Soundtrack: Cheng Lei | After Freedom — From CCTV Anchor to Prisoner "03"

This episode features an interview with Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei. Cheng Lei reflects on her journey from immigrating to Australia with her parents as a child, to her decision as an adult to return to China and work as an English news anchor for CCTV, and her experience of being secretly detained in 2020 for sharing key information from the government work report during the Two Sessions, followed by over three years of residential surveillance and imprisonment. She also shares her life and reflections since gaining freedom in Melbourne.

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Full transcript:

Back then you even said you knew where the red line was? That's hilarious. You might as well write it on my tombstone; he doesn't know shit. Welcome to "Life Generations," I am Xiao Yu. In August 2026, I knocked on the door of Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei's home in Melbourne. At the age of 10, she immigrated to Australia with her family. At 14, she stood on the streets of Melbourne, joining many others in supporting the democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. However, as an adult, having received a Western education and holding Australian citizenship, she voluntarily returned to China, joined the country's most important propaganda machine, and became a news anchor for CCTV. Until one day, that machine swallowed her up too. In 2020, Cheng Lei was secretly taken away, accused of illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities. Having lost her freedom for over three years, during those days she was no longer Cheng Lei, but just a prisoner with the number 03. I asked Cheng Lei, if you could go back in time, would you still board that plane to China?

Cheng Lei, thank you so much. We are now here in your Melbourne home, and it is such a rare opportunity to do a face-to-face interview like this with you. It is truly meant to be. Coming back to this home, it has been almost three years now, hasn't it? Yes, and to this day, are there still some small details in daily life that make you feel moved and say, "It's so good to be free"? There are probably some every single minute. I have a quirk: I love drying clothes. Every time the sun is bright and there is a gentle breeze... because in the detention center, clothes had to be either laid out on the floor or dried on the bed board, so they never got the kiss of the sunlight. And there was a discipline in the morning that we had to pack all the clothes away, even if they were still damp. So we would put our socks and underwear on our hands and walk around waving them like they were drying. Compared to that, being able to dry clothes under the Australian sun feels—and I feel like washing, drying, folding, and putting away clothes gives a person—it's like a metaphor for life, that I can get things clean and in order. Although life is always a mess of trivialities, especially for me right now with elderly parents above and young children below, my son is so picky. He doesn't eat eggs, doesn't drink milk, and as for meat, if it's too tender it won't do, if it's too tough it won't do, if it's too fatty it won't do, and anyway he is picky about everything. But I am also quite simple, very willing to satisfy him—your lion's head meatballs are very good. No, no, these lion's head meatballs were bought, that's why—so I said I am so ashamed, usually whatever I make is... and I cook things that definitely taste better than this, his didn't even have water chestnuts in them, and besides, I have to serve it to his lordship in his room. And my son also eats fruit, it has to be the high-end fruit he likes like longans and lychees; ordinary apples and bananas, Cheng Lei, he won't eat them at all. Come here, let's see where your son is. Grandpa Wang, your bananas are here. It's not that your legs hurt, right? This is Aunt Xiayu, hello. You've eaten, right? School is out, eat one meal first, and then eat another meal before going to sleep at night. You're going to sleep again? What's wrong? Eat something, right? Hurry up and eat, drink water, oh drink water, you won't eat either.

It came from so far away. When you were 10 years old, your mom and dad brought you from Hunan, China to Australia. Why did they want to come to Australia back then? At that time, very few people across all of China were able to go abroad. My father was a visiting scholar, and belonged to a family with a very, very bad background. If you were talking about family backgrounds at that time, both my father and mother came from bad family backgrounds. Therefore, whether it was the Land Reform, the natural disasters, or the Cultural Revolution, they suffered a lot, a lot of bitterness. So the desire to come out or to gain freedom is not hard to understand. You said their backgrounds were bad, what kind of background did they have at the time? My grandfather once held a position in the Kuomintang government, and my grandmother also spent time in prison, was locked up, and severely beaten—tortured in a very inhumane way. Your mom and dad were both intellectuals, right? Yes, my mother was a physics teacher, and my father was a scientist. So what were your mom and dad's political stances like at that time? I should say my father has always been very, how should I put it, very disgusted by many things the Chinese Communist Party has done. I saw an interview where you said your dad was an old-style disgruntled intellectual, and as he got older, he became an old rebel. A rebel, rebel is a new word. Yes, yes, since I was little my father also loved talking about current affairs, so after coming to Australia, whether it was friends coming from the mainland, newly acquainted friends from Southeast Asia, or Taiwan, they all loved getting together to talk about current affairs. In 1989, you even went to the streets of Melbourne to join everyone in supporting the student movement in Beijing, right? I even drew posters at school and hoped everyone would go participate, yes. And after the June Fourth massacre, you took to the streets again, meaning there were new gatherings—we went to commemorate. At the time, it seemed there were a lot of people, and many people were crying, right? Yes, yes, what moved me tremendously at the time was that whether they were white, black, or Asian, everyone felt these events were extremely tragic. Did you shed tears at the time? Definitely, I am also someone with a low threshold for tears. It wasn't just because of that point, it was truly feeling extremely grief-stricken, as well as furious and helpless. Previously, every day when we got home, we rushed in front of the television to watch the news, also hoping that China could have more freedom and more fairness.

Then why, after graduating from university, did you choose to go back to that country—back to where your parents had taken you out of, and knowing yourself perhaps that the government was of that sort? I don't know why, as an adult, you made the choice to go back like that, voluntarily. I feel that from 1989 to the end of 2000 when I returned to China, quite a lot of changes had actually taken place in China. And for me personally, in 1992, during my freshman year of college, I met my first boyfriend, who later became my first husband. He was from Beijing, and his family belonged to—I wouldn't say they were vested beneficiaries, nor were they inside the system, but at least he was rather pragmatic. At the end of 1992, I went back to China for the first time, going with him to see it. I had never been to Beijing, and I remember taking a tourist photo at Tiananmen Square there, with Mao Zedong's portrait in the background. When I got home, my dad was furious and wanted to sever the father-daughter relationship with me. Then I felt very confused myself, wondering why I hadn't thought of that at the time, why I hadn't thought that this was a place where shots were fired, and how I could have been skipping around joyfully right there. Back then, going to Tiananmen Square was quite easy; you didn't have to check any IDs, and it felt like there were no security police around. We were just like those tourists today going to China and maxing out, 'Wow, so much fun! So many people! Such a huge square!' After graduation, you chose to go back to China again. You worked here as an accountant first, for five years, and then because of a position at a logistics company—a Sino-Australian joint venture, yes—you went back to China to work and live. You went back in 1996 too, right? And in 1998. You got married in Beijing in 1998. Everyone felt they saw a changing China, and with more and more foreigners going there, and more and more foreign companies in China, you were quite inspired by this environment, or this positive energy, weren't you? What kind of China did you see when you went back to China at that time? What I saw was construction everywhere, because commercial housing and residential property sales were starting, and everyone probably had RMB flashing in their eyes, thinking about how to make money, yes, and how to buy a house. Moreover, back then, people talked every day about aligning with international standards, talked every day about WTO entry, and even back then, returnees were still quite popular.

What was your understanding of CCTV back then? Did you consider it a news media outlet, or what kind of institution did you think it was? I always knew it was the propaganda mouthpiece of the Party, but I perhaps mistakenly believed that the English channel was less strictly controlled and that the people there had a more international perspective. I felt that working there was not only less restrictive but also a place where I could utilize my abilities. Perhaps your presence was exactly what they needed—part of 'telling China's story well'—which is what they required. But it wasn't like that from the beginning. I think China's external propaganda also had periods where it wanted to be more open, more... because if you want to integrate with the international community, you have to follow their rules, right? If you just keep saying 'socialism is good' and 'China is good' all day, no one will believe you. So you have to be objective. There were some signs of that, some periods like that. But later, it increasingly became a media outlet that just sang the praises of China. Have you ever said things you didn't believe in front of the camera? I don't think so, because I was a foreign expert there, so I had the responsibility of editing scripts, and I would remove Xi Jinping's name from parts that involved personality cults. Looking back, do you feel that you were, to a certain extent, an accomplice in this state machine? Yes, I have had that thought, but I also think that I produced a lot of objective reports that were not what they wanted to see. I once believed that by being inside the system, I could actually help it progress, or at least prevent it from getting worse, whether by interviewing a wider range of guests or by asking more challenging questions. Looking back now, do you think that idea was a bit naive? Yes, that's true. When you thought about the state security detention center, or residential surveillance at a designated location, you must have hated yourself, hated everything, and hated the journalism industry. I remember my father entrusted someone to buy me a book by Yang Lan about her interviewing people. I later told my father, 'Don't buy me anything related to journalism.' Your father hated the CCP so much, yet he still wanted to help you become a good host and bought you books to study—is that how it was? My father liked Yang Lan very much, but I really disliked her; I thought she was very fake. Then how did your father view your job at CCTV? I think he never looked favorably upon me. I don't know, and even until the end, I felt he had very complex feelings. This included the last WeChat message he sent me, which said, 'The CCP is a cult. Leave quickly and come back to Australia.' And I said, 'I will, Dad. Once my daughter graduates from elementary school, I'll go.' When was that? That was in 2020. You were arrested in August, right? Yes. Do you remember what month your father sent you that WeChat message? I'm not entirely sure, because all my WeChat messages are gone, but it was right before that, right? He was still telling you that. But at that time, did you have any premonition that you might be in a dangerous environment? Did you have that feeling? No, not at all. I think I gave a speech recently, and someone asked me what my state of mind was back then. I said I thought I was really fucking awesome at the time, feeling like I could handle anything, that I understood the whole situation in Beijing very well, knew many people, frequently attended various embassy events, and I was quite pleased with myself, feeling quite safe.

As you just said, you initially felt that the field of finance had relatively little official interference and seemed to be non-political. Looking back now, do you think there are any non-political fields in China? There are no non-political fields now. Back then, you also said you knew where the red lines were—that's hilarious. Put that on my tombstone: 'He knew jack shit.' When did you realize this? That is to say, I actually had no idea where the red lines were. It was definitely a gradual realization. Even when I was being arrested, I still thought they just wanted me to turn off my water and electricity. I said, 'It's fine, I often don't turn them off when I go on vacation for two weeks.' The officer probably thought to himself, 'What an idiot.' You really never went back? Of course not. I was actually sick that day, and while I was being tortured by the pain, I suddenly found that my leaders and various colleagues were calling me, telling me to go to the office. So I rushed over. Then they told me to go to a conference room, saying it was to discuss my ideas for a new program with our channel director. As soon as I pushed the door open, the atmosphere was wrong. Everyone was looking at me very seriously. One person stood up and said, 'I am from the Beijing State Security Bureau,' yes, the state security (MSS), and then something like, 'You are being notified that you are suspected of buying or providing illegal intelligence to foreign institutions, and you are required to cooperate with the investigation.' My leader even gave me a wink at the time, meaning 'explain it clearly,' implying it should be fine. I also felt, in my heart, 'Okay, fine.' Then they took my bag and phone, and from then on, I was never alone. There were always two female police officers following me. Then we went to the garage, got into their car, and drove to the basement of my apartment complex. The property manager came out to greet them, and I knew they had made arrangements in advance. They searched my apartment for five hours, took away many documents and all my electronic products, and then put a blindfold on me. Two officers sat in the back of the car with me, and we drove to a place while I was blindfolded. I didn't know where it was at the time, but I later found out it was 47 Dahongmen South Road, Fengtai District, Beijing—the state security (MSS) detention center. I was taken to what seemed to be South 106, a detention cell. That was the room where I lived for the next six months. It was a room about four meters by four meters, with a bathroom inside that had no door. The walls were covered in soft, artificial padding. Inside, there was nothing but a stool and a single bed. Right next door was where they interrogated me. I heard later that this is not allowed under criminal law, so this so-called 'residential surveillance at a designated location' should not be in the same place as the detention facility, but these are their rules. You said they had actually been monitoring you even before this? Yes, they started monitoring me at the end of April. Could you describe that 'residential surveillance at a designated location' a bit? You have to sit for 13 hours a day, just sitting like this. And then sometimes you have to stand up, meaning you have to report, stand up, and then report to go to the restroom. And those two officers—they were actually security guards, because security guards and police officers are completely different concepts. Police officers are inside the system, while security guards are temporary workers. I heard they were all from Henan on performance-based pay, maybe 3,000 yuan a month. They also had to wear masks, and their discipline was very strict. I couldn't use the toilet in my cell; even if I had diarrhea, I couldn't use it. Yes, you said one day someone seemed to have diarrhea and had to defecate in their pants while standing in front of me. This is extremely inhumane. I think residential surveillance itself is inhumane, and making these security guards watch these people is also inhumane. In that kind of environment, you were still able to sympathize with the people monitoring you? Do you feel they are also part of the state machine? I think journalists generally have a lot of empathy; otherwise, how could you produce an objective report? And I am also naturally soft-hearted; I cannot bear to see people suffer. And what about your own situation at that time? Extreme loneliness, and, how should I put it, I was completely dazed. I didn't know anything because there was no clock, no calendar, and no windows. The windows were basically always closed. But later, under the request of the Australian Embassy, they opened them for 15 minutes every day. But it was just that one small row of windows at the very top. And they would make a big show of it, as if it were a great act of grace, slamming the curtains open, climbing onto a stool, and opening that small window just a crack. You couldn't feel any fresh air at all.

However, I feel that everything I went through was much better compared to my roommates, the Chinese citizen roommates, but much worse compared to the privileged Chinese roommates. For instance, some of them got out or finished after three or four months because of strong connections, or some were kept in hotels, which really felt a bit like house arrest; for some, the police officer just sat on a sofa in another part of their room, instead of watching them from such close quarters. But I think they probably really thought they had caught some big fish, and felt they needed to use this method of torturing my mind to get whatever huge scoop they wanted. Whenever I think of this, I feel a strange sense of satisfaction, knowing they must have been extremely annoyed and disappointed, wondering what on earth this was. One of the hardest parts is that you don't know when all of this will end; I knew the upper limit, the upper limit of residential surveillance at a designated location is six months, but as for the prison sentence I imagined, who knew. I thought it might be life, right, or 15 or 20 years, who knows, because inside you are kept completely in the dark, and matters involving state security are judged very severely. What were you thinking about the most at that time, because there is so much time to think every day, during those 13 or 14 waking hours, plus sleep is not sound at all, with a lot of insomnia, waking up with a start, or waking up crying. So every day, at first it might be a complete mess, going from fear to extreme panic, then to incomprehension, experiencing all possible negative emotions, and then as the interrogations slowly decreased, and through consular visits I learned a tiny bit of news from the outside, I slowly began to set daily goals for myself, either I'm going to embroider flowers today, or I'm going to read this book today, but I have to ration it, I can only read 80 pages, and I have to savor the well-written sentences in my head. When there were no books left, I could only sit there and think about writing a short story in my head, typing it out mentally, and I would get inspiration from the tiniest details to sustain my soul and feed my spirit, because a person is in a state of extreme deprivation. So I remember at that time, it was usually a middle-aged male doctor, and occasionally a young doctor came by, and he would come twice a day to take my blood pressure. I enjoyed it so, so much every time my blood pressure was taken, because it was another human touching me. He had a perm, and I said his perm looked quite nice, just like how in the mornings I would say good morning to the security guards. I feel that no matter how I myself am doing, when I can still be my original self—polite, friendly, and humorous—it is still a positive form of inspiration to myself.

Have you ever thought about death while inside? Yes, around late October, which was probably the rock bottom, because it was basically pitch dark all around, and I felt so terribly sorry for my family, maybe even less than myself, so I hated myself, regretted it, and in my mind, whether I was asleep or awake, I was crying the whole time, and I just felt like I didn't want to live anymore, and then I had this fantasy of giving myself a release, just thinking about a math problem, or a physical problem, which is my head, right, the weight of my body, at what speed it needed to hit the tiles on the floor, the ceramic tiles on the bathroom floor, because that was the only hard thing; the shower was just a rubber hose, and the switch was embedded in the wall, so there was no way you could get any metal object, a spoon was very small and soft, so it wouldn't allow you to use chopsticks, it was just to prevent you from having this kind of suicide, or self-harm, including the walls being soft, yes, so I was thinking about at what speed, while these two security guards, because they both watched me use the restroom, before they could stop me, I could make the maximum impact to my head, and then thinking about being able to end it gave me a slight sense of relief. What was it that kept you alive? It was still family, I suppose, even though I didn't know when I would see them, or if I did see them, would they still recognize me as their mother, so sometimes when I received their letters, I would act inexplicably, because they still loved me.

Speaking of your case, actually, the overall trigger for your case was eight characters that you sent to a friend, yes, and there was a government report that was still in the embargo period, yes, which was the Premier's Report on the Work of the Government, the main document of the Two Sessions every year, and usually, in the past, Caijing actually got this report very late, and we would just talk about some data related to finance and so on, but that year, maybe because the leadership abandoned the fruit, they had me and an anchor from current affairs news co-host the opening of the Two Sessions that year, so to help us prepare, they gave us the report in advance. At that time, when I was in the dressing room, my colleague brought it to me, and I was doing my makeup, and I didn't look carefully at who it was, because it was just a little girl who handed it to me, and then I was reading it there, but later during the review, they said—their testimony said—that she told me this was a confidential document, which was completely untrue, she didn't say that at all, and after I read it, I also told the makeup artist at the time, and I also told the two guests waiting in the dressing room at the time about this report, and I asked the then president of the EU Chamber of Commerce, I said do you want to read it, and he said he had already read it, and then I gave it to—this should be Peking University, right—Professor Yao Yang, I said do you want to read it, and he said sure, and he read it for a while, and then I told two pieces of information from the middle of it to Fan Ruyi at Bloomberg. What were the eight characters? The eight characters in English were No growth target, and then, and then I—this—clarified that it was GDP, and then it was 9 million jobs target, and this is your entire crime, yes. And a year later, after this, after I had already been detained for a year, the prosecutor said, you guys don't have a state secrets bureau, how can you say this is declassified—when was it declassified, when was it unclassified—and then they made the state secrets bureau issue another—they sent the case back to the police officers who handled it at the time, and had the state secrets bureau issue a document saying that it was at 7:30, and the time I sent the message was 7:23, so that seven-minute gap, yes. At the time, this Government Work Report was found among a pile of documents in my apartment, and because I hadn't cleaned my desk for a long time, there were also things like old propaganda notices on my desk, and so they took some of these documents, and my mind kept going back to—if I had been more attentive to tidiness and thrown that document away, would it have been some other document, or because I imagine that anyone in China dealing with information is like a cow eating grass; previously you knew where the power grid was located, and now the power grid is hidden, it can be set up at any time, and it is also constantly expanding in such an area, so anyone dealing with information, whether you are a consulting firm, or the media, that is definitely a disaster zone, or politicians, or diplomats, civil servants, any of them could get electrocuted. So do you think that even without that incident, perhaps you couldn't have escaped it either? Absolutely, if they get you into this sort of thing, if they want you to be guilty, you will be guilty.

When we talk about the detention center, what do you think was the most unbearable part? Well, how should I put it? There is only 'more unbearable,' never 'most unbearable.' Every day was the same, and to pass those endless days, it was just extreme isolation. You knew nothing. For someone like me, who is usually addicted to news, it was very difficult. So, I used to specifically ask the consuls from the embassy if they could read me some international news, because what you saw on the CCTV News was definitely not real news. By then, you were no longer Cheng Lei; your number was 21003. Yes, so every time I heard '03,' I would jump, because 99% of the time it was nothing good: '03, why are you hugging him?' '03, don't sing.' '03, what are you so happy about?' Every move you made was monitored. Yes, there were five cameras and an intercom. So, for example, when we wanted to get up to use the toilet during a nap, we had to press the intercom and wait for the other side—which meant you had to ask them to watch the monitor—before you could go to the toilet.

In such an environment, how did you keep your mind sane? I think when you lose everything, you truly get to know yourself, or understand human nature. For example, in the past, I had makeup, hairstyles, accessories, clothing, and my job to define me. But in there, the kindness you could think of and show, and the little creative ideas you could come up with—these were the things that no one could take away. So, when I used a milk powder bag, combined with the floor heating and the paste we made from milk powder, and successfully made soft cheese, I was quite proud. I also passed this technique on to my cellmates, because as I just said, against this monotony, the only thing that can defeat it is human creativity. Although our materials were limited, human ingenuity is infinite. We also brewed apple cider. I took the hair tie I managed to buy, tied it to the lid of my lunch box, and could pluck out the melody of 'Two Tigers' or 'Jingle Bells.' I felt it was quite fun; it was like a feeling of 'I won.' I was actually able to find such joy in the midst of this suffering. Yes, later there were all sorts of things, like teaching them 60 English songs, coming up with various English dialogues every day to teach them English games, playing idiom solitaire, playing Yahtzee, and learning trivia from the dictionary—a study group, really. Yes, this was much better for your mental state than when you were in prison, right? Ten thousand times better. There was this human-to-human emotion. Yes, because the situation was completely closed. No one could attend your trial. It was nine months—I was arrested for nine months before I saw a lawyer for the first time. I had already recorded all kinds of confession videos, and my defense lawyer still had to show his documents—his opinions, his defense arguments—to the prosecutor. So, without transparent media, without a transparent judicial process, and without any oversight, how could you possibly convince anyone?

Do you feel like you were a pawn in the game between great powers? I think so, because at the time, Australia unilaterally demanded an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, which made China very angry. So, they immediately began surveillance on Australians in China and imposed various trade sanctions, and the relationship could be said to have hit rock bottom. According to the Australian Ambassador to China at the time, they wouldn't even take our calls. Actually, my sentence was due to end on October 7, but they said that because the sentence was too short, it had to be confirmed by the Supreme Court. Then it was the National Day holiday, so it was delayed by three days. They made me stay in a hotel in Shunyi with a dozen police officers, all watching me as if facing a great enemy, terrified that the news would leak out. The condition at the time was that if this matter got out, they wouldn't release me. But honestly, until the very last moment, you didn't dare to think, 'I am really going to be free, I am really going home.' I didn't dare to have such high expectations, fearing that the higher the hope, the greater the disappointment. In that state, hope is very dangerous. I even imagined the worst possible scenarios every day; that way, I could protect myself and maintain a calm state of mind. So, from the day of the trial and sentencing until I actually boarded the Air China flight and truly lived in freedom, I basically couldn't sleep. You would think it should have been ecstatic, but I was thinking more about what a huge blow it would be if this fell through. So, I was desperately trying, on one hand, not to yearn for the beauty of freedom, and on the other, to sternly remind myself not to be happy too soon.

When you saw the children, what was the first thing you said to them? It must have been all sorts of exclamations, like 'Oh my babies, you've grown so much,' laughing, crying, and shouting. Many people have asked me how I felt at that moment, and I think it's impossible to describe in words. Now, if today's Cheng Lei could meet the Cheng Lei of 2000, the one who was preparing to return to China to work and strive, what would you say to her? I would tell her: don't be so naive, don't be so gullible, learn more, and question yourself more about what you are doing. Would you still let her board that plane to China? It's hard to say, because even now, in a sense, I am grateful for the ordeal I encountered. How should I put it? As a mother, I would never want this in a million years, but perhaps this was a huge warning—a massive warning life gave me to turn around. Because after this incident, my life changed drastically. Many so-called friends from before are no longer friends. For a long time in my career, I would look at it with a very questioning and critical eye, but through it, I gained a deeper understanding of the Chinese regime, the suffering of the Chinese people, and so many unknown dark sides. Because of this, I have met many like-minded people, which is also a form of wealth. I have received a lot of kindness from ordinary people, and I have become stronger and cherish life and freedom more. For example, I've had a cold these past few days and felt very uncomfortable, but I remind myself that I am so lucky to still be able to feel pain. My son also has a cold and a high fever, and sitting in his room, being able to pat him before he goes to sleep at night, I feel especially happy. Being able to feel pain and being able to love are both parts of freedom.

What do you hope to do with the freedom you have gained today? I am convinced every day that I must live up to this freedom. For instance, because I have, how should I put it, nothing to do with China anymore, this state of having nothing also brings me a sense of relief and freedom. Many, many people who still have friends, careers, investments, and many connections in China are actually afraid—many things they dare not say, especially now, when entry and exit management is even stricter. So, this is a great advantage of mine; I can speak up for many people. I also realize that there may be many people who think I deserve it. First, for joining the mouthpiece of the Party, and some even associate me with Rui Chenggang, whom I used to host programs with, labeling me as a 'refined egoist,' or thinking I am not a competent mother, right? Because my own affairs have caused such great harm to my children. I have seen all these various comments online, whether they are real or from internet trolls. I am also a person who is very good at self-criticism, so everything they can think of, I have thought of too. But if this incident has taught me one thing, it is like when we play soccer: in the first half, the score was miserable, but at halftime, the coach would say, 'The first half is over; let's treat the second half as the start of this match.' Sometimes in the second half, we might score, and the failure of the first half does not mean we lost the whole game. So, I am now working very hard to play the second half well.