Essays on Yuchen Hui

A Journey Through Hebei

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last summer I went back to China for a little over three months of vacation, and during that time my mom and I drove back to our family’s hometown in Hebei. Along the way there were moments full of laughter, and there were swells of emotion that brought me to tears. If my memory were a snow-white canvas, these moments would be the thick, bold strokes of ink and color splashed across it, some bright, others somber, and when I savor them again now, the aftertaste is still a tangle of sweet and bitter. Having stumbled on a bit of free time lately, I wanted to set all these feelings down in words, so that even if I go senile someday, I can still travel back through them and feel the faintly humid air of that summer.

L'Abstraction, c'est la Cognition

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve long wanted to write down some of the thoughts that have come to me over these years of study, and I’ve finally found the time. Let me begin with the first wisps of thought that drifted into my head after I started university. In the first semester of my freshman year, because the digital logic professor at my own university taught so terribly, I went on Bilibili and found a digital circuits course taught by Prof. Wang Hong of Tsinghua University. To this day, I still consider it the most logically structured teaching I’ve ever come across, and the best at keeping hold of the main thread. The course’s central logic is this: a computer’s CPU is an extremely complex system, and understanding a complex system like that requires mastering the skill of “abstraction.” As another excellent textbook, which I later read nearly cover to cover, puts it:

The Nutcracker

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today, after our group meeting, I went to Place des Arts with friends to see The Nutcracker, a ballet I had been longing to see for ages. The Nutcracker is my favorite music, bar none. The first reason, of course, is that Tchaikovsky is simply phenomenal; the second is that it was the music that first awakened me to music, back in my elementary-school music class—thank you, Teacher Wang. Every time I listen to The Nutcracker, it takes me a long while to calm down again, as if I had traveled through time and space. When I’m doing some fairly tedious work, I like to listen to ballet music—Coppélia, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, Swan Lake—but The Nutcracker is the one I almost never put on, because it always sets my body and soul resonating, and then I can’t concentrate.

La paix | Reconciliation

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes

a plain, simple blue sky

is enough to make me smile without even realizing it

Sometimes

I’m dazzled by a colorful snail on a treetop branch, still beaded with dew after the rain

Leaving the lab at dusk, I can still savor the soft colors that the last glow of sunset and the blue-hour sky blend together overhead

Walking down the hill past some nameless vegetable patch, I’m reminded of a plate of stir-fried pumpkin vines I ate long, long ago

Ce train qui s'en va

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On the metro, I like to prop my elbow on the window ledge, rest my head against my fist, and let my whole body lean sideways against the wall of the car. In this position my body goes completely loose, and all my senses are free to take in everything around me.

The train slowly pulls out of Lionel-Groulx station. The vast, open space of the two-level station before my eyes, the people hurrying through it, the announcements echoing over the speakers—all of it, every last thing, begins to fall back and blur, faster and faster, and in its place comes that shrill screech, so particular to Montreal, of rubber tires grinding against the track. At first this warping of the world around me is slow, but soon it speeds up until it is almost dizzying. It truly feels as though it were my youth slipping away, ever faster, along with all the time I have already lived through.

Le rhume

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I came down with a bad cold alone abroad, it just had to be during midterm week (month).

Ever since I was little, colds have kept me company through every spring and every autumn, never once skipping a year. Of them all, the pneumonia I caught during midterms in my first year of high school left an impression of gray; the laryngitis I got while studying French in Shanghai felt like cold; the tonsillitis during last year’s midterms made me break down in the middle of my homework; and this time, the unidentified upper respiratory infection here in Canada, a COVID hot zone, has left me panicked and a little desperate (why is it midterms again?).

Pas d'un | A Spring Still Cold

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

May in Montreal: warm one moment, cold the next. Spring on the North American continent has a character all its own. It has none of the muggy “south-wind days” of Guangdong and Guangxi, the clammy chill of Jiangnan, or the dry heat of northern China; none of the breakneck warming of Siberia and Central Asia that leaves you in a sweat; and none of the cool, mild mists that shroud Western and Central Europe, born of the warm, moist air that sweeps in unimpeded from the Atlantic. The moment I stepped out the door, a chill slipped in under my collar. I seemed to see, hundreds of kilometers away, the vast, hazy white ice of Hudson Bay, and to hear the north wind still howling, refusing to give up. Down jacket, padded pants—compared with what I wore in the dead of winter a few months ago, my outfit was short just one pair of long johns.

Which City on Earth Do I Love Most?

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Which city on Earth do I love most?” I put down my phone, gently close my eyes, and ask myself. If it’s a question of love, I have to go with my first instinct. I try to melt into the darkness of the room, the better to catch the images rising from deep in my memory. Little by little, a street scene, mostly gray and green, appears on the black curtain: the gray is a six-lane, two-way asphalt road and the bike lane running alongside it, and the green is the dawn redwoods growing in the median strip. At this moment I am standing on the sidewalk, level with the bike lane; the paving stones under my feet are about fifty centimeters square, their texture and color exactly like polished granite in Minecraft. These stones don’t meet the asphalt of the bike lane directly; instead, a band of smooth, polished gray tiles traces the outline of the border between them. I lift my gaze from the ground to eye level and look toward the far end of this tree-lined avenue—the densely planted dawn redwoods on its left and the low buildings on its right seem to stretch all the way to the distant horizon, drawing ever closer to each other, forming a perfect perspective drawing. In the gusts of the howling north wind, the dawn redwoods bend and bow like dominoes, yet no one can see where the first domino fell—the end of the road seems to be the very source of this north wind, the whole of my life.