Christmas and New Year's Day

Yesterday, I heard in a group that Shenzhen University will not allow students to celebrate Christmas this year. I don't know if it is true or not. Although I occasionally saw the news of "boycotting Christmas" on the Internet at that time, I laughed it off and never thought that one day the "Ocean Festival" would become a kind of politics in this land. Incorrect, it even became one of the reporting items.

For this city, this should be quite absurd, because before coming to Shenzhen, I had never heard of Christmas, nor did my well-informed cousin tell me. Shenzhen spent my entire teenage years instilling in me the belief in Christmas, and now abandoning it ruthlessly, people like me can probably be called "Christmas refugees".

The animations I watched before I came to Shenzhen did not mention Christmas, such as "Saint Seiya", the background is Greek mythology. "Doraemon" has a lot of single episodes about Christmas, but I haven't watched them before I came to Shenzhen. When I was in third grade, I had a single copy of "Doraemon" that sold for about 6 yuan (it was expensive in comic books at that time), and once in it, it was mentioned that one of Nobita's classmates wanted to spend time on Christmas night out of face. He received friends from the class, but his family of nearly ten people crowded into a small dilapidated house. Sometimes when one person came back, the other had to go out. In order not to disappoint him, her mother planned to take the whole family out to make room for him in the cold weather. In the end, this problem was solved through a magical gravity paint: the six sides of the house became a place for activities, classmates You can come, and your family can stay.

This story shaped my imagination of Christmas, and since then I have felt that this festival should be enjoyed by a group of people, and preferably in a space that is not too large. At the end of the comic, Nobita, Doraemon and the classmate sang "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" together, other friends were chasing and playing on the wall, while the classmate's family was still doing handicrafts, and the whole house was radiating Has a warm air. On Christmas Eve in 1995, I revisited this story. In the room facing the guest house on Songyuan South Street, I was covered with a light blue and light red quilt. Also warm.

At that time, there were several stationery stores near Hongling Elementary School, and they would sell all kinds of Christmas cards at Christmas, nothing more than printing a Santa Claus or a Christmas tree, each with fifty cents or one dollar. That year, I received a Christmas card from a female classmate with a very ordinary Christmas greeting written on it. I took the card and asked her, why did you send it to me? She said, I just bought too much, so I just want to give it to you. I didn't get into her words, but for this reason, I also buy a few Christmas cards every Christmas and give them to some friends who I have had more fun with this year, such as my roommate A Cai.

I didn't get a chance to spend Christmas with a group of people until I graduated from elementary school. This aspect of course has something to do with the strict control of the parents of elementary school students. After all, it is really Christmas, and it is too disappointing to go home before seven or eight o'clock. On the other hand, my popularity is really not good. I know that some classmates have Christmas activities at home, and the friends who participated can spend the night at his house. Of course, this kind of thing is not my turn. After junior high school, staying home all night doesn't seem like a big deal. Just make a phone call at home, but let alone find someone to spend Christmas with me, I can't even receive a Christmas card now.

In the second year of junior high school, the head teacher used the class fee to buy a whole set of "Bookworms" series, which are abbreviated English versions of various literary masterpieces. A female classmate named Xiaoman and I were the most diligent in the class, so we would say hello to each other from time to time, "Remember to give me your book when you finish reading it." When we were almost finished, she asked me which books I liked the most. I said The Call of the Wild and Edgar Allan Poe. She said she was Pride and Prejudice and Little Women. There's only one book that crossed our minds, and that's Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

I don't know if this is the reason, but during the summer vacation after the breakup, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was walking around Hongling Road with my classmate Xiaoman. The neon lights across the road were very bright. I suddenly asked her, will you spend Christmas with your family this year? She said it should be. When I woke up, I didn't know what the dream meant. In the next three years, I went up and down Hongling Road hundreds of times. Sometimes on the way to chat with her in the Internet cafe, I saw the bright white light of the 7-11 sign opposite, and suddenly I would be dumbfounded. After standing for a while, I never had the opportunity to ask Xiaoman such a question in person.

As mentioned earlier, Christmas is a belief. For our generation of children who grew up in Shenzhen, another deeply ingrained belief is the New Year's Day countdown. It was my childhood playmate Ah Shui who passed on the latter belief to me. In the 1990s, when the young and dangerous culture was popular, Ah Shui regarded me as his little brother, and always had a posture of "covering me". That's more or less the reason we parted ways later on, but at that point, I do appreciate that he didn't forget to take me with him on some big days. On the New Year’s Eve in 2000, we set off from the electrical appliance company after dinner. The first destination was Sungang Bridge, and then we walked along People’s Park Road to the East Gate. We picked up one of his classmates along the way. After sitting in the room for two hours, we finally arrived at the Shenzhen Grand Theater at 11:30. In my junior high school diary, there was also a photo of him and a few classmates leaning against each other beside the flower bed.

Xiaoman classmate, high school went to another school. I still miss her, and I go to the Internet cafe every weekend just to have a word with her. A week before New Year's Day in 2002, I asked her if she would go to CITIC Plaza, the most popular New Year's Eve location after the Grand Theater. She said she should go, with her high school classmates. In order to look good when I saw her, I decided to make an exception to ask my classmates if they would like to go to New Year's Eve together. I asked around among people with a little friendship, and found that all the high school classmates planned to celebrate the New Year with their junior high school classmates, but all the junior high school classmates planned to celebrate the New Year with their high school classmates. I ended up going alone that night. I was afraid that Xiaoman would be embarrassed when he saw me, so I decided to find her first, and then just watch her from a distance, so that she wouldn't see herself. I have no concept of the scale of tens of thousands of people, and just searched for her figure in the crowd with the phrase "should go". She did have a cell phone at the time, but I've only used my dad's phone to text her once, and it's clear my dad wouldn't think days like this would justify taking me out for a night. Before and after the countdown, I searched for about an hour or two. At 12:30, a large number of people began to pour in the direction of the Grand Theater, and I was also pushed to that side. When I arrived near the portrait of Deng Xiaoping (the roads on both sides were not fenced with railings like they are now), I saw three or four classmates from Jade Garden, from junior high school, high school, the same class, and different classes. A few of them also saw me, and they all invariably looked surprised at first, then embarrassed with sympathy and suppressed smugness, and finally turned their faces away. No one dared to say hello to someone who was alone on a day like this.

The material poverty of my teenage years did not cause me any trauma. I never made "prosperity" my goal in life, I never thought about making money by any means, and I never wanted to prove to those who laughed at my poverty that they thought gone. While I was instinctively making money and saving because of my insecurities, money was never too high in my value order, just instrumental. However, the isolation in interpersonal relationships left a poisonous effect on my spirit that was difficult to remove for a moment, and it still accompanies me to this day.

This toxic effect could have been cured after the sophomore class. The new class is a liberal arts class. My grades in Chinese, English and politics are still relatively good, so I am often praised by teachers and classmates. There are also many people in the class who are willing to make friends with me, such as Lao Zhang and Lao Wu, one of them has turned their home into my holiday resort, and the other loves to pull me along to guide the country. On the New Year's Eve in 2004, the two of them knew my knot and insisted on going to CITIC Plaza with me again. When it was almost midnight, Lao Zhang took out his mobile phone and asked me to call Xiaoman. She told me a while ago that she was going back to China for Christmas vacation. I dialed the number she gave me, and I heard that familiar voice. There were so many people around me. I couldn't hear what she said at all. I just hurriedly said "Happy New Year".

In any sense, this is an ideal class, and even the math teacher and the Chinese teacher met each other because of the conflict of spirits, which has a strong comedy color. The class regularly organizes activities, and they never leave me behind, just like the arrangement, they visited the places that left their mark on my growing up, Litchi Park, Luohu Library, Xianhu, and Dameisha. . In my senior year of high school, my physical problems never ceased, but I never heard a sarcasm from any of my classmates. It was also during this period that I began to write a little more decent text, which was inseparable from the good literary atmosphere in the class.

It seemed like a kind of compensation for the miserable first half of my life, but it was not actually compensated. I just became more intolerable to be alone and didn't know how to maintain some long-term relationships that could be trusted. When I got to university, I didn't have much burden, so I distanced myself from my former classmates, because there was a wider space for me to display. I managed to gain a foothold in some groups without much effort, and make this a bragging achievement. Although I read a considerable number of philosophy books in college, most of which spared no effort to criticize the diseases of the times, what I didn't realize was that I had developed a fascination with "symbols" in the matter of relationships, This is not fundamentally different from those diseases.

I'll never spend Christmas and New Years alone again, not only that, but I'll be making notes in places. Judging from the documents left behind, I spent Christmas with my girlfriend at the time in the first year of college. In the second year, a girl with Christian beliefs invited me to have dinner and go to their church. I refused in the second half. In the fourth year, I met a junior sister who looked like Xiaoman, and we spent Christmas Eve in the atmosphere of "Blueberry Night". As for New Year's Day, in 2006, my friends from the student union and I counted down in the sea world. In 2008, we were still this group of friends. We were in the fishing village of the common people for some things that we can't think of now.

I spent these festivals with them, which shows that I still like them, but more importantly, I have a fear of spending both festivals alone. After high school, I rarely felt the chill of loneliness soaking through my body, replaced by the heat of being surrounded by bustling relationships. During the few days when I took the graduation photo, I was rushing around with my phone vibrating, and unknowingly realized an idea that I secretly sprouted at the entrance of the No. 13 bus a few years ago, and wanted to become a popular person. On the evening of the graduation dinner of the English Department, everyone simply ate 70% full, and they all said that they would go back to the dormitory to rest, and some people had to get up early tomorrow. I stopped a few of them and said, what are they talking about? Why don't you find a restaurant to continue drinking, and find someone to carry the broken pieces back, this is university graduation. They looked at me with strange eyes, these eyes and the ones I saw at the junction of Shennan Avenue and Hongling Road in the early morning of January 1, 2002, became the lingering nightmare of my life. I've spent most of Christmas and New Year's Day diligently and diligently for the past four years, only to be ruined at the last minute, which is probably another god's joke with me.

After graduate school, the knot of Christmas and New Year's Day still exists, but it has been transformed into a ritual in the heart, which is more or less related to the determination to pursue philosophy as a career. I once said to my friends that literature saved me, it created a world for me, away from the poverty and triviality of reality, but at the same time, it also magnified my loneliness, because loneliness is shameless in literature, even to be praised. Philosophy brought me another effect (in my undergraduate years, philosophy was just a subordinate of literature, as can be seen from my preference for Nietzsche, Camus, Rorty), most philosophers take loneliness for granted, But I don't take this too seriously, this is probably my attitude towards life from now on.

On Christmas Eve in 2008, I went to Grandview Plaza in Guangzhou by myself and saw girls wearing Christmas headgears and some boys wearing Christmas hats. After midnight, I followed my memory and walked back. Along the way, I saw those low arcades under the dim light. The people walking below seemed to be protected, cramped and at ease. When I arrived at the Haiyin Bridge, everything suddenly became clear. I read a few pages of "Zhuangzi" under the street lamp, and the grievances in my heart over the past ten years seemed to be washed away by the strong wind on the bridge. On December 24, 2011, I imitated the scene of "Tokyo Girls" and had a long-distance Christmas Eve date with a girl. I started from my favorite Longjin Road and went straight to Enning Road. The arcades on these two roads are relatively concentrated, but they are not in the downtown area. While taking pictures of the festivities, I wrote beautiful prose poems about my thoughts and feelings and sent them to her. Looking back now, this was really a "dating" that was never so shabby, but at that time it was only romantic. If everyone has a stage of themselves that is closest to their "authentic self", then for me, it is probably this stage, where there is no hatred, flattery, or revenge towards the world, and only true expression of oneself.

On the other hand, however, I study political philosophy. Politics is "people's business", and political philosophy is naturally a "group study". From Aristotle, to Rousseau, to Arendt, to contemporary republicans, they have all emphasized the need to achieve connection with others in politics. My attitude towards this approach has undergone very complex changes. Initially, I preferred classical liberalism based on "atomic individuals" as the starting point. The theory that emphasizes the obligations of individuals to others and to the community always falls into the pattern of Chinese "collectivism" in my opinion. The turning point was in the spring semester of 2011, when Mr. Deng started a study of "The Theory of Justice". Rawls said that contemporary society is a field of "life and death", and everyone is affected by it and cannot escape completely. In other words In other words, the very nature of contemporary society predestines everyone to be connected to others in some way. In Scanlon's words, "we owe each other."

My identification with the new idea is not only manifested in a greater focus on republican theory, but also in the possibility of a connection of reality, as Arendt said, "Power is only formed when people come together for action. ". I quoted this sentence for the first time in "The Sinicization" of Left-wing Liberalism in 2015, which also marked my commitment to real politics. Unfortunately, when my mindset began to change, the last wave of China's movement dedicated to building broad civic ties was coming to an end, and by the time I took on the responsibility, many of that group of people were already isolated from the rest of the world. . Nonetheless, for the first two years I have always positioned myself as a "connector", connecting academics with activists, liberals with pan-lefts, feminists, and Christians. This is really a difficult task for someone who has been socially isolated since childhood, but in recent years, I have witnessed the tear between reformists and reformists, liberals and feminists (starting from Liu Yu's comment on #MeToo), feminist and pan-left split (from Wang Xiaohai's dismissal from the Jianjiao tribe), split within feminists (from North American feminist group incident), support for Sichuan The tearing apart from the anti-Sichuan faction, a sense of powerlessness arises spontaneously.

I know some people in the minority who, like me, are not very pleasant personalities themselves. They are concerned with public affairs, both out of a natural or learned sense of justice, and out of a need for personal redemption. Some of them stand against their opponents because of some deceased companions, some feel owed to the weak because of their superior background, and some rise up because they feel the systemic oppression brought about by a certain identity. Compared to them, I feel my motivation is much smaller. For the first half of my life, I was trapped by loneliness and bad relationships. Only in the past few years can I vaguely feel that a vague community is gradually becoming clear. When I'm writing some articles, I can even see the hair and nails of a reader behind the text, and hear him slowly exhale from his mouth. This is probably the so-called "comrade".

This year, the community has become blurred again, because the channels of connection are decreasing and the risks of connection are increasing. I fell into a more unbearable state than college, and I was constantly running around in some relationships that made people feel drained. The sense of meaninglessness covered every corner of my mind like moss. On the evening of the 24th, when I had a lifeless Christmas meal and saw the Christmas atmosphere in the mall so cold, I couldn't help but feel sad when I thought of these things written here.

Going around in circles, back to a certain point of origin. Christmas and New Year's Day, isn't it a metaphor here?