SI creation: Chengdu · City Boat
cityboat is the online name I have used for many years.
It was not something I deliberately designed. It was more a name that stayed with me from a particular scene.
In my first year of work, my boss began trusting me with business trips on my own. My first visit to Chengdu was probably around 2000. Back then, Chengdu was still a city I knew largely through imagination: the 'Land of Abundance', with a rhythm different from Shanghai and that mixture of freshness and uncertainty you feel when travelling somewhere unfamiliar for work.
I no longer quite remember whether it was dusk at Tianfu Square that day. In my memory, I am pulling a rolling suitcase and standing beside a vast city square, watching the crowds, the traffic and the streets slipping into evening. I was not yet the seasoned traveller I later became. Being sent out alone for the first time as a young person brought nerves alongside the excitement.
At that moment, a coach passed in front of me. Four Chinese characters were written on its side:
A boat in the city.
The coach was full of passengers. It was not a real boat, yet it was carrying a whole load of people forward along the city's roads. An ordinary scene, but one that stayed with me.
My surname is Zhou, which sounds the same in Chinese as the word for boat. Later I wrote it as cityboat, and it gradually became the name I used online over the years.
Looking back now, the name fits better than I realised at the time.
A working life begins with travelling while young, entering different cities, companies and projects, moving between customers, teams, institutions and real-world constraints. Much of the work is not dramatic. It is more often about moving things forward a little at a time: communicating, judging, taking responsibility, delivering, and then continuing to the next stop.
For me, 'a boat in the city' is not a romantic symbol but a simple image of working life: keeping direction while moving, maintaining order amid the crowds, and staying afloat in uncertainty.
Vigorapid Notes uses my present platform and public identity; cityboat preserves an earlier, more personal layer. It reminds me that many enduring things do not begin with a grand plan, but with an image glimpsed by chance and never quite forgotten.