Vol de Nuit

December 1st, Shanghai Jing’an Sports Center.

As the spotlight turned to the top of the stage, Wya quietly waved to the crowd before heading down to join his team at the main stage, seeming at ease about his debut. Like many of his experiences in the past, Wya’s debut didn’t go as planned — it ended in a haste as Wya was subbed out after the re-shuffled Guangzhou Charge lost 0–2 to Chengdu Hunters on Nepal. He didn’t bring the defeat to the post-match meet-and-greet, and politely responded to fans’ requests for photos and autographs.

Wya entered the competitive Overwatch scene in August 2017. Since then, two years and three months had gone by before he made his way to Guangzhou Charge, one of the twenty teams in the prestigious Overwatch League. Wya spent two years playing for the Chinese Contenders team The One Winner, and its predecessor, MT1. And he is not unfamiliar with victories and defeats.

Already a strong team back in its MT1 days, T1W gained a ton of attention since its founding in 2018. In September of the same year, T1W won their first ever championship, the LanStory Cup. Nonetheless, the upcoming NeXT series was a lot more important to them, as they would be playing against Korean teams.

“Our coach, Jumpcat, cares a lot about cross-nation matches, and so do we,” said Wya. For two seasons in a row, T1W played Lucky Future Zenith, an all-Korean team, in the semi-finals of Contenders China 2018. Twice they pushed their opponent to the limit, and twice they failed to finish the job. To them, every match against LFZ was a cross-nation match. And only a cross-nation win can make up for a cross-nation loss.

The NeXT Summer series gave Wya and his teammates a chance to revenge, when T1W was at the peak of its popularity. But they failed once again in the grand-final, where they played RunAway, the Korean Contenders Season 2 Champion.

That game became the biggest regret for Wya. “KK (Krystal) was still with us at that time, but I played poorly and we got 0–4’d. After the game, KK left the team. I wanted to win so badly but I wasn’t good enough. I was willing but incapable.” Wya reflected on some of his losses in the past, “All Chinese teams have pretty much the same playstyle, so when we run into something unfamiliar, we panic and underperform.”

“It’s true that we don’t perform well against foreign teams.” He said bitterly.

Nonetheless, T1W continued their dominant performance as they stomped Contenders China Season 3, dropping only one map over the entire season, after the original members of LFZ had gone off to the Overwatch League. However, nobody was satisfied with a Contenders championship and another LanStory Cup championship. Their stellar records in domestic tournaments pale in comparison to the string of defeats against foreign teams, and the community mockingly called them “gods of domestic battles”. For a while, their social media coordinator even put this nickname into the team’s official weibo bio.

“We didn’t really celebrate.” Even though the Contenders Championship was T1W’s biggest achievement to date, Wya’s memory of it had already faded. “The upcoming NeXT series was much more important.”

But they didn’t get to face off Korean teams in the Winter series of NeXT 2018. To T1W, this only meant another missed opportunity for atonement. In 2019, T1W slipped into a series of ups and downs, and Wya never got to touch another championship trophy.

Wya was born in Hegang, a city in China’s northernmost Heilongjiang Province. During school holidays, he would get up at 3am every day, climb up some hills, and practice martial arts with a group of people who were old enough to be his grandparents. “When I was little, my health wasn’t good, so my family sent me to practice martial arts. Looking back, it felt kind of strange.”

Wya could not recall how he managed to survive. It probably had something to do with his stubbornness, as his grandfather would say. Wya was raised by his grandfather, a college philosophy professor, who set high standards for his grandson and exerted a strong influence on the young boy’s character.

Wya’s fine looks drew the attention of many fans, but he did not think much of it. “I think I look much better in photos than in real life, and I think for professional players, looks are a bonus rather than a must.” And so are many other things in life — Wya does not have a fan group on QQ (the largest Chinese messaging platform), does not stream, hardly posts anything on social media, and seldom ever shows up in online communities where fans and gamers congregate. “There would be moments when I felt I wanted to share something nice that I saw with other people. And then I pause for a bit, and those moments would go away.”

He spends his leisure time in a different way. “A book that I read recently was ‘Meditations’,” Wya said shyly, “not a book many would read. I don’t find it particularly interesting, but I think I can learn something from it.”

Note: “Meditations” is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy (Wikipedia 2019).

Wya was not an early comer in Overwatch. Unlike many pros who started playing Overwatch during the alpha or the open beta, he made his start in Competitive Season 2. “I was pretty addicted,” Wya paused for a little, “But I was addicted to grinding.” After a while, he became friends with a group of high-ranked gamers, and like many who chose to go pro, he, too, had similar opportunities.

But for Wya, Overwatch was not the reason he quit school. “Grandpa passed away, and I didn’t want to go to school anymore.” His voice trembled imperceptibly. Grandfather was his anchor. And as the anchor broke off, he was set loose, and slowly drifted away.

“Grandpa provided a stable environment for me, but after he was gone, the peace was also gone with him.” As the concept of family became increasingly blurred, Wya first sought solace in reading after he left school. Philosophy and history books became his best friends. And then, it was Overwatch.

There was no drama in Wya’s negotiation with his parents. Silence was his way of showing unwavering determination. His parents gave in eventually, even though they did not want their sixteen-year-old son to leave for Shanghai. “I don’t think they can stop me,” Wya said calmly, in the same manner as the sixteen-year-old Wya announced to his parents the decision that would change his life.

On November 14, 2019, Guangzhou Charge officially announced the newest addition to their roster — “welcome to the GZ family, Haomiao ‘Wya’ Qi.” Not only does it mean that Wya has finally made his entrance into the highest level of competition in Overwatch, it is also proof of an exceptional career accomplishment for a professional gamer.

At about the same time that Wya was announced by the Charge, Illusion, his former teammate at T1W, announced his plan to retire and return to school. At an interview in early 2019, Wya had said, very assuredly, that Illusion was the best main support in Contenders China.

He looked particularly serious as he spoke about Illusion’s decision to return to school: “I thought about going back, too. But then my situation is different, because I chose to quit. In some sense, going back would mean that I made a wrong decision.” He didn’t think attending school was the only way to learn and grow, even though he had good grades in school. “My experiences at school taught me how to focus on one thing or another.”

“It’s such a pity for Illusion,” Wya said with regret. “But he made this decision after some serious self-reflection, so I shouldn’t really interfere.”

“I still think he is the best main support in Contenders China.”

In that same interview, Wya also revealed that he didn’t think there was a giant gap between him and other OWL support players. Presumably, he was working diligently towards entering OWL back then, or perhaps even long before.

“He slept every single nano-blade in the tryouts.” This was a comment from Tutu, the Special Correspondent of Guangzhou Charge, on Wya’s performance in the tryouts. Wya, on the other hand, was not as excited: “we had very few scrim blocks or matches during the OWL tryout phase. I was quite relaxed, and knew I had nothing to lose even if I don’t do well in the tryouts.” He jokingly recalled: “now that I come to think of it, the first few tryouts that I did when I first arrived in Shanghai went really bad. I’m somewhat lucky to have come this far.”

In early 2019, Wya believed he would place in the bottom half of the distribution of all OWL support players. He has now updated that assessment. “I think I’m in the middle of the pack. I did grind for a year. All this time would have been wasted if I made no improvement.” Wya’s persistent pursuit for excellence is fueled by a discontent with failure and unrelenting motivation: “Sometimes I feel like a taotie.” (Taotie 饕餮 is one of the “four evil creatures of the world” in ancient Chinese mythology. It is mostly used to imply a “glutton” (Wikipedia 2019).)

Move forward, and there will be bigger stages, tougher opponents, and stronger teammates. When asked which part of Guangzhou Charge attracted him the most, Wya answered without hesitation, “Shu.”

Shu was an absolute top player for Guangzhou Charge in the 2019 season. He was a solid pillar of the team and one of the strongest flex support players in the league, and was nominated for the OWL Role Stars for flex support. And Wya essentially plays the same role as Shu.

“I do think he will give me a lot of pressure,” Wya was not shy of talking about upcoming competition. “I think he is one of the best flex supports in OWL.”

“I have never encountered this level of pressure before. I can learn a lot of things from him, and this will push me to go forward.” Wya was genuinely excited about this competitive friendship. As he spoke, the humble teenager in him went away, replaced by the young boy who practiced martial arts everyday at the crack of dawn, and who was never willing to acknowledge defeat. “I think I have something different from Shu. I grinded Zenyatta for a long time, and he is my best hero.”

Wya’s explanation for his unrelenting motivation sounded somewhat philosophical: “it’s not about being better than other people, it’s about being better than yourself.”

This is like solo climbing. You know no fatigue, and you care little about other climbers. The higher you reach, the harder it gets. You are the only living being between earth and sky. The wind blows hard. You can fly in it, or get swept off the rocks.

“Of course I feel scared,” Wya said unhesitantly, “but it is this fear that propels me to keep climbing up.”

“Whiplash” is one of the very few movies that Wya felt he could relate to. Andrew Neiman, an ambitious young jazz drummer, consistently suffered the cruel, inhuman treatment of his ruthless jazz instructor, Terence Fletcher. Towards the end of the movie, Neiman asked Fletcher: “you know, maybe you go too far, and you discourage the next Charlie Parker from ever becoming Charlie Parker?’ To which Fletcher answered:

“No, man, no. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.”

Note: Charlie Parker, nicknamed Bird, performed alongside the well-known drummer Jo Jones when he was sixteen. Parker’s attempt to improvise failed when he lost track of the chord changes. This prompted Jo ones to contemptuously throw a cymbal at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. However, rather than discouraging Parker, the incident caused him to vow to practice harder, and turned out to be a seminal moment in the young musician’s career. He became one of the most important pioneers of modern jazz and the one of the greatest Alto saxophone players (Wikipedia, 2019).

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