“Sorry,
we are the last generation,
thank you.”
China, May 2022.
That line has the weight of a final utterance. Not only because of when it was spoken, or why, but because it sounded less like a slogan than the beginning of an unspoken curse. It is easy to imagine a near future in which even this plain little monologue becomes forbidden across the internet. But long before that, it has already settled into people’s minds as something unforgettable.
I am not interested here in debating its so-called historical significance. Sooner or later, it will probably be buried together with the special incidents of a special period. Any amount of explanation feels weaker than the sentence itself. Once spoken aloud, it produced very different kinds of panic. Some people were terrified, as if being seen to understand it would expose them. Some were infuriated, reporting anyone who repeated it, as if the phrase were contagious, some source of hysteria that might infect them too. Others felt a flash of excitement: at last, someone had said what they themselves did not dare say. And then life went on, exactly as before, under the same cursed restraint.
I often joke with friends that one day I may disappear from the internet entirely. That disappearance could be voluntary, but more likely it would not be. Take this blog, for instance: it does not carry an official registration number. If a strict whitelist system were ever fully enforced, a site like mine would simply be shut out.
There is another kind of disappearance too: being erased by other people.
I have met the type who follow you around reporting everything you post. Back when I used Douban, there was someone who could find something worth reporting in anything I wrote. It was a remarkable talent, the ability to pick bones out of an egg. I could not help thinking that perhaps this gift had been passed down from grandparents shaped by the Cultural Revolution. Whatever I posted, he could always discover some hidden insinuation in it. At times I almost wondered whether I really did possess some extraordinary talent for writing satirical fiction.
Why did the reporting eventually stop? Because I deleted the account. Afterward, he posted a triumphant status of his own, announcing that after sustained effort he had finally made a foreign-worshipping snob pay the price. I spent a long time reflecting on where exactly I had said anything “foreign-worshipping.” In the end, the answer was obvious enough: that Douban account contained many reviews of Japanese animation, especially films by Hayao Miyazaki, and several of those reviews had become popular. At some point I must have mentioned that domestic comics lagged behind Japanese animation in some respects. That alone was enough to earn me the label of someone who worshipped the foreign. After that, every opinion I expressed was read through that thick ideological filter.
Before I deleted the account, I swore I would never sign up for Douban again. That was my last-generation Douban account. Of course, I was saying it mostly for the benefit of that self-appointed moral police officer. I only wanted him to enjoy his little victory and, for a moment at least, leave me alone.
There was another time when a film director came after me.
I had gone to an offline screening of a niche independent film. Back then people were not yet using that phrase about embarrassment so intense your toes curl hard enough to dig out an entire apartment, but looking back, that movie probably made me dig out a whole Disney castle. Later, on Douban, I gave it a low score and wrote a sharply negative review.
To my surprise, the director himself showed up. At first he was polite and tried to reason with me. He asked whether I could delete the review and explained that he was an emerging director with much still to learn. I happened to be very busy at the time, and after posting the review I did not check Douban much. Since he could not reach me, he changed his attitude a few days later.
This time he contacted me through what he called his studio—though I was convinced it was just one of his alternate accounts. Now the tone was completely different. He demanded that I remove my “insulting” remarks about his work, otherwise they would reserve the right to pursue legal action over my “insult.” To be honest, even if he had not put on this second act, I still would not have deleted the review. That fraud’s movie was just that bad.
After several days of harassment, I finally made it clear that I was a law student. If he really wanted to drag this out, it might even be useful to me—I could treat it as a chance to put my legal knowledge into practice. Once he realized intimidation would not work, he switched tactics. Various Douban accounts started appearing under my review, objecting to my “negative rating” and lecturing me, and several other reviewers who also thought the film was terrible, that we simply did not understand art.
In the end, he gave up for a very simple reason: more and more people had seen the film, and they were all giving it low scores too. Amid a growing pile of negative reviews, the only conspicuous counterpoint was an awkward “monologue” written by the director himself, where he explained his artistic intentions, how difficult the creative process had been, and how misunderstood he was by the majority. Later, he even deleted the one and only full-mark review, then closed his account altogether.
Before leaving, he sang his own little lament as well, grieving that no one in this world understood his art, as though he were the last generation of some uniquely mournful aesthetic tradition.
At least he still had the chance to say it.
That, perhaps, is the one consoling part. Many people are worn away long before they ever get to utter their final line. Whether they have any “descendants” is no longer something anyone cares about. It is even less likely anyone will remember them.
I once saw a small joke online. Someone asked: since Cao Mengde knew Lü Bu was such a formidable man, why did he not keep him alive and pass on his genes, so that more powerful descendants could be bred from him? The answer was: Cao Mengde was Mengde, not Mendel.
What interests me about that joke is something else. It is not that Cao Cao failed to understand the value of preserving Lü Bu. It is that he saw Lü Bu as a person—still a defeated man with dignity—and therefore someone who had to be executed, not an animal to be kept as breeding stock and used to produce offspring.
Maybe that is what makes the phrase hit so hard. To be reduced to thinking in terms of whether there will be a “next generation” is already a kind of humiliation. And for many, even that is a luxury. They are erased before the question can ever be asked.