Yesterday, a friend asked me that, when I went back to Beijing in the last couple of days, did I hear anyone gossiping about the topic of China’s future in the next ten years? I replied: seemingly not, who would be blathering away on such a serious and heavy subject, besides, what could that topic start from, the China–America trade war? It seemed very distant from practical life, apart from someone dropping a line like “we have been officially named as an enemy by Pence” in the working chat group that no one responded to, the trade war was a topic that we didn’t know how to talk about. My friend was agitated and replied: that is not far from our life! An obvious “reason” is that although an individual’s wellbeing does not necessarily progress with the country’s economic growth, it will definitely be damaged when the nation’s affairs are jeopardised. But, will this kind of preemption help us to respond with greater ease? I am afraid not. Instead, why don’t we withdraw from such worries and focus on what we can deal with at hand?
What did we talk about when I went back? What was touching in “Ash Is Purest White”? Did the film portray a world that mirrored our time, or was it a fictional mumble-jumble? How could the tax-evading actress not be caught? Could that killer be an icon of the modern woman? Apart from fanciful stories in the film, the scope of our conversation does not go beyond a kilometre distance from us, such as the house rent has gone up to eight thousand outside of the fifth-ring road, working out in the gym that cost eighty dollars, those unimaginative and travail things that do not exceed the complexity of credit card limits. Not to say after ten years, we were clueless about the next year. Distant worries seemed too far away, the troubles on hand turned into debts before they were dealt with. Why don’t we just keep watching I Can I BB (奇葩說). Should the cheater go to jail or hell? There were heated debates by very talented contenders. Friend said that watching I Can I BB is undoubtedly more enjoyable than seeing an exhibition, where most works were considered interesting only by artists themselves. However, the more comedy sketches were there, the less humour there seemed to be in real life. Arts became the escape and salvation in a free-falling daily life.
So it went round and round like a recurring nightmare or a shuttle run. When I used to read Les Choses (物), I only liked the first part. Perec accurately described how a generation of young people were worn out by the fanatical pursuits of materialism and the inability to separate themselves from conflicting mentality. A silk tie was a must-have, but the real fine food was unaffordable and unappreciated. They love to hang out with friends, but tired of the repetitions and conflicts of a collective life; they blamed themselves for not protesting on the street, but ran away the very moment when the siren rang. I could sympathise with the portrayal of ridiculous, conflicting mental and emotional states, but I was more amused as a bystander — after all, it was about the agony and resentment from the last century. Through the change of the zeitgeist, the ways human beings dealt with time should “progress”. I was not very concerned about how they handle all sorts of problems in upcoming chapters.
While the fictional characters aged in the novel, the readers were also growing old, so the story had to go on. During the second part of the novel, the protagonists ran away from the world which “promised too much but gave away too little”, but they didn’t find salvation. “They felt the past was eroding each and every day, like a floating, unrealistic, and elusive legend, at least they preserved the craze to pursue. This craze often replaced life itself. For that they confronted what was ahead of them, a feeling of tightness and anxiety spread from head to toe, desire had them devoured.” But now, every day and every week were dry like in a dessert, weightless. They couldn’t recognise any trace of desire in them. It had become a world without motivation.” From anxiously high to desperately tired, the story was slowly moving towards a conclusion, where people were waiting inside a carriage and the scenery flying by through the window. “If I was a moralist, then, I ought to find a way out for them… if someone told me the ending of this novel is unfortunate, I would say the opposite, that it symbolised a type of blissfulness; if someone said to me that the ending is fortunate, I would tell him, that the novel ended in a misery.” The novelist described the ending in this way. “It is not easy to escape one’s history”.
Someone might preach to you that the human world is not worthwhile. But you see everyone is still diligently planning, proactively chasing this deadline and working hard to find that next. In the end, every topic was surrounding a not-distant-future, ten years, twenty years, no matter what the future of the nation, the direction of the society, or the destiny of any individual might entail. To say that, whenever the current affairs and people’s fate are discussed, there will always be surprises; I just heard of a lakeside university where my college classmate appears to be on the enrolled list — the branching out of an individual’s destiny not only shows one’s excitement, depression, or the silences of the other onlooker but also divert as far as those who are active outside of sixth-ring road during the night can never experience the dawn of Chang’an Avenue (vice and versa); On the other hand, this discovery also made me realise that, my life might not be far away from the China–America trade war, there was only a classmate reunion in between.
image credit: Ash Is Purest White.
