What happened to those who refused to return to China?

In fact, it is an old article from two years ago. It was sent by Jieping at the request of XDDD

-----------

Many years later, when the four of us gathered again at a 20-storey bar in Tsim Sha Tsui, facing the lights of Victoria Harbour, we once again talked about why we left our hometown.

Ayi went to study in Japan alone after learning Japanese by herself. Tian Ye traveled to and from several domestic and foreign cities and finally chose Beijing. seven years.

I told them that after chatting with many Hong Kong locals about life philosophy, I felt the need to re-talk with old friends about what it means to live away from home.

The feeling of being out of place when I chatted with my Hong Kong friends stemmed from the difference in everyone's imagination of life.

It is very common for our generation of mainland youths to leave their hometowns and wells: they were born in city A, went to city B to study at university, and went to work in city C after graduation. We fly from one place to another like migratory birds.

"Long-distance relationship" has always been a hot topic on the Internet, because you drift away from your high school sweetheart after college, and you have to realistically break up with your college girlfriend when you return to your hometown after graduation or choose a career.

From the big propositions of "escape from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or return to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou" and "whether to go back to my hometown for development", to the small question of how to go home during the Chinese New Year, we are all concerned. All the waves of cross-regional survival are naturally engraved in our way of life.

But when I faced my peers in Hong Kong, I realized that this kind of life is not inevitable.

Except for a small number of people, most young people in Hong Kong were born here, grew up here, studied here, worked here, and died here. There is almost no option of "leaving Hong Kong" in their consciousness.

They are always close to their parents; when they are in their twenties and thirties, the group of friends they usually get together are still middle school classmates; the boys and girls who were together when they were young, continue to date until they get married. This is what they take for granted.

There's nothing wrong with that, it's just that this state of being makes us see the world differently.

The moment I realized this, I suddenly felt that Hong Kong, an international city... "is like a small fishing village" - I was careful to find the words, but I was still afraid of hurting the other party's feelings.

"Hong Kong was originally a small fishing village," the Hong Kong friend said calmly and laughed it off.

I dare not say this to my friends in my hometown, even though I feel the same.

I once went home to attend a gathering of friends before. Among the few people besides me, one was in the Education Bureau, one was running a health care product store, and the other was doing a micro-business. The friend who opened the store had a child who was about to go to school, and asked about the school distribution of the Education Bureau. The micro-businessman sold some products on the storefront of the store, and asked the other party how the sales were.

During the banquet, there was a lot of smoke and fire in the room, and I couldn't get in my mouth. Then I was speechless for a while, and the three of them played the glory of the king online. At that moment I looked at them and found it very interesting, as if they were close to me and far away from me.

Of course, I dare not and cannot have any "superiority of Hong Kong overseas students" towards them. The income of all of you here should be higher than mine. On the contrary, the current international students and returnees are all trembling, for fear that domestic friends will misunderstand that they have a sense of superiority. Hurt each other's national self-esteem.

If you chat with Tai Fascinated about your ups and downs outside, I'm afraid you will be rewarded with a sentence:

"What's so great about Hong Kong?"

"Pretend to be a foreign guest."

It's just that feeling, the feeling when chatting with Hong Kong friends, flashed in my heart again.

I later mentioned to my friends who stayed in the US and the UK that they had similar feelings when they chatted with some British and Americans who had never left their hometowns.

It's as if life draws a line between us, dividing people into those who have really lived in a foreign land and those who have not lived in a foreign land.

When you cross that line, you don't see things the same way. You feel that the important things are different, the things you care about are different, and the content of interest is different.

This is not the cliché of "pursuing self-worth", and it is not about abandoning daily necessities and mainstream values. This is a reborn value measurement standard and perspective.

Life has changed your eyes for you, just like in the science fiction novel "Three-Body Problem", the fleet escaped from the earth when the catastrophe was imminent. The moment they flew away from Earth, they conceptually became another alien race, even though they were still biologically identical to humans.

It certainly wasn't income that brought about the change. If the quality of life is the only criterion for judging life, then contemporary foreigners must be lacking in confidence.

And the next thing to come to the table is "vision." The ancients liked to say that "reading thousands of books is not as good as traveling thousands of miles". If a person travels far and comes into contact with more new things, his "vision" will naturally be wider.

We always acquiesce that living in a foreign land can allow people to "see the world", so it will inevitably help people's spiritual growth and worldview shaping. This may seem logically simple, but this presupposition does not actually make sense.

More exposure to new things does not necessarily mean stronger speculative ability and more open ideas.

It took about two years before I realized that what changes our eyes is not something as simple as "new things". It is not that when you wander in a foreign land and see different skin colors and languages, folk customs and laws, it suddenly becomes a vision vast human beings.

What changes us is pain.

It is the loneliness and displacement brought about by dislocation and separation, the identity confusion faced when resetting the identity, and all the special pains that must be faced in cross-regional life, which makes us become another race.

Living across regions is essentially an artificial dislocation.

You are like a cog, pulling yourself out of your comfortable growth and running, placing yourself in an unfamiliar machine, trying to find the embedded position again, and start turning.

Migration is the unknown that lies in front of everyone. It is an uprooted tree, transplanted from one petri dish to another, drifting from one kind of existence to another kind of existence.

In Western society, excessive relocation of parents is even recognized as a kind of childhood injury to children, because children's living environment and childhood friends have to be changed, and children may fall into loneliness, confusion, emptiness, and even cause various psychological problems.

And most of my friends who are abroad have suffered from depression more or less.

A few years ago, I read a story about a mainland girl who came to Hong Kong.

She felt that Hong Kong was a cold and ruthless financial city. She came to Hong Kong for four years and got very little warmth, and later contracted depression. One day when I was eating at a chain restaurant, the local uncle who shared the table suddenly chatted with her and talked about his several part-time jobs: delivering food, selling fruit, and working as a back chef. The uncle said that Hong Kong is a city with a lot of pressure.

Tears welled up in her eyes suddenly: "I feel so stressed." After receiving the tissue from the uncle, she burst into tears.

People who live across regions are no strangers to this feeling.

One late night a few years ago, I just got off work and was sitting on the last train of a double-decker bus. I was crying because of all the troubles in life, so I called Ayi who was far away in Japan: "Ayi, I am very sad. , can I hear you sing?"

Ayi didn't ask a word, and sang me a gentle Japanese song. She didn't ask me what happened until she hung up the phone.

I think this kind of tacit understanding is almost a password, and she and I are in a foreign land without too much explanation.

In "Journey to the West", when Tang Sanzang was treated coldly by the monks of the Wuji country, he said: "People who leave their hometowns are cheap."

For the children of high-ranking officials or the rich and powerful, this means that the naked domestic resources cannot be realized: the monk who was surrounded by the royal brother in the Tang Dynasty can only be ignored by the demon monk when the tiger falls in Pingyang; the child who holds the golden key in the country , Leaving home may only be an "ordinary citizen" with some money.

For the more common middle-class immigrants and people studying abroad, the words "people leave their hometowns and humble" contain a more real skin-to-skin experience: in order to open your eyes, you step into this icy river and walk The rivers and lakes, self-inflicted. All emotions are unique.

Below the sea level of this emotion is the self-cognition impact that you need to face when you are alone in a foreign land as a stranger, facing the arrangement of identity and social position.

When Tian Ye was studying political science in Europe, he once told me that he thought it was not suitable for Chinese students to study abroad.

"I think you should study for a master's degree before going out. Young people have unstable values, and when they encounter a little adversity outside, they can easily become a fierce regionalist."

When you live in your hometown, national identity or hometown identity is never a primary issue. Unless it's a quarrel with a netizen, you don't usually say "I'm proud of being a Shandong/Fujian/Chinese" out of the blue.

And when you live in a foreign land, regional identity will suddenly occupy an important proportion in your life and even your survival.

Some commentators have cited Russian history as an example. Intellectuals who were deported to Western Europe by Tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia generally became Russian nationalists later on; Alleviate the sense of loss of being excluded from the local mainstream society, and enhance the cohesion of the immigrant circle of the same ethnic group.

As a result, they actually developed stronger nationalist sentiments than those who stayed in the native land.

And you must have seen the other extreme of the scale.

In order to be able to integrate into the living circle, some people will quickly accept all the culture and values of the living area, please the local residents, and even show disdain and criticism of the original place.

We call the former kind of people overseas students Little Pink, and the latter kind of people are called foreigners.

But behind this, I am afraid there are more psychological factors than value positions. Living outside, facing the dislocation and gap of identity, people always need to adjust their position to achieve balance again.

Local friends in Hong Kong always like to ask me: Do you feel that you are from Hong Kong?

And I relegated this question to the other end of that cross-regional living thread—because it never bothered me.

Why do I have to be from a certain place? Or, can I be from many places at the same time? It is this sense of detachment that is both far and near that makes me no longer define myself with the conventional geographical labels.

So, I think I've found a real balance in the face of dislocation.

This is the way of thinking that the struggle of living across geographies teaches us. And this is probably closer to the way of thinking in the future.

A sci-fi website once imagined the appearance of a future person: TA looks like a mixture of the characteristics of almost all different races in the world, and it is completely impossible to see which race it is more like.

It has been 50 years since globalization in the modern sense, the cost of human migration has been decreasing, and the population living across regions is also increasing at the world level.

According to the 2016 Identity Report by the polling agency GlobeScan, more and more people around the world consider themselves "citizens of the world".

Especially people in developing countries and emerging economies: 71% of Chinese, 73% of Nigerians, 70% of Peruvians and 67% of Indians identify themselves as "world citizens"; 56% of emerging economies The people of a country first identify themselves as "citizens of the world" and secondly as "citizens of a certain country".

While opening their eyes, people living across regions are redefining nomads, and their cognition, their contradictions, and their perspectives will become the main story of the next era.

When the four of us met last time, we were still debating whether to return to China or not.

However, when we break away from the trivialities of reality and consider the matter of personality growth from a macro perspective, "whether to return to China" is actually not an important issue.

The question is not whether you want to stay somewhere else, be something else, but have you ever actually stepped out and seriously put your foot in that river? Most importantly, you didn't set a return date for yourself.

Because you and I both know that if you leave with a countdown, then you can only be a passing passerby.

First you have to actually put your foot in it. No worries about rocks or leeches. You embrace the joys and pains of living across borders, and take the time to love yourself and feel all the delicate emotional responses within you.

Then one day, the way you look at the world will be different, as if Ren and Du’s two veins have been opened up—it’s as if you used to only listen to pop music with a strong melody, but suddenly your ears are opened, and you know how to appreciate classical music or heavy music. music.

At this time, when someone asks you "where are you from", you will answer: I am a foreigner in this world.

What I see is what the world will look like in the future.

But the premise is that you have to go out.

-------------

This article was originally published in Tencent "Everyone"