Book cover of *We Always Travel Hand in Hand*.
Twenty-seven years of knowing each other, eleven years of being in love, eight years of marriage, and ten years of traveling together. Zhang Qianli and Zuoshou are not only life partners but also travel companions
Her name is Zuoshou, his is Qianli. Back then, neither of them expected that their names would align so perfectly with a way of life—holding hands and traveling a thousand miles. It’s just like a childhood photo of them playing house twenty-seven years ago, where behind the five-year-old Zuoshou and the seven-year-old Qianli, a big red wedding character was stuck on the refrigerator.
“Love will eventually lose its passion, but we will always travel hand in hand.” In February this year, a Weibo post by Zuoshou and Qianli was reposted over fifty thousand times. Thirty-six travel photos documented their footsteps in more than thirty countries, including the United States, Cuba, Switzerland, and Israel. At the end of the post, a childhood photo of the two moved netizens, who sighed that in this rapidly changing era, there are still childhood sweethearts who can hold hands and travel the world.
Zhang Qianli is a contracted photographer for *Fashion Travel* and Sony. In 2006, his wife Zuoshou quit her job as a media editor and co-founded a studio with her husband, working as both a photography assistant and a freelance writer.
During this year’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays, they avoided the peak travel season, worked overtime every day, and didn’t get home until seven or eight in the evening. They’ve always been like this—working hard intensively for a period, then traveling together intensively. Within a year, the two of them spend a total of two to three months on the road.
Balance and Rationality
During the 2006 National Day holiday, faced with the company’s refusal to grant even one extra day off, Zuoshou, who had already prepared her flight tickets and visa for Spain, chose to resign, giving up her nine-to-five job and an upcoming promotion.
The cheerful woman laughed and said that she had always looked forward to quitting her job with her husband to travel, but she knew very well that this was not as brave or beautiful as it seemed on the surface.
“It sounds cool and free, but the effort and reward are always equal. Freelance writing is unstable and lacks security. Relying solely on writing income doesn’t bring high earnings. I also have to assist my husband, handling photo editing and design, running a Taobao shop with friends, and I even plan to open a coffee shop.” Zuoshou said that at her busiest, she worked fifteen hours a day straight and couldn’t even remember to drink water. She could sleep in, but she couldn’t fall asleep naturally. Two months after giving birth, she returned to work, using one hand to operate a breast pump and the other to control a mouse. All this hardship was just to take control of her career and time, so she could travel whenever she wanted.
Some netizens, seeing the travel photos they posted online, mistakenly thought they were wealthy second-generation kids from affluent families. In reality, they have always tried hard to balance travel and reality. As written in their co-authored book *We Always Travel Hand in Hand*: “Making a brave decision takes only a day, a week, or a year, but making a balanced decision requires ten, twenty, or even more years to maintain. For example, if you want your parents to understand your dreams, you must achieve results to show them you’re not just playing around; if you want to maintain a stable income after quitting your job, you must not neglect your work on ordinary days; if you want to maintain a complete family, you inevitably have to get married, have children, go through ten months of pregnancy, and breastfeed; if you want to maintain the breadth and depth of your travels, with limited money and vacation time, you can only choose to travel steadily over time.”
In the eyes of many, travel is about leaving the starting point of life to seek another kind of existence. Among their friends are colleagues who gave up high-paying jobs to drive trucks in Tibet for five years in order to deeply experience life in a different place, and friends who went to Japan and ended up settling down there to work. Regarding this, Zuoshou believes that the former can afford to live on low incomes while traveling, and the latter have the ability to find jobs locally to support their travels. If she can’t be like these two types of people, she will always have to return to the starting point of life.
“I won’t give up my current life; I have a sense of belonging to it. Even if we have the ability to live in our ideal places, we have to consider coming back to take care of our parents—that’s a practical issue. We are rational travelers.” Zuoshou said that they only travel for about twenty days at a time, and if they’re not satisfied, they can go again later, which allows them to keep returning to reality.
Because of a viral Weibo post and the publication of their book, aside from being a bit busy replying to netizens’ comments, their lives haven’t changed much. August was originally the peak sales season for their new book, but they didn’t focus on promotion and instead traveled to Europe together.
Partners and Travel Companions
Twenty-seven years of knowing each other, eleven years of being in love, eight years of marriage, and ten years of traveling together—as partners and travel companions, it’s a unique relationship.
“Partners don’t necessarily become travel companions, but travel companions often develop a sense of understanding during the trip, forming long-lasting friendships, or even deeper relationships. The journey often reveals many issues, but fortunately, our values are similar,” Zuoshou said.
Long-term travel experiences have led them to adapt to each other. Zuoshou fell in love with travel after high school, while Zhang Qianli’s initial travels were more for photography—he preferred spending money on photography equipment. Back when they were students, Zuoshou would take the initiative to plan trips and save on expenses, trying to persuade Zhang Qianli to shift his focus on spending and travel concepts.
Zhang Qianli said he has now fallen in love with travel. “At first, I thought travel was quite expensive, but later I found that you can gain a lot in a concentrated way. Even often, I’d rather experience the journey and not take photos, just keep it in my memory.”
For Zuoshou, who used to be passionate about scenery, her focus has gradually shifted to the people along the way. She resonates more with her husband, a human geography photographer. “All the landscapes in the frame are supporting roles. The real core is just people: the friends and lovers walking beside you, the strangers you meet on the journey, and the living conditions of other groups in different worlds.”
Travel companions will inevitably face difficulties together on the journey, which also deepens the bond between partners.
On the Harding Icefield in Alaska, they didn’t bring trekking poles, a water bottle, or quick-drying underwear. Without mental or equipment preparation for climbing, they still set off hand in hand. The more they walked, the more their breathing became labored. The two walked one after the other without speaking, just walking for the sake of walking. Zhang Qianli would point to tiny, blurry figures in the distance to comfort Zuoshou, who was running out of energy.
On the Svalbard Archipelago, the northernmost inhabited place on Earth, where the latitude is 78 degrees north, the world seemed to end. They drove snowmobiles to look for polar bears. Zhang Qianli was driving a snowmobile for the first time and wasn’t skilled at controlling the direction. Zuoshou recalled that her palms were sweaty. “We were on the same snowmobile, and I could only trust him—and I had to trust him.”
Actually, compared to being partners or travel companions, the couple both feel they are more like teammates. “Before the trip, she lists the places she wants to go, and then I remove the ones I don’t want to go to, so there’s no disagreement on the route. Then she plans the itinerary, and I take the lead on what to do once we arrive,” Zhang Qianli said. They work together, with him taking photos outside and her doing photo editing and writing. They’ve always cooperated seamlessly.
Keeping a Balanced Mindset Toward Travel
“Exploring outward and reflecting inward” is how Zhang Qianli and Zuoshou view the meaning of travel. To see a different world—including landscapes, architecture, people, and ways of life—and to reflect on what you truly desire. Even a cursory glance can make you feel a connection to the place. When crossing glacial zones, large chunks of ice falling into the water cause a cruise ship of over two thousand people to tremble, making the effects of global warming and the connection between humans and the landscape particularly vivid.
However, after walking the Via Dolorosa, the path Jesus once walked in Jerusalem, feeling the scorching sun of Sri Lanka while gazing up at the towering Galle Fort, and facing the sudden appearance of black bears on the Alaskan ice fields together, they’ve found that the more landscapes they’ve seen, the harder it is to be surprised. It’s like European towns—seeing too many can lead to aesthetic fatigue.
Travel is essentially about getting tired of one place and moving to another. As visual fatigue from scenery becomes more frequent, the process of delving into humanistic depth begins.
Left Hand and Zhang Qianli travel in a way that combines broad exploration with in-depth visits. When they arrive in a new place, they take a casual, surface-level look around, just like most travelers. But when they find a place they like, they will definitely come back again.
“For the same place, I can keep digging deeper into it. Take Italy, for example — the first time I go, I get a rough sense of the scenery; the second time, I experience the carnival myself; the third time, I go with my child. Each time, it’s a different layer, and traveling with different people makes the experience unique,” says Left Hand. They plan to visit Italy for the fifth time next year. “The world is too big — you could spend your whole life and still not see it all. It’s only when a place no longer feels new to you that you start to notice the life and the people there. Your mindset toward travel also becomes more peaceful — it’s not about ticking off another destination.”