About 4 or 5 years ago, I formed a habit of searching myself on the Internet periodically. Normally I type in my full Chinese name or its English spellings in one word in Google or Baidu, then I go “search” to see what’s come up.

4 or 5 years ago, when I did that, I have only one page of search result about myself on Google, but now I have about 3 pages. Most of them are the articles or translation work that I have done over the past 6 years and published in different sorts of Chinese magazines. Lucky that there seems no second person who’s got exactly the same Chinese name as mine, so all these 3 pages are all really about me.

By googling yourself, you are kind of being open to expect something unexpected. For example, yesterday I happened to notice that Haidian District HR (Personnel) Centre, where my personal file is being kept since I came to Australia, just announced a new list, which released a number of persons’ names who hasn’t contacted the centre for a long time or paid the money up to date for keeping their files. They said after 30 days of this announcement, our files would be ceased being kept in place. (Well, I think I have to let them do so as I don’t see any point to pay for it any more). I actually found another name in the same list that I felt it could be one of my mother’s acquaintances.

You know what else I have been noticing in the past 5 years? I have so many articles that had been re-published in other medium sources, such as other newspapers, online magazines, websites, forums…… but I have never been contacted by any of them for my permission to use them. Getting paid for that? don’t even think about it! Those websites don’t even have courtesy to mention the magazines that initially had published my articles and paid my work That’s where they got them at the first place.

So this is something I found about myself, from Googling myself You might think I am being a total narcissist, but it’s not all about it. There will be a lot of interesting things you would find about yourself if you do it. It’s more like a way to find out what’s happening in this world about the part of yourself that you don’t know

By the way, you can also google other persons’ names to find out where they are up to. Maybe you can find some old Friends from your primary schools. Who knows?