Wrap Up 2025 and Leave “Resilience” Behind

On the last day of 2025, I cooked myself a bowl of noodles in the traditional Chinese way.

It was the taste of my childhood, made with:

1. a sunny-side-up egg

2. a handful of dried wheat noodles

3. an abundance of tender, fresh pea shoots

4. some soy sauce, a spoonful of rendered lard, a pinch of salt, and a touch of chili oil, mixed into boiling water to form the noodle soup

Credit: Xiaohongshu

The soul of this bowl of noodles is the pea shoots.

In my hometown and across the Sichuan region, we call them 豌豆颠 (wān dòu diān) in the Sichuan dialect, the soft spot of our hearts.

In my childhood, during the economically strained years of the 1980s and 1990s, pea shoots were a true luxury, something you could only afford on special days.

Now it is 2025, a year in which I can still buy pea shoots in abundance. That alone tells me life is not that bad. All the days when we can afford pea shoots are good days.If you have a Chongqingnese heart, pea shoots are more than a vegetable: they are an indicator of economic trajectory, a quiet index of life quality.

Yet the past year has been tough for most Chinese people. Last night, as I read Life in China: When Economic Indicators and Lived Experience Diverge by Wanqing Chen, a piece that weaves together the bittersweet stories of 50 ordinary Chinese lives in 2025, my nose tingled and my heart sank.

Even though economic indicators, from GDP to the stock market, point upward, lived reality tells a different story.

That is why I have always resisted the label “resilience” when it is used to describe Chinese people as a collective identity. Too often, it becomes a lame excuse, a way of saying there is no better option, so we must endure, accept, and swallow reality because we cannot change or twist our fate.

So we are told: be resilient.

But we have already been resilient for over 5,000 years.

At the end of 2025, I wish we could throw “resilience” into the cabbage bin and leap forward as the Year of the Horse approaches. For 2026, may everyone make tangible progress, evolving from merely being resilient into becoming a better version of themselves.

With pea shoots as the baseline of life quality, how hard can life really be?