Near the end of yesterday’s Cornerstones class, our professor gave us a little Puzzle Hunt.

Can you imagine how I felt?

Cornerstones, as the name implies, is the class you must take if you hope to survive at LETU. It is the foundation of everything. Fine, it is not actually that grave. Apart from doctrinal material such as the cheating and plagiarism policies, the class is basically one extended tea party. Our professor also chairs the writing section of the student center, so she gleefully assigns us a journal every week. Presumably she hopes we will take our drafts to the tutors there for help, although I have never once done that. My first thought was: perfect, I can lazily count these as entries in Sojourner’s Diary! My second thought was: perhaps exercises written with elementary-school vocabulary and grammar are better left unpublished. (

In any case, it is a class for international students from all over the world, though Koreans somehow make up a third of it. Where did all these Koreans come from? For me, the class is also a channel for learning about events around campus. For example, this week’s Humans vs. Zombies game.

When I first moved into the dorm, I wondered why the common areas contained so many toy guns, each of them seemingly premium quality, lightly used, 99 percent new, boys’ personal collection. Later, my roommate—who collects every variety of foam ammunition—told me about this campus edition of PvZ. People begins with P too!

Throughout the week, every player wears a green band around one arm and goes out fully armed. The moment they leave a building, they step onto the unpredictable stage of fate. Aside from the “original zombies” randomly selected by the organizers, everyone must put down their phone and raise their weapon while walking if they want to avoid infection.

As you might imagine, zombies infect humans by touching them. Sometimes they carry foam batons or similar implements to “lend a helping hand.” When a human projectile—or a sock used as a “grenade,” hopefully a clean one—hits a zombie, that zombie cannot infect anyone for ten minutes. My roommate once watched a friend stride cheerfully out at the beginning of HvZ, ready for “hunting time,” only to return with a face full of misery and tie the band around his head: the sign that he had become a zombie.

Me, curious: Are you playing too? I have not seen you carrying a gun.

Him: (Raises the enormous bag of darts and grenades beside his hand.)

Yes, he collects ammunition so that he can become an arms dealer and make a fortune from the war rescue people in their hour of need. I hear he has already made quite a profit helped quite a few people.

On my way to lunch today, I saw several humans whose bands were still around their arms standing with guns to block the bridge—sorry, the cafeteria. Food is the first necessity of the people, and a cafeteria with only one entrance is therefore ground every strategist must contest. By dinnertime, these “guards” had apparently vanished. All I could see was a squad of zombies gathered around the picnic table beside the door… Right. The balance of the game seems to have shifted suspiciously fast.

After all that, you have probably noticed that I did not participate. Easy to comment when you have no skin in the game!

Let us return, then, to the CPH that I did join. In case the acronym escapes you, that means Cornerstones Puzzle Hunt. After random team assignment—not random, since we counted off—and a team-leader election—not an election, since I seized the role—the CPH began without the slightest network difficulty. Fine, in essence it was simply a set of puzzles built in Google Forms. If you can access it, you can try it yourself.

In keeping with the great Puzzle Hunt tradition that “the story is decorative,” I studied the plot intently for one minute, reached the profound conclusion that Carmon was apparently a woman, and then opened the puzzles with my randomly assembled pickup team.

Solve equations: instant kill. Monoalphabetic substitution: quipqiup destroyed it. Logic puzzle: instant kill. Probably a Pigpen cipher: spotted the pattern, instant kill. Cupcakes: delicious—cross that out—Nutrimatic destroyed it. Maze: instant kill. No idea what this one was, but Nutrimatic destroyed it. Spent ages indulging in “flights of fancy” before realizing we did not need the shortest route at all: overthought it. Scrabble: understood the rules, instant kill. Huh? We are already at the final password? Huh? We finished?

In short, after an exhibition of instant-solving tools and some collective brainpower, our team took first place. Incidentally, I originally mistyped “instant solves” as “instant instant.” On reflection, it was still accurate, so I kept it. Next time I will once again rate the difficulty “Very Easy”!

After thinking briefly and firing—occasionally exploding—the answers at everyone, I heard a teammate say, “He is so smart.” My vanity was immensely satisfied. Naturally, I finished with “Oh, it was only a few tools,” displaying that uniquely Chinese form of false modesty.

Come to think of it, LETU has a fairly strong puzzle culture. The engineering department’s orientation event was a campus scavenger hunt, which I failed to finish because I did not yet know the campus. Once, while eating lunch in the cafeteria, I happened to see the current university president making the rounds. When I overheard him tell my advisor that his wife liked puzzles, yours truly charged straight in with an enthusiastic self-introduction, only afterward wondering whether that had been a little too enthusiastic. Even after my advisor and I finish discussing my academic plans, we still look at the clock, say, “How about a few more word puzzles?” and forcibly seize control of the conversation.

It seems that mischief and genuine interest are the only two things that never leave a person tired or inhibited.