On the 35th anniversary of June 4, I officially became a citizen of Matt City

Jun 4

I hope to finally start free writing without the need for self-censorship.

I say "hope" because I know that the poison of self-censorship in my body has not yet been cleared. Fortunately, the more I write, the more I can get rid of the poison.

I first learned about the Matters platform in early 2020. At that time, I was relaying news and rescue information about the epidemic on Douban, WeChat groups, Moments, and Weibo, racing against the post deleters. Some of the articles came from Matters, but later I learned that many of them were backups of deleted posts.

In recent years, there have been too many restrictions on expression on China's social platforms: posts on Douban and personal public accounts often need to be modified several times before they can be published successfully, posts on Moments are only visible to oneself, WeChat accounts are banned, Weibo posts are deleted and traffic is limited... This cycle repeats over and over again, and the desire to express oneself has been destroyed to the point where there is little left.

After leaving that invisible wall in the spring of 2021, things didn’t get better for a long time. At the end of last year, I finally brought my cats and books to my side, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I settled down and realized that waiting was not a good idea. I needed to start writing, and then in the process of writing, I slowly realized free expression without the shackles of self-censorship.

So I started looking for a writing platform that suits me. At first, I searched for several Taiwanese websites, but to no avail. Recently, I listened to the conversation with Matters founder Zhang Jieping on the Ununderstanding Podcast, and as someone who once studied journalism, I felt deeply resonated. Yesterday, I saw a link to the "Seven Days Book" event forwarded by a friend on the Twitter homepage, and I officially registered as a Matters member.

I look forward to achieving “the smallest unit of freedom” together with other writers here.

(The cover picture comes from the Internet, Portugal's "Carnation Revolution" in 1974)