[Life] Solitary Shadow in Battle

Author: Jeffi Chao Hui Wu

Article Date: Sunday, June 22, 2025, 7:05 PM

That year, I was 20 years old, alone, carrying a suitcase and my beloved guitar, boarding a flight to the Southern Hemisphere. It was a completely unfamiliar country, my English was just enough for daily survival, and I had no relatives or acquaintances. My parents had exhausted all their resources, raising money from everywhere, just to cover my tuition and living expenses for half a year, with no further support. At the moment I boarded the plane, my mother had deep worries in her eyes but said nothing; she just gently waved as I got on, as if handing all her hopes to me.

When I arrived in Australia, I had to do everything by myself. While studying, I worked various jobs—cleaning, moving goods, washing dishes, delivering newspapers... I took on any job that could earn me money. If my tuition fees were insufficient, I would pause my studies, work during the day, and attend night school in the evening. To save money, I ate the cheapest food and lived in the most basic accommodations, all to save up more money to pay off debts and support my education. During those years, I had almost no friends and no one to rely on. While others were partying, traveling, and enjoying their youth, I could only sit alone in my quiet rental room at night, holding my guitar and practicing silently, using music to suppress the loneliness deep within.

It was a battle of complete solitude. But there was always a light in my heart. I knew I could not fall, nor could I retreat. I told myself that even if the whole world could not see my efforts, I had to persevere. It was under such high pressure that, relying solely on hard work and willpower, I successfully obtained permanent residency in Australia in 1992 in less than three years. With no connections, no background, and no resources, I carved out my own place with just my two hands.

After gaining my identity, I did not choose a comfortable life, but immediately immersed myself in entrepreneurship. Starting in 1992, I founded an advertising company, and subsequently opened Chinese magazines and a printing factory, relying on every penny saved from my early jobs. Without a team, I wrote proposals, negotiated with clients, ran business, designed layouts, operated machines, and even delivered flyers door to door by myself. Every step felt like swimming upstream—lonely, exhausting, yet exceptionally clear-headed.

In 2005, I saw the opportunity in cross-border e-commerce and began building the early overseas warehouses. Without any external assistance, I designed and constructed the first generation of e-commerce infrastructure on my own. By 2013, leveraging years of experience, I independently developed an intelligent logistics system that accomplished complex scheduling and automation structures that were unimaginable in the industry at the time, using only the simplest Excel and logical formulas. While others needed a team of programmers and financial support to achieve such functionalities, I completed it with an old laptop and countless nights of work. This system is still in operation today, supporting the processing and flow of countless orders.

Along the way, I have traversed multiple industries, from publishing, advertising, and printing to warehousing, e-commerce, finance, and logistics systems, even expanding into qigong, martial arts, philosophy, music, photography, and writing, constructing a complete and independent multi-domain system. Someone once asked me why I don't seek collaboration, bring in investments, or build a team. I smiled and replied that there is only one reason—perhaps it is precisely because no one understands my forward-thinking ideas that there is no capital support and no one is willing to walk alongside me, leaving me to continue on my own. But it is also because of this solitude that I have made no compromises, allowing me to maintain pure independent thinking, spanning dozens of fields, and ultimately building a complete system. This is not luck, but rather decades of unwavering persistence and the courage to rise from countless failures.

This is not an inspirational story, but a reflection of reality. Battling alone, there has never been applause. Many late nights, I walk alone on the streets of a foreign country, the cold wind piercing through my bones, my fingers numb with cold, yet I still think about how to solve the problems of the next day. Failure is the norm, but I never allow myself to stop. Because I know that only by continuing to move forward can there be a way out.

Today, looking back on the journey of more than thirty years, I truly understand the meaning of that loneliness. No one walked alongside me, no one understood, but step by step, I turned my ideas into reality, building a complete system that spans dozens of fields and connects them with each other—from information platforms to logistics systems, from forum operations to original publishing, from music creation to qigong practice. Over the years, I did not rely on any shortcuts, nor on capital or teams; I relied solely on a heart full of courage and extreme execution to reach where I am today.

Lonely shadows in battle are not just past experiences, but the underlying color of my life. They make me clearly understand that true independence is not a slogan, but a silent perseverance; true strength is not applause and spotlight, but the ability to walk in the direction you believe in when no one else supports you, even when there is no one ahead, even when there is only the sound of the wind beneath your feet.