[the_af]

It feels off to me as well.

It's the kind of unverifiable story that we would like to believe, but there's almost zero way of having independent confirmation. The photos could be from anywhere. The author seems likeable and writes an interesting story, but who knows how much of it is true.

The story seems almost tailored to cater to HN, with secret projects, nuclear power, China, and secrecy.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is completely plausible, and no details in the story are outlandish for China. Heck, it feels tamer than I would imagine, even.

[robwwilliams]

Agreed. In my opinion, too much strange embodied experience in this engaged and engaging Part 1.

If I told you stories from my childhood as an 10-year old child of an undercover operative in West Germany in 1962-1963 I think many would claim “fiction”. If I did not have my sister as an independent memory backup, even I might have doubts. She was lucky and unlucky and had a big brother.

[seanmcdirmid]

There was a lot of weird stuff going on in China in the 70s and 80s (and perhaps into the early/mid 90s). Any Gen X Chinese adult will have a lot of stories to tell, like how it was like to join the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 (my gf in college was from Beijing). I wouldn't discount this story at all based on its contents, and it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all to make it up, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

[the_af]

There was a lot of weird stuff in the 70s and 80s in the US too, no surprise there.

[seanmcdirmid]

As an American Gen X, I don’t think very exciting things happened in our youth. We were kind of rich, kind of broke, we had recessions but not upheaval, not hardship, not a society that was more similar to North Korea is today liberalizing at a rapid clip. I could be romanticizing it as an outsider, but I think Chinese Gen Xers have much better stories to tell than we do.

[the_af]

From someone neither from the US nor from China, you sure did your share of weird things too. So I think that yes, you are romanticizing it as an outsider.

Almost all of the stories we get told in the West are from the US perspective, so there's that: anything from China feels fresh in comparison.

[Vincent_Yan404]

Part 2 is the harsh part, including death and execution. And now I know how hard life was, but when I was a kid, I just feel 404 is the sweetest home.

[maxglute]

I was invited to lunch near factory 541, tank city, a pseudo closed area sprawled in some Shanxi valley. Turned out it was lunch and a show, they were going executing some drug traffickers from strike hard. Impromptu don't do drug lesson from uncle. We had to turn around because I had naturalized western citizenship and weird dialect by then and they figure security would not let us through. It was pretty surreal experience vs how nice and insular danwei life was otherwise.

[seanmcdirmid]

That makes sense. I’ve heard harsher stories in China.

I lived in west Richland Washington as a kid, my dad worked at Hanford which is a giant nuclear reservation in the western USA. It was mostly typical American kid life, so nothing on your experience, except my dad eventually died of a rare cancer and we got a settlement from the US Department of Energy.

I spent 9 years living in Beijing but first visited in 1999 when thinks were kind of still brutaleski. I’ve had a couple of experiences with the PLA (living in a building where I wasn’t supposed to be living and some off limit areas on the border for foreigners that they don’t tell you about).

[johanyc]

is part 2 already published somewhere in chinese?

[the_af]

Yes, you can find it in a 2016 blog post (linked to here in other comments).

[the_af]

It's completely plausible, which is the most convincing kind of unverifiable stories.

It also caters to the usual biases of the HN crowd: China, nuclear projects, secrecy, etc.

How come the Chinese post is from 2016 and complete but now we're getting it in English and in parts?

Of course, none of it means this is fake. It's just, like the parent commenter said, "slightly off".

[amdivia]

Feels AI-ish as well, and OP used em-dashes in some of their replies. But it could be attributed to a language barrier of sorts requiring the use of LLMs to communicate

[Vincent_Yan404]

I'm using AI to translate comments, and it does sounds AI. My IELTS is 7.5, and writing band 6.0, so I have to rely on the tool currently.

[nephihaha]

I use em dashes in prose — and I am not AI.

[Vincent_Yan404]

It's published in China many years ago, and it's nonfiction. I just used AI translate to English. And can you make up something to cater HN, like nuclear power stuff?

[Vincent_Yan404]

Those pictures photoed by me and my parents,I did use LLM to translate, cause my english is not good enough to write a long article.

[saltwatercowboy]

I apologise. I write too and I've been bothered by LLM-generated content masquerading as the work it takes to tell an effective narrative. It was the combination of generated responses in the comments alongside what I thought was a generated image that set me off, but I was clearly being far too militant.