On March 17, 2019, Raymond Hou (Raymond) was affected by a neighbor’s fire at his rental home on Kaixuan Road in Tainan. He was still a student and shared the rental with a roommate. The home itself did not burn directly, but thick black smoke from the neighboring unit entered and contaminated the entire living space. The accident happened during a period when Raymond was traveling intensively between northern and southern Taiwan for lectures and workshops. Coming after a string of hassles including losing his phone, it prompted him to joke that “disasters follow me everywhere.”
The Situation After the Fire
The real problem caused by the fire was not the flames but the smoke. Afterward, Raymond consulted information and his teachers’ advice and learned that black smoke is a product of chemical combustion, contains large amounts of volatile organic compounds and acidic substances, and poses cancer and health risks after long exposure. Simply repainting the walls could not isolate it; harmful molecules would continue to be released for months. Based on this assessment, Raymond decided not to repair the home and to move away from Tainan.
The amount of work required to clean the contaminated home far exceeded expectations. Each item had to be wiped individually, first with cleaner and then with water; cotton swabs were needed to clean narrow gaps. Cleaning a single desk and bookshelf took several hours, yet accounted for only a tiny fraction of the whole room. Raymond described it as “a hundred times” more troublesome than an ordinary move: for a move, one only needs to pack belongings, but after a fire every item has to be treated again. He barely rested on the first day afterward. Having slept only briefly at a convenience store the previous night, he spent the entire day finding a new place and cleaning the home. His time standing that day totaled twenty-two hours, a personal record. In terms of material loss, some clothes and furniture had to be discarded, and the secondhand belongings he had planned to sell when leaving Tainan were destroyed.
Why It Matters
This fire was one of the few events during Raymond’s student years that forcibly disrupted his daily rhythm. It was also the first time he had to deal simultaneously and quickly with a health-risk assessment, financial loss, and a change of residence. It turned “rational optimism” from a belief into a real test. Faced with a sudden disaster, Raymond chose not to dwell on complaints and resentment, but to treat the situation as an experience to break down, handle the controllable parts one by one (researching, finding a place, and evaluating whether to stay), and accept the uncontrollable losses. When he documented the experience that day, he wrote: “Diving into complaints and rage only makes you more exhausted. Better to be a rational optimist in the middle of tragedy.”1 This way of breaking a difficult situation into actionable items and regaining a sense of control through them runs through the problem-solving habits he later displayed in From Ordinary Person to Life Hacker to Super Individual and the Super Individual path.
How He Recovered
Two forms of support helped him recover from this low point. First was immediate help from people: teachers, a school instructor, and his roommate helped Raymond find a new place that day so he would not be left without shelter. Second was his existing way of restoring his emotions. Looking back on his life in Tainan, Raymond said that since 2016, whenever he faced setbacks, disasters, or major changes (the fire being one), he would visit a custom ramen shop with fewer than ten seats where customers had to queue. Watching the owner and his wife focus on making noodles and eating the ramen one bite at a time helped him calm down and feel again that “I am still fortunate.”2 The fire became one concrete event that activated this personal ritual and also pushed him to leave Tainan and enter the next stage of life. Later that year, Raymond married Yuzu, then took a job at Keep in Beijing and returned to Taiwan as a digital-transformation consultant. His student years in Tainan came to an end.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “A Firsthand Account of the Kaixuan Road Fire in Tainan—Are You Conan? Why Do Disasters Follow Me Everywhere?” public Facebook post, 2019-03-17. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “The Bustle of Taipei and the Character of Tainan: A Beauty Revolution Brought by Urbanization?” WordPress article, 2020-04-03. View original ↩