Sunsets became brief emotional pressure valves inside a city that rarely slowed down.
My professional journey began in Beijing, where I spent six and a half years of my life. As the capital of China, Beijing concentrates a vast amount of resources and opportunities, yet it also comes with a dense and complex structure of living conditions and constraints. For many individuals, everyday life often feels compressed—faster in pace, tighter in space, and heavier in cost.
Within such an environment, moments of emotional release are relatively scarce. Looking back, some of the few shared points of resonance on social media were often tied to the sky. Sunsets in particular. Whenever the sky over the city turned vividly colored, there would be a collective, almost synchronized response on WeChat Moments—people expressing brief excitement and relief in a similar way.
This shared emotional reaction became, in hindsight, one of the few gentle memories I associate with life in Beijing. To me, those sunsets were not merely natural phenomena, but rather accidental emotional pressure valves emerging from within the city’s structure.
