Living like this for thirty-five years

In fact, I am not yet thirty-five, and I was not even born in 1989. But sometimes I feel like I have been alive since the Ming Dynasty in 1566, and I am like a zombie today.

We often say that Chinese people have no history, but the fatigue and pain that often appear in the Chinese group are undoubtedly the legacy of history. They can instantly dream back to the Qing Dynasty, full of "I want foreigners to die", "an 80-year-old lady guarding the country's borders", "I will never coexist with the little Japanese", but they forget the part that finally entered the modern era. Or maybe these two are "accomplished" by each other, and they are the result of the cause that was planted.

I saw on the famous Chinese social platform "Little Red Book" that some people regarded the ban on changing avatars and backgrounds during the June 4th period as some kind of measure for the national college entrance examination, and thus rationalized its existence.

People who have not experienced communist China may think that the fact that June 4th has been forgotten must be due to the people themselves. But the ban has been so elaborate that it is almost a blank slate. They would rather return to the Qing Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty in 1566, and would rather walk into the dead end of history than this history that attempts to move forward. What can the people convey? Even if they are lucky enough to be eyewitnesses, they will only become people who tell their children all day long to "stop expressing opinions online." A generation will eventually grow old.

Correspondingly, we can understand Soviet jokes better only because we live in communist China. The cruel fact is that no one needs to have imagination about censorship. We have imagination about everything, but not about censorship, because the latter exists to restrict the former. Those works that record censorship and add meaning with interest are just a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome of censorship. But in other words, what else can we play besides playing tricks with censorship?

When I woke up this morning, I looked through the first information about June 4th that Google could access. Most of it consisted of photos and oral memories of the public. The testimony that made me feel the most heartbroken and angry was this:

"A 20-year-old student who was in Tiananmen Square when the army arrived in the early morning told VOA that it took him nearly two hours to crawl out of the square to avoid the gunfire. He said he saw hundreds of bodies along the way. Soldiers shot anyone who stood up or moved.

The student said he saw four female college students begging the soldiers not to kill them. He said one of the women grabbed the soldier's leg and the soldier responded by stabbing her with his bayonet. He saw the soldiers shoot the other three.

Then I saw some photos of students lying on the ground in X. The blood was really as tragic as people remembered. Flakes of photos were all over the Internet outside of China. I believe that in the lost 35 years of China's history, although the center of June 4th is empty, it radiates out to a wider world. It is a totem of spirit and ideals that is constantly evolving, and its connotation is becoming richer and more profound.

I have no way to talk about "home" today, to talk about all the "warmth, happiness, restraint, escape", although it sounds so similar to my situation, it can be my relationship with China, but I don't want to repeat a false emotion in such a lingering way, which will ultimately lead to no expression, but just fall into a pre-modern family-country relationship of resentment and hatred - a common sense that needs to be confirmed repeatedly is that home is not a country, which does not mean that it can invade my room and search my thoughts.

In that house that we can tentatively call "home", the land will be reclaimed by the government in 70 years, and even if the door is locked, the community committee can break in at will. My mother's daughters, who studied journalism, worked in the Internet industry, or have been unemployed since graduation, or need to take the college entrance examination, have mastered every detail so that they can use it one day. And in the past three years, they have used it unlimitedly and never returned it.

From the early morning of June 4, I became an "overseas IP" that needed to be controlled. I couldn't post a single picture. Although I didn't plan to test the censorship anymore, it stood in front of me fiercely, and circled the cyberspace as its own territory. A friend who lives in Hong Kong posted a circle of friends, but I also know that it might only be visible to me and her. The "wall" is so cruel and so effective.

The billboard advertisements in New York's Times Square are waiting for the arrival of June 4th local time, when people will put up Taiwan there to let the world see the Taiwanese people's determination for democracy.

This sound finally turned into a song and a poem

That's how we are

Become a living poet

Not just a living poet

In this life and after this life, we must also

Become three, seven and eleven

We are born

The function of our passing time is us

Our condolences to someone at this moment

With his condolences to you and me

——【Korea】Gao Yin, "Time Spent with a Dead Poet" (excerpt)

June 4, 2024