[Terminal Star Incident] 15 years of knowing Cai Wei

Starting from April 19, 2020, it has been 68 days since my friends Cai Wei and Chen Mei were taken away by the Beijing Chaoyang Branch on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" because they backed up articles related to the epidemic.

Cai Wei is my hometown and classmate. We have known each other for 15 years since we were in the first grade of junior high school in 2006.

Our hometown is Huanggang City, Hubei Province, which is a well-known place for exam-oriented education.

My grades in elementary school were pretty good, and I finally got into the key classes in junior high school. In such a rural junior high school, the dormitory has bunk beds for 4 people, and a small dormitory can accommodate about 20 people. To bathe and wash clothes, I have to compete with the senior students for the water faucet. Because I am small, I often cannot win. Later, the classroom where I worked had no window locks and someone needed to sleep in the classroom, so I signed up and became the night watchman of the classroom. Some nights later, on the way to the toilet with a flashlight, I discovered that there were two night watchmen in the classroom next door. One of them was Cai Wei. This was the first time I met them.

Xiaowei is an out-and-out academic dominion. He has been ranked first or second in the school for almost three years in junior high school.

We finally ended up in the same class in our third year of junior high school and had some interactions. He is a standard left-behind child. When he was in elementary school, his parents went to Shenzhen to work and lived at home with his sister and grandfather. At that time, our weekly living expenses were about 50 yuan. Every weekend, he would go to Xinhua Bookstore and stand there for hours reading. Sometimes he would also go to the Xinhua Bookstore opposite the school. The owner was the vice principal. When you see him coming, tell him that he will give you more discounts.

The food in the cafeteria is available in 3 stalls, 2.6 yuan, 3.6 yuan and 4.6 yuan. I usually choose 3.6 yuan, and occasionally add meals. But one week, apart from breakfast, this guy only spent 50 cents on white rice every meal, and then ate with a bottle of Lao Ganma for four days. Now that I think about it, he might have been saving money to buy books.

In my memory, he has always had little pursuit of material comfort. When we were in junior high school, we all came from various small villages, and we could not compare ourselves to each other in cloth shoes. In high school, when I saw my classmates wearing Nike and Adidas, I felt low self-esteem. I was so obsessed with comparison that I couldn't afford these, so I asked my father for money to buy Anta Xtep. However, Xiaowei still dressed simply and didn't care about food and clothing. This is something I really admire about him.

The days in the third grade of junior high school are very stressful. I have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, study in the evening until 10 o'clock, and keep attending classes and doing papers. Even though other classes are on winter vacation and the campus is covered with a thick layer of snow, our class is still making up classes. Ji shi zhe, he could also find time to read. He spent 15 yuan to buy a thick pirated copy of "The Collected Works of Han Han" at a bookstall. During his lunch break and finishing the papers in advance, he quickly finished reading "Three Gates" "Like a boy flying fast".

He liked military programs very much at that time. When he was at home during the holidays, he learned about many weapons through Zhang Zhaozhong's CCTV program. Only later did he learn that the man was the legendary bureau chief. I also watched "Bright Sword" avidly. I am a fan of Li Yunlong. I even bought the original book to read it and lamented Li Yunlong's fate again and again. He learned about Ma Ying-jeou from programs such as "Cross the Strait" and said that he was a very popular leader in Taiwan. This was the first time I had heard of him. By the way, he also likes to watch football games. We really don’t have many fans in our remote country. In short, he has a wide range of interests.

After passing the special recruitment examination, we all entered the County No. 1 Middle School to attend high school three months early.

Starting from the second year of high school, we only had 6 hours of vacation per week. We all used it to play football like crazy with our classmates. There was no coach or tricks, and we were very excited to touch the ball. He often wore very simple Double Star brand football shoes. Once he said: Do you know there is a football star named Kaka? I’ll just call you Kaikai, haha. This nickname was too cute. I rejected it at first, but later he got used to it.

Since the opening of the library, our reading horizons have also been opened up. We returned to the town and carried books to school in batches. At that time, I could only read some realistic novels. I liked Yan Lianke very much, watching him write about the real suffering in "Dingzhuang Dream", and watching "My Fathers". , I think of the fate of my fathers, and Xiaowei’s reading volume is several times that of mine. He can read the thick "Interviews in the 1980s" with a flashlight in a few nights after finishing his self-study at 9 o'clock in the evening. 》.

Once, he was able to find Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone" from a pirated bookstall. After reading it, he lent it to me. I skipped through a third of it and was shocked by the hunger disaster. I touched the inferior paper and almost felt I suspect it is unofficial historical material.

There are some interesting anecdotes about reading. After reading Yu Hua's "To Live", he was very fond of it, so he bought the complete works of Yu Hua, because one of them contained a lot of sexual descriptions, and he felt that the writing was not good and a bit filthy. It's obscene, so after reading a few pages every day, I have to tear it off and throw it into the trash can, as if to show my innocence, haha.

The head teacher occasionally made surprise bed checks at 1 a.m. and saw him reading with a flashlight. There were too many good books piled beside his bed. The next day, he was called outside the classroom and said: If he continues to read books like this, get out. Go home and stop reading. He retorted: It is a legal requirement to receive 12 years of compulsory education. Besides, I paid the tuition and did not violate any school rules. What right do you have to ask me to drop out of school? The head teacher couldn't argue and threatened to call his parents, so he gave in. Finally, under his watchful eyes, Xiaowei dragged all the books to the car home. It is said that the repressed and submissive Peiyou Class students were impressed by his thinness.

After studying in the so-called peiyou class for a year, I found more and more that I was not good at science subjects. I couldn't get out of the bottom ten despite trying my best. I became a poor student in the competitive system, so I went to the liberal arts class. However, Xiaowei still had very good grades in science and became a chemistry class representative. Once he said to me: Do you know that there is a substance called roasted blue? Its chemical structure is particularly stable and corrosion-resistant, so I decided to name it this. I didn't understand his excitement at that time.

When I was applying for the college entrance examination, I was afraid of the cold and the weather in Guangzhou was warm. It was said that the media there was developed and the atmosphere was open. After giving up several management majors, I applied for the social work major. But he felt that he wanted to go to a big city. Only Beijing was big enough for him to make a living, so he chose Central University of Finance and Economics to study sociology. Without any exchange of major choices, we both went against our parents' expectations and chose majors that were unlikely to make a lot of money. One did practical work and the other did research. We really had a tacit understanding, as if we were still classmates in the next class.

There are many public welfare activities and activists in Guangzhou, and many salon lectures and professors in Beijing. Under the influence of different environments, we have indeed formed different styles.

Since my senior year in high school, I have been unstoppably fond of cycling and traveling. During the winter vacation of my sophomore year, I went to Hainan Island to cycle around the island, and had a great time practicing a long-distance trip "on the road". After returning home during the Spring Festival, he gave me a copy of "The Baron in the Trees" by Calvino. He found the electronic version himself and then printed and bound it. The title page roughly said:

To Kaikai: I hope our friendship is as white as feathers and as strong as a big tree.

What kind of story is this novel about? It's about a baron who felt that life on earth was extremely depressing. The trigger was his dissatisfaction with a snail lunch made by his sister. He started living in trees when he was 12 years old until he died at the age of 65. . His tombstone is inscribed: "Living in the trees - always loving the earth - rising into the sky." I have forgotten the content of the book, but I still vaguely remember that the Baron will stick to his ideals until his death. Even if he is lonely, not understood, and his love is fruitless, he will never compromise.

Later, he changed his online name to "On the Tree" on Weibo and Douban.

When I was a sophomore in college, I discovered a movie called "Splendid Life", which told the half-century lives of several Italian youths in six hours. I felt that I and my friends were almost living out the fate of the characters in the movie, so I invited the children to Wei will repaint it every year. I really hope I can relive it with him this year.

After 2015, he began to attend graduate school at Tsinghua University. One year before graduation, I asked him if he wanted to continue studying for a Ph.D., and he said that he felt that he was not suitable for academic research. At this time, he was already learning R language and SQL, interning in a financial company, and working as a data analysis engineer.

The last time I asked him what he was reading, he said he was reading Wu Xiaobo's "Thirty Years of Stirring". I thought he, like me, no longer cared so much about public issues and had changed, so he concentrated on becoming a programmer as an amateur. Buy some virtual currency and save more money, and you may be able to issue and transfer earlier in the future. Unexpectedly, he and Chen Mei quietly started the Endpoint Star project to save deleted articles on the wall. They not only paid attention to the suffering in the public domain, but also did something.

When the epidemic broke out, he was unable to return to his hometown and was stranded in Beijing. When the epidemic was at its worst, they were also saving reports on the epidemic.

Thinking about it now, he gave up his ideal of writing, being a public intellectual or a scholar, and wanted to seek a life without financial hardship by mastering Internet technology, and use his skills to do something to defend his values.

Xiaowei and Chen Mei, do you know that just when you are behind bars, it is said that more projects are launched on github. I pay tribute to you and stick to the freedom of speech you understand. Because if you do this, you are not guilty.

On their current situation:

It’s not because their families are poor and they can’t afford lawyers. Their families have hired lawyers for them a long time ago, but now they have been assigned legal aid lawyers. Cai Wei and Chen Mei will face unfair judgments.

The lawyer appointed by Cai Wei's family is lawyer Li Guobei of Beijing Biyi Law Firm (@李国贝lawyer on Sina Weibo). The lawyer appointed by Chen Mei's family is lawyer Liang Xiaojun of Beijing Daoheng Law Firm. Please support them. .

Cai Wei's designated legal aid firm is Beijing Donghuan Law Firm, and the designated lawyers are Liu Nanzheng and Fang Zhi

Official website: http://www.donghuanlawyers.com/

Tel: 010-53678058

Chen Mei's designated legal aid firm is Beijing Zhongzhou Law Firm, and her designated lawyer is Zhao Zhijun

Official website: http://www.bjzhongzhou.com/

Tel: 010-51266607