only remember that nothing went dramatically wrong.

Then we flew to Fairbanks. The plane was tiny, with exposed propellers rather than enclosed ones, and it was the smallest aircraft I had ever flown on. It rocked and rattled as though it might come apart at any moment. Evidently, it did not, and we landed safely.

From there, the trip became one mishap after another.

The first arrived as soon as we left the plane. We rented a car that would cost a little over $600 for those few days, but this rental required payment by credit card. Debit cards were not accepted, much less cash. We had not encountered that requirement when renting in Anchorage, and I had no idea why this place insisted on a credit card.

We then discovered that among the four of us, we possessed exactly one credit card. Never mind credit cards: between all four of us, we had one Social Security number. Given our circumstances at the time, getting another credit card was not especially easy. The lone card belonged to me.

It was my first credit card, with an extremely low limit. My philosophy at the time was to use it for the month, wait for the statement, and pay on time to build credit. The ideas of managing utilization or paying early had never occurred to me. I checked and found that I had only a little over $300 available—not nearly enough for the car.

I made a payment on the spot, paying off everything the system would let me pay, and brought the available credit to a little over $500. Everything else came from purchases during the previous few days and was still listed as pending, so I could not pay it yet. We were still short.

We asked the employee whether there was a cheaper car. She said no; this was already the cheapest. We were stuck. Then she suggested that perhaps there was a way to make this car cheaper. After working through the reservation, she told us that she had removed every optional insurance and protection that could be canceled. If we rented only the bare car, the price would come down to a little over $500. I checked my limit. It was just enough. Once the charge went through, my remaining credit was in the single digits. We could hardly have cut it closer.

One important form of rental-car protection is a Collision Damage Waiver or Loss Damage Waiver. Put simply, if vehicle damage falls within the terms, it can spare the renter a great deal of trouble. We had neither.

And so we drove away in a car with none of the optional insurance or protection. I estimated that the car itself was probably worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars. If we actually crashed it, even an ordinary repair might cost thousands. Our attitude was that it would probably be fine. We were young, fearless, and apparently willing to drive off under those conditions.

In fact, one option would have been to call the credit-card company and ask for a temporary limit increase. Since I was short by only a few hundred dollars, perhaps they might have approved it. But I was completely new to credit cards—and the other three did not even have one—so there was no way I would have known to try.

The car had four-wheel drive. As events proved, for the way we wandered onto whatever road looked interesting, 4WD in an Alaskan winter felt less like a luxury than a matter of survival. Once, we drove into a small snow hollow on a road. It was only about half a wheel deep, and precisely because it was small, we failed to notice it before driving in. Once inside, we could not get out. We tried every reasonable method and several unreasonable ones, including the idea of putting bricks under the wheels. The main flaw in that plan was that we had no bricks.

The other three got out to push while I worked the controls. After more than ten minutes, the car had not moved. We were completely baffled. Somehow, not one of us thought of calling roadside assistance. That may have been fortunate; without any extra protection, who knew how much a call would have cost us out of pocket.

Then one friend noticed something useful: for a four-wheel-drive vehicle, why were the rear wheels not turning? Only the front wheels were spinning in the hollow. Was this thing really 4WD? We examined the controls and discovered that it could be switched between front-wheel drive and four-wheel drive. We had been driving in front-wheel-drive mode the entire time. We switched to 4WD, pressed the accelerator, and drove straight out.

So what exactly had we been doing for the previous ten minutes? Also: four-wheel drive really worked.

I drove for the entire trip. The reason was simple: among the four of us, we could produce two driver’s licenses, and one of those was a piece of paper. Its owner had not driven since passing the test. Would you have handed him the keys to a rental car stripped of every optional protection?

The road I remember most clearly was the one to a hot spring in the mountains. For perhaps twenty or thirty kilometers, its entire surface was ice. Yes, ice—not snow, but snow that had long since been compressed into solid ice. Once you have driven on that, ordinary snow begins to seem wonderfully manageable. We definitely had no snow chains; I no longer remember what kind of tires the car had. We simply gritted our teeth and kept going.

With that particular car under the conditions that day, it might begin sliding above 30 km/h. Above 40, it would usually start to slide and then become completely unresponsive until its speed dropped. We lost control several times along that road, which was more excitement than I wanted. I did not dare make sudden steering inputs. I simply tried to keep the car steady, and somehow managed to recover it each time. Fortunately, the road was nearly empty, leaving enough room for us to slide without my having to turn sharply. I drove the entire trip without an accident. Looking back, that seems rather impressive.

One day, we went skiing at nearby Moose Mountain. It turned out to be about as wild as an Alaskan ski area could get. Chairlifts? Apparently not. To reach the top, you boarded a bus at the bottom and rode it up the mountain. Getting back down? That part was up to you.

As complete beginners, we had somehow assumed there would at least be guardrails along the runs. There were not. The runs themselves were broad enough, but guardrails simply did not exist. Need to slow down before leaving the run? Hit a tree.

Knowing absolutely nothing about skiing, I used this emergency braking method several times. Its principal drawback was that it could kill you. Fortunately, I was moving slowly enough whenever I hit a tree. There was also one occasion when I struck a tree and, somehow, both skis remained attached to my feet. I was stuck—completely stuck. I jabbed desperately at a binding with a ski pole until it finally released, and I was free again.

In short, Moose Mountain was far too wild for beginners like us. We did not even have goggles. We did not have gloves, either. We simply went ahead anyway. Youth does have a remarkable talent for bad decisions.

The four of us got off the bus at the top with absolutely no idea what we were doing, then began making our gradual way downhill. At first the run was fairly level, and we even started to think we were doing all right. But beginners are beginners: we could not even read the trail signs. So another classmate and I followed that gentle run straight onto a black-diamond run. The easy opening seemed to exist solely as preparation for one enormous final drop, as if the entire vertical descent had been saved for that last pitch.

On the flatter run, we could still brake by hitting trees. That was no longer an option here, because we could not even stand up. The slope was so steep that I did not need skis at all. Wearing only the ski boots, I could crouch down and immediately begin sliding at alarming speed with no control whatsoever. To stop, I had to sit down—and be careful not to roll straight down the mountain.

Eventually, we found that the only way to keep from sliding was to hold our ski boots against the snow in the same braking position we would have used with skis on. We pushed our skis beside us and inched down the mountain. Meanwhile, children barely tall enough to reach our waists flew past at high speed, some of them skiing backward. I have no idea what they thought of the two adults scraping their way downhill.

After nearly an hour of determined effort, the two of us reached the bottom alive. There we found the third member of our group, who said something had felt wrong almost immediately, as though they had twisted an ankle, so they had turned back, taken the next bus downhill, and waited for us. The fourth person was still missing. We decided to wait at the bottom. For our own safety, we also unanimously decided not to go back up.

About half an hour later, the last person appeared. Clearly the most athletically gifted among us, they had successfully found the proper beginner run and had already completed several trips down it.

In the end, all four of us left alive with every limb still attached. It had not been easy.

The final event I remember clearly was the night we drove out to see the aurora and nearly scared ourselves to death. The online forecast said there might be activity, so we set off. Where were we going? We had no idea. Our plan was to leave town, find some hill at random, drive to the top, and look up.

That is exactly what we did. At the top of a small hill, we found a house. We got out and pulled a camera and tripod from the car. The homeowner came outside. From more than ten meters away in the darkness, we could not see what he was holding. One friend walked over and asked whether we could briefly use the area in front of the house to photograph the aurora. Everything went smoothly, and we stayed there taking pictures for quite a while.

But when our friend returned, he told us that he had not seen clearly either, but thought the homeowner might have come out carrying a gun.

On reflection, that would not have been hard to understand. From the homeowner’s perspective, a car had driven onto his private property in the middle of the night. Four people, all apparently adult men, got out and opened the trunk as though they were retrieving equipment. Would that make you nervous? If the homeowner really had come outside with a gun, his caution would at least have made sense from his point of view. Meanwhile, my friend had simply walked straight toward him. If he had mistaken us for threatening intruders, who knew what might have happened.

If what he was holding really was a gun, our little operation was fairly alarming in retrospect.

We saw the northern lights—or perhaps we did not, because they were very faint. With a thirty-second exposure on a proper camera, the photographs clearly showed colors across the sky. To the naked eye, however, they were barely visible.

In the end, the trip concluded safely. The car was fine!

That year, we organized an ambitious trip around the United States. My travel companions were coming from China, and getting all the way here was no small trip, so our guiding principle was simple: see as many of America’s most distinctive cities as possible in the shortest amount of time.

I had only been in the United States for a few years myself, so I was hardly an authority on which cities best represented the country. We eventually put together a list as a group: Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital; New York, its financial capital; Las Vegas, the gambling capital; and Los Angeles, the capital of film and television. No obscure choices there.

Our first stop was Washington, D.C.

The White House was, of course, at the top of the list. It has served as the president’s residence and principal workplace since 1800 and is probably one of the most recognizable government buildings in the world. Hollywood had blown it up more times than I could count; now I was finally seeing the real thing.

We had assumed the White House could only be viewed from a distance. Once we arrived, however, we saw tourists filing right inside. I looked it up and discovered that tours were indeed possible, but they required advance requests and space was limited. Since we had waited until we were already in Washington to investigate, we clearly had no chance. We gave up on the idea.

Even from a distance, the White House looked quite impressive.

We walked through a park beside the White House and found free meals being handed out, with many homeless people nearby. Among the homeless people we happened to see there that day, most were Black. One of my companions remarked that Obama had made it all the way to the presidency, yet so many Black people were still homeless in a park beside the White House, and wondered what the president would make of the sight.

The next day, we happened upon the National Cherry Blossom Festival Parade. Washington’s famous cherry blossom tradition can be traced to the more than three thousand trees Tokyo gave the city in 1912. Over time, they became one of its best-known spring sights. We had come simply to see the capital and, by sheer luck, landed in the middle of a major festival as well.

The parade we saw was wonderfully loose about formation. Everyone seemed to be marching in whatever way made them happy.

We then visited the U.S. Capitol, home to both chambers of Congress. Its enormous white dome is one of Washington’s defining landmarks. Many of the bills, budgets, and political battles that fill the American news revolve around what happens here.

Wandering around the nearby grounds, we encountered one Washington Monument. The immense white obelisk was built to honor George Washington, the country’s first president, and stands more than 169 meters tall. With almost nothing around it to block the view, it is difficult to overlook from just about anywhere in central Washington.

From there, we walked to the Jefferson Memorial. It honors Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. Set beside the Tidal Basin, its white dome and ring of columns are unmistakably modeled on classical architecture, giving it a different feel from the political landmarks we had passed earlier.

That was the end of the day.

After two days in Washington, it felt as though we had made the rounds of the capital’s best-known political landmarks.

Our next stop was New York City. We took the subway from the airport into Manhattan, then headed straight for the United Nations—we were going to be late!

Why not take a cab? Because under the rather extreme traffic conditions around Manhattan, the subway was much faster for us.

The moment we emerged from the station, Manhattan’s towers filled our entire field of view.

Then we entered United Nations Headquarters. It stands beside the East River on Manhattan’s east side, and institutions that constantly appear in international news—the General Assembly and Security Council among them—meet here. They had always seemed somewhat distant on television; this time, it felt as though we had walked directly into the setting of the news. We had booked a Chinese-language guided tour, so at last we could make sense of what was where.

We saw several of its famous meeting halls.

We then went to the top of the Empire State Building. Completed in 1931, the Art Deco skyscraper dominated the New York skyline for decades before still taller buildings began to appear. Even when we visited, it remained one of Manhattan’s most recognizable structures.

At last we could look down over Manhattan instead of feeling hemmed in by its skyscrapers.

To be honest, the express access we had bought was completely useless: there was no line at all when we arrived. But we were in a hurry, so we had purchased everything in advance anyway.

The next day, we visited the 9/11 Memorial at the former World Trade Center site. The footprints of the Twin Towers, which collapsed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had been transformed into a memorial area, with a reflecting pool occupying each tower’s former location.

In the most bluntly literal description possible, there were now two enormous pools. The names of the victims were inscribed on the bronze parapets surrounding them.

Next came the New York Stock Exchange, followed by the famous Charging Bull nearby in Lower Manhattan. The NYSE stands in the Wall Street area and is one of the world’s best-known stock exchanges. Yet the neighborhood’s classic tourist photo stop is still that famous bronze bull. Whether Wall Street itself was bullish was anyone’s guess; the bull, at least, showed up every day.

Then came the day’s main event: the Statue of Liberty, the ultimate American icon. A gift from France to the United States in the nineteenth century, the statue was dedicated in 1886. Over time, it became one of the defining symbols of both New York and the country—something almost everyone has seen, even if they have never visited the United States.

Honestly, I suspect some of the statue’s fame among my generation owes a little to the well-known game Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Plenty of young gamers probably first learned that America had a Statue of Liberty by blowing it up in the game.

The boat ride in both directions also gave us a view of the Manhattan skyline from the water.

We then arrived at Times Square, which seemed to be what happened when New York turned the crowds, tall buildings, and advertising all the way up at once. Enormous screens lit nearly the entire neighborhood, especially after dark.

It was packed. We had heard at the time that certain Times Square advertising slots, when purchased for only a very short run, were not as outrageously expensive as one might imagine. That apparently explained some of the wonderfully random things that occasionally appeared there.

On our third day, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s collections span much of the world and thousands of years of history, from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to European painting and Asian art. It was far too large to examine seriously in a single day. With our breakneck approach to sightseeing, we could only pick a few things to see. Still, there seemed to be treasures of every imaginable kind.

After some more eating and wandering around New York, our visit came to an end.

Our next stop was Las Vegas.

Most of our time there was devoted to eating and drinking. We sampled buffet after buffet, watched show after show, and tried the gaming tables downstairs at our hotel. Both sides of the Las Vegas Strip were essentially one enormous entertainment complex, with each casino resort packing rooms, restaurants, gambling, and performances into a single building. For people like us, who had no serious plan, it was possible to spend an entire day without even going outside.

The show I remember best was David Copperfield’s. When I told the others about it, someone asked, “Was it really him?” I said, “I think so. Probably.”

At the time, I did not yet understand Las Vegas’s place in the entertainment world. I had no idea that so many major performers held long-running residencies there, so I genuinely was not sure whether we had seen Copperfield himself. I compared the man onstage with his photographs. Probably him.

The show was excellent and full of the enormous stage illusions for which Copperfield was known. Making a person appear would have seemed almost too small. The things turning up onstage included cars, motorcycles, and a dinosaur skeleton.

It also reminded me of something I had once heard: no magician could possibly perform for an entire career without making a mistake, so when something went wrong, the trick was to talk your way around it. I have no idea whether anything went wrong that night. There was, however, a great deal of talking.

That created a problem. My travel companions from China could not understand the English. What were they supposed to do?

I stepped in to provide live simultaneous misinterpretation. Yes—misinterpretation.

Unlike actual simultaneous interpretation, mine maintained only a loose and occasionally adversarial relationship with the source material. I simply could not keep up with Copperfield’s delivery, so the result came out in scattered fragments. I would translate the first sentence of background perfectly; he would then rattle through a long story; I would fall hopelessly behind and eventually offer this summary: “He just told a story that wasn’t very important.”

My companions still rated the show highly. Their reasoning was that magic remained watchable without understanding the dialogue, which beat staring blankly at a Broadway stage.

We also ate at plenty of buffets and tried several well-reviewed restaurants nearby. The largest trap we encountered was one buffet’s unlimited-alcohol package.

Unlike soft drinks, the alcohol had to be brought by a server. You could not pour it yourself, nor was there anywhere to do so. The server therefore became the system’s primary bottleneck.

The glasses were neither especially large nor especially small—perhaps 300 or 400 milliliters. For the northeastern Chinese contingent among us, that amount of beer was only a few mouthfuls.

What happened, then, was predictable. A beer arrived and vanished in two swallows. The server vanished too, and it might be another ten or fifteen minutes before the next refill. One of my companions grew extremely unhappy. Unable to express that in English, he picked up the glass and knocked its base against the table. The server responded with an irritated look and something roughly equivalent to, “I heard you. I’m busy.”

Wait, now you were unhappy too? The glass was empty, everyone’s patience was empty, and a prompt refill could at least have filled one of them.

Neither of the two understood what the other was saying. During a two-hour buffet, we probably managed only about five refills. And this was supposed to be unlimited drinking?

At this particular buffet, “unlimited” existed only in theory. In practice, the bottleneck reduced the throughput to something decidedly limited. I could not recommend paying for it.

Our only real excursion away from Las Vegas was to the nearby Grand Canyon. Driving there would have consumed far too much of our tight schedule, so we chose the quickest option available to us: a helicopter.

Helicopter trips from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon were already a classic local excursion, flying directly over broad stretches of desert and canyon country. For an itinerary in which time was tighter than money, it looked entirely reasonable—on paper.

We booked a tour that promised hotel pickup, a helicopter flight to the Grand Canyon, time on the ground, and a flight back. It was extremely expensive.

The hotel pickup alone was enough to astonish me.

A stretch Lincoln pulled up for us. A man who looked rather like a butler stepped out and invited us aboard. Inside, the car felt like a living room, complete with a refrigerator and a table.

It was my first time in a car like that. One of my companions observed that this was Las Vegas: apparently, if you supplied enough money, Vegas supplied the spectacle.

Then I boarded the helicopter—my first helicopter ride in years.

The important thing was that I did not yet know helicopters made me airsick. I climbed aboard in great excitement and immediately began moving around and taking photographs of everything. After takeoff, I photographed Las Vegas through the window.

From above, the already extravagant hotels and casinos around the Strip suddenly became a small cluster of buildings in the desert. The gold-covered Trump building was undeniably gaudy, but also, somehow, a little cool.

Five minutes into the flight, I began to feel as though I might vomit. I remained dizzy for the entire trip, but somehow held on until we landed several dozen minutes later without throwing up inside the helicopter.

Here are the precious photographs I took at considerable risk of making myself sick.

It had looked enormous from the helicopter. Once we were actually on the ground, the scale became even more absurd.

It was spectacular. The Grand Canyon was, in fact, very grand. And unmistakably a canyon.

There was also the famous Grand Canyon Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped glass bridge projecting from the canyon’s edge, with the canyon directly beneath your feet. In theory, it should have been thrilling. After the helicopter flight, however, I had very little capacity for additional thrills left.

Then we flew back. Once again, I very nearly threw up.

I learned my lesson. From then on, whenever I take a helicopter, my rule is to keep my head pressed firmly against the seat and minimize unnecessary movement, in the hope of keeping the airsickness to a minimum.

And with that, our Las Vegas visit came to an end.

Our next stop was Los Angeles.

Los Angeles was enormous, and getting anywhere without a car was nearly impossible. Los Angeles traffic was another matter entirely, however, and none of us wanted to drive. In the end, we booked a three-day tour that included transportation. It was quite convenient. The city sprawls in every direction, and the distances between attractions can be absurd. For people who wanted to roam all over the place without personally doing battle with Los Angeles traffic, the tour solved the most difficult part of the trip.

On the first day, we began on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There was no shortage of famous names. Looking down as we walked, we passed actors, singers, and directors we had previously known only from television and film, now embedded in the sidewalk beneath our feet.

Next came Madame Tussauds Hollywood. At that point, I had not yet visited Madame Tussauds in London. It was one of those famous places I had known from textbooks long before I ever saw one in person.

We secured several photographs with celebrities.

We then went to Universal Studios Hollywood. Beyond the rides, visitors could tour parts of Universal’s film and television production areas. To me at the time, it felt a little like suddenly stepping behind the scenes of a movie: sets, streets, and production facilities that I had previously seen only on a screen were now directly in front of me.

That brought the day to an end. It had been remarkably full.

Early the next morning, a bus took us straight to San Diego. It was essentially the San Diego expansion pack for our Los Angeles tour. That story belongs in the San Diego entry.

Our third day was devoted to a tour of Los Angeles itself. We began in Beverly Hills.

We toured the outskirts of Beverly Hills. At our level of celebrity, the outskirts were probably about as far as we were getting. We were told that many extremely wealthy people and celebrities lived there. Beverly Hills is one of the Los Angeles area’s best-known luxury residential districts, so our principal activity as tourists was to sit in the vehicle, look at the streets, mansions, and landscaping from outside, and imagine how the wealthy lived.

We then went to the Getty Center. After two days of classic Los Angeles entertainment, the tone of the trip suddenly became much quieter. In addition to its architecture and hilltop views, the Getty Center holds an extensive collection of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts. We saw several works by the Impressionist master Claude Monet.

Afterward, we walked through the Getty Center’s Central Garden. The garden is one of the center’s signature landscapes, with water flowing down toward a central pool and a large maze of clipped azaleas at its heart.

The azalea maze could probably trap a small squirrel.

And with that, our final day in Los Angeles came to an end.

Early in the morning, we took a bus from Los Angeles to San Diego. On the way, our guide told us one of his more memorable stories.

According to him, border inspections from Mexico into the United States near San Diego were extremely strict, while checks in the other direction had once been far more relaxed. Sometimes, he said, vehicles were simply waved through without being checked at all. His explanation was that, under normal circumstances, no one was trying to sneak from the United States into Mexico.

Then, on one occasion, a tour-bus driver got lost and drove an entire busload of passengers straight into Mexico. Getting back was much more difficult: most of the people onboard, including the driver, had not even brought their passports. The whole bus suddenly found itself stranded in a deeply awkward situation.

The guide went on to say that the United States had gradually strengthened southbound checks. One reason, reportedly, was that fugitives really did use that route to escape into Mexico. By the time of our visit, he said, it had become much harder to repeat the legendary feat of accidentally driving an entire bus into Mexico.

We began with a harbor cruise, seeing San Diego Bay from the water and passing the Coronado Bridge along the way. The scenery was excellent.

We then went to SeaWorld San Diego. It combined marine-animal exhibits and performances with amusement rides, making it roughly equal parts marine park and theme park.

We first walked through the animal exhibits.

To be honest, judged purely as an aquarium, the variety of species was not particularly impressive.

We then watched the killer whales—or orcas—perform.

The name “killer whale” suddenly sounded rather less theoretical. According to our guide, SeaWorld had experienced serious incidents involving trainer injuries and deaths in the past. San Diego had also seen an incident in which an orca bit a trainer during a performance and dragged the trainer underwater. The whale shows had also drawn sustained criticism from animal-welfare groups. At the time, I wondered how much longer this kind of performance would continue. Since we were already there, we watched while we still could.

Looking back, 2016 happened to be a major turning point for SeaWorld’s orca program. A little over a month before our visit, the company had announced that it would end orca breeding and that the whales already in its parks would be the final generation. In the years that followed, its traditional entertainment-focused orca shows also gradually shifted toward presentations emphasizing animal behavior and education.

There was also a seal show.

And then came that staple of almost every aquarium: a dolphin show.

By the time the shows ended, it was nearly time to head home. Then we found a water ride in the park.

There was no line at all. We rode it, got off, immediately climbed back on, and repeated the process several times—the sort of treatment one rarely receives at a crowded amusement park.

That evening, we took the bus back to Los Angeles, bringing our San Diego day trip to an end.

My first paper was published at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). It is one of the leading international conferences in parallel computing and distributed processing, with related work in high-performance computing and computer architecture as well.

In my own informal hierarchy, IPDPS was never going to outrank STOC or FOCS in theoretical computer science, or SC in the hardcore HPC world. But within parallel computing and distributed systems, it was absolutely among the very top conferences.

Getting a paper into IPDPS in the second year of my PhD was a considerable stroke of luck.

My first stop in Chicago was the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Our conference was being held at another hotel nearby, and I briefly considered staying at the Trump for a night. That idea ended exactly as expected: it was too expensive, and I could not afford it.

The university was reimbursing my lodging and meals, subject to a limit whose actual amount I did not know. The limit existed in theory; in practice, someone would simply hint that a price was too high. For reasons I never understood, the regular room rate I found for the conference hotel was extraordinarily expensive that Monday—$600 for one night—while the other nights were a little over $300. I submitted that quote for reimbursement and, sure enough, was told that it was absurdly expensive and that I should find somewhere cheaper. So I stayed at another nearby hotel for the first three nights and at the conference hotel for the final three. In the end, everything was reimbursed successfully.

The conference welcome event included a live musical performance. Once people began chatting, the subject that inevitably came up was Trump.

This was during Trump’s first campaign for the U.S. presidency. The topic was not merely hot; it was, to use the precise technical term, extremely hot. Put a table of strangers together with no obvious subject to discuss, and somehow the conversation would make its way to Trump.

I also saw a meme online at the time. The other candidates were labeled things like “the first woman president” or “the first president born in Canada.” Trump was simply “the last president of the United States.” That one made me laugh far more than it should have.

My English political vocabulary was painfully limited. While everyone else chatted away, I mostly listened and laughed along.

Then it was finally my turn to present my paper at the conference.

And so I came away with one precious photograph of the occasion.

A few years later, I was back in Alaska. This time, I wanted to try somewhere different, though I could no longer remember where I had gone on the previous trip.

The highlight of this visit turned out to be the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage. We had gone simply to fill some time, expecting an ordinary zoo. It ended up giving us quite a few surprises.

First, we saw plenty of wolves.

The thing about wolves is that once one starts howling, the rest join in. So we gave our best wolf impressions, over and over, until we set the real wolves off. Once they got going, there was no stopping them. A whole pack howling together was quite a spectacle.

We also saw two Siberian tigers.

And a polar bear roaming around its enclosure.

Not bad at all. We left thoroughly satisfied.

A few years later, I was back in Fairbanks. I took some photos from the plane on the way in, and they turned out rather well. Once we arrived, a trip to the supermarket gave us a fine example of what happens when you don’t dig your car out after it snows.

Our Fairbanks itinerary was unusually simple this time: mostly staying in the hotel and waiting for the northern lights.

On my previous visit, I had gone to a hot spring deep in the mountains, but only as a day trip. I hadn’t stayed overnight. We figured somewhere that remote ought to be good for watching the aurora, so this time we decided to stay. For two days, no less.

I found myself driving the same road to the hot springs again. Conditions were much better this time. At least it was snow. Whatever else I had forgotten about the previous drive, I remembered the road being all ice.

There was a small complication on the way. One of us received an email from a company they had interviewed with, suggesting a phone call sometime soon to discuss the interview and next steps. Then we drove into the mountains and lost cell service. They promptly started panicking.

We checked into the hot springs hotel and paid for its Wi-Fi. It turned out to be Wi-Fi in name only. Almost nothing would load. Web browsing was out of the question, though the email app on the phone barely managed to work, perhaps because it needed so little data.

With no cell signal and hardly any way to communicate, we considered driving back out of the mountains for the call, then returning. We eventually abandoned that idea. It was too much trouble, and the email hadn’t said the call needed to happen right away.

We all knew that a day or two wouldn’t matter. Companies themselves could take a week or two to get back to you without thinking twice. But being the one waiting for an interview result is another matter. Then we discovered a landline in the laundry room that could receive calls. So they emailed the company that number and asked to be called there if needed.

That afternoon, we sat beside the phone for more than two hours. Naturally, it never rang.

The grand resolution came two days later, after we left the mountains. One follow-up call, and it was all sorted out with no trouble at all. There had been absolutely no need to get so worked up.

Anyway, back to the hot springs hotel.

We had poor luck during those two days. The aurora was so faint it was barely visible to the naked eye. I also found that the hotel itself wasn’t actually a great place to watch it, because there were lights on at night. The hotel did its best, switching off as many of the big outdoor lights as possible. But some had to stay on for guests’ safety, and even those were too bright. To see the aurora properly, we would have had to head farther into the dark wilderness. In that case, what had we come here for?

We didn’t get much aurora, but we certainly got our fill of the hot springs. With no cell service and essentially no Wi-Fi, what else were we going to do? It was also properly cold, with nighttime temperatures around −40°C.

So we played around in the water. At −40°C, hot spring water poured over your head quickly cools and freezes. With only your head above the water, the air around your hair is cold enough to keep the ice from melting, leaving it sticking up in every direction. The result: we all turned into Super Saiyans. A very satisfying transformation.

During those two days, the hotel’s eaves showed us why sheltering under a roof in a freezing northern winter doesn’t lead to a sweet romance. The icicles get you before love does.

One of those drops. Game over.

In the end, we never got a proper view of the aurora there. Throughout the trip, it was about as faint as the aurora I had seen a few years earlier. A bit disappointing.

I was disappointed by the choice of location for that year’s World Finals. I was no longer a contestant, so attending was mostly an opportunity to travel, watch the contest, and enjoy the events. Naturally, I wanted the Finals somewhere worth visiting; Phuket, Thailand, the previous year had been a fine choice. This year, though… everyone who had heard of Rapid City before, please raise a hand. If you had never visited Mount Rushmore yourself, would you have known it was here?

The university paid for the trip, which immediately put me in a good mood. My only regret was that I was doing research on campus that summer and could otherwise have been a teaching assistant for a large course, earning what seemed like serious money to me at the time. After I spoke with the professor, however, he explained that the course had only one TA and could not accommodate someone disappearing for an entire week. So he turned me down. I had to TA a smaller course instead and earned only half as much. Still, there was nothing to deliberate over. Going to the World Finals was obviously more important.

Our team that year consisted of three students I called the “American Brothers” and the “Hong Kong Correspondent.” For their path through the regional contest—and the origins of those nicknames—see the regional-contest collection.

For once, I could join the day trip without a contest occupying my thoughts. The organizers took us to Mount Rushmore, the best-known attraction in the area. I went around with the Hong Kong Correspondent, whose reporter’s eye proved worthy of the nickname: he immediately spotted tourist, alone. After a moment’s hesitation, he rushed over and asked for a photo, successfully catching his chance. The Hong Kong Correspondent had always been a devoted tourist fan, so this was an enormous win. The moment the picture was taken, tourist appeared to activate a video-game escape skill and vanished at speed, plainly unwilling to be caught for another round of photographs. I did not get one. An enormous loss on my part.

All I can offer here instead is the bare rock of Mount Rushmore. Looking at the photograph of myself from that year, it is hard to believe that, despite being so young, I was already that young.

Afterward, we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. What can I say? It was certainly a sculpture. The story as I heard it was roughly this: after the four presidents had been carved, a Native American chief objected. “We have our own great heroes,” he supposedly said. “We will carve a monument larger than your Mount Rushmore.” The planned mountain carving was 172 meters high and 195 meters wide, on a far larger overall scale than the Leshan Giant Buddha. Crazy Horse’s face alone is about 27 meters high, considerably taller than any single presidential head at Mount Rushmore. According to the project, the finished work would be the world’s largest mountain carving. Work began in 1948 under a sculptor; after his death, his wife and family continued the project, and the work carries on today. The project has long declined federal or state funding and relies mainly on admission fees and private donations. Combined with the immense scale and complexity of carving a mountain, that has made progress quite slow.

As for the current state of completion… the photograph speaks for itself. The small sculpture in the foreground, outside the shop, shows the intended result. The mountain in the distance shows the actual progress. Was it even ten percent complete?

When contest day arrived, I had no pressure at all, and the contestants did not seem to feel much either. They understood their own level. A ranked finish at the World Finals would be enough; anything but an unranked Honorable Mention.

They ended up with an Honorable Mention after all. The three of them solved three problems by minute 63 and then spent the remaining four hours working without another accepted solution. ITMO, entirely unsurprisingly, won the championship again.

I had no responsibilities at the venue and did not know anyone there, so I wandered around. Eventually I found a small group from Shanghai Jiao Tong University watching the contest and spent a long time sitting behind them, listening to their problem discussions. I had expected five hours to feel long, but they passed remarkably quickly. Sometimes I would stare at the scoreboard even though nothing had changed, with no idea what I expected to see. Then I would look up and two hours had disappeared.

After the contest, the organizers took everyone to a nighttime “light show” projected against the mountain. The quotation marks are deliberate, because my immediate reaction was: you call this a light show? I could gather a hundred people in the hills with laser pointers and produce something similar. It was painfully meager. It was not only my perspective as someone accustomed to China’s fondness for large, extravagant light displays. Even our American coach seemed unable to take much more. He wore an expression that said more than words could, then left early. From the look of him, one might have thought the show had personally embarrassed the United States.

I had another paper published that year, and once again I felt extremely fortunate.

I am not trying to humblebrag here. I really was fortunate. Publishing papers was quite difficult in our theoretical computer science group. The theory itself was hard enough, but just as importantly, our papers often had a single student author and one advisor; long author lists were uncommon. Meanwhile, the AI group next door and the hardware group one door farther over seemed to produce ten papers per person every year, each with ten authors. Were they grinding publication stats over there or what?

That is an exaggeration, but it captures the general idea. At least from where I stood at the time, they really did publish far more papers than we did.

I had also assumed that the little niche I had chosen might happen to be exactly the sort of thing this conference liked, which was why I had managed to publish there. For a while, I thought perhaps I could keep doing this in the years ahead. As it turned out, I was getting ahead of myself.

The university covered the trip again, and this time I stayed at the conference hotel throughout. It was in the Disney resort area, and the surroundings were excellent.

Soon after I arrived, something vaguely vulture-like flew onto my balcony, apparently intent on competing with me for food.

The conference schedule was relentless. After one talk after another, I spent much of the time trying to work out what I had just heard.

In theory, I could have eaten every meal at the hotel. In practice, the food did very little for me, so I had to venture out in search of something better. It was a resort area, though, and the surroundings truly were hard to fault.

That year, I once again took the stage to present my paper.

And once again, I came away with one precious photograph of the occasion.

After the conference, we made a special trip to Universal’s Volcano Bay, which had opened only a few days earlier. We had not known about it before arriving in Orlando; it simply popped up when we searched online. I would not say the advertising was inescapable, but we certainly saw plenty of it.

And then there were the ratings. If I remember correctly, it had only a 2.8 on Google Maps at the time, which was spectacularly bad. By the time I wrote this entry, the rating had climbed all the way to 4.5. In later visitor reviews, I could even find quite a few positive comments about its wristband-based virtual queue system—the very feature that had been savaged when the park first opened. The complaints said that it frequently lost its connection or otherwise failed, that a virtual wait for a single attraction could last for hours, and that while waiting for that attraction, guests could not join another virtual queue. Even when their time finally arrived, they might still face a physical line, only for the attraction to shut down temporarily, and so on.

Those bad reviews seemed to be aimed more at the operational problems of a brand-new park than at whether the park itself was actually fun. We ultimately decided to ignore them and give it a try. The result was a very pleasant surprise: none of those problems affected us. Everything went smoothly that day, the crowds were light, and we could enjoy almost every attraction with very little trouble. It was an excellent experience.

Before I knew it, the day of my dissertation defense had arrived.

I had lived in this city for six and a half years. Looking through my phone, I discovered that I had hardly any photographs of it. Perhaps the longer you live somewhere, the more ordinary it begins to feel.

So here are a few photographs from earlier years.

A tree on North Campus. Absolutely beautiful.

The wildlife I regularly encountered by the roadside.

And then there were the little squirrels that seemed to be everywhere around my apartment complex. Ann Arbor squirrels were ridiculously fat. After I moved to California, every squirrel there looked half-starved by comparison.

The two in these photographs were not even particularly impressive. Go to Central Campus and see someone carrying a mountain-sized bag of nuts to feed the squirrels, and then you will understand what a truly fat squirrel looks like.

The weather around town could change in an instant. It took only three hours to go from green grass to a blanket of snow—and I could photograph the entire transformation without leaving home.

And that was it. I could not find any more photographs.

Back to the defense. It went smoothly. I already had papers in top conferences, so I wasn’t particularly worried about graduating.

After the defense, my committee had a short meeting. About twenty minutes later, my advisor came out and told me there were still a few things in the dissertation that could be polished, but after discussing it, they decided there was nothing that really needed to be changed. So they left it at that.

And I passed.

Many thanks to my advisor for making it so easy on me at the finish line.

A week later came the retirement ceremony for a senior professor who had taught at the university for 34 years. He had also served on my dissertation committee. He was the head coach of our ICPC team, and I had known him since I first arrived at the university. In my first semester, I took one of his courses, absolutely crushed all three exams, finished at the top of the class, and earned an A+. I suppose we made quite an impression on each other after that. He and my advisor had been friends for decades.

The ceremony needed a student representative to give a speech, and they chose me.

My advisor was representing the faculty and spoke first. After finishing his own remarks, he needed a way to introduce me. He said, “This student will be speaking in a moment. He defended his dissertation a few days ago. Fortunately, he passed, or I have no idea what he would be saying today.”

The jokes never stopped coming. Thanks for that. They had only asked me to give the speech a few days earlier; if I had failed my defense, I probably would not have accepted the job.

Then I went up and spoke. It was a great success—perhaps more successful than my dissertation defense. I did not use a script, so the delivery felt natural. I turned stories from the previous six years into a ten-minute comedy routine, and it went over extremely well. Several professors came after me with compliments and told me I had a talent for comedy. All those years of watching the Chinese comedy roast show Roast! (《吐槽大会》) had finally paid off.

When I first arrived in the United States, about all I could manage at a burger place was “Number One.” As soon as the cashier asked a follow-up question, I was completely lost. And now, somehow, I could do a comedy routine in English. Perhaps academics were not the only thing that had improved over those years.

Until we meet again, Ann Arbor.

Surprised to find me still here? Frankly, so was I.

I could already have graduated the previous year, and by now I was no longer even at the university. But the problem was much the same as in 2016: once I left, the student-coach position was suddenly vacant. The red-rated star stepped in, but a few issues involving our systems still drew me back. Michigan had its own judging system, built years earlier by my former student coach—an impressive achievement in itself. We had used it for years. It was basic, but remarkably complete.

I did not contribute much that year. I barely knew who the contestants were and did not attend the regional in person. What made the year different was the arrival of the North America Championship, or NAC. Previously, teams had qualified for the World Finals directly through the regional contests. Beginning that year, NAC added an intermediate stage. Each regional sent several of its leading teams; in ours, I believe it was roughly the top five.

This was the first NAC. As I remember it, regional contests still retained a direct qualification place at the time: the champion advanced automatically, while the remaining places were decided through NAC. A few years later, the regionals no longer had direct places and every team had to qualify through NAC. There was even a later occasion when a central region that had once sent four teams—allocations at the time depended on participation and other factors—saw every one of its teams eliminated at NAC, with none reaching the World Finals. In the years after the NAC system began, our region reliably sent three teams, sometimes more. It became rather easy to see which regions had not been quite as competitive as they thought.

The top five from our regional could reach NAC. That sounded almost too easy. There was hardly any pressure at all.

And indeed, the team qualified without difficulty. I followed Michigan to the inaugural NAC. I shared a room with one of the contestants, so my lodging cost nothing. I do not know whether there was an entry fee; whatever expenses existed, the university paid them. I did pay for my own flights, however. Officially, I was no longer at the university.

The overall schedule resembled the World Finals and lasted nearly a week. I had just started working, did not have that much leave, and had little involvement with the contest anyway. So I arrived midway through the event.

Under normal circumstances, someone would meet arrivals at the airport during the official arrival window. I apparently arrived too late. There was nobody at the airport and nobody at the metro station. I took the train to the contest venue by myself.

This was the hotel provided for the contest.

It was rather striking.

Contest day soon arrived. The competition hall was vast and open.

My impression was that NAC did not have many teams—perhaps a little over fifty—so it did not really need a venue this large. The organizers appeared to have arranged the room in a way that made the space look fully occupied.

During the contest, I spent most of my time discussing the problems with Michigan’s student coach, the red-rated star. It felt much like every other contest. Five hours looks long on paper, but at the venue it disappears remarkably quickly.

As for the result—well, never mind. I was not even entirely sure who was on the team. The only contestant with whom I had much connection was American Three, who was apparently still there.

We did not qualify, which was more or less what I expected. If reaching the World Finals had been that easy, what exactly had I spent all those earlier years doing as a coach?

Looking back much later, however, there was little to regret. The World Finals associated with that season was subsequently delayed substantially by the pandemic. Even if Michigan had qualified, I probably could not have attended because of my U.S. visa. The circumstances were very similar to the Bangladesh year; the full story is in the Egypt World Finals entry.

After many years, I was back in Anchorage.

The main event on my previous visit had been the Alaska Zoo. This time, we had also booked a trip to Knik Glacier, adding something new to the Anchorage itinerary.

Speaking of the Alaska Zoo—we went back there too. Apparently, the experience can vary considerably. I wondered whether funding had become a problem between visits, because it felt like a substantial step down. Or perhaps we simply caught it on an unlucky day.

My first visit had been quite something. There was a whole pack of wolves, and I even managed to set off a full chorus by imitating their howls.

This time, though, where were the wolves?

We walked all around the zoo, eagerly looking for that enclosure, and never found it. Not a single wolf in sight. That was disappointing.

On the previous visit, I had also seen a tiger searching for food in the snow. Where was my tiger?

The polar bear behind the glass did little to improve matters. When I was there last time, it had been clambering all over the place. This time, it lay flat on the ground, seemingly without the slightest interest in moving. Perhaps it was simply having a lazy day. But with the wolves and tiger missing from our visit, and the bear’s enthusiasm apparently missing too, I began to wonder what was going on.

Would I recommend the zoo now? Based on this visit, no. It felt as though we had barely seen anything. A shame.

Then came our trip to Knik Glacier. Northeast of Anchorage in the Chugach Mountains, it is one of the large glaciers in the area that are relatively accessible by helicopter tour. We flew straight into the glacier area, landed on the ice, and got out to explore. An excellent way to save time. Money, considerably less so: it was expensive.

But the experience was terrific. Once again, spending enough money did seem to get us very good service.

There were several ice caves nearby, and the ice underfoot was ridiculously slippery.

Time to look inside.

After about half an hour exploring the area, we climbed back into the helicopter and flew back.

That wrapped up our brief Anchorage visit. Next was Fairbanks, where we hoped to see the northern lights.

I was back in Fairbanks. After landing, we headed straight for the hot spring hotel.

I had learned my lesson from my previous stay and booked just one night. With such poor internet and no phone signal, I had no idea what I would do with any more time there. This time, though, we found that connectivity had improved dramatically since my visit years earlier.

The Wi-Fi actually worked. On my previous visit, it had been Wi-Fi in name only. Now there was an actual internet connection. An unexpected development.

We stayed for one night. The weather was bad enough that we saw no northern lights. We barely even saw the sky.

The hot spring experience was not as good as I remembered, mainly because it was not cold enough. At night, the temperature was only around −20°C. Out in the wilderness around Fairbanks, this was practically tropical. On each of my two previous visits, the nighttime temperature had been around −40°C.

As a result, we could not recreate the Super Saiyan hairstyle I’d managed on my previous visit. Back then, at around −40°C, hot spring water on my hair froze quickly and locked it in place.

But −20°C was simply too warm. The water cooled too slowly, so the hairstyle needed hands to hold it in place. Above the water, it was not cold enough to keep everything standing on its own.

Transformation failed.

Over the next few days, we tried various activities during the day and went looking for places to watch the northern lights at night.

We visited a privately run reindeer farm. Those antlers!

We were told that some reindeer here liked to fight, and that the troublemakers had their antlers cut to keep them from injuring the others. Otherwise, apparently, they would end up breaking them in fights anyway.

We also booked a dog-sledding trip. Proper dog sledding, covering a substantial distance—not the sort of experience where someone hands you a dog and a plank, takes you a few steps, and calls it a day. Before coming, we had debated dog sledding versus snowmobiling. Dog sledding won. No profound reason; it simply sounded like the more unusual experience.

Once again, the location was in the middle of nowhere, with very little phone reception.

Most of the places we drove to over those days were like this. That seemed to be the general arrangement for outdoor entertainment around Fairbanks. Our four-wheel-drive SUV was once again making a persuasive case for itself.

When we arrived, a member of staff took one look at our down jackets, insulated pants, and winter boots and apparently concluded that we had dressed rather lightly. He explained that the ride would be extremely cold and that we needed extra protection. Each of us got a larger pair of insulated pants to pull over our own, oversized insulated waterproof overboots, and a hat. We emerged as heavily armored tanks.

Dog sledding does, of course, require dogs. First, we visited his dog yard.

So many dogs. So much energy. And all of this was outdoors.

Alaskan sled dogs are something else. It was only −20°C that day, but I knew from previous visits that temperatures could drop to −40°C or lower. These dogs lived out in it. Clearly, they had not signed up for the sofa edition of being a dog.

Then the dogs took us on a sled ride through the wilderness. We must have covered several kilometers, with this view the whole way.

That evening, the sky looked clear, so we decided to go out in search of the northern lights. There was a website forecasting the strength of the aurora each day. You could choose to trust it. The trouble was that it seemed to keep its higher numbers under lock and key: almost every forecast was weak unless something genuinely strong was coming. It was not necessarily wrong. But if a weak forecast kept you indoors, you might never see anything, because weak was the usual state of affairs.

We reached a lookout sometime after ten that night. There were already quite a few cars and some people. “Some” is the important word: this was an ordinary outdoor lookout, not an organized tourist attraction. It never became a crowd, which made the experience rather pleasant.

The forecast had kept those higher numbers firmly locked away for days. Based on my previous Alaska trips, there was a good chance this entire visit would also consist of weak auroras. We decided to stop negotiating with the forecast and go watch anyway.

We stayed from around ten until one in the morning, and the wait actually paid off. Around eleven, the aurora put on a small burst of activity. By ten, clouds had already appeared, and things had briefly looked rather unpromising. But the clouds gradually blew away, revealing a clear sky.

For about thirty minutes, the lights were clearly visible to the naked eye. Even an ordinary phone camera could capture them.

Please excuse the photographic style, somewhere between magical realism and Impressionism. This was about as much as I could ask of a phone. The pictures do at least make one thing clear: the sky lit up that night.

We returned to the hotel very pleased with ourselves and went to bed.

To finish the trip, we boarded the Aurora Winter Train from Fairbanks to Anchorage, traveling through a landscape of snow.

Taking a scenic train through beautiful country had become something of a tradition. The scenery on this route was excellent. Away from the train, seeing this sort of wilderness would mean driving ourselves, which sounded like far too much trouble.

There was plenty to look at.

That evening, we arrived at the station in Anchorage, headed straight to the airport, and flew home.

A thoroughly satisfying end to our Alaska trip.

With the crisp weather of early fall upon us, we rented a car and set out on a road trip around Lake Tahoe.

And speaking of the car we rented, we really do need to talk about the car we rented. It was a Porsche 718, and there was quite a story behind it. A few months earlier, a new mobile game called Neverness to Everness had launched with a Porsche collaboration, adding the 918 Spyder, one of Porsche’s flagship limited-production sports cars, to the game. That gave me the idea of trying one. The 918 itself was obviously a little too expensive: at around a million dollars, I could neither buy one nor find one to rent.

So I started looking into what else Porsche made and discovered that its entry-level sports cars were surprisingly affordable. I began entertaining the idea of getting one, only to find that they seemed remarkably difficult to buy. It was not like ordering another model. If you want a Cayenne, for example, you can configure everything you want online and have the factory build it. Orders for Porsche sports cars, however, reportedly depend heavily on dealer allocations. A dealer can order only as many cars as it has allocations; configuring one on the website does not mean the factory will necessarily build it for you. On top of that, production of this generation of gasoline-powered 718s had already ended in 2025, with the next generation originally planned as an electric model.

That meant anyone who wanted one had to choose from the cars already in circulation and take whatever configurations were available. I searched Porsche’s website and found only a little over twenty certified cars for sale across the entire United States. There were, of course, plenty of uncertified used cars, but then assessing their condition and figuring out what had been done to them would be up to the buyer.

The 718 was not particularly expensive, either—only a little more than the price of two ordinary cars. The base 718 was one of the least expensive models in Porsche’s lineup, below even the Panamera and Cayenne. That was very different from the Lamborghinis and Ferraris I had imagined, cars that might cost ten or even dozens of times as much as something ordinary. The 718 had filled a sizable gap in my automotive knowledge.

Then I researched how to test-drive one, and the internet’s answer was essentially: you cannot. At a Porsche dealer, either there is one or there isn’t. If there is, you can drive it. But with so few available nationwide, the nearest dealer with one was more than a hundred kilometers away. Making a special trip that far for a ten-minute drive seemed rather pointless. The internet also said that a different dealer could have a car transported to your local dealership for a test drive, but only if you told them you were seriously interested in buying that specific car. Moving it would cost at least a thousand dollars, so the odds of a dealer doing that for someone who might not buy it were extremely low. Perhaps a dealer in a generous mood might decide you were a promising customer, but I would not count on it.

The best test drive, then, was to rent one. So we did. And since there was no point in renting it just to sit around, we built an entire road trip around it. All I wanted was to try the car, and somehow that became a vacation.

To be fair, we had originally hoped to drive around Iceland that summer but could not go for various reasons, so this trip also made up for some of what we had missed.

Here was the Porsche 718 we rented.

At first glance, it looked extremely cool. After looking at it for a while, it still looked extremely cool.

First, the driving experience. Judged purely as a driving experience, it was excellent. Many of the things the internet said might take some getting used to were actually fine.

The car sits extremely low, so driving it feels as if you are sitting on the ground. Honestly, that sensation was not particularly pronounced. I could certainly tell that I was close to the pavement, but I did not notice it affecting the driving itself. The length of the nose was a more serious issue. The nose is already long, and sitting so low makes it easy to misjudge the distance between the front of the car and the vehicle ahead. That took some adjustment.

Then there was visibility to either side. California driving rules require you not only to check the mirrors before changing lanes, but also to look over your shoulder for cars in the blind spot. Looking back in this car was not very useful, because the bodywork blocked most of the view behind. From the driver’s seat, the view to either side extended only about as far back as my own body; beyond that, it became difficult to see anything. In practice, besides turning to check, I relied more on the blind-spot monitor and the positions of cars in the mirrors when changing lanes. Anyone accustomed to looking over their shoulder before every lane change would need some time to adapt.

Then there was the engine placement. I drove the car for more than ten hours and never felt that the mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout made any difference to me. Perhaps it would become apparent on wet or snowy roads, or while drifting. People online also said that the engine sound came from behind rather than ahead, but I did not find that particularly noticeable either. In normal driving, the engine noise in this car and any other car seemed like surround sound: it came from inside the vehicle, with no clear front or rear. As for volume, it was perhaps a little louder than other cars under ordinary conditions, but not dramatically so. Then again, my own car is already quite noisy, which may be why this one did not seem especially different.

If I had to name one obvious difference, it appeared when I stepped hard on the accelerator. In an ordinary gasoline car, the engine goes from a quiet hum to a loud hum—the low mechanical hum of an internal-combustion engine, not the whine of an EV. The 718 did much more than hum. The engine gave off a deep roar, punctuated now and then by sharp pops from the exhaust, and the sound unmistakably came from behind. I found it exciting, though merely exciting. A serious motorsports enthusiast would probably feel an immediate surge of adrenaline. Starting the car was similar: ignition produced a very loud growl, perfectly confirming what people said online—the entire parking lot knew you had arrived.

The steering was heavy and extremely responsive. Presumably this was what people meant by “driving feel.” Because it responded so readily, I gripped the wheel hard for much of the trip, which became tiring. In fact, the car was very stable in a straight line. If I relaxed my grip a little, it continued directly ahead without wandering. That, too, probably took some getting used to; otherwise, holding the wheel so tightly all the time was exhausting.

In short, the throttle was fierce, the acceleration quick, the steering responsive, the chassis low, and the car planted. If I were judging only its “driving feel,” I would say it delivered everything promised. It was genuinely thrilling, rather like threading through traffic in Need for Speed.

Now for the parts of the experience that do not show up online—the things you discover only after spending real time with the car.

First was the position of the doors. Online descriptions said that because the seats sit so deep, getting in is like lowering yourself into a hole. It requires some bodily maneuvering, unlike stepping into an SUV or a large sedan and simply dropping into the seat. I understood that the first time I got in. But I understood it much more deeply in a cramped parking lot. On our final day, we stopped for a meal at a place with tiny, crowded spaces. Once parked, the door could open only about thirty degrees. Getting out was awkward, but I still had not grasped the full seriousness of the problem. Then it was time to get back in.

Opening the door exposes almost the entire cockpit. The rear edge of the door sits behind the seat, alongside the bodywork behind the driver’s seat, generally about ten centimeters farther back. In a normal car, the rear edge of the front door lines up roughly with the middle of the front seatback. Here it was nearly twenty centimeters farther behind. When the door opens only a little and you have to squeeze in sideways from the rear, that difference becomes a problem. I put one leg inside, only to discover that my foot was still nowhere near the floor and almost landed on the seat. I had to stretch much farther forward. In the end, I wriggled into the car in something close to a split.

The conclusion was simple: if the door cannot open fully, getting into the car is difficult. I recommend learning the splits first. Depending on how far the door opens, a front split will usually suffice. In extreme cases, however, a side split may also be required. Alternatively, simply avoid places where the door cannot open.

Next came the rear trunk. Because the engine sits behind the seats and immediately next to the trunk, the cargo area becomes noticeably warm after the car has been running for a while. Anything that needs to stay frozen clearly does not belong there. Buy ice cream at the grocery store, put it in the trunk, and drive home, and it will probably be thoroughly melted in no time.

Then there were the front and rear trunk lids. Both require a firm downward press to close. The problem was precisely that firm downward press. Modern vehicles—especially SUVs—usually have powered tailgates that require no effort at all. Even without one, you can generally grab an interior handle, pull down hard, and let momentum close the trunk without touching the exterior bodywork.

Not in this car. Closing either trunk requires touching the exterior and pressing down firmly. Under ordinary circumstances that may be no great issue, but it becomes one in two situations. The first is a long road trip like ours. The body was not exactly filthy, but it was covered in dust, and we really did not want to put our hands on either lid. There was no choice, so every closing left a large fingerprint. The second is extreme heat, as in Phoenix. On a 45°C day there, the surface of a car can exceed 50 or even 60°C—hot enough to fry an egg, as countless online videos demonstrate. Now imagine pressing down hard on that surface with your bare hand to close the trunk. Are you trying to sear your own palm, slow-roast it, or simply recreate a medieval torture device?

From the standpoint of daily practicality, then, the car certainly had its share of problems.

Which brought me to the final verdict after the full experience: should I get one? My answer was no. I had rented it as an extended test drive before buying, only to finish the test drive and decide not to buy. At least the test drive had done its job.

The most important reason was this: the biggest problem with driving this car was that I had to drive it.

That was it. The reason really was that simple. The longer you spend behind the wheel, the more you appreciate the value of automated driving. However good the 718’s “driving feel” might be, I fundamentally did not want to drive.

It reminded me of a video I had seen on TikTok. A man who had bought a McLaren said he deeply regretted it and that the car was worse than a Tesla costing one tenth as much. Buy the Tesla, he said; if you want to drive a supercar, rent one for a few days. It would not cost that much. At the time, I did not entirely understand and assumed he was engaging in a rather elaborate humblebrag. Now I understood completely. If someone asked for my recommendation today, I too would unhesitatingly suggest buying an EV. If you want to drive a supercar, rent one for a few days.

All right. After all that, a perfectly good road trip had somehow become an automotive lecture. Back to the trip. Our original purpose was simply to drive, so we deliberately designed long, indirect routes in both directions, with one full loop around Lake Tahoe in the middle. That was essentially the entire plan. Then we searched online and discovered that the lake was apparently a proper, extensively developed vacation destination, with all sorts of activities rather than merely a natural body of water. We booked two: a dinner cruise at sunset on the first evening and transparent kayaking on the lake the next morning.

While we were still driving on the first day, however, we received notice that the kayak outing had been canceled because of strong winds forecast over the lake the following day. It was a shame that we would not get to paddle out onto the water. Those transparent kayaks were quite the social-media attraction, too.

On the first day, we followed CA-88 toward Lake Tahoe. As for the scenery along the way, there really was not much of it. Based on what we actually saw, nothing was especially striking. The roadside generally looked like this. Calling it beautiful scenery would be a challenge.

That evening, we boarded a lake cruise and ate dinner while supposedly watching the sunset. I say “watching the sunset,” but you could barely see it. There was no ocean horizon here; mountains surrounded the lake, and the sun simply dropped behind them. By the time it disappeared completely, the sky was still bright. Some sunset. We treated it as a lake-view cruise instead.

On the second day, the early-morning kayak outing had been canceled, so our only remaining plan was to drive all the way around the lake ourselves. We were immediately stunned by the traffic at Sand Harbor. This was where the kayaking should have taken place; now we could only enter the park on our own.

We were circling the lake counterclockwise. Perhaps most people went clockwise because that put the lake on the passenger side and made it easier to pull into viewpoints. Whatever the reason, there seemed to be very little counterclockwise traffic. When we reached Sand Harbor, cars on our side were moving normally and could turn left straight into the park. Traffic in the opposite direction, however, was doomed. There was only one lane in that direction, and vehicles entering the park moved exceptionally slowly, largely because cars inside had to inch along while searching for parking. The entrance admitted perhaps one car every fifteen seconds. Since the highway had only that one lane in each direction, anyone approaching from that side was trapped in the line whether or not they wanted to enter the park.

Judging by the situation, parking inside must have been extremely tight. If nobody was leaving, going in would accomplish nothing for us. We thought it over and decided to leave. We could return for kayaking some other time; there was no need to join the mess today.

As we continued around the lake, the line in the opposite direction stretched on for several kilometers. Heaven knew how long it would take to clear. At that pace, the cars at the back would wait at least several hours. It was hard to imagine what anyone was getting out of this journey.

In short, consider this a grave warning: never drive clockwise past Sand Harbor in the morning. Whether you intend to enter the park or not, you are finished.

Continuing around the lake, we passed Kings Beach, Sugar Pine Point State Park, D. L. Bliss State Park, Emerald Bay, and several random viewpoints along the road.

If you were not pursuing specific attractions, the scenery along the road was quite good. If you were pursuing a particular attraction, however, you might be disappointed.

If you zoom infinitely far into the panorama above, you can see an older gentleman paddling naked.

Why was he allowed to go kayaking? There really was wind that day. The commercial kayak operator may have decided the risk was too high and canceled, but private paddlers were evidently still going out as usual.

At Sugar Pine Point State Park, we found these rails extending into the water. And there was absolutely nobody there. If this were in China, a photogenic spot like this would have a line stretching to the ends of the earth. Here, nobody cared. People seemed to prefer entirely natural scenery such as beaches and lakeshores.

At Emerald Bay, we looked from shore at Lake Tahoe’s only island. We had only just circled it by boat the night before.

And the houses along the shore.

And with that, the day’s drive was over.

Many stretches of the road around Lake Tahoe have only one lane in each direction. Whenever traffic backs up at a park entrance as it had that morning, the entire road effectively implodes. Fortunately, going counterclockwise meant that we never encountered another jam like it that day.

As for the scenery at Lake Tahoe—how should I put this? It would certainly be wrong to call it bad. But saying it was truly extraordinary would also be an exaggeration. Having seen my share of dramatic landscapes, I viewed it as a pleasant destination within driving distance of home. Its level was, more or less, what that description suggests.

For lake and water scenery of this kind, Jiuzhaigou remains my first recommendation. Of all the places I have visited so far, Jiuzhaigou Valley stands in a class of its own even on a global scale. I did not find waterscapes to match it even in New Zealand, the Lord of the Rings filming location celebrated for its picture-perfect pastoral landscapes.

On the third day, we began the long trip home. We made a substantial detour south, driving first through Monitor Pass and then Sonora Pass before heading home.

Neither place was a particular attraction; each was simply a stretch of road. In principle, the two passes were the same kind of thing as Tioga Pass, Yosemite’s best-known mountain pass. Based on the Google Maps ratings and number of reviews I saw at the time, Monitor ranked worst, Sonora came next, and Tioga was way out in front.

There was no way we could detour as far as Tioga on this trip, or we would never make it home that day. In my experience, Monitor was indeed the weakest, while Sonora was much better.

This was Monitor Pass.

May it live forever in glory!

The roadside scenery looked roughly like this: true middle-of-nowhere country. To be fair, it looked remarkably similar to the photos on Google Maps. Many of these pictures were taken from inside the car and may contain all manner of peculiar reflections. Please ignore the details.

At Sonora Pass, we entered a national forest, and the scenery on both sides improved considerably. It also looked like a clearly defined stretch of road, with metal gates at both entrances. The gates were open now, of course. In winter, once snow arrived, the road would close. Signs at either end clearly warned that it was not routinely plowed to remain passable during the seasonal closure.

We continued wandering through the national forest, with trees on both sides and exactly the same view repeating for dozens of kilometers.

Then we emerged from the forest, joined the highway, and headed home. The trip was officially over.