When I first received my Chengdu assignment in my Silicon Valley office, the image of Po practicing his martial arts with Dan Dan noodles from Kung Fu Panda immediately came to mind. This city, which has been honored by UNESCO as the “World Capital of Gastronomy,” has spent the last three months turning my perception of modern China upside down — behind the glass walls of the skyscrapers lies such a vibrant pulse of history.
Lesson 1: Decoding the Philosophy of “Slow Life” Technology
At the Crane Tea House in People's Park, I was shocked by the scene in front of me: thousands of bamboo chairs are neatly arranged like components on a circuit board, a tea doctor holding a 1.2-meter copper kettle performs the “Eighteen Styles of the Dragon”, and boiling water is precisely injected into a blue and white flower bowl without a drop of water leakage.” This is the earliest assembly line work in China.” My local guide Alan explains with a smile, “Chengdu people mastered the algorithm of balancing efficiency and enjoyment 600 years ago.”
With a cup of jasmine tea, I witnessed some of the city's most subtle human-machine interactions: elderly people trading stocks while refilling water from a long spouted kettle, young couples planning a marriage proposal in the middle of an ear-pulling service, and even passing ear-pickers who looked like service robots with special sensors. This wisdom of embedding modern needs into traditional scenarios makes me, a technology practitioner, stand in awe.
Lesson 2: UX Design in Ancient Buildings
Standing on the red walled mezzanine of the Wuhou Ancestral Temple, the ginkgo biloba leaves look like streams of golden data weaving in and out of the vermilion-colored background. This memorial hall in honor of Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms period, actually hides the interaction design that amazed me: hanging 34 copies of the attack on the heart of the United Nations as an ancient version of the pop-up interactive, visitors with cell phone scanning code will be able to hear the interpretation of the different dialects; Jinli Ancient Street shadow puppet theater workshop, the master taught me to make the exclusive “Mechanical Combat Armor” shadow – when my Iron Man shadow and Guan Yu leather shadow. When my Iron Man shadow and Guan Yu shadow dueled on the curtain, Chinese tourists laughed and called it “the first technical cooperation between Marvel and the Three Kingdoms”.
I was most impressed by the Dujiangyan Water Conservancy Project. Standing on the Yuzui embankment, I watched as the “damless diversion” system designed by Li Bing and his son 2,279 years ago still irrigates the Chengdu Plain, more than 2,000 years before the California Department of Water Resources' proudly named Central Valley Project. When the guide demonstrated the use of bamboo cages filled with pebbles, a “biodegradable material,” to build a dam, I suddenly understood what my colleague often said, “Green technology is not an invention, but a return.
Lesson 3: Intercultural communication on the tip of the tongue
At Jade Orchid, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Broad Alley, chef Lan Guijun showed me a molecular cuisine version of mapo tofu. Tofu molecules frozen in liquid nitrogen are suspended in a matrix of red oil, and the waiter reminds me to plate them as carefully as I would a semiconductor chip.” The essence of Chengdu cuisine is like programming,” says Chef Lan, shaking the Pixian bean paste in his hand, ”allowing for infinite iterative upgrades in the underlying logic of spiciness.”
But it was a diplomatic incident at the hotpot restaurant that really made me a team favorite. When I confidently shouted out “mildly spicy” in my newly learned Sichuan dialect, the red pot served by the waiter caused my colleagues to take three steps back. It was only later that I realized that Chengdu's “mildly spicy” was the Silicon Valley equivalent of a “high-risk investment” in terms of risk level. However, this hot pot worth three bottles of soybean milk, accidentally exchanged for the R & D department director Zhang's collection of anti-hair loss Chinese medicine formula.
Special Operation: Agile Development of Panda Base
As a level 10 Kung Fu Panda scholar, I found a real-life version of the Dragon Warrior training camp at the panda breeding base. Sister Wang, a keeper, revealed that the progress management of panda babies learning to climb trees is comparable to APP development: “Climbing height data is recorded every day, and the number of falls is the bug fixing record”. When I put on my protective suit to feed apples to the cubs, I suddenly realized that these black and white groups are the real masters of user experience — they conquer humans with their cute attitude and get a permanent VIP survival guarantee.
CULTURAL EGGS: Digital Twins at the Chuan Theater
At the Jinjiang Theater on Huaxing Street, a Sichuan Opera actor puts on a motion capture device for me. While my wusheng disguise was rendered into a hologram in real time, the face-changing master actually made the digital character change faces 12 times in 0.8 seconds.” This is the craft of the old ancestors meets Unreal Engine,” said Technical Director Xiao Li, debugging the motion-capture system, ”We're developing a VR version of The Legend of the White Snake, and next time you put on your Oculus you'll be able to experience the particle effects of the Water Flooding San Francisco Temple.”
Meditations on the Way Back
Before the trip at the Qingcheng Mountain Taoist Temple, the Taoist priest pointed to the Tai Chi diagram under the eaves and told me, “You Silicon Valley pursues from 0 to 1, we are talking about 1 to 0 here.” Overlooking the flights taking off and landing at Shuangliu Airport at the moment, I suddenly read the city's code: while California engineers are working on flexible screens in their labs, Chengdu embroiderers are using a 0.07-millimeter silver needle to write another form of code on silk. Perhaps true innovation is never a new skin on ancient wisdom.
(Postscript: After returning to the U.S., my “panda paralyzed” lunch break position has taken the office by storm, and the HR director is considering incorporating ear-pulling services into employee benefits.)
