Chronicles of the Plague Year｜The value of all things needs to be remeasured with freedom [2021 year-end record]

1. After that, everyone’s fate is falling and drifting

It’s been a year since I wrote this article.

Since I live in a unique time zone, the time is different from that of most of my friends in China, the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States, so I spend most of my time watching others New Year's Eve.

Looking at the atmosphere where everyone is seizing the time to reconcile, heal, and look forward to the last day, and thinking about the situation in 2021, there is an inexplicable feeling that even if a person is about to die, he can say the right thing...

I saw netizens discussing "the two years stolen by the epidemic" on Weibo, and I know that there are still many people whose lives have been wasted to this day, and I am far from being one of the miserable ones. At least I haven't been in embarrassment in terms of material life, but I have always been on the verge of survival mentally, and I am used to trying to find fun in life to cover up my fundamental existential crisis.

I had a long chat with my friends in China a few days ago. Both of us feel about 2021: “I don’t know what I’m doing every day.” Life seems to be stuck in 2019, and then it’s just the same, with nothing. Progress, as time goes by, I am gradually being worn away. I left China in the summer of 2019 and have not been able to go back. I don’t know when I will be able to go back. I moved to an extremely cold place with no relatives or friends. I haven’t seen my parents for more than two years, and I have lost several friends. It is becoming increasingly difficult to publish articles within the wall. Compared with the state before the epidemic, my body and mind are completely different. Although there have been many happy moments this year, the overall trend is downward. I have never had a lower opinion of myself than I do now. In order to reduce consumption, try to keep a psychological distance from yourself and let go of yourself. Many things will become unworthy of mentioning.

The reason for my lowest evaluation of myself is that I have been in constant turmoil and separation over the past two years, unable to stay where I want to be, unable to do what I want to do, unable to be with the people I want to be with, and my wishes have been repeatedly frustrated. , as a human being, I no longer feel my own agency, and almost fall into learned helplessness. The most difficult thing was the days when I was going to school and working at the same time in the first half of the year. The heavy pressure made all the contradictions in my life more acute, and my mood changed from depression and anger to endless self-loathing. Fortunately, when I was in New York at the time, I could engage in many interesting activities to counteract this negative emotion, so as to maintain daily emotional stability, normal functions, and the ridiculous decency of modern people, pretending like nothing was wrong every day; but deep down in my heart, I know that the absurdity of current life cannot be solved, and there is still no way to escape after midnight dreams.

Recalling watching "The Summer Palace" with his ex in a student dormitory in London more than ten years ago, he said that the turn of spring and summer was the turning point for this group of people. The tone of the first half of the story is upward, and the fate of everyone after that All are falling and drifting. Somehow I remember this sentence clearly.

The epidemic is probably the turning point of our generation, although all this did not start after the epidemic.

What gave me strength in this process was the community of feminist partners around me and the public events we care about. From the Stop Asian Hate movement that started in March to the global support for Peng Shuai at the end of the year, this community is always on the front line. You will be surprised at how they, who are single and weak, can attract the world's attention. After the Xiao Meili incident in the first half of the year, the community of grassroots feminist activists endured unprecedented violence and attacks. People I knew were doxxed and their accounts bombed one by one. Fear spread from April to May and June... At the height of the internet violence, we held onto our private lives tightly, sharing cherry blossoms, food, cats and jokes in small groups, reminding each other of the existence of good things in life.

In fact, I am not that selfless because they are always there, so I am too embarrassed to leave. I also plucked up the courage to write about that experience, hoping to empower myself and the community through words and resist fear and self-censorship. But as soon as the article was published, I was relentlessly scolded by a friend I had known in China for more than ten years. I was accused of "passing a knife", mocked for being hypocritical, and ordered to shut up. I tried to communicate but gave in every step, but was unable to arouse the other person's empathy. Only then did I realize that the gap in our contexts could no longer be bridged. But what irritates me in the end is her unreflective attitude towards her own privilege. In a place where violence is rampant, the so-called elites do not assume any responsibility for justice, but think they can find fault with those who resist. It is really disgusting.

I remembered that when I wrote my first article "The Lost Dog", many people also scolded me with the same words. Later, by chance, I met Cheng Yizhong and his wife in New York. He said to me, "A totalitarian society does not allow you to express emotions, especially pain, because pain is very contagious and can connect people's hearts." This gave me great encouragement.

From 19 years to now, it turns out that I have not been able to change anything, and the trauma only keeps repeating itself. At that time, I endured coaxing those who did not cut their seats, but even today they still have to cut their seats. But what’s different from 2019 is that I’m used to it.

So screw you.

In October, the editor-in-chief of Crooked Nao told me that the special project "Rescuing the Ten Years of Faults in the History of China's Feminist Movement: Group Portraits of Activists, Process and Current Situation" in March this year won this year's American Online News Society's Annual Online News Award. , cheered me up for a while. At least, this is one thing I have succeeded in this year. This project has given me a lot of empowerment. The experience of working in a team that is almost all female is still nostalgic; my spirit has been comforted, and my editing experience It has grown significantly, and I have also earned much-needed extra income. Unexpectedly, I also received an honor in the end, which saved me from wasting this year without accomplishing anything.

After my parents heard the news, they were happy and worried at the same time. They were afraid that too many people would get into trouble if they knew about it. In the end, they just shared it with their family circle and said that I was studying full-time while working this year. In order to obtain permanent residence status, I endured so much hardship and finally won a journalism award. It was really not easy.

Seeing her appreciation, I felt that this pain had found a place to accept it, and I felt very peaceful inside. Those who love me forever are always by my side.

2. We need our own house, our own fortress

As the end of the year approaches, temperatures in Winnipeg begin to approach extremes. When I got up one day, I saw a glistening layer of frost on the surface of the floor-to-ceiling window in the living room, and the snow on the balcony had no longer melted. Occasionally, heavy white snow would roar outside the window. The snow would fly sideways, and the sound of wind hitting the window frame would be almost barbaric. When it's not snowing, there are many calm days with bright sunshine, but the lighting time is too short, and it gets dark at 4:30 every afternoon.

When I went shopping recently, I could no longer expose my cheeks, and I began to feel the weight of my eyelashes. Fortunately, Qiqi gave me a down mask when I left Vancouver. Otherwise, if I wore a medical mask when I went out, even my nose hairs would start to stand out - they would freeze solid between breaths.

The temperature in the past two days has been minus 24 to 26 degrees Celsius. After the New Year, it will reach minus 40 degrees Celsius. I heard it’s been particularly cold in Canada this year, but since I’m still working from home, I don’t feel the cold without going out. I only suffer from the homeless people who often sleep in glass houses at bus stations. Before the Christmas holiday, the company also said that I would go to the office to work in February next year, which is the coldest time of the year. I couldn't help but secretly pray that the epidemic would end later and let me finish the winter at home. After all, I don’t have much contact with anyone in Winnipeg all year round, so the epidemic is far less of a threat to me than the weather.

Because of this weather that is very hostile to humans, all my activities are restricted to my home. At this time, I feel very lucky to have a comfortable living environment. Although I buy the cheapest furniture, I carefully select it to ensure it is both practical and beautiful. I have also successively bought many small appliances that can enhance my sense of well-being (after the egg boiler, the latest addition is Soda Stream, a machine for making homemade sparkling water). The most useful one is the 55-inch high-definition TV I bought with one bite. You can comfortably sit on the sofa and watch movies after work.

Materials have brought me unprecedented happiness, because I have been living a life of low material desire and lack of personal space for 5 years. This was also the first time I lived alone after many years abroad, and I found that I had underestimated (or forgotten) the importance of a house for a good life: living alone in one bedroom is so great! Do whatever you want to do every day. Woolf said that women need a room of their own to write, no, we need our own house, our own fortress.

My apartment strictly requires no pets (not even fish), only flowers and plants. At first I bought a ready-made pot of Peace lily to decorate the coffee table in the living room. Later, because I went out to play for too long, it unfortunately dried to death and turned into a pot of bare soil. When I was bored, I bought some seeds of Ping Pong chrysanthemum and planted them, and all of them sprouted suddenly. My interest grew so much that I bought other flower and plant seeds, started gardening indoors, and bought more and more equipment. In order to allow the new buds to get enough light during the long winter, I even bought a special LED light for plant growth and illuminated it regularly for 12 hours a day.

I remembered that my parents had moved to the suburbs since they retired, and they were gardening in the yard, digging and digging. I never understood the joy of taking care of flowers and plants before, until I got older and had enough of the torture of human society, and finally I was able to understand the tenderness of plants.

I’ve never cooked before, and I rarely did when I was in New York. I either ordered takeout or went out to eat. It’s a bit expensive, but there are so many delicious restaurants. But when I came to Winnipeg, the restaurants on the street were deserted, and takeout was not to my liking. I quickly developed the habit of cooking by myself, and now I cook three meals a day.

Recently, I learned how to fry steak. I wanted to eat steak on a whim when I was visiting the supermarket, so I bought the raw materials, watched an instructional video on YouTube, and started to learn and sell it now. Canadian steak is good, and it doesn’t require any skills to make. Just put the marinated steak in hot olive oil, then add butter, garlic, onion, thyme and rosemary, flip and fry. . Unexpectedly, the first time I fried it, it was a great success. It was more delicious than the steaks I had eaten in restaurants in the past. It was rich and juicy, and I was instantly addicted. Later, I made it more often and mastered the heat better and better.

It is said that the soil and water support a person. There is a reason why Canadians are addicted to steak. The environment can really change people's eating habits. Before I was 30 years old, I had a firm Chinese stomach. After I went to the United States, I became able to tell the difference. Which burger is delicious?

During Christmas, I called a female classmate from Hong Kong and another Chinese classmate to my home for dinner. I made a home-cooked menu based on the stock in the refrigerator. I made tomato and egg soup, green pepper stir-fried beef, mapo tofu, and herb and garlic flavor. shrimp. My friend brought Indian-style Butter Chicken and Tiramisu desserts. In the end, we ate them all and had a great time chatting. We sent them off just before midnight. Even so this year.

3. How many times has my heart sent requests to my brain but never received a response?

Although a person lives a very free life, not everyone can endure the loneliness of middle age. This year, loneliness seems to have officially become my destiny, and it has become inseparable from the essence of my existence.

I have actually liked to be by myself since I was a child, and I also needed a huge amount of space for introversion when I was growing up. It is precisely because of this personality that I became a writer, and the work of writing made me even more lonely. But it is always a state that I am very familiar with and even enjoy, especially in New York, where everyone is lonely but everyone enjoys it.

However, during the process of moving to Canada during the epidemic, all kinds of unfamiliar people and scenes made loneliness grow too much, beyond what I could control. It spreads like a rising tide and often erodes my entire state of mind, making all the places it touches become silent and deserted, just like the frozen river and white squares in Winnipeg during the day. A pedestrian nothing.

I began to dream often, and the dreams always had a lonely ending, or at the end of the dream, the feeling of loneliness would always surface, and I would be stuck in it for a long time after I woke up. Some people say that dreams are subconscious desires, repressed needs that are ignored by your reason. So I was forced to count how many times my heart sent requests to my brain but never got a response. Then I thought desperately that in my best years, the people I loved were not around. What a failure in life.

It actually hurts one's self-esteem to be powerless about one's own needs. I gave up my fantasies, stopped taking risks, retreated to the best of my ability, and did what I had to do every day to keep my life going. You will be glad that life has given you these tasks, because one day you will understand that when you are withering, what sustains you is not your love, but these trivial things that you have to do. If the world succeeds in giving us a mess of responsibilities, it succeeds in keeping us alive.

4. Never speak ill of Canada again.

Fortunately, rebuilding a life in a new country can be overwhelming, and the process can be surprisingly healing.

I returned to Winnipeg from New York at the end of August this year, and moved out of the student dormitory the next day after landing. I hadn't rented a house at that time, so a female classmate from Hong Kong let me temporarily stay in the basement of her house. I lived with her whole family for about half a month.

The afterglow of summer is unexpectedly long. Although Winnipeg has a cold climate, it ranks among the best cities in Canada for the number of sunshine days throughout the year. It is mostly sunny on weekdays, which makes people lose most of the reasons to resent it. During the half month I was living under someone else's roof, I looked at houses everywhere, and the more I looked at them, the more I felt overwhelmed. After getting used to the housing prices in New York, the housing prices in Winnipeg were really impressive. With my budget, I could afford a house independently. bedroom house.

When I was in New York, I lived in the Williamsburg area of ​​Brooklyn. It was just across the river from Manhattan and just one stop away from the subway. It was considered a good neighborhood. I used to share an apartment with two roommates. The monthly rent for the master bedroom where I lived was about US$1,200, not including water and electricity. But considering the size of the room, the location of the apartment and the convenience of transportation, it was already a lot. The price is very reasonable in the area, so I have lived there for 5 years without moving.

After arriving in Winnipeg, I found that the price for renting a studio apartment is generally between $700 and $1,000, and most of them include water and electricity. After money was no longer an issue, I wanted to travel more conveniently, so I only looked at houses in the busiest areas of the city center, looking for the best facilities and room types. It really brought me back to the feeling of being middle-class in China.

After several comparisons, I settled into my current apartment for a monthly rent of more than $700. It is located on the 17th floor of an apartment building and overlooks downtown Winnipeg. The large floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room face the west. Manitoba Provincial Parliament Building. There are very few such tall buildings in Winnipeg, so standing in front of the window I can see the city's horizon at a glance. Every day I can enjoy the magnificent sunset in the snowy city and the gradually lighting up of thousands of lights. Late at night, you can occasionally spot the bright moon rising above the dome of the Parliament Building.

There was nothing in the house when I moved in. I slept on a sofa bed sold to me cheaply by a female classmate from Hong Kong. I spent the whole month of September slowly adding furniture, electrical appliances, and various household items. During that time, I often went shopping everywhere to buy things. What I originally thought would be a troublesome and boring process turned out to be very fun and fulfilling. Watching this home take shape bit by bit, becoming more and more lifelike, it seems that the broken self is gradually being gathered and repaired, and this wandering heart finally regains its stability.

When I quickly moved out of New York, I was roughly torn, shattered, and stripped away, and I was rebuilt here bit by bit in different places. Those memories that have nothing to do with survival, but are very important to me, can finally leave the box and find their place beside me. I placed books and travel souvenirs in the display cabinet, and also made a photo wall with postcards I received in the past five years and photos I took with friends. On Christmas Eve, I finally framed a New York street painting that my friend gave me before I left, and hung it on the wall of my living room.

I even traveled twice before and after moving to my new home. Travel may be a hobby that I will never lose my passion for in my life, and I have always been looking forward to the days when I can get back on the road during the epidemic. I went to Montreal at the end of August and Banff at the end of September. Even though I had seen so many beautiful places in the world, I was still shocked by the cities and natural scenery in Canada. Especially when I hike every day in Banff, everywhere I go there are beautiful lakes and mountains, the wind is clear and the sun is bright, and I feel like I am being held in the palm of nature and loved. In the face of this overwhelming yet all-inclusive beauty of the world, existence itself is the most grateful thing, and all the unwillingness of being a human being is insignificant in comparison.

These two trips transformed my emotions towards Canada. While standing on the top of Sulfur Mountain overlooking the pink-blue mountains of Banff, I had a profound reflection: I will never speak ill of Canada again.

During the days when I was traveling around and posting beautiful pictures, my mother noticed that I was in a good mood and took the opportunity to leave me a heartfelt message:

"After experiencing hardships, tossing and hard work, you are slowly entering middle age. You should know what you want, find a beautiful and free country, settle down, and live a carefree and happy life from now on. This is what Dad That’s what I want to see the most. People always have to think about their own lives. They can’t always live in political depression. They need to get rid of it as soon as possible and live their own good life.”

I didn't reply to her, and I didn't know how to reply. I don’t know how many times they have given similar advice, either good or bad, such as “stay away from politics” and “mind your own business”…

The difference is that this time, I was really shaken inside.

5. The value of all things needs to be remeasured with freedom

After leaving Banff, I went to Vancouver to find Qiqi, catching up with the red leaf season, and played with them throughout October. I returned to Winnipeg at the end of October, successfully found a new job, and started to go through the immigration procedures step by step.

I tried my best to live an extremely ordinary life. Suddenly one day, I thought it was funny: before I left China 5 years ago, I already had a better life than this - a beautifully decorated house, brand-name appliances, expensive toys, a dog and a cat, and a daily life of fine clothing and food. , it was once my home, it was ready-made happiness, and why did I abandon them and travel thousands of miles here to rebuild it all? And no matter how I rebuild, it may never be better than the life I had before.

I always think that the value of life lies elsewhere, far away, and I want to go out and find it. Today, I have reached the end of the world and discovered that the value of all things is created by the process of establishing a "relationship" with them. We invest our time, money, energy and physical strength, but in the final analysis, it is human beings who spend their lives on something, which forms the connection between us and others, and gives "him" to " "I" meaning of existence.

It turns out that this is the secret of life, it’s that simple. Why can't I find value in the "happy life" that my parents have arranged for me in terms of studies, house, marriage, and job, and I can't feel the meaning, so I have to work hard to escape? Whatever I have not obtained through my own efforts, even if I have it for a while, I am destined to lose it, even if I give it up voluntarily.

I saw a blogger saying, why do people who win the lottery often have worse lives? Because their relationship with money is damaged. We earn money through labor, which ensures that people can establish a good relationship with money, so that people cannot abuse money, and money cannot corrupt people. It is what we give that makes what we receive meaningful. This is the process by which value is generated.

I didn't understand until now. The little prince said: "It is the time you devote to the rose that makes your rose important." Growing up, I have heard similar truths thousands of times, but I have never understood it.

My parents love me so much. They really want me to be happy, to avoid detours, and to give me the best with all they have, but I abandon it like a broom. Because it is not until today, until the end of the world, that I understand this happiness.

The paradox of life is that if I don't leave, I will never understand, but when I understand, I have already lost it.

However, you still have to understand it. At this moment, all the absurd and false temptations in life will be seen through. The value of all things needs to be remeasured and reestablished with freedom. I hope I still have the chance to grasp the love that remains at the end of freedom.