The greatest enemy in life is oneself. That idea struck me as true the first time I heard it, but the older I get, the more deeply I feel it in actual life. Defeating heaven or earth is secondary; what really matters is learning how to overcome yourself. I don’t think I’ve managed that. In the end, I may simply be too false in the way I live.
That is the kind of person I am: one thing on the surface, another inside. My thoughts and my actions often refuse to line up. Sometimes I already have a clear opinion in my heart, yet my face presents something entirely different. People say words come from the heart, but that saying has never worked very well on me. A lot of what I say is casual, spoken before it has truly passed through my mind.
For a long time I thought I was clever. I thought I knew how to read people, how to imitate the way others normally behaved, how to deal directly with their problems. But that was never my real self. At times I feel exhausted living that way, and then I look for messy, pointless ways to vent what has been suppressed inside me. I smash things—usually the things I cannot actually afford to break. Or I rewrite events in my imagination, giving them a different ending than the one that really happened, using fantasy to numb whatever is buried deep inside.
The long-term result is a bad habit: I am not good at direct communication. Perhaps the only thing that saves this from being a complete tragedy is that I can put my thoughts into writing. And because of that, some people who read what I write are surprised. They cannot believe those thoughts are really mine.
I still remember a midterm English test in my first year of middle school. I was one of only three students in the class to score above ninety. The other two had already studied that grade once and had been kept back. My English teacher, who was also the homeroom teacher, looked at me with obvious suspicion and asked, "Is this really your score?"
I was furious inside. Suspicious of me? Was it really so upsetting for a student to do well? Or did he think he simply wasn’t capable of teaching a student who could earn a good grade?
But I did not challenge him directly. I only answered with a simple, "Yes."
Then I watched him walk away still looking doubtful. There was a reward attached to that test, after all, so perhaps he thought I had cheated for the prize. That was possible, wasn’t it? From that point on, my interest in English faded. I felt there was no point to it. I even came to the mistaken conclusion that English teachers were all like that, and that people who liked English probably were not much better. It was a wrong idea, but it affected my studies afterward.
From that year on, I rarely even passed English. Even though I finished that term ranked first in the class, my interest in studying had already begun to fade. I still played the role of the good child—obedient to my parents at home, obedient to teachers at school, never openly showing dissatisfaction. A person who did not even like studying somehow became the class study monitor. The irony of that was enormous.
Looking back, I do not think any teacher I ever met truly understood me.
When I was in my third year of middle school, my second older brother once told me he had spoken with one of my Chinese teachers. The teacher had said I was cheerful and outgoing at school. My brother found that strange, because in his eyes I was very introverted. They went back and forth without reaching a conclusion, so he asked me how I saw my own personality.
I said, "I don’t have any opinion. My biggest opinion is that I have no opinion."
That careless sentence later became one of my classic lines, something I reused in all kinds of situations. If someone asked me what my dream was, I could say, "Having no dream is my greatest dream."
My brother just laughed and went back to what he was doing. But I was left feeling even more uncertain about myself. What kind of personality did I actually have?
At school or out on the street, I could chat easily even with complete strangers. But in front of relatives and family, I became a person of very few words. Especially with elders: ninety percent of the time I just listened, and every now and then I would show agreement with a quiet "mm." Those conversations were dull in one sense, but fortunately many of the elders in my family were experienced and reasonably educated, so even if only one person was really talking, I could still get something out of it. In that way, even my perfunctory responses were not entirely false to my heart, and speaking like that was not tiring. So although I never felt visiting relatives had much meaning, I was not especially resistant to it either.
As time passed, I gradually realized the biggest problem in my personality: I am extraordinarily fake.
At home, there is no need to be fake, so I do not talk much. In other settings, who really knows whom? Every gathering eventually ends. What is there to say, really? Those words are not much different from air—they are spoken and then scattered by the wind. I do not know when I developed this habit. If I force myself to trace it back through memory, the first time was probably in the dormitory, bragging and telling stories with my roommates.
I had read quite a lot of martial arts fiction, and because they were too lazy to read for themselves, they asked me to tell them stories. Today that might sound unusual, but at that time it was perfectly normal. The school had no television, the library was not open to students, and there were no internet cafes outside the campus. So gathering together and talking became one of the greatest pleasures in life. Besides, they all liked wuxia novels.
I remember one friend had grown tired of reading martial arts fiction and actually asked me to read it aloud to him, which of course was impossible. So I told stories instead. Once I had finished all the plots I could remember, they still wanted more, so I started making things up myself. In the end I even improvised three continuations to Gu Long’s Little Li Flying Dagger. I no longer remember those storylines, but at the time my classmates listened with real enthusiasm.
And now, I do not even know where a single one of those people is. We were all from the same town. Some of them, I think, I never saw again after middle school graduation.
I became used to talking with strangers, and that made me seem especially open and cheerful. But the biggest flaw in that openness was that almost everything in it was without feeling. Because of that, the people who once talked with me so well disappeared from my life the moment we parted. We never met again, never kept in touch, because I had no emotional attachment to them.
That is not a blessing. If anything, it is one of the great tragedies of my life.
That is why I have so few friends. I am too lazy to contact the people I once got along with so well, and I do not even know why. This includes people who borrowed money from me. Whether it was tens or hundreds, I could let it go. The money was mine, but once lent out, it felt as if it had little to do with me anymore. It did not hurt, and it did not matter.
How empty must a life be when a person lacks feeling?
And now that I think of it, among all those people I used to talk to so easily, there were very few girls. Maybe that is why, after so many years of school and after meeting who knows how many girls, I never truly liked any one of them. Some classmates even joked that I might as well become a monk. And honestly, there would be nothing especially wrong with that. Every line of work needs someone, after all.
Go where life takes you. Adapt to local customs. Once a person loses feeling, he can make a home anywhere and live anywhere. In a world like that, what is left that deserves too much thought?
And yet, to say there is none at all would be another lie. Human beings are emotional creatures in the end. Time passes, and what can it not change? Even if that change is tiny, a tiny change is still enough to move the universe—and enough to begin another story.