Miscellaneous
🏫 Life Before the Grid: The Pre-Tsinghua Era
Before diving into the intellectual rigor of Tsinghua, I enjoyed a leisurely seven-year stint in the inaugural class of the Early Development Program (EDP) at The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China (RDFZ). My formative middle school years were essentially a delightful blend of soccer, basketball, and mastering the crucial arts of Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, and Rubik’s Cube.
🏀⚽ The Athletic Career (and its glorious failures)
My promising soccer career came to an abrupt, tragic end in 2012 when I, in a moment of unmatched brilliance, scored a game-losing own goal during our most crucial match. I’ve been happily retired ever since.
On the hardwood, as the starting center for the EDP basketball team in 2014, I proudly helped us secure the runner-up title in the RDFZ league—contributing a whopping two points per game on average.
At Tsinghua, the sporting spirit continued, albeit with mixed results. In a 2017 soccer match against EE75, I executed a magnificent lob shot… unfortunately, the rest of our EE73 team was, shall we say, “developmentally challenged.” On the basketball court, the EE73 team had a long-running, if somewhat disappointing, tradition of never reaching the final of the INFINITY CUP (the EE department’s league), primarily due to a never-ending, team-wide epidemic of injuries.
However, persistence pays off! I joined the EE department’s volleyball team in 2022 as a middle blocker, and we finally tasted sweet victory, clinching the John Mo (马约翰) Cup Championship in both 2024 and 2025!. You can witness our glory in the final match videos here and here.
🗣️ The Pursuit of Unspeakable Tongues
I also have a secret passion for learning languages and Chinese dialects—a passion tragically undermined by the fact that I am generally terrible at actually speaking them. My current linguistic victims include Cantonese and French. I’ve managed to acquire some proficiency in Japanese (JLPT-N2) and Korean (TOPIK 4), plus a truly minimal amount of Russian. When my brain needs a rest, I enjoy the competitive serenity of watching Riichi Mahjong matches.
🏆 Speedcubing
My speedcubing saga began in the spring of 2014 with my debut at the World Cube Association (WCA) Beijing Spring 2014. My official WCA Profile lives right here.
Having collected 13 golds, 15 silvers, and 24 bronze medals across 45 WCA competitions in China and the U.S., I can genuinely say it’s been an incredible, finger-straining journey.
In the second year of my cubing career, I reached my peak, briefly holding the Chinese National Record for the Fewest Moves event with a 23-move single solve, and tying the average record of 28.33 moves at the Beijing Long Events Open 2015, held fittingly at my old stomping grounds, RDFZ. (You can analyze my genius/luck via the solution reconstruction in this post.)
I’m proud to say I have competed in all 18 (now 17) official WCA events. Beyond Fewest Moves, I’ve managed to sneak into the China TOP10 rankings for Rubik’s Clock, Skewb, and Megaminx. For a fleeting moment in July 2017, I even ranked 2nd in China on the overall “Sum of Ranks” leaderboard—a rank that proves you can be pretty good at many things without being the best at any of them!
After entering Tsinghua, my practice sessions became significantly less frequent, and I switched my competitive focus to bureaucracy. Under the visionary leadership of MA Zeyu, we successfully resurrected the Tsinghua Student Speedcubing Association in 2019. I subsequently served as President in 2020 and now hold the title of Vice President. Our epic cubing events are documented on our Bilibili account. My current mission: to convert more Tsinghua students into fellow cube addicts and host the greatest on-campus competitions the world has ever seen.
I currently hold the school records for three events: the 3x3x3 average (8.60 seconds), the rather tedious 5x5x5 Blindfolded single (34:03.00), and the “I can solve three at once” 3x3x3 Multi-Blind single (3/3). All the glorious details are on our school record page here.