About en cn 

I've been writing on the Chinese internet since its earliest days.

It started around 1999, writing weekly columns on internet marketing for a newspaper. I remember always procrastinating until the last minute. Writing was an assignment back then, not something I sought out. Looking back, I regret not writing more — those were the very first years of the internet in China, and every day brought new ideas, new people, new companies. I should have written more and built more connections with the media. But I didn't.

After that, I wrote on every platform that came along: BBS forums, NetEase personal pages, Rongshuxia, Bokee — one after another. It was the golden age of Chinese internet writing platforms, and I was there for almost all of it.

Most of those platforms are gone now. When they shut down, whatever I'd written on them disappeared too. The BBS posts, the blog entries — all unrecoverable.

That was the first time I learned something important: words written on someone else's platform don't really belong to you. When the platform goes, the words go with it.

In 2015, I registered this domain: vincentping.com.

I started writing again, on and off — health, education, tech, building websites, learning English, doing Rubik's cubes with my kid. Mostly just notes on whatever I happened to be doing. I didn't think much of it at the time. Recording things was just a casual habit.

What turned it into something deeper came later.

In recent years, the older generation in my family passed away one by one. And after 2024, I moved to the United States to start over.

When you reach an age where you start looking back, you realize something: your own past isn't entirely in your hands, nor is it fully in your own memory. I don't really know what I was like as a small child — I was too young to remember. Those memories were held by my elders. When they left, those memories vanished forever. That experience gave me a far deeper understanding of what happens to things that were never written down.

And what I find hardest to accept isn't the parts I could never have captured — it's the parts I could have, but didn't.

I lived through those years, but I didn't leave enough words behind. Now much of it is just a blur in my memory. Nobody deleted it. I simply never saved it. Those were days I could have kept, but let slip away.

That's when I finally understood something I'd been saying for years without really meaning it: What isn't recorded ceases to exist.

Not just words. Words, photos, recordings, videos — any form of record counts. The point is: an experience, a thought, a person — if never captured in any form, then given enough time, it's as if they never existed at all.

I'd actually been saying a version of this for a long time. Back in 2013 and 2014, when I was leading engineers, I used to tell them: code that isn't committed doesn't exist. If you don't commit and push, one dead hard drive or one departure, and it's as if the code was never written. Back then it was just engineering discipline. I said it easily enough, but I didn't truly understand it.

What made me understand was these past few years. Lost code can be rewritten. Lost days cannot be recovered. Things that were never written down will, after enough time, be indistinguishable from things that never happened — that's true of my own years, and it's true of those old posts on shuttered platforms. The only difference is: some can still be salvaged, and some never can.

This site, vincentping.com, is the root — a foundation that doesn't live on someone else's land. The tools have changed over the years, from Joomla to WordPress to Pelican, but this root has remained. Everything I can still find from 1999 to now lives here.

Here you'll find what I've written over the years — on tech, health, education, and whatever else was on my mind.