I’m not a particularly focused person. When I’m eating or working, part of my attention is usually still roaming around, tracking whatever is happening nearby. That’s probably why I so often end up noticing the table where something illicit is clearly going on, or the family whose entire emotional structure is visible from the way they pass a dish.
So here’s a small collection of those observations.
The misery of the middle-aged man
At a family dinner last night, I was struck again by how much one relative’s fear of death has intensified.
He used to be the sort of man who indulged in every vice available to him. Back when his daughter—my younger cousin—was still in middle school, he and his wife were already sleeping in separate rooms. The marriage had long since become a shell, but his wife was determined to preserve the appearance of happiness at any cost and absolutely refused divorce. At these annual family meals, you can watch the two of them stage that performance for everyone in attendance.
What makes me say his death anxiety is getting worse is that his life now feels completely enclosed. He complains that both his wife and daughter monitor everything he does. His daughter knows when his car starts and which parking garage he enters. His wife can infer where he’s been through highway ETC charges. He’s reached the age where he no longer has the energy for his old forms of pleasure, and the rest of life no longer does much to hold back his fear of mortality either. So over the past couple of years, he has rapidly turned into an ultra-nationalist type, surrendering his individuality to the crowd so he can borrow from it a sense of grandeur larger than himself.
He ended up with a university job teaching political history, and seems to have fully abandoned whatever remained of his former individual appetites. He now fends off his growing fear of death through the pleasures of fatherhood and through identification with the nation.
As far as I know, he doesn’t have those hobbies some men use as symbolic substitutes—no fishing, no heavy motorcycle obsession. His masculine energy has been transferred almost entirely into national glory.
The 80/20 rule of moving a refrigerator
Workers came to take away an old refrigerator. The pickup had been arranged online, which meant we had to pay a 60-yuan bulky trash disposal fee, and in exchange they could take away a refrigerator that was still intact.
Then began the whole ordeal of getting it out of the kitchen.
At first they couldn’t move it through the kitchen entrance, and one worker told me that if the kitchen door frame stayed in place, the fridge would never come out.
I said: if the fridge door can be removed, then why not remove that first? Otherwise how did it get in there to begin with?
He had to go downstairs to get tools. After removing the fridge door, he discovered it still wouldn’t come out. Then he started complaining again and hinting that I should just cancel the order myself.
One glance was enough to see where it was actually getting stuck: not the refrigerator door, but the support around one of the feet. So he started dismantling that bracket. He removed one side, got impatient, tried hauling it out again, and of course it jammed completely. He turned around and started lashing out at me in pure incompetent frustration.
I said: isn’t the other foot still attached?
Eventually, amid several rounds of pointless anger and repeated suggestions that I should just deal with it myself, the second support came off and the refrigerator slid out easily. In fact, the door hadn’t even needed to be removed.
That’s the difference between identifying the 20 percent of a problem that actually matters and spending 80 percent of your energy on blind brute force.
Performing on command
One morning I took the dog downstairs and got into the elevator with a mother and daughter. It was around 8:30, which should have been school time, but the girl clearly wasn’t going to school.
An ad was playing on the elevator screen, and the girl cheerfully sang along to the jingle—completely delighted. Her mother, in a flat and cutting tone, said: “Weren’t you sick? So now that you’ve taken leave from class, you’re suddenly all better?”
The girl immediately changed expression and began sighing like she was unwell again.
A pair who would kill as a low-grade comedy duo
Because of work, my wife and I both spend a lot of time observing people. To what extent? We can be talking business with a client in a café while simultaneously taking in enough information to identify which nearby table is having an affair.
And once again, the room delivered.
At a high-speed rail station we saw a man and woman traveling in business class. The woman was dragging a large suitcase by herself; the man had only a backpack. They looked profoundly mismatched. But while going through the station, he kept getting handsy—touching her hips, her back, and generally behaving with the kind of casual physical familiarity that didn’t quite match the rest of the picture.
So what was the most likely relationship?
To test our theory, we even consulted a friend who knows the nightlife and hostess scene well enough to explain some of the local patterns—like how women in this line of work who carry their own suitcase are often transporting outfit changes and props.
Our final conclusion, in the format of a stand-up routine, was roughly this: after finally making it to P7, he booked an escort on a business trip to congratulate himself on the promotion.
What children are made of
A large part of why I dislike children is that most of them are pure irrationality. If they do happen to be rational, they often grow up into people who are difficult to approach—real oddballs.
The difference between that kind of oddball and the sort who perform being “different” is whether or not they need attention.
Children whose rational faculties develop too early often become self-contained very young. Their inner world already makes sense to them; they don’t need witnesses. But the self-consciously “unique” type depends on contrast and recognition. If nobody sees them, and they keep searching for existence purely inside their own private world, eventually they start to drown in it.
At the waiting hall, I saw a child who seemed to belong to the first category. He radiated a very strong lack of interest in the outside world. The only thing that genuinely interested him was comparing the ingredient lists on two different snacks and reporting the differences he found to his mother.
His mother, staring at her phone and paying almost no attention, responded only with: “Are you eating it or not? If not, put it back.”
The boy didn’t protest. He simply picked up another snack, compared the ingredients again, and kept happily talking to himself as he looked for similarities.
Café field notes
A few scenes from one café:
- A high school boy had clearly used “studying at the café” as cover to go on a date with an older woman, maybe 25 or 26. She mentioned taking her younger brother out for hotpot at noon. The boy immediately asked whether he could go to her place in the afternoon.
- An office worker was in a video meeting. At first he kept the call on speaker, probably to project that he had some respectable professional life. Then the people on the other end started criticizing his work attitude, and he put on headphones almost instantly and never dared use speakerphone again.
- An older woman was interviewing a younger candidate. The candidate quickly seized control and started asking what the company could actually offer. The interviewer listed afternoon tea and periodic travel perks. The candidate replied: “Can any of that be converted into money? My last company said the same thing.”
- A man whose wife had taken his phone went to borrow one from staff at a tea shop. The staff were understandably cautious. In the end he suggested they place the call for him and leave the phone on speaker at the counter. As soon as the person on the other end realized it was her husband calling, she asked: “Whose phone is this? Which woman are you with?”
Don’t block my peacock display
Middle-aged women in Chengdu really don’t hide competitive femininity very well.
I watched one woman recommend drunken crab to the other two at the table. When they both accepted without asking the obvious follow-up question, she hurried to add, while ordering, “Get two drunken crabs for them. I drove, so I can’t eat drunken crab.”
That set the tone for the entire meal. All three spent the whole time snatching the conversational microphone from one another. Someone would begin telling a story about herself, and before the point had even landed, another would hijack the topic and make it about her own experience instead.
The woman eating the crab refused to lose ground, so while eating she kept putting down the restaurant’s version and emphasizing that she had eaten more authentic drunken crab “in Shanghai.” Another woman wasn’t about to fall behind either. Out of nowhere, after they’d already been sitting there for twenty minutes, she complained that her head felt warm even though the air conditioning was cold. Then she pulled an Hermès scarf from her bag and arranged it around her neck.
And yet there was a strange balance in the relationship. They weren’t truly concerned with whether the others were looking at them. What mattered was simply that, in that exact moment, no one blocked their chance to spread their feathers.
What kind of “distinguished family” is this?
At another table there was a father with his daughter, his parents, and his grandmother.
The great-grandmother barely spoke and focused on eating. The father also ate calmly, almost expressionless. Meanwhile the grandparents lavished such constant, minute-by-minute attention on the little girl that it became irritating just to watch.
Their care had expanded into total control over the surrounding environment, including spaces that weren’t really theirs to command. They insisted there be no empty chair near our table, because they wanted room to carry the girl around and soothe her by pacing. Any empty seat in the area, to them, counted as an obstacle. They also made the restaurant staff disinfect the baby chair in front of them.
The grandfather’s way of loving her was through control. Every action had to happen according to his rules: what she should eat first, how many bites, in what sequence. Whenever the girl became impatient under that pressure, the grandmother rushed in to rescue her and switched into indulgent doting.
So the child was being raised inside this split, almost schizophrenic pattern—strict control from one side, immediate emotional rescue from the other.
The father ignored the two elders almost the entire time. And when the granddaughter was under the grandfather’s jurisdiction, the man’s mother shifted her controlling energy back to her own son—serving him food, portioning dishes for him and for the old grandmother, then continuing to narrate what the granddaughter should eat and why.
At one point the son finally snapped and said to his mother: “If you want to eat, then eat. You don’t have to explain every single thing you’re doing. Your granddaughter doesn’t even understand what you’re saying.”
It didn’t discourage her in the slightest. She soon “retrieved” the granddaughter from her husband’s arms and went right back to explaining to the child why she was putting this particular dish into her bowl and what would happen after she ate it.
It was an intensely fractured family. The father seemed as if he had already given up resisting his parents, had a daughter, and simply handed the next generation over to them. That may be why his attitude toward the child looked so much like indifference.