I go through the wall

Even if you don't look at the scary news, you can still feel that the "wall" has become significantly higher. Sometimes I need to keep switching nodes and jumping to get rid of the cut off speed. For the first time, the Internet has returned to the era when it intersected with reality, and we calculated lost time by seconds and pulse beats.

The wall, from the Great Wall to the "country not connected to the Internet", or you can enter keywords in the old photo submission account on a whim, and you will get a series of horrifying and sad moments from the establishment to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, as if a secret collective unconscious longs for us. The tangible and invisible wall we are experiencing also follows this historical development pattern, and we finally have the day when we can freely explore the world.

Thinking back to the anime "Attack on Titan" ten years ago and "Pantheon" that was born in the era of the new crown pandemic, there is no reason to pretend to be just metaphors anymore. We are indeed facing such a situation: electrified barbed wire at the border, and The idea first proposed by the Soviets was to "take the country off the Internet." Visible and invisible, it surrounds our lives.

When the epidemic prevention and control blockade was lifted at the beginning of the year, people on the China-Vietnam border celebrated the Huashan Festival across a barbed wire fence and wished each other a Happy New Year. Some people "walked" (as the name suggests, walking across the border) to the United States. These two pieces of news are actually related to the same issue.

The Vietnamese on the other side of the barbed wire fence also call it the "wall", which is what separates them from their families. For them, the people on the other side of the wall are not "Chinese", but family members, relatives, and a real family. The only exception China made for that festival was to cut off the power supply to the barbed wire fence. However, after seeing the scene of the Huashan Festival meeting, we understood that this action was just a last resort. Since it could not stop the meeting, it had no choice but to make concessions.

Keywords such as "route" and "United States" are obviously not allowed to exist or be disclosed, and now they have almost disappeared. But later I learned that the country they went to without hesitation did not even have a department like the Immigration Administration. It was already clear what kind of longing drove them forward under this choice.

Don't look at me now. I can give so many examples and seem to be able to accurately describe the "wall". In fact, it's just because you and I both agree on the "wall". When I was in college, my 20-year-old roommate learned about the existence of the "wall" for the first time. She asked curiously, and I and another star-chasing roommate tried to explain it, but it all seemed like a science fiction story, based on the imagination of the person involved. In the clouds and fog.

She hadn't climbed over the wall, and it was even less likely to happen after that. Later, I went to work as a publicity mouth for a state-owned enterprise. This is a common destination for our journalism graduates. When she first graduated, she would also send me private messages asking me what our professor with the most radical political views was really angry about in his posts on WeChat Moments. The subtext of the confusion is that the country has not done enough, so it must take its time. So later on, he became devoted to patriotism.

The fourth person in the dormitory, who at that time remained silent or uninterested in the "wall" issue, became a teacher after graduation. Now that I think about it, he is indeed the kind of person who can be seen joining the body in a few years.

I don't blame these people, nor do I ridicule them. On the contrary, I love them, but I feel sad when I think about them.

Another story about "climbing over the wall" was told to me by a friend of mine. Only one year of her college life was normal, and the remaining three years were "epidemic prevention" and she never went out again. During those days of lockdown, they literally climbed over the wall, and some even broke their legs, but they still didn't force the wall to collapse.

My mother already knows that I am a writer. She sometimes smells the slightest danger signs from the iron-barrel-like cocoon of the Internet. When chatting with me, she specifically told me: We just need to know. You can only say this. Tell me, don’t post it online, everyone’s point of view is different. In fact, these words have been processed by her. What she means is that there are more people with different views and they are more fierce. If you trespass among them, you will only be torn to pieces.

But even this kind of environment has to be attributed to that wall. It is not a thousand years old, but it has a thousand years of merits and blessings for future generations.

My sister-in-law's five or six-year-old child came home and asked her if Americans are all bad people. She said, no, there are good people and bad people in every country. The child no longer listens. The news said it, the teacher said it, and grandpa said it, and the mother was wrong.

And those silent and poor people usually live like animals with their heads buried in their chests. Only when they talk about "patriotism" do they open their eyes, pupils dilate, raise their voices, and become super orators.

I saw it with my own eyes, and it still shocks me.

Tonight I was looking for metaphors related to "wall" and saw a poem "Wall" written by Shu Ting:

I can't fight the wall

only the desire to resist

What am I? what is it?

Very likely

It's my aging skin

I can't feel the rain, cold or wind

I can’t stand the fragrance of Milan either

Or I'm just a plantain

decoratively

parasitic in its mud crevices

My chance determines its inevitability

At night, the wall comes alive

stretch out soft pseudopods

Squeeze me and blackmail me

I need to adapt to all kinds of shapes

I fled to the street in terror

Found the same nightmare

Hanging on everyone's heels

A series of shrinking glances

a wall of cold

finally, I understand

The first thing I have to resist is

My compromise with the wall, and

Insecurity about the world

注：近年中国边境建起了距离边界不远、动辄绵延上千公里的铁丝网，包含中朝、中俄、中蒙、中哈、中吉、中塔、中越、中缅等国的边界。