Writing the number 2022 still feels strange. Shouldn’t next year be 2021? After thirty, it is as if someone pressed the accelerator: things you must face arrive faster, and things you once argued with become easier to ignore.
Since the year the world was supposed to end, I have written a before-the-new-year essay at the end of every year. This year is different because I finally left Douban, so this piece cannot appear there. I used to mock people who insisted on rituals as a way of avoiding something. When it was my turn to make a ritual out of moving my personal blog, I wanted it to be grand. Then the move happened, and it felt ordinary. I had planned how many posts to write, how many gaps to fill, how many new gaps to dig. Those plans became another ritual, and ritual became delay. So I dropped the plan and just wrote. That abandonment was one of 2021’s most vivid strokes.
This year’s theme is not a set of phrases but words broken into smaller parts.
01 | The Sickness Radical (疒)
The sickness radical. Almost every character it combines with feels negative. If you stare at it long enough, before the shape breaks apart in your mind, you can feel the压抑 and unease it carries.
Much of 2021 circled this radical.
Xiaolian became seriously ill. She collapsed in the bathroom, too weak to stand. I held her limp body and sobbed, then cut off my own breakdown and waited for the ambulance.
Then I became seriously ill. I was hospitalized for the first time in my life and came close to dying. My brain, struggling against pain, slipped out of my control and produced something like a protective madness. I got through the worst days in endless nightmares and symbolic processing of real data. When I woke, I kept asking Xiaolian what had happened. After a few sentences I would cry: grievance, fear, guilt toward her, thoughts about death, thoughts about being alive.
That experience of death is a huge source file I cannot yet translate into words. Around this time last year I had conceived a novel, tentatively titled If You Are Free After I Die. These experiences connected to scattered fragments of it. I used to joke that I might not live past thirty-five. After actually passing near death, I learned how much I wanted to live. One plan for 2022 is to write that experience into the novel. I call it translating death.
I burned reason and courage / lit the staff for the return journey
You held my palm / melted the last grain of frost / I brought back from the dead prison
If You Are Free After I Die
02 | The Knife Radical (刂)
The knife radical: a broad chop, or a slow carve. This year’s keyword was not so violent, but it was related to parting. After a serious illness, cutting off some people, events, and moods started to matter. The ugly Chinese saying explains it well: you do not shed tears until you see the coffin. Many plans would not have received such attention without that illness.
Many people in 2021 were saying goodbye to someone or something: leaving a city, leaving an old lover, stepping out of a relationship, giving up a decision. Under the pandemic, such partings became more dramatic. People added the helplessness of the pandemic to ordinary separations, and the result became sadder and more tragic than it needed to be.
Years ago, and I can really use that phrase now, I was terrified of parting. What I could not bear was the look on a train platform: someone smiling a blessing while holding back tears. The more they suppressed the air going into their body, the more that ignored breath rushed upward and produced an ache in the nose that you only remember in that moment.
Now parting hurts me less. People come together and separate. Wanting to maintain every relationship is itself a kind of deep inferiority. You fear that your own responsibility will break a relationship, so you live carefully. That is probably a common illness in this society: wanting good relations with everyone while being extremely afraid of being hurt by closeness or distance.
Lately I keep saying: no fate, time not yet. You keep missing someone’s timing, or you exhaust yourself trying to make someone understand, or a person and an event are always one breath short. I now call these annoying things no fate, time not yet. For the moment, those eight characters work better than none of your business and none of mine. At least they stop me from insisting on pushing something forward or holding it back. If the timing has not arrived, it has not arrived. Try to describe how sweet an apple is to someone who has never eaten one, and all they can find is sweetness they have already met in their own life.
So if something comes up and you think the time is right, tell me, or ask for help. Before that, I will not beg or force it. I will just keep muttering no fate, time not yet. This is middle-aged cunning: do not strive, do not force, and above all do not stir things up.
03 | The Speech Radical (讠)
If this section were posted on Douban, it would be blocked.
In recent years I have stopped wanting to speak online, sometimes not even wanting to look. When I see the discussions under news stories, I can guess what the crowd is getting excited about. Before I deleted my Douban account, many posts were deleted within a week for no reason, some of them broadcasts from years earlier. The reason was always violating relevant laws and regulations.
When I graduated in 2016, I did not choose work related to my major because I already sensed the awkward legal environment ahead. As I predicted, the Chinese internet can no longer be described as merely unpleasant. It is like the Sunflower Manual: if you want to learn the martial art that brings traffic, you must first castrate yourself willingly and without complaint. That is why I resolutely reopened my blog here.
In 2021, many people became targets of public opinion and verbal attack. The Cultural Revolution did not end forty-five years ago; it became a sequence written into Chinese genes and now functions like a vaccine in this society. To survive verbal harm, you have to learn every method of harming others with language. Otherwise, one day the iron fist will fall on your head too.
Not long ago I returned from Changsha. The day after I left, Changsha found confirmed COVID cases. The community called and urged us to get a nucleic acid test. At the hospital, the woman at the entrance who checked temperature and health codes stopped us because we had come back from Changsha. Our travel and health codes were fine, but she insisted we could not enter. I found it absurd and fired back:
Has the state said Changsha is a medium-risk area? What gives you the right to violate the state’s will and declare Changsha medium-risk? Are you trying to defy national policy? Do you want to overturn the rules and order our country has set?
She had nothing to say. Maybe she remembered that day forty-five years ago, when she was young and held a little red book, followed a frenzied crowd, and used the same logic and slogans to rush into homes labeled counter-revolutionary. Those sentences are like magic spells. They always make the enemy accept the era’s arrangement without a word.
I did not live through the Cultural Revolution, but these methods come to me easily. They are already part of my genes. I am ashamed of it, but it also feels like a way to survive.
In 2022 I may speak even less. Even if I have thoughts like these, I probably will not put them online. Instead I will hide the mockery inside stories and sharpen it into a sharper knife. Because one day, the same iron fist may land on my head.
04 | The Water Radical (氵)
The water radical. Though it is water, the characters it forms are not always about water. Take the character for law: it represents rules and order. Forcing a connection to water still works. Think of the state I most dislike: the highest good is like water. Law should reach that state too.
After waking from death, I often told Xiaolian what I had learned from dying once: I finally understood what it means that the Dao follows nature. The illness became so severe because I kept fighting the law. I thought a thirty-year-old body could still take a hit like it did when I was young.
What is called Dao-law can be understood as rules. The water radical in it, I think, is not the rule of the highest good being like water. It is closer to the rule that water can carry a boat and also capsize it. Or it is a kind of measure, like water overflowing when full.
A digression: from 2018 to 2019, after finishing a five-hundred-day writing plan, I kept writing for a long time. I reached entry two thousand-something and then could not continue. Back then I planned a new collection called Measure, one piece a day on some kind of measure. Measure did not last.
I began formally encountering Daoism in 2019. Insights about Dao and law often surfaced, but I felt they were too simple, so I used time not yet to slow my impatience. This year the deepest insight has been the word law. Everything has its own pattern. Drink when thirsty, treat illness when sick; there is no other way. If you insist on violating the established rules, you receive unexpected punishment from those rules.
But who made these rules?
Lu Xun said there was no road in the world to begin with. Before a road exists, rules seem not to exist. Only when many people make the same movement does a rule form, and then a road. But why must there be a road here? I remember a documentary about fungi. Biologists used a fungus as a test carrier and placed nutrient droplets on a petri dish at points corresponding to dense hubs in a city like New York. Then they watched how the fungus covered those points with the shortest, most efficient routes. The layout the fungus produced almost matched New York’s transport plan.
Humans obey the rule of the road when they build cities. The shortcuts in the fungal world obey it too. These rules exist in everything. What can be calculated, we put into science. What cannot be calculated, but can be translated by human thought, we put into philosophy. What cannot be calculated, cannot be made concrete, and cannot be framed by human thought is left in religion, where it has been transmitted for thousands of years.
In recent years I have encountered many so-called mystical things: tarot, astrology, religion, Freemasonry, and deeper contact with Daoism. The more I encounter them, the more I feel these rules are linked by an invisible rule, like fungus spreading from one point to another. The path is unique, but it contains infinite possibilities.
Writing this, I suddenly understood a classical sentence I had only understood literally before: everyone dies, but a death can be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather; what differs is the direction one pursues.
05 | The Walking Radical (⻌)
The walking radical. Moving from one point to another often uses characters with this radical: escape, return, chase, tend. One word looks related, but now I feel it should not use this radical. It is also the word my friend Momo has hated seeing lately: logic.
In a word like patrol, the character for logic is fine. In logic itself, something feels off. This has also been a mistake I made in the past.
I used to love emphasizing logic. When I was examining whether something should exist, I would dig into the logic behind it. If someone told me they associated A with B, I had to work out how A led to B. Partly this came from my second job in brand planning, where I was obsessed with the process from concept to product.
I turned many things into logic: work, life, even my own existence. I sealed myself inside a frame, deciding what I liked and what I could not accept. Over time I was trapped in a transparent container with a lid. I could see what was outside, but I could not touch it. Later I tried to accept things I had once rejected, but I still approached people and events by asking why they were like this and what logic lay behind them. Logic is independent. Apply it at random and the formula error becomes a system bug, crashing an entire life at some node.
In this short year I changed a little. I rarely discuss the logic behind something anymore, because the absurd things in this society cannot be derived by logic. I may feel something should not exist, but in the moment we discuss it, it has already happened. That means the formula producing it is correct; I simply cannot understand it with my own logic.
There is a saying: if you have not suffered as another has suffered, do not urge them to be kind. Rewritten as moral kidnapping, it becomes: you are not me, so how do you know what I want? In the past I would interrogate: what exactly do you want, and what exactly caused such a huge misunderstanding between us? Now I think: what do you want? Shit? I will not help you shit, because I cannot be sure which kind you want.
People are too stubborn about the conclusions inside their own logic, so they demand things of others without restraint and even treat others’ charity as owed.
This is probably the lesson I will live through in 2022: to know the world again without logic. Going back to the beginning of this section, I do not think the character for logic should have the walking radical. A basket radical seems more fitting.
This year I have written another pile of summary text. There is still much worth savoring and sorting, but life has priorities; otherwise the plot becomes too bland. As for regrets in 2021, the biggest is that Non-public Dream was finished so hastily. Many sharp knives never got hidden inside it. Another regret is a scripted murder mystery story I like very much. I could not find the balance between the market and my own insistence, and I thought I could finish such a seemingly simple script alone. It turned out to need slow polishing.
It just occurred to me that Non-public Dream was actually rushed out in spring 2020. I still keep feeling next year is 2021.
Damn. Another year stolen.
Happy New Year.