Personal Work
Self-expression has been one of the quieter engines of my high school years. I keep a diary, and I return again and again to writing and art as the mediums through which I try to understand what I think and who I am.
Reflections after reading, mostly, alongside records of the moments and decisions that left a real mark on how I study and how I live.
The form I turn to most often: small, unguarded observations from daily life, and ideas I wanted to share. Over these three years, this has been where I found the most empathy and recognition.
Stories written across three years of high school. All of them are unmistakably ummature work, but each one holds a version of what I believed at the time, preserved rather than polished away.
Pieces built around my activities, expressing feelings and open questions that technical or practical means alone couldn't resolve. Making them has expanded the boundaries of my thoughts and actions.
Jottings
1. Reflections on Dissection at Summer Carleton
My original heart is a love for the natural and the untouched. I love the breath of all living things, love watching them run free in the woods, on the grasslands, or across the ice fields, yet in the blink of an eye I meet them instead on the dissection table. For a long time I was afraid of dissection, afraid of cutting open those wondrous creatures, and this is also why I so revere Fabre.
Fabre once said: "You work in torture chambers and dissecting rooms, while I make my observations under the blue sky, to the song of the cicadas. You test cell and protoplasm with reagents, while I study instinct in its highest manifestations. You probe death, while I probe life."
I love to observe. I hope I can go on forever recording the dance of all living things. I aspire to Fabre's loftiness, and so for a long time I felt I was actually proud of my fear of dissection. I felt that although I could never become a veterinarian, I still hadn't lost my original heart of guarding nature.
But today's dissection seems to have shattered that illusion. I wasn't as saddened as I'd imagined, and this is precisely what pains me most. I should have mourned the life that was lost, should have felt ashamed of humanity's crime of trampling on life, but I felt none of it. When that bird's chest was opened, my hunger to explore and my sense of novelty overcame everything, and the fear that had secretly made me feel a cut above was utterly crushed. I was as calm as a killer, even a little excited.
The me of now doesn't know what is right or wrong. Instinct tells me I shouldn't be like this. Before the dissection I was still composing sentences in my head, wanting to ask the professor how one views the gap between the ideal and the real in this field of study. I want to guard every life with all my heart, want to make people love these creatures the way Fabre did, and can't bear to see any life die in pain or without dignity, so I was rather resistant to dissection, feeling it would ruin my original heart of loving nature. But reason, in turn, tells me that without dissection our understanding of living things would be far poorer, and it would then be much harder to benefit them further. It's like how the surgeon with the steadiest hand is rarely the most compassionate one.
Did you ever have this kind of confusion back in the day? What insight do you have? In the blink of an eye the question lost its meaning, because I discovered that I'm not resistant to dissection at all, and that little bit of sorrow was gradually dismantled, piece by piece, as the dissection went deeper. All my emotion, carrying one last hope, turned into a single question: "Professor, do you still remember how you felt the first time you dissected something?"
But perhaps he didn't remember, or perhaps this bit of feeling simply never arises in other excellent scientists. The final answer was: "If you're uncomfortable and need to step out for a bit, that's understandable."
I felt the professor's thoughtfulness, yet I also instinctively sensed that this wasn't a simple discomfort, because in fact I might have been quite comfortable, and it was my own comfort that felt foreign to me. Maybe influenced a little by The Lincoln Lawyer, I wanted to preserve an original heart that perhaps no one actually cares about. When the dissection was done, I peeled off the blue rubber gloves stained with blood and went to the bathroom to wash my hands, which were actually quite clean, because of the gloves, with nothing really to dirty them. But looking at myself in the mirror, and then at my wet hands, I felt there was a layer of blood that could no longer be washed away.
That bird died on a window made by humans, losing one life. Humans picked up its body and said they could grant it a second life through education. Humans dissect a bird, in the name of protecting its kind, owing it two lives.
2. Reflections on The Grave Robbers' Chronicles
The sense of the inexplicable is one of the wellsprings of creation. It's precisely because it can't be explained that I hope to explore it through writing.
Today I finished The Grave Robbers' Chronicles proper, and my mind wandered off for a whole evening, always feeling something stuffed and stifled in my chest, yet also feeling that a piece was missing, just like today's rain, which looks refreshing and cathartic but leaves you feeling gloomy all the same.
The source of the catharsis is, I suppose, simple: I watched a very wonderful story from a god's-eye view, a story whose sheer grandeur is astonishing, and the ending is an HE. But the gloom is far more complicated, so much so that I can't quite think it through myself. It's plainly just words, plainly just a story, so why is it as baffling as a worry that had happened to me personally? At the shallowest level, it's perhaps because the author left so many holes unfilled, forcing you to dive deep into ten-thousand-word analyses on Bilibili and Weibo just to make sense of the story's genuinely murky logical framework and its contradictions. So, even though the story's suspense and pacing are addictive, and its characterization and atmosphere astonishing, it's hard, after finishing, to say with a refreshed and cathartic heart: what a fine book! It's like seeing a crack you can't ignore on a rare and precious treasure, one that makes you sigh with regret. While reading I thought countless times about how, if The Grave Robbers' Chronicles were as rigorous as xxx, as logically airtight as xxx, this book would have become, like xxx, a masterpiece in my own heart. When both the shortest and longest staves of a barrel stick out to a degree you can't ignore, how is one supposed to set the standard for evaluation? I was tormented by its plot and its holes in language, yet I couldn't cut myself loose from the characters and bonds within it. What's even more painful is that I don't seem able to blame the author with any righteous confidence. Because he really is that good. Willing to lay waste to his studies and his future and throw himself wholly into writing, ending up a legend who came to it from outside the field, self-taught and switching paths midway, and even if he gets cursed for digging holes he never fills, for pure money-grubbing, how could I not admire, even envy, his perseverance and talent?
There's also the way he gets cursed for pandering to the female market by taking his shirt off and selling fanservice, which leaves me with such mixed feelings. On one hand, I really am moved by the friendship between Ping and Xie; on the other, there's always a voice in my heart reminding me that their bond is a product of the author pandering to the market, just as he wrote countless sequels but left many of them unfinished. Even if you can't deny his respect and regard for the characters, it can't cover up the money-grubbing. If it weren't for so many people loving them, would the bond still exist? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? When I ship a couple, whether in 2D, 3D, or whatever, I seem to like the current damp rat in the sewer, poking its head out from the well to watch two people, out in the sunlight, come to know and love each other naturally through their own traits and their mutual bond, secretly delighted, because I always feel a melon wrenched off by force isn't sweet. It's not that I'm putting Lalang or Wu below Zheng (some fandom disputes I won't get into here); there's a different kind of thrill in both of these natural forms. It's just that if I've "given my real heart," if I want a pairing to last long and forever, I seem to still have a bit of a mental cleanliness fetish, insisting it be the kind where it's tacitly understood, where feelings grow over time, where things come to fruition when the water arrives. So with Ping and Xie, I ended up with a lot of complicated thoughts. On one hand I love these two's unique personalities and pasts; on the other I think about whether, without the push of readers and author, in another parallel world, they really would like each other. If I'm honest with myself, based on my own understanding of the plot and the characters, I can interpret the answer as yes to convince myself, only the little bit of impure, out-of-book interest that stains the pure feelings within the book can never be washed off, like a tiny splinter, one that can be harmless enough, or can prick a person until they itch.
In the end, all this tangle still comes from how one views the relationship between inside the book and outside it. I've always thought I was someone who could keep the two clearly separate, and after mixing through countless heated fandoms, after seeing countless bloody storms in fan circles, I could still keep my original heart toward the characters I love. But the moment it involves the author, things don't seem so simple anymore. The author is the bridge connecting inside the book and outside it, and they hold the final right to interpret the plot. So can a person and their book really be separated at all? After the overwhelming online siege against Sanshu, how am I supposed to view this book, view the characters I admire? At this point, I feel like I understand Lin Yihan a little. Words really do have power, and even a piece of purely entertaining fiction can influence people, can bring emotion and thought, perhaps more than one would imagine.
Writing it out does feel better after all. Everything above is really just some of my deeper grumbling, the kind that would never surface in daily life and never leave anyone tangled up, some of this dissection just an attempt to sort out my train of thought, and to see, along the way, whether it might strike some kind of chord. And now, I suppose I've found the perfect way out: Nan Pai Sanshu is an ordinary person, one who was granted a divine gift, who shoulders the burden of describing another parallel world, talented but also flawed. His descriptions may not be perfect, but we've already been given a glimpse of that other world, and been moved by it. After this, the person doing the describing and the describing words themselves no longer matter; as a medium, they've already served their purpose and can retire, while our own minds become the new vessels of this world, and we go on, by our own imagination, expanding and enlarging it, so those characters can live on in our hearts too. As for those unfilled holes, they're just like the unsolved mysteries of the real world we live in, nothing more than Sanshu not being careful enough when he accepted the divine gift, or lacking the skill of the pen, unable to lay everything out down to the finest detail. In a thousand people's hearts there are a thousand Hamlets. As long as reading makes you happy, that's what matters, and you think about it however makes you happy.
3. Reflections on Lord of the Mystery
First time finishing a thousand-chapter novel, I originally wanted to talk endlessly about it, but when I opened my notes app I found my inspiration had run dry; I couldn't come up with anything eloquent. I thought hard about why, and finally realized it's because this book read too smoothly. I didn't suffer through it, there was nothing to complain about, so it couldn't generate any new thoughts (and I suddenly realized that, put bluntly, this means web novels lack "nutritional value": thinking has to come from finding flaws, and once you can't find any flaws, there's nothing to gain. Though this critique of my own reading taste feels a bit too harsh). But it clearly doesn't feel right to write nothing at all given what this book, and the time I invested, deserves, so let me ramble a bit anyway.
First, I really love this book's style of "using Eastern things in a Western way, and Western things in an Eastern way." This style isn't limited to the overall setting of a Chinese person transmigrating into a Western fantasy world; there's clever craftsmanship in many details too. For example, the entire book has an authentic "translated-novel" cadence, occasionally interspersed with just the right touches of Chinese linguistic style; Eastern legends carry mysterious Western magic; God and the Heavenly Venerable (天尊) coexist. I still remember that the reason I first started reading this book was because I was searching Xiaohongshu and Google for web novels recommended by foreigners, hoping to find something to enjoy while improving my English and learning about Western culture. As I searched, I came across "Lord of Mystery," what a cool, classic-sounding European/American fantasy title! So I was "tricked" into opening it, and it turned out the Chinese version was easier to find than the English one. I was confused at first: this novel is popular enough in China to even have a translation? How had I never heard of it before, I thought I'd missed out on discovering a hidden gem of a fantasy author. Then I clicked in and saw the author's name was "Cuttlefish That Loves Diving" (爱潜水的乌贼), and realized the English version was actually the translation. This was a homegrown Chinese novel, an excellent piece of cultural export. That made me even more interested; I started wondering what kind of Chinese novel could make foreigners love it so much. Now that I've finished it, putting myself in a foreign reader's shoes, it makes complete sense. The language, characterization, character names, place names, and descriptions of customs and culture throughout the book all fit European/American sensibilities very well. Yet it still carries an unmistakably Chinese flavor, especially in the occasional clever wordplay, which really does make you feel it's a shame that foreign readers, reading the translation, can no longer get the original, authentic flavor.
Second, the characters. Lord of Mystery succeeds in its characterization; by the end, you genuinely come to love many of the characters, love their interactions, love how their fates intertwine. Because of the setting involving Sequence titles and supernatural abilities, every major character has a "'XXX' XX" naming format, just like in Water Margin, "Timely Rain" Song Jiang, "Panther Head" Lin Chong, and in Lord of Mystery there's "The Fool" Klein, "Chanter of Miracles" Merlin, and so on (not implying these two novels are comparable). This certainly helps with characterization, but Lord of Mystery's success goes far beyond that. The author's detailed depiction of characters' actions, psychology, and expressions, and the descriptions of scenes, give the novel's most brilliant passages a strong sense of visual imagery, and the characters naturally come alive as a result. Many novels can make their protagonist vivid, but few manage to make every major character three-dimensional, give everyone a complete storyline, and make readers genuinely interested in following them all. By the later chapters, every time I opened the book I found myself looking forward to the stories involving them, looking forward to their interactions, looking forward to seeing them again. This is probably also why many people find this novel slow-paced and fragmented in its plot, because the everyday details are so real, so granular. For someone who loves characters, this is a gift; for someone who doesn't, it's torment.
Beyond the traditionally "major" characters, the author's use of minor characters and "functional" characters is also quite impressive. The novel has seven volumes, and my favorite is the volume titled "The Faceless" (无面人). The author's multiple layers of interpretation of this title are fascinating: from referring to a specific supernatural ability itself, to a state of existence, to the ordinary masses swept along by the great tides of the era, especially that last layer. This is concretely reflected in the book too: minor characters who rarely appear are given their own individual chapters, showing how hard life can be, with detailed psychological description and flashback fragments. Combined with the Dickens quote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," cited at the beginning and end of the volume, it really does carry the flavor of the French Revolution, evoking Les Misérables and A Tale of Two Cities. Though of course, the book's steampunk aesthetic is itself borrowed from the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.
Finally, about the "level-up, monster-fighting" genre itself.
This book is written so well that I suspect after finishing it, I won't want to read another "level-up, monster-fighting" story for a long time (maybe not even infinite-flow, sci-fi, or fantasy in general), because it feels like I've seen every trope this genre has to offer. This feeling had actually already started building up before this book; after all, infinite-flow stories are, in a sense, also a kind of level-up genre, and many of its tropes are just as predictable as the "returning home in chapter one" trope in romance novels. Still, the fact that I managed to hold out until now before getting tired of it is probably thanks to how emotionally rich the story is. Emotion is the soul of many novels, and this is even more true for fantasy, which is relatively detached from reality. Real life is often boring, while art comes from reality yet transcends it, drawing readers in. This statement can be interpreted many ways, but what I want to say here is: in fantasy, the world-building completes the part that transcends reality, while the emotion completes the part that comes from reality. In this combination, any setting or trope is merely a vehicle; only by ultimately conveying emotion can a story resonate with readers, especially contemporary readers (unlike classic literature, contemporary web novels lack depth, but they gain in immediacy and documentary-like quality, often keeping pace with the times more closely). This grasp of emotion is what makes many stories within the broad framework of the "level-up" genre still moving, still full of blood and flesh, still eye-catching. With such a vast worldview, so many characters on stage, and such delicate emotion, how could one not be moved? But since it's just a vehicle, it can naturally be swapped out; maybe my next step should be to find a more nonfiction vehicle.
In any case, thank you to "Cuttlefish That Loves Diving" for this cultural export, and thank you for the encounter. All praise to Mr. "The Fool"!
Stories
1. A Novel: Between Dreams and Waking (Ongoing)
2. An Epistolary Love Story
Reader's Guide:
Setting
The story is set in 1980s China—an era where reserved emotions coexisted with vibrant spirits.
Main Characters
The heroine is a brilliant and accomplished doctor, admired by society as the epitome of perfection: young, successful, and devoted to saving lives. From birth, she has walked a flawless path—one that is right, proper, and aligned with every expectation placed upon her. That is, until she meets the male protagonist: the alter personality of a patient diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). (A person with DID typically has multiple personalities; in this story, the patient has two—the primary personality and the alter personality.)
Format
The story unfolds across three sets of documents: diary entries from the doctor, the primary personality, and the alter personality—each distinguishable by handwriting and tone (their handwriting reflects their respective characters to some degree). Letters corresponding to the scenes described in the diaries are also interspersed throughout.
All documents are arranged in chronological order and can be read straight through. If the order is disrupted, they can also be read according to the date marked in the upper right corner of each diary entry.
Central Conflicts
Professional duty versus personal love; social expectation versus true self.
[Spoiler — best read after finishing the story]
What I love most about this story is that the relationship between the two protagonists is never driven by impulse or physical desire—they are soulmates who make each other better through their restrained love. They understand each other profoundly and respect each other's choices without needing to speak them aloud. For instance, even though the alter personality never directly tells Dr. Lin about his decision to leave, she already knows. And though the parting is painful, she lets him go without resistance.
After his disappearance, Dr. Lin doesn't remain trapped in grief. Instead, this love awakens a long-suppressed yearning for freedom within her, buried for years under the weight of social expectations. It becomes the beginning of a new chapter in her life. This part of the story was inspired by Rose in James Cameron's Titanic, who, through her love for Jack, discovers the hope and strength to truly live.
Wechat Moments
1. In the departure lounge in Miami, I suddenly heard a familiar piece of BGM. It took me a while to place it. It was Madonna's "Hung Up." And in that moment I realized that I was no longer as clueless about this country's culture as I once had been, and that I would not be alone either, because this experience had made me believe, more than before, that there are many good people in this world waiting for me somewhere in my future. I can't say that these few short days changed anything about me, made me braver or more fearless, more confident or more optimistic. But at the very least, these days made me aware of how much I had changed over the past year. Or rather, they let me witness the qualitative shift that had been quietly building, bit by bit, ever since I moved into the international track.
Choosing the international track never involved anything unwilling on my part, and yet, ever since high school began, there has always been this deep sense of uncertainty. Not long ago, for instance, after finishing Love Letters to My Mother, I suddenly became fascinated by the records left behind by overseas Chinese, probably because I could feel, in advance, what it might be like to be so far from home. So around that time I went and read Fei-Fei Li's The Worlds I See, and in the diary I wrote after finishing it, there were these two passages:
"How am I supposed to know the truth? Just as Fei-Fei Li says, that faraway place is less a destination, less a future, less a hope, than it is a concept, an abstract and drifting concept. I exhausted everything I knew and everything I had read, gathering up the experiences of studying abroad, of immigrating, of working overseas, across every walk of life, every era, every kind of existence, hoping that from all of it I might piece together in my mind a complete picture of that foreign future. But no matter how I pieced it together, what I ended up with was a broken, 2D, crack-riddled, low-resolution black-and-white photograph. What can I know? What can I possibly predict? The time is getting closer and closer, and I have been staring at this picture the whole time, standing off against it, hoping to make something out. But there is nothing. I watch that picture grow larger, closer, until it hangs over my head and slowly presses down. I feel as though I can already smell the hot, dry wind of the New York subway, hear the loud and unfamiliar noise of the streets, see the state parks stretching out with no end in sight. The picture is gradually becoming three-dimensional. I close my eyes and feel that I am already inside it. After three years, my senses have finally caught up with my imagination, and yet I dare not open my eyes. What is out there?"
"I think I know the reason for my disappointment now. It was never that I couldn't find a guide to adapting to a foreign country. It was that I couldn't deal with my own anxiety, an anxiety with nowhere to go, colored with fantasy, and impossible to resolve precisely because it had no real basis at all. What I feared, from beginning to end, was only the unknown."
The backdrop to this passage, as I said earlier, was that even after reading so many stories of overseas Chinese, I still had no idea how to face my fear of life abroad in the future. When I finished writing it, there was some comfort in having faced my fear head-on. But knowing where it came from and still being unable to change it made it feel all the more helpless. So this piece of writing was left out to dry for several months. I had always meant to post it on Xiaohongshu to see if it might resonate with anyone, but somehow I felt it came across as a little melodramatic and not very well written, so I never dared to. Now that things have gotten a little better, I suppose I finally have the chance to bring it back out and set it side by side, before and after.
I think it was BELL that made me realize this whole problem had been quietly fading away without a sound. Over the course of the whole program, the thing I gained the least of was knowledge, and the thing I gained the most of was scenery and friendship. It was precisely this scenery and this friendship that made a foreign land no longer so hard to imagine. Because wherever there are people, there is home.
Although I had realized long ago that people from different cultures around the world are not as different as one might imagine, that so many stereotypes and cultural barriers come from nothing more than a lack of depth in our communication, since we all inevitably go through joy and sorrow alike and share similar ways of seeing the world, I had never been able to work up the courage to reach outward, because of language and because of my personality. But this program gave me the chance to be picked up by so many people, whether introverts or extroverts, in English or in Chinese. The talent show and truth or dare on the last night in particular (even though I didn't take part) made me truly realize that people from different cultures can have so much fun together. The boundary of language is no longer the boundary of thought, because emotion, feeling, and experience are enough to expand those boundaries and let us find common ground and resonance with more people.
All of the above, really, was just wrapping for a plate of dumplings. What I actually wanted was to make up for the kudos I never wrote and the thanks I never expressed during the program, when my brain kept going offline. Thank you for the existence of everyone. Everyone was so lovely, including the white boys and white girls I don't mention specifically below, who will never see these words of mine. Special thanks to Anvy for being so willing to talk to me; thanks to Eric for being so lively and so good at volleyball; thanks to Coco, who I saw teaching Anvy Chinese on the last night, which looked like a lot of fun; thanks to Eileen and Janny, who lent me their things and were always so lovely, softening everyone's voices; thanks to Evangel for the semi-permanent sunglasses and for being the first to talk to me at the airport; thanks to Olivia, whose honesty let me win my bluffs; thanks to Dora for always being so active in the group chat, and safe travels to you; thanks to Jessie for teaching me Guandan, ordering takeout for everyone, and being so, so reliable and so, so much fun; thanks to Xiaoyou for that Beijing accent that makes everything sound as funny as a comedy routine, and for always praising how lovely everyone is, dialing the emotional value all the way up; thanks to Grace, for teaching me new ways to play cards, and for letting me catch a glimpse of a part of my past self, my present self, and my ideal self, and for giving me the chance to offer some of my own worth. In short, it was probably all of you who made an abstract concept concrete, who turned that flat, 2D black-and-white photograph into a rich and colorful hologram, who brought a faraway world right in front of my eyes.
When I left I looked calm and utterly carefree on the surface, but really my head was full of oh no, the summer camp effect, I'm never going to be able to go back or let go, I'm going to get stuck in this awkward emotional vacuum, especially when I left FLL and started, all alone, to listen to the playlist Jessie had put together. But in the end everyone has to keep moving forward, and after turning it over and over in my mind, all I could do was try to make my peace with it. I have always believed that feelings and relationships are fluid rather than eternal, and yet certain moments lived through together, certain emotional highs, can shine on forever in memory. So I still want to say this: whether or not we ever get the chance to meet again, everything we went through together will become a part of my life and go on with me. And so, years from now, whether we meet again at the far ends of the earth or lose sight of one another in the crowd, I will always wish every one of you happiness, day after day, safety and smooth roads ahead. And of course, if the chance comes, we really should hang out again.
2. A low-energy person, worn out after a long day, goes to a park they haven't been to in ages to relax and unwind, only to run right into high schoolers heading back to school. By a little past four in the afternoon the high schoolers had gradually disappeared one by one, and the park's age distribution visibly cracked into a gap, so that a seventeen-year-old walking through it felt like someone who had traveled through time, at once an outsider and someone who had lived it, very calm and very content. Pingshan may be pretty far out, but I still love the everyday warmth of this place. I can't help lamenting how Sunday return-to-school ruins people. A Sunday like this one, so peaceful and right in the middle of the term, feels like something from middle school already. Sunday return-to-school turns Saturday into Sunday, robs Sunday morning of any peace, and makes Sunday's lunch feel like a last meal before the gallows. Even if you take leave and don't go back on Sunday, that tense, cramped feeling of having to return keeps chasing you, as if Monday morning and Sunday were conjoined twins, impossible to pull apart. I don't even dare to imagine how wonderful it would be if Shenzhen Middle School were only ten minutes from home, so that a new week could begin only on Monday morning. But today was still a happy one. I felt like I had gone back to who I used to be, and my retrograde amnesia got cured a little. The one regret is that I wanted to save money and in the end never bought myself a balloon to play with, and too many people wanted to swing, so I never got my turn in line.
3. Every time a big exam or some major blow comes to an end and a stretch of free time follows, I get this feeling that even though my body is still at school, my thoughts have been set loose free of charge. They say suffering is the breeding ground of literature, but suffering itself cannot bring literature into being. When a person has been repressed to a certain extreme, they don't want to write at all. Otherwise Frankl would have just carved Man's Search for Meaning straight onto the wall of the concentration camp, and there'd have been no need to wait until he got out to write it. So whether creativity really comes from suffering or from ease is hard to say. Rather than saying suffering is the breeding ground of literature, it's better to say that literature needs to be steeped in suffering first and then simmered slowly on the breeding ground, the same way hot noodles rinsed once in cold water end up with more of a chew.
4. People always say diligence makes up for a lack of talent, but diligence itself is a sign of powerful inner drive, and just like being smart, it's a god-given cheat all the same. An ordinary free-to-play player of Planet Earth online like me, who doesn't pay to win, can grind until I'm about to throw up and still burn out after no more than two hours of mental exertion, then lie in bed and start wondering why I'm this bad, this much of a slacker. No matter how hard I whip myself forward, it can't compare to one line from a player running a cheat: "Ah, it just seemed pretty interesting, so I went and did it." And then they do it, and they do it well on the first try.
5. A Birthday With Two Cakes
I've been in low spirits a lot lately, without the leisure or ease of mind to tinker with words, and I honestly thought this piece was going to die in the cradle. Thankfully the Mid-Autumn Festival gave me the courage to finish it up and put it out. Today, taking advantage of the festival, I had cake with my family again, and my seventeenth year on Earth can be considered brought to a satisfying close.
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I've always wanted to write a piece like this, as a kind of birthday present to myself.
Maybe I've been spoiled by an environment as cozy as a warm bed, feeling that I can just barely pass for a child until I turn eighteen, and so I've never been willing to grow up. It's not that I don't understand age is only a number, but somehow, the older I get, the more precious each day of being underage becomes to me. Especially these past few years, I've come to feel that youth is a kind of privilege, the only kind that needs no backing from power or money, a privilege everyone can possess. The recklessness of being underage is courage, the ignorance is innocence. You can ask "why" endlessly without being judged as shallow, you can be afraid without being called a coward, you can be ignorant of the ways of the world without being punished. It's this privilege that so often lets me act or hold back, sing or weep. I don't want to lose this privilege, and out of that came a startling sense of ritual: as long as I keep recording, my pen, against the privilege I'm losing, can make the magic spells of the past reappear the way the Rememberall charm works on a wand. Time will pass, but at least I can hold on to the feeling. People always only learn to treasure something when they're about to lose it, so much so that the birthday rituals I began to find childish and dismiss at eleven, twelve, thirteen were somehow picked back up at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, only with the emphasis shifting from "celebrating" to "recording."
I also have to thank a certain someone, who got me into the habit of keeping a diary about half a year ago, which is what let the fragmentary thoughts of daily life escape the fate of being forgotten. But the longer pieces that get refreshed at irregular intervals have actually been around a bit longer, like the Moments post from last year's birthday. It moves me, how the obstacles that seemed insurmountable back then, the answers I searched everywhere and couldn't find back then, have somehow quietly become internalized over this past year, no longer leaving me lost and confused. It's like a passage of writing that struck me as breathtaking at first sight, which in later rereadings gradually sheds its stunning, heart-stopping brilliance, and instead becomes an inscription carved into a corner of my heart, one that no wind or rain in the days to come will ever wear away, as if it had always been meant to be there. I wonder if growing up is just like this, the truths that once needed profound philosophical language to be spelled out becoming, without my noticing, a motto that no longer needs any explanation, internalized in the heart and made manifest in action. For this, I feel deeply content.
But the world is always changing, and for me too there has always been something new. This year, I finally left school, left the country, and saw so very many people and things I had never seen before, never even thought about. Catching a glimpse of how vast the world is brought both delight and shock. I had thought I'd finally built up a little worldview and set of values of my own, only to have them smashed to pieces the moment I stepped out the door. So it turns out convictions can be made of glass too. Go out and take a look around: those who believe in fortune-telling say it's science that hasn't been explained yet, those who don't say it's a professional con; the young say the irresponsible are doomed, the old say it's just immaturity; the love-struck say love conquers all, those who marry money say material things are the foundation; some say making money is the process of devoting what you love to society and getting rewarded in return, others say that's the limited understanding of people in low-risk professions, and that if you're too idealistic you'll be trapped by your ideals; some say you should devote yourself to society, others say enjoyment is what matters. I once wanted to find one or two people to serve as models for how to live, and then, as a matter of course, find the answer to the question "what kind of person do you want to become," only to discover that everyone's philosophy of life differs wildly, and that their glamorous, impressive experiences make every one of these philosophies equally persuasive. This left me bewildered. I want to be a good person and live a good life, but that word "good" is something I've never been able to define. In the past I had many fantasies, like being an ecologist in the woods, nameless and quietly devoted for a whole lifetime, only to find that I can't nobly cast off fame and gain the way the sages of past and present did; I've also thought about making a killing in the financial markets, only to not actually want to be a player of numbers and money with nothing to show for it; I want to be a scientist but don't want to suffer for it; I want to be an artist but have no talent; I want to live off someone else but can't let go of my pride. It's not that I want too much, I just don't know which metric truly matters most to me. Not knowing the weights, I can't evaluate; with the risks unknown, I don't dare to act. And so I keep pacing in place, glancing at your life for a moment, at his life for another, longing to distill some kind of model out of it, one that can at least tell right from wrong. Sometimes I also feel these ruminations are meaningless, since convictions are shaped by experience, and no matter how clearly I think things through now, if fate won't allow it, I'll just have to give up, then be pushed and shoved forward along the one road fate points out, slowly grinding all my expectations to dust and constructing a set of values that the ambitious younger me could never have accepted.
And yet life has to go on. There's a saying that when you feel lost, don't stop, because pacing in place will never lead you to an answer. So going by the thinking I have now, I know that at the very least I have a desire to be seen, I know I want to learn more things, so I'll just go and do it. This year, I finally stopped fixating on a difference of a few points, and stopped measuring others by a difference of a few points; this year, after shaking off nine years of assigned-topic essays, I finally began to leave behind more written records that are meaningful to me. The pain hasn't necessarily lessened, but happiness is accumulating too. Like getting out of school one period early on Fridays, being able to get home a step ahead of nightfall, watching the sunset drift lazily by from the roof of my own home instead of from the subway station. Carrying a chair over and sitting without turning on the lights, letting the night gradually flood my whole body, it's truly so warm, like lying in the arms of Mother Earth. When I get tired of spacing out, I watch the cat roll around, take some photos, and idle away the time until Grandma calls me to eat, then go lie in the air-conditioned room, play on my phone, eat fruit, and mindlessly enjoy myself right up until I fall asleep. Every day like this feels like a gift from the heavens. If I could have chances like this often, then no matter how tired I am, being alive would be infinitely worth it. People can only ever sum up the trajectory of their lives when they look back, analyzing the cause, course, and result of every crucial turning point in perfect order, but the present moment is in fact made of instants, and it's these little drops piled up out of love and beauty that are the meaning of my being alive. Let it just go on like this, may happiness flow on like a quiet steady stream, and may everyone be safe and joyful.
6. Checking off The Smiling, Proud Wanderer. A book this long is no easy thing to finish, though getting to the end left me feeling a bit like a dog that just ate chocolate...
You can feel the political allegory and the depth of thought, but the collapse of the characters at the ending and the usual ailments of the male-oriented genre still made me want to cough up blood. I beg the writers of male-oriented fiction to spare us the romance lines. Is there really nothing better to write about? But things being what they are, I did spend over twenty hours finishing off this pile of chocolate. The ensemble cast is excellent as ever, and this dazzling constellation of characters does make up for the internal injuries the protagonist's flaws inflict on the reader, while a protagonist this "imperfect" probably serves as more of a cautionary note about reality too. It's interesting to think about: the word "jianghu" sounds like it refers to a region, but it's really a social network with people at its core. Behind the tales of heroes lie all the deception and scheming, the plots and intrigues, tying together the interests of person to person and faction to faction, weaving a great net through which people flow. Recluse, wandering swordsman, monk or Daoist, everyone has their own way of surviving, and as a reader looking on at other people's lives, it feels a little like taking one's own gleeful spin through the jianghu, catching sight of both sides of human nature. Honestly I somewhat regret spending this long finishing it, my eyes are about to go blind. Maybe it's because the Condor Trilogy I'd so often heard about left such a fine impression that this book, as Jin Yong's so-called crowning masterpiece, fell a little short of my expectations for me (mostly to be blamed on that love-brained protagonist whose chivalric bearing is visible to no one but himself). But every experience, whatever its nature, has meaning, and I suppose I gained something from it all the same.
"Though the chivalrous knight may die, his heroic spirit lives on. Flowers bloom and flowers fall, and year after year there are knights and heroines who wander proud and smiling through the jianghu. The spirit of chivalry in this world will never die out."
7. I've seldom been one for sweet dreams in this life. Most are a murky gray, or nightmares of dread. Last night was the exception. My soul actually drifted back upstream to the day I left America. That day I very nearly missed my flight. On the airport shuttle bus I ran into every friend I knew and every one I didn't, heard everyone talking about math, economics, philosophy, or the destination of their next trip, and so I very nearly forgot the departure time. The bus had all but emptied out at the airport station, and I was getting ready to get off too, when I saw an old acquaintance still sitting on the bus, saying they weren't getting off, because their friends little A, little C, and little D weren't going back to China for the time being. Curious about what they meant to do, as if led by some unseen hand I followed them and stayed on all the way to the Sunac America station, where they got off, without looking at me, without a word, walking straight into a group of people I didn't know, probably all classmates. Someone whose name I had only ever heard from their lips seemed to be the leader, standing at the front to welcome them, then going on about the bottleneck facing the economic-mathematical model they were developing. Oh, so it was academics. A little crestfallen, I left. I'd already wasted most of the time I had, and all I could do was hurry back to the airport station. At the airport I lost a bag, which held me up for a long while again, playing an endless-loop escape dungeon inside a terminal full of sour-faced flight attendants all speaking broad Henan dialect. Finally giving up on getting the bag back, I went to the gate to meet up with Mom and Dad, only to unexpectedly find, inside another bag, the very bag I'd been searching so desperately for. The airport's boarding gate was on a beach, and across the vast expanse of sand I saw the most diverse array of creatures I've ever seen in my life. There were whale sharks, two-headed birds, colorful Archaeopteryx as big as people. Then night fell, and the lights, from who knows where, all came on at once, and people gathered together and began a Gatsby-style revelry. Avengers heroes darted about everywhere, Disney's Winnie the Pooh and Piglet came drifting down from the sky with parachutes. The plane was urging everyone to board, but I didn't get on. Several colored points of light suddenly appeared in the pitch-black night sky, and then the whole universe was shimmering for me. On some coast of America I saw the aurora, more brilliant and dazzling, more endlessly shifting, than any aurora in all the photographs and films I'd ever seen. They pulsed like snakes, filling the entire universe, and out of them were born streak after streak of shooting stars, bursting like fireworks in the night sky above the sea's surface, until even the sea reflected a molten-gold color, like a river of melted metallic rainbow. In that instant I thought the Trisolarans were coming, but on second thought, even if it were an omen of the end of the world, I would only go on marveling at her devastating beauty. I kept taking photos the whole time, of the crowds, the animals, the aurora. Mom and Dad came again to hurry me onto the plane, and I took one last look at the aurora, then turned toward it. Before I left, Grandpa and Grandma came around from behind the terminal, and at some point three very lifelike silicone piglets had appeared on the ground too. Grandma said the Disney piglets used for the revelry were made from the taxidermied specimens of piglets killed by cars, and Grandpa, frightened, went to visit his mother's gravestone, and now felt much better. I nodded and agreed, saying nothing more, the aurora still burning in my heart, but all I could do was leave, giving a squeeze to the phone in my hand that was filled with aurora photos. I would remember this most beautiful of nights. At this point the scene before my eyes gradually faded, the weight of the blanket and pillow on my body growing clearer and clearer, and a sinking sense of loss, heavier and heavier, finally overcame the beauty of the aurora, and only then, eyes still shut, did I realize that my photo album would in fact be empty, and I suddenly opened my eyes and grabbed my notes app, to keep faithful record of this one great dream. From now on I am someone who has seen the aurora with her own eyes.
8. I want to take the high school entrance exam all over again, so that I could live through that most beautiful summer once more, carrying the most beautiful state of mind. A while back I watched Bidao on Bilibili say that a person's perception of how long a stretch of time is depends on the proportion it takes up in the time they've already lived, and that time passes for us on a logarithmic scale. Maybe there's something to it, since the days really have gotten faster and faster one after another as I've grown up. But going by lived experience, that isn't the whole of it. A person's perception of time also depends on how unique and how rich the things they experience within that stretch are, and the more unique, the more wonderful the experience, the longer it seems to stretch in memory. It's only recently that I discovered the so-called shortness of happy time and slowness of painful time only affects perception in the present moment. By the time you look back on it, whether or not you were happy doesn't seem to affect your judgment of how long that stretch of time was. The countless boring hours in class when I nearly fell asleep still feel like they passed in the blink of an eye, while the few minutes of a single class break spent leaning on the railing back then somehow felt very long. Though it could also be that class simply left no memories worth marking. So, thinking about it now, that summer really was so long, so long it can never be replicated, so long that the me back then felt it would never end, so long that it could pass through layer after layer and become a patch of pure land in my heart.
9. Today I was truly, truly lucky. Shenzhen Middle School with no one around is genuinely beautiful. During the holidays it's a carnival of plants and animals. I walked a full loop along the river and discovered so many beautiful, fascinating things, most of which are in the photos. First I tailed an egret for a long while, and the last time she took off I saw something drop beside her, so I ran over and picked it up, and it turned out to be a perfect feather. Sure enough, devout believers always get their reward. Then I saw two cats playing together, looking so genuinely relaxed, and nobody knows how much I envied them. Even when I got quite close they were still rolling around on the ground, and in the end they climbed the steps and didn't keep chasing each other. They had better be doing well from now on. There's also something not in the photos: I chatted for a bit with an uncle in charge of the greenery, and you could tell he really loves this job. He even reminded me to look at that little red fish (though I'd actually already spotted it before he pointed it out). There are just too many, too many details, and a few pictures and a few words truly can't describe this breathing patch of green.
p1: A little red fish appears in the SMS river (looks like it's been ostracized by the school of black fish)
p2: Every time the SMS river's water gets redirected, the deep spots turn into an ultra-high-density fish soup
p3: The butterfly god who graced me with its presence, staying put less than ten centimeters from my hand and still not fleeing
p4: Two kittens who are close friends
p5: The sneaky, furtive Master Night
p6: The egret god about to touch down
p7: The egret god's gift to her stalker
p8: Another kitten who met my gaze
p9: An adorable little flower, strikingly conspicuous in all that green
10. Having finished listening to a bit on phenomenology, I suppose I've finally found a philosopher whose thinking runs fairly close to what I've long thought myself. When I can't perceive that I'm being deceived, then being deceived doesn't matter; when I'm willing to sink into illusion of my own accord, then the illusion is real. What the essence is, to me, is perhaps not nearly as important as what it is that I see. For a moment I recalled the image below, opened my album from 2021, and saw once again that self who used to steep in endless-loop stories all day long, and that line rang in my ears once more: "Only a world with you in it is real."
11. Humans have free will, and do not operate according to a set program the way a machine does, and therefore possess a part beyond mere matter, namely a soul. But is this right? Then do animals have free will? If they do, does that mean animals have souls too? If they don't, and if we assume at the same time that Darwinian evolution is correct, then it follows that humans too evolved from ordinary animals, sharing a common origin with every other living thing on Earth. So at what point, exactly, did humans split off from "animals" in the narrow sense, become endowed with a soul, and turn into true human beings?
12. Why would I be so happy that I cry? Why is it that when people express the most extreme happiness and the most extreme pain, they always choose tears as the medium? These two seemingly opposed emotions, why do they converge along different roads within our tears? Perhaps it's precisely because they are not truly opposites in essence, but rather the two faces of a unity of opposites. So many of the so-called "antonyms" in this world are, in the end, nothing more than two sides of a single coin, at once separate from and dependent on each other.
I've long been used to understanding this through a kind of "if there were no ..., there would be no ..." pattern of thought. Applied here, if there were no pain, happiness too would cease to exist. But this explanation is a little too mundane. Every pair of opposing concepts can be plugged into this formula, and the result can only stay on the surface. Is there a more profound possibility?
Perhaps the roots of happiness and pain are the key to unlocking the puzzle. What is that root? It is desire. Desire is the shared starting point of them both. When desire is satisfied, we feel happiness; when desire goes unsatisfied, pain follows like a shadow. What is unified is their cause; what is opposed is their outcome.
Every religion tries to give pain a way out. Christianity relies on prayer, Daoism advocates following nature, and Buddhism seeks peace. The "freedom from desire and want" that Buddhism exalts seems to offer a path to curing pain at its root. Since pain comes from desire, then by eliminating desire, can one escape pain? In other words, Buddhism's goal is not "happiness," nor is it "pain," but a greater state, a so-called "peaceful happiness." Whether such an idea is true doesn't matter. What matters is that when believers trust that "freedom from desire and want" is the road to fulfillment, they then have a meaning to pursue. This sense of meaning is, in itself, already enough to let them feel at peace.
But I don't want to choose such a road. Maybe because I can't manage it, maybe simply because I'm unwilling. All the myriad things in this world are so beautiful, and even the plainest, tiniest things brim with life and meaning, so how could I bear to cast them off? I need desire, need it to burn me, to guide me, to drive me. I want to be glad, want to be happy, want to be excellent, want wealth, and want, even more, to have around me those who truly love me and care about me. I want to become a more interesting soul, want to make my own thoughts shine. I can't, and won't, drift along with the current like a speck of plankton floating on the sea.
I have desire, and therefore I am a whale. I let the endless seawater flow through my lungs by the ton, I hold my breath and dive deep, all to chase after what I long for. Onward, and onward again, my life takes desire as its fuel and lights the flame of the pursuit of happiness. Yes, desire inevitably comes with pain. But I do not fear pain, because for the sake of chasing happiness, I am willing to embrace it. Pain will pass through my body, and I will face it head-on, feel it, until it disperses bit by bit. But my pursuit of happiness, like a lamp undying through all eternity, will forever light the road of my life.
Desire coexists with happiness and with pain, but it is also what grants life its depth and its power. That being so, why not chase to the fullest, and live to the fullest?
13.
On My Sixteenth Birthday (Also Squeezed Out in the Last Few Minutes)
A pretty happy day. It's so good to have you all. May we stay forever green.
Last night I was scrolling on my phone and just scrolled right past midnight, and it wasn't until the birthday messages came in that I suddenly realized I'd gotten a year older.
They say the days pass one at a time, and a person doesn't just leap all at once from 2023.9.16 to 2024.9.16, but this one day is somehow just so apt to send you into a fit of sentiment. A year is both long and short, long enough to forget all of the year's worries, short enough that I still remember what it felt like to be sitting on a different bed typing this out around the same time last year. Back then I was still a carefree studying machine, and now I've become a headless-fly of a high schooler.
I suppose the first fifteen and a half years went a little too smoothly, so that I took it for granted to brand myself a "brave, confident, cheerful, optimistic" person, only to discover now that I was badly, badly wrong. All the assurance and all the confidence I once had actually came from positive feedback from the outside. If I had the misfortune of becoming the "phoenix tail" in a high-pressure environment, losing that timely and heartening positive feedback, I would easily shed the halo it brought and turn "cowardly, self-doubting, introverted, pessimistic." My mother noticed too, and warned me time and again not to belittle myself, to be confident and optimistic. But empty talk on paper is of course of no use. If I could just coax myself into acting strong, she would never have noticed in the first place, so I remained convinced that I could only solve the problem by finding the source of the illness. And so I often tried to probe for the cause of this contorted personality, only to go online and find nothing but an overwhelming tide of denunciations of one's family of origin. I racked my brains and couldn't make sense of it. My family is beyond reproach, my upbringing beyond fault, and all I could do was chalk up my own strangeness to a genetic mutation.
Not finding the cause, the sun still rose in the east and set in the west, and school still had to go on. One day in psych club I heard an older schoolmate say that unconditional positive regard is a necessary precondition for self-actualization, and in that moment it was as if everything suddenly cleared, and I felt I'd found the cure for this chronic illness brought on by genetic mutation. So I tried to console myself unconditionally: if someone did the math faster, I consoled myself that they'd been grinding since they were little; if someone left me in the dust in English, I consoled myself that it was just from doing too many zhongkao papers without expanding beyond them, and that I'd be fine once I filled in the gaps; if I wanted to slack off, I told myself that relaxing now and then is acceptable (when it was, in fact, no longer now and then). In short, I kept reminding myself that my badness was pardonable, that I really wasn't as useless as I'd thought.
After a while I found this method wasn't as invincible as I'd imagined either. This unconditional regard couldn't actually make me positive, and its effect diminished over time, until it finally dropped into negative values. Sometimes, right after consoling myself, a little cluster of nerves in my brain would suddenly go on alert and send out signals like "you're just lowering your standards for yourself," "keep this up and you're really done for," as if there were always something stopping me from letting myself off the hook, or from believing in myself. On ordinary days, running nonstop at school, I didn't have much time to put my inner self on trial, but the moment I had nothing to do I would suddenly break down instead, falling into a terrible state of being unable to study and unable to have fun either. Even though I still felt that pessimism was only temporary and that being alive is very interesting, in those moments I really wanted to laugh at myself.
Lately, with more school piling up, I've somehow gotten a bit used to it, and I've gradually come to see that confidence is something you simply must have. It shouldn't need a source. To be alive is to have confidence. Confidence isn't a moral hostage-taking of fate, isn't a bargaining chip for success. You can have confidence and still fail, but without it you truly can't go on living. "Fate takes no bribes, but hope is with you. This is the true meaning of faith, the road of the believer." Maybe confidence is just a state of being, not coaxing yourself with "ah, I can definitely do it," but believing that no matter how wretched the situation, there can always be a "worse" ahead of it, that things are already pretty good as they are, and that every further step forward is a bonus, and if there is none, then that too is fate's doing, and you just accept it, since there will always be people in this world who have to be unhappy, otherwise there'd be no such thing as happy people. Since pain is unavoidable, and will inevitably become a precious treasure of my life in the future, then there's no need to be too afraid of it.
High school will maybe become one of the turning points of my life. There's no set road before me anymore, and as far as the eye can see it's all open wilderness, everyone around me cultivating their own separate track, and no matter which direction I look, there's always someone far, far ahead, as if I'm the only one pacing in place, pondering where to go. When school had just started I always felt the sky was about to fall, but now I'm okay with it, since as long as there's still poetry, and love, and beauty, and romance around me for the time being, there's really no need to rush so anxiously off into the distance. Let me first go take a stroll here and there, carrying a young, open, positive heart, and who knows, maybe one day I'll look up and find the passion I've been searching high and low for right there before my eyes.
Studying and exploring are a part of life to begin with, and they can't be entirely utilitarian. There has to be some sense of experience to it, at least. Now I'm sixteen, and though the road ahead is long and the fog still hangs, and I've yet to see the clear day they speak of, so what of it? My heart is still beating just fine. As the saying goes, "In me the tiger sniffs the rose." Let those grand futures and lofty ambitions stay buried at the bottom of my heart for now. The present moment is better suited for sniffing the rose up close.
And fortunately I'm still young, able to act or hold back, to sing or to weep.
So what is there left to worry about?
Drawings & Handicrafts