The feeling of cutting seats in my generation

The term ceding seats was first heard in the Hong Kong anti-extradition incident in 2019.

As a woman born and raised in Guangdong, even if her native language was Cantonese since she was a child, she benefited from the convenience of residents in Guangdong Province to travel to Hong Kong and Macau and the ability to watch TVB in real time. Empathize with the plight of Hong Kong people.

During the anti-extradition period, the news and social media opinions inside and outside the wall were basically divided into two poles: the public accounts and Weibo inside the wall were mostly criticized and criticized. Democracy; Facebook and Instagram are outside the wall, but Hong Kong friends they know have expressed anger and protest for many days, and many have changed to black avatars.

At that time, I did not express my position clearly.

On the one hand, I am emotionally sympathetic to the Hong Kong people who share a river of water, and I am grateful that the Cantonese language can maintain its influence is almost entirely Hong Kong’s contribution; .

The internal division of Hong Kong people is also gradually divided. There are a series of slogans and code words to express different attitudes towards action in the later stage of the movement, such as "Be Water", "Brothers climb the mountain, work hard by each other", which also includes "cutting seats".

I still remember that the confrontation was so fierce at that time that even when people from Hong Kong opened Tinder in Shenzhen and swiped to the other side, they would mark a yellow ribbon on their profile, or write "Yellow Silk Do Not Disturb". A friend I met in a youth exchange event in Hong Kong before also unblocked me on Instagram.

Not living in the same context, lack of experience in discussing public topics, and even different stages of life make it difficult for me to try to understand Hong Kong youth. It is also conceivable that my friends in Hong Kong are in the center of the whirlpool every day, but when the social media shows that my years in the mainland are quiet, the inner sense of gap and the anger of cutting the seat. One of the paradoxes of modern communication technology is that the means of giving long-term connections to people who have a relationship on one side does not provide any guarantee of maintaining long-term meaningful relationships. Now that they are no longer in each other's lives, the synchronic differences exposed by emergencies can become the fuse of hostility at any time.

Finally, because I personally experienced the closure of the city in Shanghai in March and April this year, I suddenly understood the feelings of my friends in Hong Kong.

On April 4th, I wrote:

Now it seems that it is the helplessness of friends who can't empathize with themselves, and it is also the passive avoidance of being unable to resist the big environment.

To a large extent, this is a secondary disaster of political expansion, because dissent, scrutiny, and questioning are not allowed, and those who suffer in it are forced to speak out in radical ways. A feeling of grievance that parents were not allowed to talk back at home when I was a child really happened in the collective public life. Shanghai's unblocking of the city on Children's Day on June 1 seems to be a metaphor: to give you freedom on Children's Day is because you have always been treated as a child.

People outside are still a little confused. Isn't this virus ruthless? Looking back, we felt that the youth in Hong Kong were extreme. Could it be possible that they also suffered grievances that we could not see? It is even more unbearable to think that Shanghai and Hong Kong still have the capital to make a noise, and the minority groups far away in the frontier may only be able to sing and dance with tears.

Many of the consensuses that I thought I could reach with my friends were disintegrated and reconstructed after two months. Seeing or not seeing each other after the lockdown is lifted, the psychological distance is there—their views on the epidemic prevention policy in the past two years have been divided into three, six, nine, etc. in their hearts. There is no need to explain too much to each other, it is all reflected in the actions of moisturizing, not producing, and buying. There are naturally involuntary choices, but sometimes you don’t even need to chat, you can see whether you are a fellow traveler on social media.

After Shanghai lifted the lockdown, the beating incident at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan was another news that stirred up a wave of public opinion. Several unfortunate women were mutilated after refusing to be harassed. After the surveillance video of the whole process was exposed, it triggered another discussion on the protection of women's rights and interests in Jane China World. Because of the news of the murder of Iron Chain Girl, Xi'an Metro Girl, and Ram, and the fact that feminism has been poured into women's boxing in the past two years, she has long lost confidence in the discussion of women's issues in the Mainland. But I still reposted a few self-confessed self-restrained speeches on Weibo. After seeing it, one of my real friends asked another mutual friend of mine: When did I join boxing? Is it because you have been detained in Shanghai for too long before, and now have psychological problems?

And this friend is a woman.

After a mutual friend conveyed information to me, he said that he did not agree with her statement and made a cryptic statement. As a woman, it's really hard to understand if you don't speak up, and you turn against each other. There is no way to discuss her true thoughts with the friend who said I was boxing. My mutual friend and I can only analyze her situation together to understand—probably a young woman in literature and art who has suffered once, and finally opened up with her husband. The company is well-known, and after becoming a small capitalist herself, she enjoys the moral superiority of hiring someone to pay taxes to criticize the group she was once familiar with.

I just wonder, she used to be a pioneering young woman who studied art history and worked in art museums. How come the ideological ideas that she came into contact with in her previous work and study did not leave a trace?

Friends said that she probably never believed it.

I suddenly understood why she had condemned and despised Hong Kong youth so early in the anti-extradition incident in Hong Kong.

Her shrewdness lies in being able to stand on the side of gaining real interests for herself, completely abandoning her past learning and gender identity, and even using her theoretical insights to criticize others; at the same time, she is very lucky not to easily empathize with her own kind suffering from emotional and cognitive conflict. A practical personal philosophy, pragmatic elitism.

She provided a typical example for me to understand the current Jane-Chinese community: just because she experienced the lack of resources and seized the rotation of a wave of class transitions, she will be more grateful to today's hard-won but inexplicable income. Hold onto it. At this time, the need to maintain one's own relative superiority far outweighs the ability to understand and care for the weak in other societies. Despite the shaky feeling of occasional events, the vague unease only makes them more instinctive to seize the moment, maintain that narrative, still seek self-consistency under unreasonable authority, in order to protect themselves in the turmoil and seize the future The priority of possibly another chance.

We are actually all of the same generation, born in an unprecedented period of globalization, growing up in the South, which was the first to develop overseas trade, and subtly received a lot of cultural education outside the mainstream narrative. However, a series of events in the society in recent years have caused us to gradually part ways like a big wave, and our value orientation is no longer the same.

The cut seats of the Chinese people are probably like this.