As my colleague Ian Johnson put it, the column aimed to explain “the disconnect one feels in talking to Chinese people — it’s not about different cultures, but different ways of perceiving reality due to different sources of information.”

I’m especially surprised that the column went viral on the Chinese internet. Censorship is a tired topic to many Chinese, who live it everyday. Since both The Times and its Chinese website are blocked in China, people made screenshots or PDF versions of the column, then posted it on social media timelines or shared it in chat groups. I posted the links on my Weibo account but the tweet got blocked quickly.

“After reading your article, I’m very worried about China’s future,” a lawyer in Beijing messaged me. Her family has been using tools to bypass the Great Firewall for years. She said her son was considered “weird” by his high school classmates because he shared information he learned from some blocked foreign websites. Now he’s studying at a college in the United States.

“He had to leave,” she said. “He was too different.”

There were some discussions about how representative the young people in my column were. Some readers, especially expats, said they know plenty of Chinese who scale the Great Firewall. Some of my closest Chinese friends also said they will have to send themselves into exile if the government blocks all censorship-bypassing tools. It will be the last straw for them.

But outside of these circles, it’s often a different picture. Some people — even those who have many ways to get out of the Great Firewall — decide to stay in and defend it.

That leads me to a book that touched me deeply because it depicts in great detail the effects of brainwashing. Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover, tells the tale of a young woman escaping her survivalist Mormon family in the mountains of Idaho. Her parents home-schooled her and her siblings and taught them their versions of the world and humanity. When I read about her struggle to unlearn what her parents had taught her, I kept thinking of my own struggle to undo all the brainwashing I grew up with in China.

So my column wasn’t just about the young generation of Chinese. It was about all Chinese who grew up without access to uncensored information. Once inside the wall, it’s hard to escape because often you don’t even know what you don’t know.