From a pampered 985 grad in Shandong, she won’t sit at the table—why not break the mold?

If adulthood is a game that requires completing tasks, Jenny Maruko would prefer to crawl out with her fragile limbs to startle the world.

If not for her daughter’s sudden decision to switch careers after graduation, Jenny’s mother might still dream that her daughter would become the head of a municipal planning bureau.
From Shandong, a Tongji University graduate trained in architecture… Everything seemed to point to a safe, prosperous path, but Jenny Maruko chose to escape this system and the world’s prewritten script.
In earlier years, she shuttled between Beijing and her hometown, eventually drifting to her ‘end of the world’—her own room. She spends most of her days inside drawing comics, turning from an ordinary office worker into a reclusive ‘weirdo’.
After drawing for nearly eight years, she finally published her first comic book titled ‘Refusing to Participate in the Game’.
In her view, if adulthood is a game of tasks, she just wants to climb out with soft limbs and scare the world a bit.
In the book, Jenny Maruko drew a protagonist Ame who overlaps with her about 80%-90%. This daydreaming girl resembles a Chinese version of Chibi Maruko: laid-back, casual, roaming outside the system, yet still moving step by step on the edge of this world.

Ame’s father thinks his daughter has grown into a ‘healthy waste’, while the mother always tries to pull Ame back on track—from hairstyle and mannerisms to life choices. The mother often tells Ame the story of the ‘lazy person who eats the pie’—in the mother’s view, Ame is the one who is so lazy that after finishing the pie near her neck, she doesn’t know how to turn the pie to eat the rest. The mother also opposes Ame watching Japanese literary works, including the anime ‘Chibi Maruko-chan’, believing Ame’s scattered, noisy, and spendthrift habits were learned from Maruko.
Ame feels that ‘anxiety is like an invisible umbilical cord linking us (mother and daughter), never ceasing.’
But Jenny Maruko liked this 2D girl. When she was little, a teacher gave her the English name Jenny, but in elementary school there were more than 60 kids and 7 named Jenny; distinguishing them was hard. Jenny Maruko was the first to say she was Jenny, so the teacher called her ‘Jenny One’, then ‘Jenny Two’ and ‘Jenny Three’… like clones, always remembering which number she was. Jenny Maruko is quite satisfied with being ‘Number One’; she feels like an original model, so she adopted her pen name as the Chinese homophone of ‘Jenny One’—’Jenny Maruko’. The ‘Zi’ was added later; ‘Jenny Maruko’ sounds more fun and seems to carry a spiritual inheritance with Chibi Maruko.

“Living outside the system,
like clinging to the edge of a big wheel”
Jenny Maruko has always lived without a fixed plan; she once tried to counter the system by studying urban planning, but failed. Looking back, she feels like Galileo dropping a ball from the Pisa Tower—initially sticky and slow, gaining speed as gravity pulls it down.
She recalls early memories: as a child in a nursery, sunlight streaming through the window, warmth on her fingers, dust floating in the air, and a worn biscuit box by her feet containing the house’s only toy—a meaningless set of blocks. At that time her life had just begun, but this feeling persisted, as if it would never end; she felt panicked and wanted to escape: not wanting to spend her life staring at dust all day.
Later she followed a path many smart children take: happy times in kindergarten, becoming the ‘other family’s child’ due to good middle-school results. Life seems to pass in a blink until she decided to switch majors after college, nearly breaking ties with her parents. At home, many ‘derailment’ behaviors—from dyeing hair to tattoos, swearing, to not taking a serious job or marrying—were criticized.
Her mother tried to stop her from switching careers, even enlisting distant relatives to persuade her. In her eyes, the daughter had ‘lost’ the chance to be planning bureau director, because in her view, getting into a good university almost guarantees lifelong stability, and director isn’t impossible.
After years of such discipline, the mother finally gave up. Recently she proposed Jenny open a small shop; Jenny found it funny. The mother’s expectations have shifted from director to small-shop owner: ‘I’m scatterbrained, a bit stutter, not becoming director may be good for the city.’
Jenny Maruko also tried working as a planner-editing role at a private publishing company, but the job was painful: tasks lacked clear standards, sometimes she wanted to finish today’s work and rest, but that was rarely possible.
She gradually realized she wasn’t fit for this system. She grew more fond of drawing manga, seeking meaning within it. In college, a friend recommended a manga public account; she read Yoshiharu Tsuge, Hanako Yamada, and ‘Cat Soup’… and realized that manga can express more than entertainment, and she knew little about manga before. From then on, she believed manga deserves a more serious approach, sowing the seeds of a career in comics.
Living outside the system, perhaps the days after adulthood are like riding the big wheel at an amusement park; she didn’t get a seat with a safety belt and can only cling to the edge, potentially being flung off and crushed. Yet she still clings on. She won’t let go.


“A Screwdriver suddenly spoke up”
In January this year, ‘Refusing to Participate in the Game’ was published. Perhaps this was her first step out of the system, ‘a screw suddenly speaking up.’ She doesn’t want to fit into a world chasing ‘efficiency’ and ‘usefulness’. As a rebel in her parents’ eyes, leaving home, a dreamer with higher ambitions, she has refused many games. She knows completely leaving the modern survival system is impossible, but says refusing is a stance, a longing.

She still has to face reality daily, acknowledging her vulnerabilities and failures; at family gatherings she still sits at the children’s table. She once hoped to switch careers and might take a gap year; to her parents, that’s akin to the child going mad or ‘I want to die’. They fought about this countless times. For a long time, Jenny couldn’t understand why her parents wanted her to enter a stable track. Later she found a reason: perhaps because she herself hasn’t known hunger, but her parents have.
Her parents grew up in the countryside, often hungry, surviving on sweet potatoes. Jenny’s mother takes pride in carrying a wagon of sweet potatoes into the family. When they argued about wealth, the debate was who could eat some dumplings along with sweet potatoes. In her youth, her mother walked dozens of miles due to hunger to join an aunt who already had city registration.
Another memory comes from an older generation. After mom started working, she took her grandmother to the city. The grandmother first saw streetlights and asked, ‘Who put a big steamed bun up there?’ That round white thing was a mantou in the elder’s mind.
That memory reminded Jenny Maruko of ‘The Moon and Sixpence’—not the moon nor sixpence, but something that could fill the stomach right away—a luxury, urban life food: mantou.
Later, the family’s gifts were dried sweet potatoes—these chewy, sweet, filling. Aunt said, ‘There isn’t much good; these are the sun-dried sweet potatoes we made.’
Besides the deep fear of hunger, her parents believed education can change fate, like sowing and harvest seasons; effort yields rewards. They hope their daughter will have a stable life; to live better, entrepreneurship and entering the system were common choices.
Jenny doesn’t want to take civil service exams, but can understand that family ‘loves’ civil service; perhaps it’s a power dream. But every life belongs to oneself, requiring balance between others’ expectations and inner desires. Living beyond societal norms, the hardest thing is to keep inner peace: ‘I will strive to balance inner worries with external influences, moving carefully like a magnet among magnets, trying not to be pulled in and out.’


Against the tangible algorithms.
Today, man-made algorithms saturate the world; escaping to a place not covered by algorithms is nearly impossible. Jenny’s way to fight algorithms is to put her phone far away when she wants to say something she doesn’t want others to hear, sometimes tucking it under the pillow. Her mother is more wary and keeps the phone in another room. Online, to stay rational, she also seeks opinions that challenge her own because every viewpoint has blind spots.
Jenny hopes platforms could implement a slider to tune the algorithm’s strength from 1% to 99%, so users can decide how much new content to receive and how much to be labeled. She fears she might never produce a truly satisfying work, fearing she will keep working for exposure or be alienated by ongoing self-doubt: ‘I still feel I have enormous energy—anger, grievance, hope—and some of it has been bottled up for so long that when released it may disappear like a fart after holding it in too long. This might be the difference between humans and AI, since AI won’t want to fart or generate creative impulses. At least not yet.’