The Boy Arrived at the Seaside
By: Cry Last
Tags: League of Legends, Esports, Lpl

Snow

After arriving at Suning, as the topic of going home during vacation first appeared, Huan-Feng told his Vietnamese teammate SofM, “There’s only a small river separating my home and Vietnam.” SofM even said he didn’t dare to believe it.

That river is called the Beilun River. With a distance of 60 kilometer in the lower reaches, it forms the boundary line between China and Vietnam, and then flows into the Gulf of Tonkin. At 107° east longitude, the Beilun River encompasses a very small city. On the other side of the river, there is the city Móng Cái of Vietnam, and on this side of the river, there is the Sino-Vietnam Friendship Park (中越人民友谊公园).

That county-level city is called Dongxing; it’s where Tang Huan-feng grew up. During high school, as soon as you leave the gates, you can see Vietnamese people in their stalls selling all kinds of odds and ends. There’s even more Vietnamese people when you go south of the Dongxing port. Huan-Feng’s school even offered Vietnamese language courses back then.

“It felt like you took one step, and you were in Vietnam.”

But on the map, if you move the meridian slightly to the west by 1° and then move 1900 kilometers upwards, you’ll reach the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Yinchuan.

In 2016, Tang Huan-Feng climbed from top to bottom alongside the 106° east longitude, and started the first stage of his esports journey.

As soon as he left school, Huan-Feng sent out his resume to every esports organization he knew of. This included his age, his server, his rank, as well as his reason for going pro. Some of those messages were gone with the wind. Some others replied back with, your rank is too low, it’s not that good, try your best again.

Anxiety spread within. “Stressed, I was too stressed back then.”

But after a period of fruitless searching, someone found him. It was an organization located in Yinchuan, Ningxia. The owner ran his own Internet café and wanted to form an esports team — the salary was 3000 yuan (~$432) a month. Huan-Feng didn’t think much; he immediately made a decision.

Before he left, his father told him: If you’re going to go, then do this properly. If it doesn’t work out, come back and join the military.

Upon his arrival at Yinchuan, Tang Huan-Feng lived in a house even worse than his home in Dongxing.

“The rent was 1000 yuan (~$145), but the shower head was broken, and there was no place to wash our clothes. We had to take our own clothes and wash them at the owner’s house.”

In that organization, Tang Huan-Feng entered a cycle of “wake up from the couch every day at 10 o’clock in the morning, play games all night until 5 or 6 o’clock, go to bed.”

His teammates had to activate bank cards at the Internet café to practice. If they got hungry, they’d order takeout. But sometimes, the owner felt kind enough to take them to his house for dinner — his parents would cook.

Tang Huan-Feng stayed in this organization for more than a year. “I only got the experience. I didn’t improve whatsoever.” He felt like he’d wasted a year.

“Living there for a whole year, it made me aware of how tiring it is to play professionally. How painful would it be if you didn’t play well? That’s all.”

One year later, Huan-Feng saved up 10,000 yuan (~$1440). He left Yinchuan and that organization. But on his way home, he’d already spent about 2000 yuan (~$289).

“Tell me, how painful isn’t that?”

His first esports journey ended in a hurry, but Tang Huan-Feng didn’t join the military. After he had stayed at home for a period of time, he decided to head out once more. But this time he went to WuDu (sister team of Snake Esports), in the municipality of Chongqing.

“It was really hot back then.”

As he recalled his past as a proplayer, Huan-Feng couldn’t quite remember the specific month. What he could remember was the temperature and the more, or less, clothes that he wore every time he left home on his path to pro, or came back again.

2018 was the first year of the secondary league, LDL. The whole nation was divided into four regions, namely Nanjing, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Beijing. There were qualification matches before the spring- and summer split in which teams competed for spots.

In May, together with his WuDu teammates, Tang Huan-Feng won a spot in the LDL Summer Split. During this split, they placed third in their group in the Chongqing region. However, since they didn’t have any wins from the spring split, they weren’t qualified for the finals.

Not too long after the regular season had finished, WuDu’s team captain called for Tang Huan-Feng, and said that he and the support were off the team. Just a few days ago, Huan-Feng felt like his rank wasn’t good enough and wanted to work harder climbing the ladder.

On the day he was dismissed, he’d just reached Challenger on the Korean server.

When he heard the news of his dismissal, Huan-Feng’s heart beat very fast. Complicated feelings surged through him. He asked the management why. They told him they wanted him to find a better platform and a better team. They didn’t say much else, and Huan-Feng didn’t have the nerve to ask for more. But he didn’t want his teammates to know that he’d left, so him and the support snuck home quietly.

It was only a few days after, as the rest of the team came back to base after vacation, they realized that two people were missing.

Huan-Feng had said some very embarrassing, very “Eighth-Grader Syndrome-esque” words to himself when he left, like, “in the future, don’t make me face you guys in the LPL.”

From 2016 to 2018, from Dongxing to Yinchuan and then to Chongqing, Tang Huan-Feng wasted two years on a meridian line only 1° away from his hometown, Dongxing.

From an “Internet café team” to the LDL, Tang Huan-Feng didn’t feel that much of a sense of achievement. He could only feel if he, himself, “did well or not.”

In the summer of 2018, in the LDL Chongqing region, there were many players of different origins. Players who had been to the LPL, even the World Championship, and new stars soon to shine brilliantly on the LPL stage a year later. But Huan-Feng hadn’t ever paid much attention to those famous or powerful opponents.

Later on, when he joined IGY, someone told him straight to his face: How do you not know anything? Are you that arrogant?

He replied: “No, I just focus on myself, that’s all.”

Now, turn back time to August, 2017. Huan-Feng — who was still in the Yinchuan Internet café team — passed through several cities with his teammates until they finally won a spot in the 2018 LDL Spring Split.

After they got a spot, the owner moved the team to a villa. They moved out of that house with the “1000 yuan (~$145) rent”. Huan-Feng had no idea what a spot in the LDL meant back then. He just thought “it’s fine as long as you can compete.”

A former LPL player joined their team later on. He shared his own version of the LDL and the LPL — the significance between the two — with Huan-Feng. He even said to him:

“You can’t make it to the LPL. Only a dozen or so people in this world can make it there, so just why would it be you?”

But the comfortable and joyous lifestyle in the villa didn’t last long. The team’s support told them the truth later — the owner chose to exchange their LDL spot for a place with a better training environment. Hearing the news, Huan-Feng felt like he couldn’t stay there any longer. He had his father help him make up an excuse, that there was something wrong at home and that his child had to return at once.

Huan-Feng left Yinchuan soon after, before the year 2018. But before his departure, the owner took him to the train station, and while they were there, withdrew around 2000 yuan in cash. He told him that it was for him to use during the New Year’s celebration.

“If that thing with the LDL spot hadn’t happened, if he’d just told us everything, then he really was a good boss.”

The difference between dreams and reality is something every proplayer has to face. But, in the process of wandering between the two, Huan-Feng still wanted to aim for even higher places.

Yinchuan is a city where it snows in October.

In the first ten days of October 2017, the region had its earliest snowfall since 1961. But it wasn’t until December when the heavy snow truly fell.

One day near noon, Huan-Feng had just woken up, and suddenly, someone told him, come quickly, it’s snowing outside. That was not long before they moved to their villa. Huan-Feng gazed down from the sixth floor where, below, the whole park had become a white sheet of paper.

Even as the whole team moved into another villa, that snow cover still hadn’t melted.

On that day, Tang Huan-Feng and his teammates ran downstairs. They played in the snow, they took a lot of pictures, and afterwards, they went for lunch together.

Snow was a novelty for Tang Huan-Feng back then. As he looked with curious eyes at the snow-covered world, he felt the intense coldness of the snow itself. He thought: Turns out snow in real life was just like the one in movies.

Nearly 1900 kilometers away from the hometown where he grew up, where snow didn’t fall, Tang Huan-Feng saw snow for the first time in his life.