The Year of the Plague | After the epidemic, we don't have any "life we know" to go back to (Part 1)

The driving force of human beings to see life and not see death is really powerful

One evening in mid-June, I took a walk as usual to the nearby pier. The summer night in New York is still cool and clear, when the night is about to fall, and the last light of the sky just brings out the silhouette of Manhattan on the other side of the river, and the top floor of the Empire State Building is flowing with purple gold. From the summer after the epidemic began last year to this moment, I have seen this scene countless times, but every time I am as pious as the first time, as if I came to answer the call of this era.

It didn't take long for fireworks to set off at the port on the other end of the Isle of Man, and the people on the pier gathered, and their smiles floated in the cool breeze.

Fireworks that day were held to celebrate the reopening of New York State. With New York State's 70% first-dose vaccination rate achieved and the positivity rate falling all the way, Governor Cuomo announced the lifting of all remaining epidemic prevention restrictions. At the same time, California also suspended the stay-at-home order and various amendments and began to reopen on a large scale. California and New York were once the worst-hit areas in the United States, with the death toll ranking one or two in the United States. After 16 months of restrictions of varying degrees, they finally opened up, which means that the new crown epidemic in the United States has come to an end.

In the official announcement, Cuomo looked back on New York's journey, proudly saying: "We can go back to life as we know it."

In fact, after slipping back to New York in early May, I didn't feel the shadow of the epidemic very much. Early summer is the best season in New York. Most days are sunny and the air is cool. The streets are full of people. Shops of all sizes are open. Popular restaurants start to wait for a table. It will also resume the habit of going to the cinema every week. With a kind of lethargic mentality, I can’t stay at home by myself. Even if I have nothing to do, I have to go out for a walk every day, and I will know the demeanor and dress of passers-by. Many times I forgot to wear a mask when I went out. But soon, there were far more people on the streets without masks.

The driving force of human beings to look at life or death is really strong. If we don't think about it deliberately, in this bright atmosphere, we have turned over one of the biggest tragedy of this century so far. More than 600,000 people have died in this country, but when faced with the offer to "go back to life as we know it", everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Let's live for a while.

After staying in New York for a long time, I often have a kind of rush to death. No matter how messy my life is, I can get up and go out at any time, grab some time first, so that I can continue to live like a photosynthetic plant for a day. After thinking about it, I felt that this was a curse that was doomed.

I realize that the pleasures of short-term instant pleasure and the pain of long-term powerlessness are completely two sides of the same coin, how anxious I was in the past plague years, and how much I want to live without heart and soul now. The texts presented in the museums that I like to go to are also too abstract. I prefer to indulge in the most material world and return to my own facial features and limbs. I even gave up my "no-essential" motto and started smearing makeup in a variety of textures and scents on my face, visiting fashion stores in the neighborhood that I hadn't visited in the past five years. I also frequently plan out activities and trips, and my spare time on the weekends is filled with parties, filled with a familiar, tranquilizer-like happiness. I have no guilt about this happiness, knowing that it is short-lived - I can't stay in New York for the rest of the summer. I embraced my nostalgia, looking at it like a lost hometown.

The epidemic has caused a kind of upside-down in my values. Living is no longer a matter of course. Those things that I have always taken for granted have become as important as my ideals. pleasure is no longer shameful. I have become more moved by ordinary, simple worldliness than by passion for profound and correct truths. I didn't even want to spend more time in my room coding, just because the sun was just right that day and I wanted to hang out in the park and lie down in the grass and scattered wildflowers.

But the most important lesson the epidemic has taught me is that it has made me realize the bond between people. I spent more time in both the Bay Area and New York making friends and building a close personal circle who shaped my sense of belonging to America, turning a foreign land into a home-like presence. In addition, because of the restrictions on entry and exit, I haven't returned to China for two years. My thoughts about my parents and relatives in China have almost turned into fear. I can't help but pray that each other will not have any accidents at this time.

But I know that the reason my bond with my family and friends is so important is precisely because I am in an environment of isolation, insecurity, and repeated stripping. Such an environment has been brewing against the background of political polarization between China and the United States, and the epidemic has made it worse. As a member of the overseas diaspora, I and many inbetweeners who exist in the cracks are in a dilemma in this process, bumping into walls everywhere, repeatedly encountering identity and emotional crises, like a lonely boat in the wind and waves sailing as hard as possible, occasionally finding a place Sheltered harbour.

The recent days in New York have been my harbor, and it is currently a peaceful and light-hearted life, which is in line with my stubbornness of living in the present. After that I still have to go back to Canada, which is the only place I can go back at this stage, but in fact I have nowhere to go and no way forward. I only know that both myself and my community have suffered irreversible changes in the epidemic, and they are far from complete, and we have no "life we know" to go back to. At this moment, the road we have explored in the past has come to an end, and there are not enough clues for the road we can imagine in the future.

As if I were a Decembrist exiled to Siberia

When I decided to come to New York, I walked so dashingly, only to find out later that it was just the fearlessness of the ignorant. It's a pity that when you finally realized the true meaning of all kinds of personnel on the road, you were no longer there.

Leaving was originally an active choice, and then became a forced wandering, but in any case, it was not done overnight like the takeoff of a transoceanic plane, but like countless rasps, stripping you out of the ecosystem in which you are embedded. Aside from the personality of the individual itself, disembedding from the domestic society is a process, based on differences in information, which constitute different narratives, resulting in different value judgments, and over time, different beliefs are formed, and finally empathy diminishes. , emotional decoupling.

The closest I got to emotional decoupling was the Hong Kong movement in 2019. When the vast majority of Chinese people in the public opinion field were shouting and killing the "waste youth" in Hong Kong, I felt ashamed and finally dismissed my return to China. idea. But it wasn't until the departure of New York for Winnipeg earlier this year that that sense of utter stripping finally came to a head.

My deepest impression of Winnipeg is that when I went out on the first day after the quarantine, the temperature was minus 28 degrees. The locals told me that this year was a warm winter. When the wind blows, the bones of the cheeks sting like needles, and the eyelids become heavy, because the eyelashes are covered with ice, and the snow on the roadside can bury half of the calf with one foot, and there are few pedestrians on the road. , all extra-experience feelings aggravated the absurdity of reality, as if he were a Decembrist exiled to Siberia.

I haven’t been to such a bitter cold place since I was born, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet, spending a lot of time on the Internet, swiping Clubhouse—it just went on sale at the time, and I was lucky to be one of the earliest Chinese users of it. I was addicted from morning to night, immersed in the long-lost Chinese public context.

Now that I think about it, it was a social media software that saved me from connecting with a large number of my compatriots scattered around the world. Everyone gathers together day and night and speaks with heart and lungs. Even if the voice is trembling and breathing is disordered, they are not afraid to talk about those topics that are kept secret: the three places on the Taiwan Strait, Tibet, Xinjiang, June 4th, the Cultural Revolution, family planning, Censorship, surveillance, wall, Communist Party, totalitarianism, civic movement... Awakening each other's memories, confronting each other's testimonies, like a group of survivors rediscovered, desperately searching for all the clues hidden in their bodies, to piece together the stories that were covered up. Restore the identity that was randomly smeared. Before this, not only had I never had direct contact with a "pan-liberal Chinese group" outside the circle, I had never even felt the existence of this "group" that a liberal is more familiar with in this era situation is always isolated and discrete.

It was a magical illusion, as if history suddenly speeded up the progress bar and jumped to the Happy Ending after 9981, exiled to the end of the world, I found my way back to my hometown, because the high wall around it has fallen down, although this is only a flash in the pan.

In my offline life, the only person who accompanied me was a Hong Kong female classmate. She and I lived on the same floor of the same student dormitory. Ever since I was quarantined, she has been greeting me every day. When I couldn't go out, she helped me buy fruit and toiletries and put them at the door. After leaving the quarantine, she took the initiative to take me to apply for a bank card and a phone card, and took me to nearby restaurants and supermarkets, so that I could get acquainted with the surrounding environment as quickly as possible. After class on weekdays, she also invites me to eat, shop, drink, and even urge me to do my homework every day. She is just like my mother. Compared with me, who is rough and fleshy, she is very careful and patient in dealing with people. In March, I originally thought I would celebrate my birthday in silence, but she saw my birthday on my Facebook page, which I haven’t logged in for for 10,000 years, so she came to treat me to two meals, and wrote me a greeting card. .

In order to recommend the local warmest down jacket brand to me, she sent a post written by herself - it turns out that she is also a well-known travel and food blogger, often writing about the experience of traveling around the world in the blog, and Recommended by various brands, and there are many messages from fans in the comments, presumably she also lived a very good life in Hong Kong.

Long before we met, we both came out politically during the exchange of messages, so we weren't wary of this from the beginning. We often talk about Hong Kong when we are together, about the struggle of young people in Hong Kong in 2019, and speak freely in a place where no one knows us.

When I was talking about spicy food, I found out that the mother of a Hong Kong female classmate is from Chongqing, and she can even speak some Chongqing dialect. She is half a fellow of me, and I feel more cordial. Her husband teaches in Hong Kong. Although I know that educators in Hong Kong are well paid, I didn't expect that their monthly salary would be worth the annual income of their mainland counterparts, which shocked me. A female classmate in Hong Kong said that because her family was not short of money, she had not worked for eight years. She gave birth to a son and a daughter. When her husband was on vacation, the whole family went on trips together. Moreover, as a popular blogger, she had public relations treats when she went to dinner. The years are more than quiet.

But since the accident in Hong Kong, she has not been in the mood to play any more. She resolutely decided to immigrate for the future of her child. Her husband also gave up the high-paying job despite the objection of his parents. Come to such a cold place to start life again.

In the past two years, I have heard that a large number of Hong Kong people have been exiled to various places. Media reports say that one in every five Hong Kong people is planning to immigrate, and it is estimated that they are going to Canada to be the mainstream. They have formed a certain scale in Winnipeg. community. In addition to the Hong Kong female classmates, there were also two Hong Kongers in the class who brought their children and daughters to middle age. I put the photo Po with her in the circle of friends, and someone left a message saying: "The bereaved dogs we met."

During the loneliest days of the whole epidemic, I was very pleased to meet her at the edge of the world, to talk about Hong Kong in our memory, and the summer that changed our destiny.

The so-called "CCP fetish"

In late March I couldn't stay still and went to Vancouver - there are at least a few friends I know well. I was lucky enough to find Qiqi, my feminist partner who has been studying here. At that time, there had just been a shooting incident at a Chinese-American massage parlor in Atlanta, and a movement against Asian-American hatred had swept across Canada from the United States. The first day we met was at the Stop Asian Hate rally in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. When I walked into the enthusiastic crowd and was at the scene of a social movement after a long absence, the whole person seemed to come alive.

It was very cold that day, and after the afternoon sun faded, Qiqi was shivering from the blow. Seeing that the rally was coming to an end, we couldn't wait to find a nearby coffee shop to chat. Unexpectedly, as soon as the chatter opened, we continued to chat until the coffee shop closed.

It wasn't until then that I felt like the breath I had been holding for so long was finally out of my breath. After the epidemic began, the depression that kept suffocating in my heart finally found an outlet to release. Qiqi and I have not seen each other since the feminist workshop in New York more than two years ago, but because we share the feminist community and concern about domestic gender issues, the gap between time and space seems to be non-existent. Before meeting her, at most I met some "people who can understand me" (this is already very rare), but Qiqi made me deeply understand what a "companion" is - your experience she also went through , your feelings she also felt personally. Without any communication cost, we can directly cut into the topics that concern each other the most and continue to resonate. Every word of the other party seemed to come out of my heart, and we all had red eyes as we talked.

What we talked about the most was the plight of being a "Chinese feminist" overseas. Although I just came to Canada, we both felt like we were "uprooted" by the whole thing. Qiqi has been far away from the North American Chinese feminist community centered in New York, and can only fight alone in Vancouver. Although I still had some connections with the community when I was in New York, at the end of the day, we could only follow and support domestic feminist activities from a distance, not with the people we care about the most, and we couldn’t promote it through local actions. The progress of the issue, but always caught in the highly stratified social media, it is inevitable to feel powerless beyond the reach.

We all said that when we saw Xiao Meili, Datu and Xianzi and many feminist partners who participated in the Women's Month in Chengdu, we felt envious.

Feminism has always had space in the domestic public opinion field, but the results are not optimistic - many issues are difficult to advance to the level of institutional improvement. At the end of March, after Xiao Meili exposed the smokers in the hot pot restaurant in Chengdu, which led to an unprecedented Internet violence, the feminist activists were all bombed on Weibo, and the feminists liked to mention the "honor" of foreign forces. Others "go ashore" by showing favor to the system, which means that the living environment of the community has deteriorated to a new level.

Behind the clamor of "foreign forces" in the domestic public opinion field, although there is a sense of crisis brought about by the confrontation between China and the United States, it also comes from an extreme public opinion environment in which everyone must support the system (the fate of not supporting it is was immediately cut out of the "national community"). The Communist Party of China monopolizes the narrative of the whole of China and speaks for the opinions of all Chinese people, so all issues must be defined by it, based on it, and our world must be polarized around it. The only difference is that at home, support for the Communist Party is absolute, while in North America, opposition to it is also absolute. The truth of totalitarianism is to "assimilate" everything, even in a way that pushes it to its opposite.

While attending a rally in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery with Qiqi, we met a white male who came up to chat. He saw signs in both Chinese and English that we held in our hands: "Against racism against Asians," "Black Lives Matter", "Decriminalize Sex Workers", "Revolt against White Supremacy", "Crush the Patriarchy", "Decolonize the Land"... Then he asked, (to the effect) what do you think of China Communist Party? How do you support these demands without stating opposition to the Chinese Communist Party?

If this question is sincere, it means that the attitude towards the Chinese Communist Party has become the criterion for legal review of the political participation of overseas Chinese in his consciousness. If this kind of questioning is a chicken thief, it means that he is just trying to summon the shadow of totalitarianism so that these Chinese people will shut up obediently.

This made me intuitively realize the pressure that overseas Chinese bear from the dominant culture. After the Atlanta shooting, I participated in a discussion of Chinese Americans at Clubhouse, and the remarks of many people shocked me, but also helped me understand the thoughts of ordinary people outside the pan-liberal circle. After that, I recorded some points that stimulated me:

"This attack is aimed at sex workers. Don't escalate to racism. We Chinese must love ourselves and choose proper jobs."

"We are all independent individuals, don't always be bound to others, don't talk about unity."

"There is a reason for others to discriminate against you. Why are the Japanese okay? They don't care about this news at all, and we don't represent Asians."

"Chinese people should reflect on what they have done in other countries, and strive to improve their status and win the respect of others."

"It's not enough to cut yourself off from the Chinese Communist Party, you have to cut yourself completely from your Chinese identity."

If you know their context at that time, you may understand that their concept is not a castle in the air, which makes people feel deeply sad in addition to anger. As if the identity of this nation was kidnapped by a power, they simply discarded the identity and the self-esteem.

Later, Qiqi and I shared these experiences with our feminist partners. Lu Pin brilliantly called this mentality “CCP fetish.” She said that the Chinese Communist Party is often used as an excuse to discriminate against Chinese people, which contains North American society's imagination of the powerless (even ignorant) Chinese public, as well as the historic fear of communism, which has led to many anti-communist banners. Racist stare. However, attitudes towards the Communist Party should not be a prerequisite for Chinese people to oppose discrimination, nor should it be a prerequisite for Chinese feminism. Although we never shy away from resisting its oppression, the issue of feminism is not to support it or oppose it, but to go beyond it and go directly to the root of the violent mechanism of human society.

Simply put, even if the party didn't exist, women's issues would still exist.

Therefore, we try not to be defined by that power, not to be a mirror image of the enemy, but to insist on discussion and participation, and strive to open up the spectrum of resistance, so that more people can participate in the movement. Even in this wave of Stop Asian Hate, Chinese feminists must highlight their existence and become a model of diversity, instead of being obscured and incorporated by a larger group, hijacked and misappropriated by those in power—— We are integrated into the "Asian" narrative, but our needs are not seen and on the agenda.

However, such "hard-core" feminists, whether in China or the United States, are caught in the cracks. They will find it difficult to locate and categorize themselves, and they will continue to suffer from identity crises.

At this time, I remembered that Lv Pin once said in an article that she hoped that Chinese feminists could "permanently be clear and countercurrent." Maybe there are very few people who can have this kind of consciousness, but they are my always. Reasons to trust feminism. They are persistent rebels, but they are not swallowed up by what they rebel against, even in the toughest of times.

(Unfinished, please continue to read the second half of the chapter)