(Part 1) Otemae (お手前) refers to the formal procedures and etiquette for preparing, whisking, and serving tea in Japanese tea ceremony. It’s not just a set of instructions for movement — it’s the tangible expression of the tea ceremony’s spirit (harmony, respect, purity, tranquility). Broadly, it varies by school (Omotesenke, Urasenke, Mushakojisenke, and others), and further branches into many variations — “usucha temae” (thin tea), “koicha temae” (thick tea), “ro temae” (sunken hearth), “furo temae” (portable brazier) — depending on the season, utensils, and occasion.

In its narrowest sense, “otemae” refers to the precise sequence of interactions and movements between host and guest within the tea room — literally, “temae” means making tea in front of the guest. But in a broader sense, it also refers to the artful shaping of time, space, utensils, and state of mind throughout the entire tea gathering. Setting aside the elaborate choreography, otemae is essentially a spiritual practice of seeking stillness within motion. Its core utensils include the tea bowl, the whisk, the tea scoop, the tea container, and the water jar. In theory, every shift in movement should resonate with the dim light of the tea room and the turning of the seasons outside the window. Each school has its own distinct aesthetic, and both the choice of utensils and the rapport between host and guest demand great care. Beyond these technical considerations, the fluidity of the movements and the visual beauty of the ritual matter just as much.

Apart from the rhythm of the whisk striking the tea, the external tools of tea-making have remained largely unchanged in their austere form; yet the seemingly rigid internal choreography demands that the host, through years of practice, peel away distraction and restlessness layer by layer with focus and mindfulness, until the tea reaches its ideal flavor and state.

There’s a kind of system in the universe called a binary star, where two stars orbit a shared center of mass, circling each other, their outer atmospheres warped by mutual gravity. The self and the subconscious are a bit like two stars entwined in the darkness, surrounded by an infinite universe. The shadowless little town walled in by towering ramparts in The City and Its Uncertain Walls feels something like that. What stays with me most is the shadow. It isn’t the weaker half — the “shadow” outside the wall is more alive than the body inside it: it feels pain, desire, death. The body inside finds peace, but grows ever more like an empty shell. Murakami never spells it out (that slyness is his trademark), but the direction is clear enough: the wall isn’t just a defense, it carries a strain of self-punishment too. The protagonist isn’t trapped inside — he doesn’t want to leave.

In the afterword, Murakami notes that the novel went through several revisions and took more than forty years to finally be published. The endless reworking of an idea may be one of the most valuable things about human intelligence — or perhaps one of the most time-consuming. As a reader, you can sense the accumulated weight of the author’s life experience folded into the text — and that, on the whole, feels like a good thing. Of course, a master storyteller never makes it easy to deconstruct his own method. Why write an “old novel” at all? Probably only he knows the answer.

The Middle-Aged Virgin: A Documentary Report on Japanese Society, through interviews with older male virgins in Japan, reveals a forgotten stratum at the bottom of society.

The subjects in the book are shaped by overlapping factors: poverty, social anxiety, trauma from their family of origin, mental illness — this book isn’t really about “sex” at all, it’s about loneliness. These men, who have never had a sexual experience and are mostly stuck in temp work or long-term unemployment, are a product of the employment instability, the erosion of social communication skills, and the breakdown of family ties left behind by Japan’s lost thirty years. The author’s intentions are admirable, but the book has its blind spots.

• It equates the physical or social state of “virginity” with social abandonment — implying that being a middle-aged virgin must come bundled with career failure and personality defects. This is, in effect, reversed causality, and it overlooks those who remain single (and virgins) by personal choice.

• The book repeatedly implies that sexual experience is the entry ticket into mainstream society. Under that logic, the complex emotional needs of an individual get flattened into a simple socioeconomic indicator. Someone who’s merely introverted but holds a stable job loses any claim to being worth discussing within this framework — which leads to a lopsided picture.

That said, it’s unfair to expect a work of documentary nonfiction like this to cover every angle. What makes it valuable is that it lets readers see not a faceless group, but a set of individual “victims” — marginalized by society and stripped of the ability to speak for themselves.

Over the Lunar New Year I read The Secret Lives of Colour (Kassia St. Clair, 2017) — a wonderfully fun and thoroughly researched popular science book on color. It covers everything from the physics of spectral analysis to the origin of the term “blue-collar worker” (indigo-dyed jeans), a little of everything. And quite a few long-standing sociological puzzles find their answers here too.

For instance: why have so many civilizations been drawn to red in particular?

The book explains that red, sharing its color with blood, has always been tied to life, danger, and death. We put money into red envelopes; Catholic bishops wear red; the ancient Egyptians wrapped mummies in linen dyed with red ochre; red appears on the flags of 74% of countries; waitresses wearing red uniforms earn 26% more in tips. Across all these seemingly unrelated customs, red’s special status shows through in a startling way. When red was first noticed, it probably meant nothing at all; people everywhere, independently, turned it into a vessel for special meaning.

The author even includes some history with a sharper edge. Purple dye, for instance, came from sea snails, was extraordinarily expensive and famously foul-smelling, which is exactly how it became the exclusive “scent of power” reserved for royalty. The wildly popular 19th-century wallpaper color Scheele’s Green actually contained arsenic — Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena may well have had something to do with the toxic green coating the walls of his room… The book doesn’t even spare Mummy Brown, the 18th- and 19th-century oil paint pigment some painters made by grinding up actual mummies. It really does run the gamut, from the sublime to the absurd.

Every perception society imposes on an individual or a group runs both ways. I recently noticed, in some programmers’ social groups, that when asked about their hobbies, most mentioned some kind of sport. That’s a clear example of the counter-stereotyping effect at work. The dominant social attitude (once?) held that programmers were socially awkward, health-sacrificing homebodies — dull, inarticulate, indifferent to appearance. Yet many programmers I know are nothing like that: they go to the gym regularly, love the outdoors, and no one looking at them would think “dull tech nerd.”

Counter-stereotyping is a form of “psychological compensation” and “identity reconstruction.” The sociologist Erving Goffman, in Stigma, observes that individuals with a damaged identity often seek social acceptance through concealment or compensation. Once someone becomes aware that their group carries a certain label, a defensive, reactive drive often emerges — a push toward traits diametrically opposed to that label, as if declaring: I am not what you imagine. But this kind of pushback is a double-edged sword. Once “counter-stereotype” hardens into a new paradigm one must conform to, the individual simply falls into another kind of trap.

The film The Substance (2024) pushes this psychological effect to an extreme. Under the rule that “beauty is justice,” the fading star Elizabeth injects “the substance” and splits off Sue — young, flawless. Elizabeth is the pitiable one: she has internalized society’s contempt for aging and tries to defeat it by adopting a disguise more in line with mainstream expectations; she cannot accept growing old, or rather, her aging is something society refuses to permit. In the end, as Sue recklessly drains away her life force, she collapses into a heap of flesh and blood.

The film is also full of commentary on how patriarchal society suppresses women, dictating what women should or shouldn’t be… even off-screen, some Canadian viewers reported men in theaters bursting into loud laughter during several of the film’s most horrifying scenes. Real social progress, perhaps, doesn’t lie in everyone having to prove themselves through “counter-stereotyping,” but in a society that can simply accept the uniqueness of every individual.

What used to be called “shadow-love” (影恋) is what we now call narcissism. Most people know the root of the term from the Greek myth of the beautiful young man Narcissus — the English word “narcissism” is simply a variation of his name.

Compared to our modern “narcissism,” the older Chinese phrase “shadow-love” sits closer to the classical idiom “to pity one’s own reflection” (顾影自怜). In the words of the scholar Pan Guangdan himself: “Whether the reflection is a mirror image, a ripple on water, or a painted or photographed likeness, it can all be summed up by the character for ‘shadow’; China has long had the saying of pitying one’s own reflection — some minimal form of shadow-love is a psychological state shared by everyone…” Likewise, in Pan’s translations, terms like “withered-willow love,” “the wild-goose phenomenon,” and “gene” all carry a distinctly local flavor. Li Yinhe, in Subculture of Sadomasochism, adopted the term “love through cruelty,” noting that the translation captures both the cruelty and the love embedded within it. Indeed, “love through cruelty” sounds far more humane than “sexual abuse.”

The surprises in the language don’t stop there. Read this book closely and you’ll keep finding little delights. Take “Nasha-Xishi phenomenon” (奈煞西施现象) as a rendering of “Narcissism” — a translation so much better than a flat phonetic transliteration that I couldn’t help but applaud. Some social researchers’ translations can barely achieve basic clarity, reading as if Chinese were being forced into the original language’s word order. And looking at the horrifying translations AI now produces, I sometimes think I’d be better off just learning a foreign language myself. The prose in this book reads almost like poetry — its retelling of the Greek myth takes only a few sentences, yet captures both the form and the spirit, flowing beautifully… there’s no end to what one could praise here.

On the case of Xiaoqing discussed in the book, Pan Guangdan says it is “the earliest example I have found in the historical record, and without doubt the most elegant one” — its psychological value, he writes, “surpasses many of the cases documented in the West over the past forty years.” That alone speaks to how valuable the Xiaoqing case is. It is, in fact, a real pity for the history of scholarship East and West that Pan never rendered this significant case into English.

Revisiting a film like this in a spare moment between playing with my child feels wonderfully relaxing. Watching a movie steeped in this kind of fairy-tale color now and then feels like being handed a piece of jelly by a small child. This kind of children’s film has no “depth,” and isn’t meant to be deep. The children in it are simply children — and even the adults end up learning from them.

The patients in the film (including the nurse) are, in truth, all psychological patients themselves — some lost in past glory, some unable to stand weakness in others, some weighed down with guilt over their own cross-dressing… but through some inexplicable force, everyone ends up healed. That force is love.

At the end, Paco’s death still moved me a little. To be moved now and then by a fairy tale — I think that’s a good thing.

You’ve grown up a good deal
no longer that boy on the grass
with the long neck
like a stem
.
You walk down the empty holiday street
quietly swallowed by sunlight
.
I can’t see you anymore
.
Addendum –> 07-Monster

This is an age of dazzling pleasures, an age of bizarre and bewildering spectacle, an age indifferent to right and wrong. So many things have become habit without anyone knowing their origin or reason. I’ve never quite understood why Leonardo da Vinci is so revered, just as I’ve never understood why psychology discussion groups are supposed to relieve anxiety, or how someone can hold forth at length about how to “not grind” while “casually” letting slip which district they live in, how many properties they own, and how many of their children got into Ivy League schools…

Granted, da Vinci is a master of some sort — though exactly what sort is hard to pin down. Many people say his paintings inspire a mysterious longing, but my first glance at the Mona Lisa only made me think: a person with no eyebrows. My first look at his manuscripts: the doodles of a scientist. My first look at The Last Supper: an old man, sick of painting murals, putting on airs of profundity… The one exception was Lady with an Ermine — I gazed at it for a long time, as if conducting a careful psychoanalysis; I suspect there’s more than a little of the dream-world mixed into its creation.

A patchwork documentary, The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci (click to watch), seemed to offer me a small revelation. Da Vinci never handed down “master’s” pearls of wisdom, nor did he confine anyone to his own way of thinking — he simply showed a way of seeking answers. Faced with complicated questions like “science,” “happiness,” or “joy,” what’s needed isn’t some intangible debate over which came first, mother or child (Chapter 52 of the Tao Te Ching), nor the all-embracing idea that the whole universe fits inside a mustard seed — what’s needed is to understand the world outside and the world within, to stay curious, and then — to ask oneself honestly.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2023 film Monster (かいぶつ). A single mother suspects her son, Minato Mugino, is being bullied, takes it up with the school, and finds herself in an endless tug-of-war with the teacher involved. Meanwhile, the tangled relationship between her son and a classmate, Yori Hoshikawa, unravels piece by piece.

The film opens with a fire in the busy part of town and closes on a calm, settled note. Fields, blue sky, white clouds, children walking carefree to school — everything signals the quiet peace of this small Japanese town. It reminds me of the town of Spectre in Big Fish, where people hang their shoes on the wires and live happily on soft green grass. Even the houses are painted in cheerful, cozy colors. But the extreme conservatism hiding in people’s hearts there is also part of what makes it a small town — no ambition left, idleness shading into boredom, a poet who can no longer write poems. Such a town is undoubtedly the product of a fairy tale, and also its end.

If Big Fish is built on a fairy tale, then Kore-eda’s Monster carries more of a social edge: a surface calm riddled underneath with holes, full of sanctimonious posturing. A dead cat is examined in close, careful detail — set alight, you can almost smell the corpse; the principal, who seems so meek and deferential, may have killed her own granddaughter; the boy’s dead father is “fashioned” by the mother into a role model meant to inspire her son’s growth, when in fact he died unexpectedly while having an affair… At the same time, the film is full of details worth lingering over, with a distinctly psychoanalytic flavor — the little drawing that falls to the ground midway through with the word “monster” scrawled on it, the wall covered in students’ handprints, and of course Kore-eda’s signature warmth, which always leaves you thinking long after the credits roll.

This OST (click to open) is full of understated color, yet shot through with something mysterious and eerie. Aqua renders that uncanny mood to the fullest. Listening to the score, it’s easy to picture the scenes of Minato and Hoshikawa together, as if it forms a strange feedback loop, breaking you apart bit by bit and then putting you back together bit by bit. A mood of melancholy, strangeness, and dreaminess lingers in the ear like a dream itself.

Meditation is a practice with a long history, one that keeps our inner and outer worlds at peace, cultivating harmony between the individual and their environment, spirit, and even the metaphysical. Meditation needn’t be grounded in any particular faith, and can still ultimately bring about a sense of completeness between a person and what surrounds them. It is precisely this kind of tradition — one that can be either religious or secular — that offers people a sense of calm, of understanding, of freedom, and of eternity. (Excerpted and translated from the preface.)

This book (click here to open) leads readers gently into the vast and sprawling forest of knowledge about meditation. Nor is it a dry, purely academic read — the author introduces his own views on meditation, along with his personal experience of it, in plain, warm, and heartfelt language.

This book, combining both scholarship and practice, is truly an essential companion for staying at home, traveling, or getting through long, sleepless nights — one that can give you an entirely fresh perspective on meditation.

White Snake is a short story written by Yan Geling in 1999. Sun Liqun, a dancer renowned for her role as the “White Snake,” falls into disgrace during the Cultural Revolution. Her figure changes, she becomes an object of ridicule, even mocked while using the bathroom. Gradually, she grows accustomed to this kind of life. The arrival of a central government official named Xu Qunshan disrupts this surface calm. Xu’s admiration warms her cold, quiet life like autumn sunlight. What she doesn’t expect is to soon discover that Xu Qunshan (actually Xu Qunshan, a woman) is in fact a girl. This may be the final straw that breaks Sun Liqun — after her breakdown, she’s sent to a psychiatric hospital. After all manner of turns and changes, the two come to understand each other, find release, and fall in love. After the Cultural Revolution ends, Sun Liqun becomes a dancer again. And just after her solo performance, the long-absent Xu Qunshan reappears. By then, each of them has her own family, and it seems as though their earlier infatuation was merely an episode in the larger course of life.

In a heterosexual world, any love between two people of the same sex is an arduous road of resistance. Sun Liqun and Xu Qunshan move from an attraction that begins, seemingly, between “opposite sexes,” into a tangled same-sex entanglement — a love that drags on messily, painful yet not without its warmth. But what they face is not merely the parental authority that Romeo and Juliet, or Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, had to confront; it is the crushing erosion of an entire society, like a thick fog hanging over a dim, oppressive sea, settling there as something eternally renewed and never lifting.

The final scene of the story is rich with implication: Sun Liqun sighs that all her longing can finally come to rest; Xu Qunshan, clumsily, is learning to become a “woman”; Sun Liqun can’t help reaching out to smooth Xu Qunshan’s hair; Xu Qunshan wipes away Sun Liqun’s tears… It can’t help but make you wonder — were they really assimilated by the secular world? Were they really violated by the heterosexual world? Did they really both become bisexual?… Of course, the answer to that is unknown. What happens after can only live on in the reader’s own thoughts.

Many TV series these days end this same way — some confusing, some seemingly complete — and behind these surface appearances lies an openness. Viewers can imagine all the different lives Rose might lead after The Story of Rose; they can fantasize about the wonderful struggles of the three characters after Hidden Love (or Ripe Town). As Valéry said: “There is no true meaning of a text.” That captures the essence of openness precisely: it is the free combination of infinite possibilities. Sartre, too, believed that “existence” cannot be reduced to any fixed set of expressions, because an individual’s existence keeps changing with each person’s free choices.

Rather than say there is no ending, it would be more accurate to say the ending never began.

The recently popular game Black Myth: Wukong is built from a sense of uniqueness, subtlety, and an irreducible, lingering mystery that together form this virtual world. Somewhere between deliberate and accidental, the developers have left us many fascinating fragments. Without further ado, I’ll record them as I play.

One.

A passage from The Compendium of the Five Lamps, Volume One.

Seeing an unusual aura about a Brahmin’s dwelling, the Patriarch made to enter it. The master of the house, Kumaralata, asked: “What sort of followers are these?” The Patriarch said: “Disciples of the Buddha.”… Luoduo said: “There is no one in this house.” The Patriarch said: “Then who is it that answers?” Hearing this, Luoduo knew he faced no ordinary man, and opened the gate to receive him…. When conditions do not obstruct one another, then birth itself is no-birth.

Two.

Three.

The turtle, the villager, and the jewel merge into one, leaving the viewer unsettled. Beneath the vast yellow sky, the question of human nature is lifted into a meditation as old and ever-renewing as time itself.

Four.

Now I understand the helplessness and the things people feel they have no choice about. I once thought such people had simply become slaves to society; now it seems that love, dreams, freedom… almost all of them are merely appendages of existence. Someone who hates randomness might end up spending the rest of their life as a statistician. What an absurd joke that is — and yet such a vivid, living portrait of reality.

Five.

Works about Wukong always seem to end up linked to “Camp,” that aesthetic which demands a certain audacity. The world insists that thinness is beauty, yet John Waters took an aging man, Divine, and dressed him as a woman in pure camp defiance; the world insists that politicians be composed, or at least pretend to be, yet Trump burst onto the scene, camping that very expectation; King Zhou of Shang was tyrannical and refused to heed counsel, so Jizi feigned madness, camping the entire decadent, incompetent society — and Confucius praised this as “ren” (benevolence). It’s like that line from the film Jeux d’Enfants (Love Me If You Dare): “Dare you?”

Six.

Qian Zhongshu once remarked that translators are good for nothing. The reasoning isn’t hard to grasp. A good translation must carry feeling and thought, must emerge from language yet rise above it. Otherwise, turning “car” into “jiaoche” (sedan car) or “bus” into “daba” (big bus) — how easy is that? Translation comes into being only where feeling and thought arrive together. Hence a translated text is itself evidence of feeling and thought. — In an age that prizes the instantly consumable above all else, translation may be the last surviving form of literary art.

The purpose of this compendium (The Wiley Handbook of Anxiety Disorders, Paul Emmelkamp, Thomas Ehring) is to give clinicians a comprehensive overview of anxiety disorders. It comes in two volumes: the first draws broadly on theory and research, the second addresses treatment specific to each condition (excerpted and translated from here). The book’s content is thorough and detailed, an impressively comprehensive achievement. Readers can use it as a map to seek out remedies for themselves, or simply read it at leisure to broaden their knowledge. (Download).

National Geographic’s documentary series Taboo is excellent material that has broadened my horizons considerably. My first exposure to taboo culture came through Freud’s writing, which introduced me to many curious anthropological customs. Of course, times have changed, and many taboos are no longer confined to remote mountain villages — plenty exist right around us too.

Taboo is substantial in scope, with seven seasons in total, each containing a number of episodes. After only a few episodes, it already feels like a vast and impressive undertaking. I’ve read a number of anthropology and sociology books before, but content delivered through the sound and image of film appeals to me even more. This series has almost no boring stretches — both the hooks and the substance are there in full. Let me jot down notes on a few episodes worth remembering:

6.2 Societies differ, but gender categories converge in surprising ways. Most people believe there are only two genders, male and female, yet in India a man can become a “third gender” through castration, while Indonesia recognizes five social genders. In Albania, too, there are “sworn virgins” — women who become men, giving up their original gender and undergoing a complete transformation in voice and bearing. Even so, for most societies, the third gender remains taboo.

5.14 I’ve always believed that people who love sociology and anthropology cannot help but care deeply about life. This documentary aligns with that belief — for all the subcultures it touches on, simply having a hook would make it no more than a circus act, something to watch and forget. This episode, “Outsiders,” struck me hard. It tells the story of a leprosy village in Nepal, the “anti-consumerist” new generation of Sydney, and the rat-catching caste of Sulurghimi village in India, sketching out the lives of these marginal figures across cultures. Beyond simply learning about these subcultures, it also pushed me toward some reflection on this kind of taboo.

4.6 I’ve personally seen, in person, a people who wear bronze rings around their necks. The reason we find this strange is that, within our own culture, it’s taboo. And yet such taboos are increasingly crossing over from subculture into the mainstream. Split tongues, eyeball tattoos, artificial horns… will these various forms of body modification — momentarily painful to us now — become some kind of mainstream in the future?

p.s. As the pandemic spreads, Shuanghuanglian is flying off the shelves — I wonder when traditional Chinese medicine might itself become some kind of “taboo”? :)

This weekend I watched Ne Zha, the animated film that’s been a huge hit lately. Its plot design is quite inventive. I recall a saying about innovation: suddenly taking a detour on a road you walk every day — that is innovation. Embedded in this interpretation are some preconditions for innovation: first, the road must be one you walk every day, a familiar, well-worn path; second, the detour must be sudden. If that road isn’t one you walk daily, but merely one of several optional routes, taking a detour isn’t innovation; and if the detour isn’t sudden but a habitual one, that isn’t innovation either. So innovation turns out to be a small trick built on top of familiarity and repetition. And director Yang Yu’s (Jiaozi’s) little tricks here genuinely deliver no small amount of delight.

Yesterday I was reading through some commentary on Ne Zha. One view holds that for a mythological story aimed at young audiences like this, the violent, gruesome details — “cutting flesh from bone to return it to one’s parents” — ought to be omitted, and that this new adaptation, by softening them, better fits “the spirit of the times” and is more beneficial for young people’s wellbeing. I can’t agree with this at all. It seems to suggest that adults are entitled to an endless range of emotions, while minors must live a life that is purely “happy and carefree.” But why must it be “happy and carefree”? Why impose such restrictions specifically on minors?

Society is often caught in an awkward position on this question. On one hand it restricts people’s desires; on the other, it’s powerless to actually enforce that restriction. We’ve all had the experience of seeing some “forbidden” content, in one way or another, before we came of age — can that really be called breaking the law? China’s Law on the Protection of Minors requires guardians to “protect” minors, but what about when minors seek such content out on their own? The law, in dealing with this kind of issue, resembles an emasculated husband who can’t control his own wife. Meanwhile, public opinion is constantly broadcasting what counts as good and what counts as evil. Yet in the end, the slightest bit of “out of line” speech on Weibo is enough to instantly scatter all that careful moral guidance. It’s clear that public opinion, too, is just a microphone held under the pressure of the state apparatus, forever skating along the edge between the forbidden and the acceptable.

I recall that our generation produced quite a few “teenage writers,” and adult critics, in discussing them, were always careful about the restrictive function of that adjective. “Teenage” can refer to the fact that the writer became famous early, was a prodigy — but it also carries an implication of being a notch below adult writers. The subtext of the phrase “teenage writer” is roughly: let’s view this “writer” objectively and with reservations. To me, this is a form of discrimination by adults against minors, and more broadly, a way the adult world rejects and looks down on whatever it sees as “other.”

Freud proposed a famous concept: the Oedipus complex, broadly the story of killing the father and marrying the mother. Adults’ extreme restrictiveness on this question seems to be an effort to keep that plot from ever playing out. The excuses given are all manner of strange — some say it’s because children’s physiological development isn’t suited to exposure to sexual culture. But was that culture itself born out of research into adult physiology?

The real reason adults restrict minors looks more like a primal complex: reproduction brings offspring, which is to say vitality and fighting strength, meaning the capacity to produce more goods or capture more prey. If children were allowed to possess this power too early, or to know its strength prematurely, patriarchal authority would be threatened. So what adults truly fear isn’t the acquisition of knowledge itself. But this world remains, through and through, a patriarchal world — in other words, a world run by old men. For a person operating purely at the level of “personal meaning,” if one truly wished to cast off all patriarchal interference, perhaps the only way would be suicide.

Olivier Meys’s 2017 film Bitter Flowers tells the story of Lina, a laid-off factory worker from China’s northeast in the late 1990s, who goes to France to work as a nanny in order to lift her family out of poverty and help her husband open a shop. Life in France turns out to be far harder than she imagined, and Lina is eventually forced into street prostitution. But paper can’t wrap fire forever — after she has saved up enough money to return home, her husband finds out anyway. In the end, he leaves the family, and Lina sets out on a path of reconciliation, seeking his forgiveness…

It’s said that the director spent a long time researching the lives of streetwalkers in Paris, which gives the film its understated, lived-in realism. Whenever Lina talks to her family on the phone, she’s evasive; when asked how she’s doing, she mumbles vague answers. This fear that comes with being a sex worker is something we can easily understand. Films on similar subjects, like Irina Palm and La Marcheuse, capture this same emotion. But setting aside Lina’s personal struggle, the film also prompts some other lines of thought.

A 2014 estimate put the economic activity generated by the sex trade in eight major U.S. cities at no less than four billion dollars a year. Judging by the substantial sums Lina earns, that figure may even be conservative. We can easily spot a recurring “social narrative” here — whenever someone is backed into a corner with no other options, a story is born about a good person forced into prostitution. What does the existence of such a vast economy, set against a “social narrative” that can’t possibly account for all of it, actually tell us? And it’s precisely because of these visceral, bloody stories that feminists convince themselves the sex trade degrades women’s dignity. One has to ask: in a market that large, is there really no one who enters the trade by choice? Is everyone really driven to it as a last resort?

That said, social pressure is of course real, and I imagine anyone entering the sex trade has to go through some process of overcoming it. In the end, very few could be as at ease as Maggie, the protagonist of Irina Palm, casually telling a friend that her occupational hazard is “Penis Elbow.”

Sexual orientation refers to which gender we’re drawn to and develop romantic feelings for. The word “homosexual” comes from the Greek root “homo,” meaning “the same,” rather than the Latin “homo,” meaning “man.” It refers to both gay men and lesbians. In general, “gay” (often referring specifically to “male homosexual”) and “lesbian” are more commonly used than “homosexual,” much as is the case in Chinese. In 1988, someone borrowed the term “tongzhi” (comrade) to translate “lesbian and gay,” and from then on “tongzhi” gradually became a near-synonym for “homosexual,” marking a milestone in the founding of the Chinese-speaking world’s “tongzhi” movement (Liu Dalin, Lu Longguang, 2005).

Looking closely, we find that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are not especially old words — they were coined by Karl Maria Benkert in 1869 (see wiki). “Gay,” on the other hand, evolved more gradually: in the late 19th century, expressions like “the gay nineties” and “gay Paree” were associated with happiness and glamour; in 1895, after Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality became public, the word “gay” took on a sexual connotation for the first time; in the 1920s, gay people began using the word among themselves, since, compared to “homosexual,” it carried less negative baggage; by the 1960s and 70s, the word had become widespread as a term for the gay community.

English slang is full of terms related to homosexuality — “queer,” “dyke,” “fag,” and so on. There’s even a dedicated online dictionary of “gay slang” (A Brief Dictionary of Queer Slang and Culture), which is worth a read if you’re curious.

Let’s return to the origins of the word “homosexual.” In Plato’s Symposium (Συμπόσιου), there’s a striking passage:

… the original human nature was not like the present … The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number ; there was man, woman, and the union of the two,… which had once a real existence, but is now lost, … “Androgynous” …

Here, Aristophanes (189c–193e) argues that humans originally came in three sexes — male (descended from the sun), female (descended from the earth), and androgynous (descended from the moon). The Symposium is regarded as the first work in the Western tradition to discuss homosexuality, because right after this passage, Aristophanes goes on to describe these original humans as round, with four hands and four feet, two identical faces on a single head, four ears, and two sets of genitals — until Zeus split them in two, and ever since, each half has gone looking for its other half.

It’s not hard to see how this account is saturated with homoerotic suggestion, and how different it is from our current categories of gender. The word “sex” derives from the Latin “secare,” meaning “to cut” or “to divide,” which has led some to argue that the division of humanity into two sexes represents some kind of ultimate truth for our species. I’d argue that this rigid, binary view of classification is exactly what fueled the rampant essentialism of the late 19th century when it came to homosexuality — rooted in scientism and a mechanistic reductionism. Intersex and androgynous figures have appeared throughout history in countless forms; to take just one example closer to home, the Ishinpō (医心方) records a passage on androgynous people. It claims that the ancient Chinese believed some women’s clitorises grew larger with the full moon, and that during the full moon such a woman had to have intercourse with a woman or she would die; during the new moon, she had to have intercourse with a man or face the same fate (R.H. van Gulik, 1990). Intersex figures appear widely across literature, conveniently satisfying readers’ appetite for the exotic.

The concept of the “intersex” gave rise to a whole series of “inventions” at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. With two wars and rapid economic change, people’s psychology began to fracture. Many insisted that the First World War was responsible for the collapse of young people’s sexual morals — which isn’t quite right, since there was already plenty of sexual upheaval before the war. As Ian Hacking put it, “a kind of person comes into being at the same time as the kind itself is invented. In some cases, our classifications and our own kinds emerge hand in hand, reinforcing one another” (Angus McLaren, 2007). What we can say with confidence is that, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, people could no longer be satisfied with just two genders, and a number of new terms — “homosexual” among them — were born alongside concepts like masochism and sadism.

In that era, homosexuality was defined and explained in extraordinarily mistaken ways. Most sexologists at the time believed it stemmed from depravity and self-indulgence, and went looking for absurd physiological “proof” to back this up — A. Tardieu, for instance, told readers that “active” homosexuals had unusually thin, dog-like penises, while “passive” homosexuals had funnel-shaped anuses. Later scholars gradually came to understand that homosexuality, if it was a “disorder” at all, resided in the nervous system rather than the body… Given the dark history the word “homosexual” grew up alongside, it’s no wonder it never won much favor among gay people themselves.

Throughout history, all sorts of “authorities” have tried to explain the origins of homosexuality as a subculture. Some supposedly authoritative experts once claimed, for instance, that sexual relationships between women were linked to masturbation, “masculine entertainment,” and an enlarged clitoris — a blatant act of vilification, if there ever was one. Setting aside the views of these self-styled “experts,” let’s look instead at some slightly more scientific theories of causation:

1. The genetic theory. Kallmann argued that if one identical twin is gay, the other is gay with 100% certainty. A report published by an American cancer research team in Science in July 1993 revealed an unusually high rate of homosexuality among the male relatives of gay men, and that the pattern could always be traced back through the mother’s side. But subsequent researchers overturned this finding. A genome medicine research group under the Human Genome Project later proposed that homosexuality is linked to a recessive gene located in a particular region of a chromosome: when a man carries this recessive gene but his spouse does not, their children will not be gay, though they may be bisexual; if both partners carry the recessive gene, their children may be predisposed to homosexuality. Of course, this research has yet to be completed.

2. The dysfunctional family theory. Bieber’s 1979 study found that the family pattern most common among gay men was a “domineering mother, weak father,” leading him to conclude that, as children, they came to identify with femininity and look down on masculinity, or developed an emotional fear of women. He also found that gay men tended to have spent at least some time in a rigid, restrictive environment, with little exposure to aggressive play. Some families even raised their sons explicitly as daughters — with predictable results.

3. Brain and endocrine factors. Human sexual arousal and stimulation are mediated through the brain — stimuli from the sensory system trigger neural impulses, and producing the resulting impulse and desire requires the involvement of sex hormones, much the way anger requires adrenaline; without it, there would be no anger to speak of. The neuroscientist Simon LeVay dissected the brains of 41 male cadavers (19 of them gay) and found that the hypothalamus in gay men was smaller than in heterosexual men.

There are many other theories about the origins of homosexuality — birth order, for instance — but it bears emphasizing that none of them are conclusive. Historically, homosexuality was at one point brutally persecuted, before gradually being treated with more reason. Clinically, homosexuality has been divided into “true” homosexuality, bisexuality, and “false” homosexuality. To me, this kind of classification is meaningless — even those supposedly “false” homosexuals shaped by circumstance, such as certain individuals in prisons or the military, can hardly be said to be free of a genuinely homosexual inner nature.

Perhaps it’s precisely because of these blurry concepts that some gay people want, or are forced, to “cure” their sexual orientation — but what exactly does “cured” mean? Some might say “normal.” But that would be a serious mistake. When Alfred Kinsey once heard an assistant use the word “normal” during a survey, he flatly criticized it, insisting that there’s no such thing as normal or abnormal in sexuality. When we talk about “normal” versus “abnormal,” what we’re really using as a reference point is the common behavior of the majority — in other words, ethics and morality. Or we judge by statistical standards: when you don’t belong to the “majority,” you’re an outlier, abnormal. But that kind of judgment is simply the many bullying the few — it has nothing to do with science. Havelock Ellis, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, also pointed out that everyone has their own mode of sexuality. Homosexuality, therefore, is not something inferior.

On another note, in 2014, China’s first conversion therapy lawsuit was decided by the courts, ruling that homosexuality “treatment” was entirely fraudulent. But then, what kind of homosexuality, if any, actually requires treatment? Before answering that, we should first talk about “harmony.” In psychotherapy, harmony refers to a congruence between body and mind — between what one thinks and what one does — without shame attached to it. In this heterosexual-dominated world, the relatively few who are gay differ from the mainstream, and if they themselves feel extreme distress and suffering because of it, then they are patients who need treatment. The third edition of China’s Chinese Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders, published in 2001, classified homosexual behavior accompanied by anxiety, depression, or inner suffering as a mental disorder — while cases without these symptoms were, naturally, not considered pathological and required no treatment at all. From this we can see that those who genuinely need treatment are, first and foremost, people with a psychological condition. Their identity is first that of a patient, and only secondarily that of a homosexual. It’s a bit like a wealthy man with a mental illness being committed to a psychiatric hospital — we can only say that he, specifically, is unwell; it tells us nothing about other wealthy people.

As for the broader history of persecution against homosexuals, and the various absurd behaviorist “treatments” of the past, I’ll leave those aside for now.

I once heard a saying: “You’re more likely to see what you believe than to believe what you see.”

Tonight I watched a 2014 film, The Normal Heart, about AIDS and homosexuality. The story is set in 1981, when a disease related to the immune system began appearing in New York’s gay community. A gay writer, Ned, watches his friends die one after another while the government does nothing. So he founds a gay health organization, calling on the public and the government to take the issue seriously. The film portrays society’s reaction at the time with striking honesty. As the infection and death toll climbed, panic spread — the association drawn between “homosexuality” and “AIDS” produced prejudice and discrimination across society; gay men who had already come out began to question the hard-won sexual liberation they’d achieved, while those still halfway in the closet grew even more terrified, even less able to face their true selves.

Setting the film aside, you can still find, in plenty of reports, a certain loaded phrase: “the homosexual infection rate” — yet at no point in history have the number of gay AIDS patients ever come close to the number of heterosexual AIDS patients. So if you’re looking for where most AIDS patients actually are, you should really be looking among “heterosexual patients” (in the film, when Ned, who has spent his energy advocating for the gay community and seeking treatment for AIDS, is asked by a White House official about the number of infected heterosexuals, he has no data and is left speechless). The rumor linking homosexuality to AIDS gave rise to the so-called “gay plague.” It was later confirmed that America’s first case actually predated this period by quite a margin. Later still, a medical researcher coined the term “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID). Though these fallacies were eventually abandoned, they reveal how, the moment AIDS quietly arrived, both public opinion and the scientific community rushed, without exception, to slap on labels. Even some gay men themselves began to waver, believing AIDS was a punishment for their own sin — a fear that conveniently aligned with the doctrines of certain religions. In 1997, even amid the news of the famous gay designer Versace’s shooting, this same lingering fear persisted — the media speculated that Versace had been killed by a vengeful male prostitute infected with AIDS…

On the other side of this blind panic, things gradually grew more rational. In 1988, public support for gay men in France kept rising. U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed the Federal Hate Crime Statistics Act, and “safe sex” quickly became a buzzword. After that, Europe and America took a far more pragmatic approach to public education and outreach — note, not education aimed at condemning sexual orientation, but education on how to prevent disease.

Looking back over a relatively short span of history, this kind of mistaken conditioned reflex eventually dissipated like a foul smell in more advanced nations. And national-level measures — laws, meaningful education — are indispensable to that process. Certain matters of personal life, like downloading adult films at home, sexual orientation, or religious belief, lie beyond the reach of any government. Should any regime try to meddle in such matters, it would amount to trying to alter human nature itself, and the effort would ultimately prove futile. The film keeps emphasizing “self-acceptance,” yet within the larger “family” that is society, if the parents won’t speak up, who would dare accept themselves freely and openly?

The “safe sex” era under George H.W. Bush left me with a great deal to reflect on, and it brought to mind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization — rising from the bottom up, each level only attainable once the one before it is met. By that logic, the need for sex sits at the very bottom, among the most basic “physiological needs.” And yet, under certain societal norms, from body to soul, it is made to feel anything but safe. Sex outside of marriage is treated as something illicit, wicked, shameless; sex within marriage comes burdened with the heavy responsibility of reproduction and child-rearing — a difficult road either way.

I remember sitting in on an educational psychology class as an undergraduate, where the instructor screened Les Choristes (The Chorus). That kind of gentle, transformative teaching is bound to leave any viewer in awe of the gardener-like artistry of the teacher in the film. In fact, education has long been a recurring theme in cinema. Among films portraying ordinary teacher-student relationships, Dead Poets Society is perhaps the most famous; among those depicting more unusual subject matter, there’s the well-known The Blue Lesson (教室别恋); and films that tie education to human nature together have their classic in The 400 Blows.

Compared to these tightly plotted, fast-paced films, The Class (Entre les murs) is inevitably a duller watch — two hours that consist of nothing but trivial classroom incidents, faculty meetings, and parent conferences. And yet, precisely because of this, it feels real. Real almost to the point of being a documentary. This distinctly European style of filmmaking comes across as pure and unadorned, as if it were never made to move anyone in the first place.

The students in the film are thirteen or fourteen years old. I’ve never worked directly with kids that age, but having spent four years as a teaching assistant in college, I’ve encountered all kinds of students. Because of that, I can appreciate all the more the particular tolerance and warmth this teacher extends to certain students. I dislike punishment just as much as he does, but I don’t fully believe that education is, at its core, built on love. Just as with the student expelled in the film, there really are troublemakers in real life. When it comes to dealing with them, an education rooted in love seems to fail — but should we instead turn to something like the reform school in The 400 Blows?

This line of thinking has led me to doubt education itself. How much power, how much meaning, does education really have? Does it enlighten people, or corrupt them? These past two days I’ve watched a number of interviews with Amy Chua, and I find myself wondering: is education an accomplice to humanity’s will to dominate?

It’s been a few days since I watched Forever Young (无问东西), and I’ve kept feeling there’s not much point writing about a film like this. Beyond its fairly handsome cinematography, its nostalgia card, and its star-studded cast, I don’t think there’s anything especially remarkable about it. And yet, the endless stream of commentary that followed has only made the film seem more substantial than it is — some reviews even go so far overboard as to label it “the most … film of [whatever].” This flood of varied opinions has gotten me thinking.

First there’s the wave of overwhelmingly positive reviews — from major websites to social media feeds, and now even Douban shows a high rating for this film. I jumped on this bandwagon myself and went to watch it. But it felt, as someone put it, like “meeting in person doesn’t live up to hearing about it.” Some analysts say its steadily climbing box office is the result of word-of-mouth, pyramid-style promotion; others say it’s the product of deliberately engineered media hype.

Then there’s a very different camp, which holds that the film is simply bad — its narrative is disorganized, overly sentimental. Plenty of viewers left confused, walking out before it ended. There are also accusations that parts of the film aren’t handled with proper seriousness, suspected of deliberately glossing things over. Someone even asked on a forum what connection the film actually has to the real history of Tsinghua University.

All the various opinions essentially boil down to these two camps. The first urges the second to look at it from a different angle, to see its sincerity and the century of Tsinghua’s history behind it; the second harshly attacks the first’s earnest emotional appeals… I won’t take sides here. What I find interesting instead is the official stance. The film wrapped production in 2012 but wasn’t released until 2018. Given the Cultural Revolution tragedy depicted within it — one death, one injury — I doubt any politician would feel comfortable with that content. The only solution was to position it as an “art-house film,” a “youth film.”

I’ve said this before: art-house films are nothing more than a small, awkwardly-positioned collection of movies. When people find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place with no other way out, humanity tends to rationalize by setting a new precedent.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2016 film After the Storm (海よりもまだ深く, “Deeper Than the Sea”) is exactly this kind of film. For a viewer used to blockbusters, the first hour or so of slow, everyday scenes might feel unbearably dull, but the unhurried unfolding of the ending left me deeply moved. I love seeing the small house where the mother lives, and her lingering attachment to the people and things that once filled her life there. At the end, after the rain clears, she waves goodbye on the balcony with a face full of smiles at her son’s “family” — radiating a warmth and tenderness that lingers.

As the film nears its end, the pleasant sound of whistling and the air after the typhoon has passed will only bring to mind those mundane, fragmentary scenes from the first half: the mother making ice cups, Ryota snooping around everywhere… A film this delicately observed is a rare thing.

Tucked away in a corner of that small house, you might feel a brief moment of warmth — but peel back the layers of that tenderness, and a far more sobering reality emerges: Ryota’s career is a mess, he’s extorting money from a high-schooler, selling off his late father’s belongings; his ex-wife, in the name of “planning her life,” is seeing a wealthy man, though there’s no real feeling between them; even his innocent young son flatly declares he doesn’t want to grow up to be like his father.

It’s hard not to sit with the question — why are we all rushing through life like this? A scene from The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is worth thinking about here. In it, an old cowboy, after his friend is wrongfully killed, faithfully honors his friend’s last wish: he drags the killer along on a journey into Mexico to bury his already-decaying corpse at a particular spot. In the end, it turns out that the address — and the wife he claimed to have — were entirely made up.

Rushing in, rushing out — where exactly are we all headed?

Zeno (450 B.C.), a disciple of Parmenides, was an ancient Greek philosopher who proposed the following arguments for the impossibility of motion (no motion).

First argument: motion is impossible, says Zeno. A moving object must first reach the midpoint of whatever distance remains, and this repeats endlessly, without end. Suppose an object travels from 0 to 1; after n moves, its position is 1 - 1/2^n. We can never find an n for which this equals 1 exactly, and therefore the object never truly moves.

Modern physics introduces the concept of “infinity” to resolve this: like Zeno, it still assumes a continuously changing process, but holds that the object passes through infinitely many midpoints — that is, there’s no 1 - 1/2^n through which the object fails to pass. Zeno denied infinity, and so he denied motion.

Second argument: Achilles races a tortoise. Achilles starts behind but moves twice as fast. Suppose the starting points are 0 and 1, and the finish line is 2. For any integer n, when Achilles reaches 2 - 1/2^n, the tortoise is already at 2 - 1/2^(n+1). Therefore, Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise.

From the standpoint of modern physics, an object’s motion across an interval of time is made up of infinitely many positions across infinitely many moments. If you deny the existence of infinity, motion becomes discontinuous.

Third argument: the flying arrow does not move. At every single instant, the arrow’s position is fixed, and therefore the arrow never moves.

That the arrow doesn’t move at any single instant doesn’t mean it doesn’t move across an interval made up of infinitely many instants. In calculus, for instance, it’s easy to find examples where 0 × infinity = 1.

Fourth argument: there are three rows — row A stands still, while rows B and C move toward each other, each at top speed. Then B’s speed relative to C would be twice the top speed — which is impossible (it exceeds the maximum speed), and therefore motion cannot occur.

The general formula for the no-motion argument: deny infinity + other conditions = no motion. Its equivalent form: (accept) motion + other conditions = accept infinity.

Freely translated from Mathematics: A Concise History and Philosophy — click here for the original text

Francis L.K. Hsu’s Americans and Chinese (Huaxia Publishing House, 1989) has a number of genuine merits:

• Tight structure. The author’s framework lays out Chinese-American differences thoroughly — from personal needs like the art of living and relationships between the sexes, to intricate social activities, to the weaknesses of each nation’s culture.

• Individual life as the throughline. The author avoids the trap of organizing the book chronologically. Doing so would implicitly assume that differences are subordinate to time — but as we know, many customs don’t change with the times at all.

• Broad sourcing for its arguments. The author draws material from both historical anecdotes and current affairs.

• No blind deference. The author has his own views on the work of those who came before him, and offers deep reflection on social activity. The book is full of genuinely insightful observations.

However, this particular edition’s translation is a real disaster. Careful readers on Douban have already compiled quite a few errors (see here); I’ll just add a few of my own here:

• “Yousenmaite National Park” (p. 95) — now commonly known as Yosemite.

• “For the first thirty years, one admires the father and tends to the children; for the last thirty years, one admires the son and respects the father” (p. 111). The common saying is actually: “for the first thirty years, look to the father and respect the son; for the last thirty years, look to the son and respect the father.”

• “Life Is Worth Living” (p. 118, rendered in Chinese) — an odd translation; the original title is “Life Is Worth Living.”

• “锲而不舍” misspelled as “楔而不舍” (p. 128) — simply a typo.

• “OB Cooper” (p. 169) — should be “D.B. Cooper.”

If these transliteration issues could be chalked up to the limited access to information at the time, the logical confusion elsewhere is much harder to excuse. For instance, on page 98:

Many Chinese people today, myself included, are surprised to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors viewed China merely as one province of their vast empire — surprising because Chinese history books simply present Mongol rule as the Yuan dynasty.

This sentence has neither a coherent causal relationship nor anything genuinely surprising about it (by the translator’s own logic). So what does the original English actually say?

It is something of a surprise for many a present day Chinese, including myself, to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors considered China only as a province of his much vaster empire, since the Mongol rule was presented in Chinese books simply as a dynasty (3rd edition, University of Hawaii Press, page 103)

You can see that a much better rendering would be: “Many Chinese people would be quite surprised to learn that Genghis Khan and his successors regarded China as merely a ‘province’ of the Mongol Empire, since history books simply classify their rule as the Yuan dynasty.”

There are many more lapses in logic like this throughout the translation. On top of that, many of the book’s citations don’t appear properly in the body text — given how differently things are translated today, you can’t easily search for these books, whereas the original edition’s notes and index are perfectly clear. Granted, this translation is nearly 30 years old now, so some of this dated quality is to be expected. A retranslated edition was published this month (Nov. 2017) by Zhejiang People’s Publishing House — hopefully these issues have been addressed.

Even before watching the film, I already sensed it wasn’t simply a film about children. Having finished it, I find myself deeply moved: a child shoulders so much blame, accusation, and attack that was never hers to begin with — what kind of feeling must she have carried through it all?

It’s 1983, and the Soviet Union has not yet collapsed. Even the red scarf on the chest of the lovable children in the film hints faintly at a spirit of collectivism. At an age meant for love, she chooses to protect the heroic image of the boy she loves; as a member of a collective, she accepts being branded a “traitor”; and as the granddaughter of an old man well versed in the art of letting go, she also embraces the nickname “Scarecrow.” Add to that her achingly pure face, and calling her a “saint” wouldn’t be an exaggeration. And yet, in the furnace of that great collective, even a saint becomes a shameless scarecrow, cast out as other.

That tightly organized little clique is worth dwelling on. What struck me most were the shrewd “Iron Nail” and the dim-witted, short girl. Both of them get along just fine. Iron Nail is the leader, basking in supreme political power; the dim girl stands apart from it all, cracking the occasional joke, playing the clown. The roles each of them symbolizes within the group are unmistakable.

Perhaps the girl admitted to being a “traitor” purely out of love, but the way this collective treats outsiders without any concern for right or wrong is truly terrifying.

Confucius said: “攻乎异端，斯害也已” — often interpreted as “attack incorrect views, and the harm will be eliminated.” But I believe the final character “已” here functions as a sentence-final particle of exclamation. Read this way, the whole line means: “Attack views that differ from your own — that itself is the harm!”

Within a vast collective, the individual is always small, easily overlooked, easily suppressed — just one of countless fragments making up the whole. In the same way, childhood, within the larger arc of a person’s growth, is merely cannon fodder for that growth — like the tiger that borrows the pig: it never gives it back.

(youtube link)

Tonight I rewatched Kon Ichikawa’s masterpiece The Burmese Harp (ビルマの竪琴, 1956). Let me say upfront: this is a very good film. Its strength lies in its delicate portrayal of human nature, its faithful capture of local customs, and the abyss of reflection it leaves the viewer to sit with. I once read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which reflects on the character of the Japanese nation and the domestic situation during the war. Watching this film afterward complements that reading well, and gave me a deeper understanding of how the Japanese, both inside and outside the country, thought about the war at the time.

The Burmese Harp unfolds through the inner transformation of an ordinary Japanese soldier, Mizushima, and the story is compellingly told. Mizushima’s unit has already surrendered, and he’s ordered by his captain to persuade another besieged Japanese unit to give up their pointless resistance rather than die in vain. He fails. When he wakes on a battlefield strewn with corpses, on his way to find his comrades, he sees the devastated land of Burma littered with mounds of Japanese dead… In the end, Mizushima gives up returning home, choosing instead to stay and walk across every inch of Burma.

Under Ichikawa’s direction, this drastic transformation never feels forced or abrupt. I remember one scene where Mizushima, inside a pagoda, can’t help but pick up his harp and play along with his comrades’ singing. By the time the others realize and rush to the door looking for him, he stands just on the other side, listening to their voices, quietly murmuring each of their names. The pain in his heart — both longing for them and unwilling to face them — comes through vividly. There are many details like this throughout the film.

Why does Mizushima do what he does? This question has almost been elevated into one of politics and national stance. Some viewers believe the director intended to whitewash Japan’s wartime history, and that even this act of atonement is being framed as “paying tribute to the Yamato race.” Japan’s wartime army undoubtedly committed terrible crimes and caused great harm to the Chinese people. But do they truly have no right to atone? Even after atoning, must they still face endless condemnation and suspicion?

At least to my eyes, Ichikawa’s depiction of the Burmese people comes from real feeling. A director without genuine feeling could never have seen that lovable old woman, the mountains and rivers, the devout and simple people everywhere in the film. I see no need to maliciously assume he had some “hidden agenda.” As for those who don’t believe Mizushima’s repentance is sincere, I suspect they’d also struggle to understand the lifelong torment endured by the heroine of Atonement (2008).

People are equal when it comes to atonement. Everyone has the right to feel that what they did was wrong, that it hurt others — that’s a form of moral cultivation, of conscience. Likewise, being able to perceive the atonement of someone who has hurt you is also a form of cultivation and conscience. In The Reader (2008), the survivor is offered money from the Nazi perpetrator, and she refuses it. When asked what to do with it instead, she simply says: As you think fit.

Our conscience, in the end, is always interrogating whether something is truly “fit” — and that’s why I believe a soldier like Mizushima could exist.

(youtube link)

A few days ago I came across an e-book copy of A History of the Bible (Central Compilation & Translation Press, Nov. 2013). By every measure, it’s a good book — provided the reader has an interest in this particular kind of history. It’s not about the history or stories told within the Bible, but about the story of how the Bible itself was written, transmitted, and translated. You could say it’s a history of a history.

The book lists in detail the various popular Bible translations, and answered many of my questions about biblical denominations. On page 714, it says:

• There are many English translations of the Bible — upwards of a hundred — and more keep appearing. Each translation has its own particular leanings and purpose; many have a clear theological bent, aimed at evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox believers, or Jewish readers. Some translations target readers of different levels: scholars, general readers, children, and adults learning English as a new language. Others are translated for English speakers in different regions of the world, using the vocabulary distinctive to that region — Britain, America, Australia, and so on.

Most Bibles share at least one common goal — to keep pace with the changes in the English language. Words that were common a generation ago have since fallen out of use, or taken on entirely different meanings, while new words keep emerging. Because of this, many popular (English) translations are updated on a regular basis. Yet I suspect Chinese-language Bibles can’t really evolve in the same way — otherwise they wouldn’t read as awkwardly as they do :)

Beyond the dense, complex history and textual scholarship, the book also has some lighter material — for instance, the “Bible Trivia and Curiosities” section (page 936) mentions:

• At a normal speaking pace, a person can read the entire Bible aloud in about 100 hours, or a bit less.

• The word “Bible” doesn’t actually appear in the Bible itself. It comes from the Greek word biblos, named after the Phoenician city of Byblos, an important source of the papyrus used to make books. At the time, biblos simply meant “book” — so the Bible was simply called, well, “the Book.”

If you’re interested too, you can download the epub preview edition to sample it.

Another idle weekend, probably. I came across online a Wanli-era (Ming dynasty) printed edition of the Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海经), its printing exquisite and its calligraphy elegant. As a child I couldn’t yet read the original text, so the first version I encountered was a picture-book collection of its stories. As Yuan Ke praised it, “Among our country’s ancient texts, none is as magnificent and strange as the Classic of Mountains and Seas.” Plants, animals, medicine, minerals, deities — everything is contained within it. It encompasses all things.

Precisely because it leaves so much room for the imagination, illustrated editions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas have always been popular. The Ming-dynasty edition’s illustrations were drawn by Jiang Yinghao; the commonly seen annotated edition by Yuan Ke mostly adopts the illustrations from Wu Renchen’s Expanded Annotations to the Classic of Mountains and Seas, though Wu’s edition is only one strand among many illustrated versions of the ancient text. Ma Changyi’s 2001 edition, Illustrated Discussions of the Ancient Editions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas (reprinted in 2007), incorporates illustrations from many other editions, and is the most complete illustrated edition I’ve come across so far.

Whether illustrated or text-only, editions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas run into an unsightly problem: many of its “strange characters” simply don’t exist in computer font libraries. I’ve heard that Yuan Ke’s traditional-character edition handles this well, with hardly any awkward improvised characters. But other editions I’ve seen are downright unsightly — some characters that couldn’t be typeset were simply handwritten in, and worse, some publishers just substituted other monster names that happened to be easy to input (the version on the App Store, for instance, is riddled with such errors). Even some editions published in recent years still suffer from this. To fix the problem, I think at least two things need to happen:

1. Publish in traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese is ill-suited to ancient texts, and can even cause ambiguity. Take radical substitution as an example: the simplified “鱼” radical replaces “魚,” and by the same logic “鯨” becomes “鲸,” and so on — but some characters in the font library were never given a simplified “鱼”-radical form to begin with, like “鱻,” which has no version with three “鱼” stacked together in simplified form. This kind of inconsistency shows up constantly in simplified editions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas: sometimes the “魚” radical appears, sometimes “鱼”; sometimes “鸟,” sometimes “鳥”; sometimes “钅,” sometimes “釒”…

2. Use or build large character sets. For example, the six-legged, three-winged bird “(尚鸟)(付鸟)” mentioned in the “Classic of the Southern Mountains” (as pictured) doesn’t exist in standard Song or Ming typefaces — you need to load supplementary character sets just to see it rendered properly.

It strikes me that the survival of the Classic of Mountains and Seas across the centuries was no easy feat. Ancient printing methods were utterly different from today’s — every single character had to pass through a woodblock carver’s hands. Compared to modern technology, the sheer scale of that labor is hard to imagine — and it’s proof, too, of the truth that fine work takes time.

This afternoon heavy snow started falling, and on the way home I spun out, so I didn’t dare drive out again afterward. On this dull evening, I remembered seeing a report a few days ago mentioning that Daniel Wu’s first film was Portland Street Blues… Lost Love (美少年之恋), so I went and watched it on Youku.

Although I’ve seen plenty of films in this genre, in all sorts of varieties and styles, a pure, beautifully innocent love story like this always makes me watch on with longing and a sense of romance. The Love of Siam is like that, Get Real is like that, Summer Storm is like that, Beautiful Thing is like that, Starcrossed is like that… these are the kinds of works that touch some still-unformed nerve in us. The film I watched today, Portland Street Blues… Lost Love, belongs to that same category.

The film carries a fairly rich amount of content, and is said to portray certain aspects of the gay community fairly realistically. Many viewers who’ve seen this film tend to focus on the handsome leads, but I’d rather take a calmer approach and analyze the inner psychological world of the character Sam (played by Daniel Wu).

Sam is, first and foremost, an obedient, sensible boy next door — as his mother says, good grades, strong body, very well-behaved. After work he happily cooks for his parents at home, and keeps everything tidy and in order. Compared to MB Ah Jet and the big star K.S., Sam is unquestionably the more “exemplary” kind of gay man. Yet there’s another side to Sam that’s rather cold and calculating. He treats Ah Qing, who loves him deeply, with utter heartlessness — even later, running into him on the street, he pretends not to know him at all. This kind of character makes me feel that, at the end of the film, Sam’s suicide note comes across as somewhat affected — I even find myself doubting whether he ever truly loved Jet at all!

Because his father discovers his sexual orientation, Sam chooses suicide to escape the person he loves most — judgment and condemnation from his family (though in truth, this judgment and condemnation is largely something he imposed on himself). This act reflects just how long he had been suppressing himself. Looking closely: when he was with Ah Qing, suppressed by a sense of obligation toward love, he never told him the truth — that the love between them was already over; when he was with Jet, he never told him that he actually cared for him, only letting Jet find out after his death. I’d like to borrow the title of a book by Li Yinhe to say to him: you needed comfort so badly.

Sam’s death is worth dwelling on. He, Jet, and K.S. each represent a different type of handsome gay man: the diligent, responsible type; the carefree, dissolute, youthfully wild type; and the dazzlingly charismatic type who keeps reinventing himself by attaching to whoever holds power. The first type is somewhat perfect, the second somewhat decadent, the third looks beautiful on the surface. They all wear a shining exterior, yet live very different lives underneath. Is this meant to prove that the harder someone tries to love, the more wholeheartedly they try to live, the more they end up rejected by life itself?

In short, Sam’s case is, on one hand, a casualty of mainstream social culture, and on the other, an inevitable product of his own personality.

It would be impossible to say I wasn’t moved. Faced with love entangled with death, I still can’t tell, as ever, whether it’s death that brings the sorrow or love that brings the tears. P.S. I Love You is exactly that kind of film. It’s true — we can never really gain anything from love, yet we always end up learning so much from it. Love arrives suddenly, and leaves just as suddenly. You can hold onto one love, or wait for the next one, you can wait for someone far away, or let time slip away beneath your changing face… After all the ups and downs, you’ll always return to the ordinary — classes, study sessions, sleep… otherwise, once time has washed over you, you’re left as nothing but a lonely old person. The whole of love is just like the changing of the seasons.

Pure love is like a bad fever: it defies definition, yet still leaves you completely drained. The plot of the novel is simple enough — a fiery, passionate woman barges into an ordinary man’s life, and they fall in love. One day the woman discovers a manuscript the man wrote long ago, and becomes obsessed with getting it published, only to be rejected again and again. Stubborn, volatile, extreme by nature, she keeps stirring up trouble around herself. In the end she goes mad, gouges out one of her own eyes, and the man ends her life, then returns alone to his old existence — writing, running his shop… Philippe Djian’s prose is as plain as a baptism, leaving you unable to grasp the danger hidden within it. The man and woman love each other with total abandon, careless of life, death, or reputation. A line the man says right before he kills her has stuck with me: like two fingers on the same hand, no matter what happens, this will never change. In truth, they’re more like two solitary islands connected beneath a vast ocean — too scorched by the sun to ever really be looked at directly. Thirty-seven point two degrees is said to be the temperature of passionate love, and that temperature never wavers even after the woman dies — and yet you can never quite explain why, just like a fever, with an entire cluster of clinical symptoms that defy any clean definition. While reading, I kept thinking of scenes from the film version interspersed in my mind — the little house in the desert, the woman’s breasts and her moaning, the carousel, the white cat… Too bad the author himself disliked that film adaptation; I haven’t bothered looking into the interviews and reasons behind that either.

Funny enough, today as I was nearly finished with the book, I was on my way to driving school, and the girl sitting next to me mentioned she’d read it too, and kept talking to me about it. She said that the feeling toward someone you don’t know well is just like a book: you want to read it for a long time, it’s fascinating while you’re reading it, but you finish it quickly, and then maybe you toss it aside or sell it to someone else. Embarrassed, all I could say was — you really do have too many books on your Douban list…

A friend recommended I watch Sexy Beijing, but since I’d heard the whole show was basically a knockoff of Sex and the City, I put off actually watching it for quite a long time.

The director and writer, Su Fei — whose name happens to match a certain Chinese sanitary napkin brand — documents ordinary Chinese people episode by episode, armed with her wonderfully witty takes. Although it resembles Sex and the City in form, its ability to see through the lives of ordinary Chinese people is every bit as sharp. I watched a few episodes this evening, and they were all quite good. Take the episode “Finding a Partner,” for instance — it clearly reflects the absence of real marriage and sexual fulfillment among Chinese people, whether among the older generation’s arranged, parent-dictated unions, or the younger generation’s seemingly unrestrained yet still hollow sex lives. There’s also a bit where a foreign guy reveals that Chinese women outperform American girls in bed. At the end, Su Fei compares village chicken to village-style simple love, and finds that both are things people want but don’t actually want to put in the work for.

In my view, for any audience on the Chinese mainland, Sexy Beijing is a light, easy introduction to sex — letting the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, caught between merely living and truly being alive, pause for a moment to think about love and sex.

Watch online: https://www.sexybeijing.tv/

Strange to say, lately I’ve developed a preference for old films, and I rewatched A Romance of Blood and Passion and Con Air, and found I still enjoyed them quite a bit. To be honest, one’s a TV drama and the other an action film — they don’t have much in common, at most a shared sense of nostalgia on my part. But I love the plain, understated, lingering moments in both, and the ordinary way each story winds down between two people. I’m drawn to understated narratives (though the latter is hardly understated by any means), and even when a story unfolds gradually, it never lacks for humanity and spirit. Once a character has presence, they shine all the brighter on screen. What I want to talk about here is the reunion in each.

Zhong Yuemin in A Romance of Blood and Passion is a deeply complicated man. Restless by nature, bold enough to take risks, yet genuinely capable. As the show itself puts it, he’s no ordinary fellow — given the chance, he could accomplish great things. He goes to the countryside in northern Shaanxi as a “rusticated youth,” and falls in love with Qin Ling, a fellow Beijing transplant who sings folk songs. But reality doesn’t let love stay: he returns to the army, while she remains in Shaanxi. Many years later, after Zhong Yuemin is discharged from the military, he hears news of Qin Ling through a roundabout path, and goes to the theater to hear her perform, where they reunite backstage in the dressing room. He tells her he’s been searching for her all along, that he’s loved her the whole time. The years of separation seem not to have dimmed the feeling between them at all — but sadly, too much has happened by then, and in the end they still don’t end up together.

The reunion in Con Air is far simpler. Cage’s character, having injured someone while protecting his wife, ends up serving time in prison. After waiting seven years, the day of his parole finally arrives — only for the plane home to be hijacked by inmates. After a string of action sequences, Cage subdues the hijackers, and the plane makes an emergency landing in Las Vegas. Amid the night, the lights, the ambulances, he and his wife exchange what feels like an almost formal greeting — and that is their reunion.

The reunion in A Romance of Blood and Passion is far more complicated than the one in Con Air — after all, the latter is just a small interlude within a tough-guy action film. I’ve always felt that no matter who Zhong Yuemin ends up with in the end, Qin Ling is his one true love. No matter what, he will never forget that girl in the worn-out padded jacket on the hillside across from him, singing folk duets back and forth. The nature of these two reunions is very different. Zhong Yuemin’s reunion looks happy on the surface, but is in fact riddled with uncertainty. Qin Ling was never a woman he could fully hold onto, which is exactly why he didn’t try to keep her — or perhaps he simply lacked the ability to, given everything going on. Their reunion points toward the shattering of an illusion, while what Cage faces is brimming with boundless hope. He spent so many days in prison consumed by longing, and I understand that process must have been agonizing: trapped in a small room he couldn’t leave, all he had to hold onto were a handful of happy memories from before. And yet, both of these reunions dramatically changed the protagonists’ lives.

I used to often wonder: is there really such a thing as someone who likes reunions? The protagonists of these two films certainly aren’t — for them, reunion is born more out of helplessness than desire. So what would someone who genuinely likes reunions be like? Surely someone for whom fantasy outweighs reality, surprise outweighs the mundane, and longing outweighs actually living it out. As for me, I think it’s best not to have reunions at all — that way I avoid the overthinking, and avoid the remembering too. Maybe some reunions really are “lucky,” but luck like that only happens when you’ve engineered the reunion yourself. There’s a lyric that puts it well: the time between saying goodbye to one and reuniting with another is nothing more than the new year replacing the old.

Qian Zhongshu, writing on Aesop’s Fables, observed that small children always manage to win the adults’ affection, while conflict always seems to exist between the older child and the younger one. A ravishing young girl will always attract the jealousy of girls her own age, while an older woman, lamenting how quickly youth slips away, lectures these young girls on knowing their place. As in the example I mentioned before from “The Long Song,” the scene suddenly swings from beautiful imagery to grim reality, and in teaching people to cherish their time, it also seems to conjure up a rather terrifying image: an elder telling a child at play, “you’re about to die, so enjoy yourself while you can.” In short, culture’s attitude toward “the lesser one” is deeply conflicted: it must extol the virtue of cherishing the young, while also resisting the instinct to fear being overtaken by them. The contradiction runs roughly along those lines.

In the film Sisters in Sin, the older sister is beautiful and captivating, while the younger one is heavyset and unwieldy, drifting monotonously between eating and sexual fantasy. Does the older sister really hate her sister? I don’t think so. If she did, she wouldn’t pull her sister aside to share rather private details about that man, nor would she say such sisterly, intimate things to the mirror. Even if there is a sliver of dislike, it’s driven by nothing more than conventional ideas of beauty. Meanwhile, the younger sister, upon overhearing her sister having sex, clenches her fists and lets a look of pure venom cross her face. She is the black cat lurking in the night, watching for something. And what exactly is that “something”? It’s love — love built entirely on imagination.

Anyone who has been touched by love, even imagined love, can hardly avoid jealousy. In ancient times, a certain Persian king’s wife had every woman who’d had an affair with the king brutally “remade” — subjecting various parts of their bodies to mutilation: hands, feet, tongues, breasts, and so on. But where does jealousy actually come from? Nothing but love — it is precisely the love the younger sister imagines for herself that makes her so envious of her sister losing her virginity, and so indifferent to her sister and mother’s deaths.

Indeed, anyone who clings so tightly to love is already somewhat sick. The younger sister’s jealousy isn’t innate — it is entirely provoked by comparison. Even though the younger sister poses no threat whatsoever to her, the older sister never stops commenting on her figure and eating habits. If we could really let go of certain attitudes toward “the lesser one,” then even if everything else still happened exactly the same way, there would have been no film to make.

Some people weep openly while reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, and some even feel a kind of helpless, baffled tenderness toward it. Werther, who falls ill from jealous love and suffers from heartbreak after heartbreak — is it Goethe elevating a pathological mental state into something noble, or is it our era that has cheapened what was once a noble feeling? I honestly can no longer tell.

For us ordinary people, jealousy is jealousy, but life still has to march forward, step by step — as dull as the film’s opening line about going from ten o’clock to six, and then from six o’clock back to ten. Jealousy spreads, tediously, through the tedium of everyday life. Or maybe jealousy is simply a byproduct of boredom? It’s precisely because every day is so insufferably dull that there’s room to endlessly play out love and hatred. We should be like Schopenhauer, firmly believing that existence is empty, that life — and even existence itself — has no meaning. At that point, the thing humanity fears most quietly creeps up beside us: nothingness. Sartre, for his part, would say that fearing nothingness, fearing that love, hatred, and death are all meaningless, all of it is simply nauseating.

Thinking about it, the love between two people really is like an assembly line — sampling, screening, mass production — nothing more than a void manufactured in the intermissions of boredom.

This afternoon I watched Made Over, a documentary that lays bare all manner of cosmetic surgeries in exhaustive detail: liposuction, double-eyelid surgery, all kinds of reshaping. Maybe because I’m so far removed from the culture of people who remake their bodies this way, even someone like me who enjoys gory, violent films found this one fairly jarring to watch.

Some of the questions the film raises: is cosmetic surgery really “fixing” the body, or “destroying” it? How should the law treat it (after all, it could be seen as a form of injury)? Does it run against certain beliefs? Made Over’s approach to these questions is direct and unadorned — interviewing the people involved and the doctors themselves, without any so-called experts or authorities stepping forward to weigh in. Maybe precisely because of this, some viewers feel the film offers nothing particularly novel. I’d say it’s precisely because cosmetic surgery is such an awkward subject that the film struggles to go very deep, and so it turns instead to another angle (including some rather taboo footage, which is also why I didn’t take any screenshots).

It reminds me of a story from Mandalas in Thangka Paintings: Tibetan Buddhist monks, after painstakingly painting an elaborate mandala, destroy it without the slightest hesitation, letting it vanish completely. But what about our bodies? Are they flawless mandalas, complete in themselves — or scattered, unfinished materials still waiting to be assembled?

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part,ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

Autumn spreads over the long leaves that love us,
swirling past the mice among the barley sheaves;
it has yellowed the rowan leaves above our heads,
and yellowed too the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour when love wanes has settled around us,
our sorrowful souls now weary and worn;
let us part, before the season of passion forgets us,
with a kiss, a tear,
— a farewell upon your lowered brow.

I just watched Our Daily Bread (documentary, 2005), and its blunt, unembellished footage left me with something to think about. This “something” isn’t quite surprise, and certainly not shock. Below are a few screenshots.

I’m not a vegetarian; but I do care about life — to be precise, about the meaning of life. Looking at these images above, what comes to your mind?

In fact, the entire film has no music, no narration — it simply documents, plainly, the production process of the modern agricultural assembly line: animals from infancy to death, plants from sprouting to withering. Some shots might even strike you as overly bloody, yet in reality this all permeates every corner of your life, my life, everyone’s life. I find myself wondering about this question (which is also what many people take away from the film): for the workers living under such an assembly line, what is the meaning of their work? Beyond efficiency, what does this rather science-fiction-like, highly mechanized production actually bring to people?

Probably just food, after all.

They all insist that “seeing is believing” — in other words, hundreds upon hundreds of medical research findings that haven’t been personally witnessed don’t measure up to one piece of firsthand observation. A good quantitative thinker would demand that numbers be used to make the case, but for some reason, the author’s parents proved the value of the research on Tamiflu using the Groucho Marx method instead: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” — Derek Niedermann and David Boyum, What the Numbers Say, Chapter 1, Shanghai Century Publishing, 2006

When people judge whether some unknown event is true or false, they always use experience as their point of reference. We make subjective judgments based on certain properties of things, and from there judge truth or falsehood. This way of thinking — from object to mind, from outside to inside, “the mind itself has no origin, it arises only through circumstance” — is the one true method by which materialists view the world. But there are also those who believe the entire world is nothing more than a product projected outward by human subjectivity.

When the author was young, he received treatment with a certain medicine and quickly recovered. But later research showed that this medicine actually had little effect on that illness. Still, the author and his parents refused to believe the research findings, dismissing them as “nonsense.” This really is a very real problem — much like how atheists don’t believe in ghosts or spirits, don’t believe in aliens… So how could the author, who never witnessed the experimental results himself, possibly believe them?

Think about it: quite a lot of our ideas are produced through experience, and we tend to file away anything that exceeds the bounds of experience into the category of the impossible, the fictional. There’s that old saying: “hearing is empty, seeing is believing.” Yet in high school politics class, the teacher would give an example — “something is false simply because you’ve never seen it” is a wrong statement, because it falls into the trap of idealism. We’ve never seen a real blue whale — does that mean blue whales don’t exist?

Going one layer deeper, that line attributed to Marx isn’t actually quite right, because sometimes we don’t trust our eyes either — what we trust instead is whatever it is we already “believe.” The “belief” produced through extensive practical experience can end up contradicting what our own eyes show us. Seen this way, the relationship between experience and belief is so ambiguous!

If I told you there are unknown microorganisms deep in the sea, would you believe me?

If I told you this world has been visited by aliens, would you believe me?

If I told you there are places on Earth where the laws of physics are violated, would you believe me?

These questions aren’t simple true-or-false items you can mark with an absolute check or cross — they interrogate your experience, and ask you, point blank: do you believe them?

In the picture above, two middle-aged-looking men stand calmly by the seaside, watching the setting sun as the seabirds fly home. This couple are characters from the work of Echigoya Tatsunoshin, a Japanese gay male illustrator.

I used to find it hard to understand why some people are drawn to these plump, so-called “bear” middle-aged men. But Echigoya Tatsunoshin’s illustrations seem to offer me a clue. This love for “bears” is just as ordinary as falling in love with a man or a woman. Love is not an image, not a fantasy — it’s simply that he is there, that he is the one, and so you fall in love, that’s all.

Perhaps this is just what we call nature. The best love is never something God hands to a chosen few — it’s something ordinary people kindle for themselves.

In the world of sexuality, there should be no such thing as “normal” at all. Normal or abnormal is only ever a reference to how the majority behaves — that is, to the ethics and morals that constrain us. Statistically speaking, homosexuals, who differ from the heterosexual majority, are the “other,” the “abnormal” — but this criterion is anything but scientific; it is simply the many bullying the few. Homosexuals are not inferior. Havelock Ellis already said in his Psychology of Sex that every person has their own way of being sexual.

The film’s protagonist, Mieko, also once looked at the group of gay elderly men in the Rainbow Retirement Home with disgust. Seeing an old man in a long dress must have given her quite a jolt. In her place, suddenly thrust into a space where gender felt slightly scrambled, I too would have felt uneasy. But after spending time with them, she gradually comes to belong among these lovable old men, becoming a member of this warm, rainbow-colored home. Homosexuality is in no way pathological. If there’s nothing wrong with love itself, how can it be wrong who one falls in love with?

The group of old gay men in the film are innocent, idealistic, even a little stubborn. Under the pressures of life in the retirement home, they can still laugh and trade easy, unselfconscious sexual jokes with the young; in the face of a real world corrupted by filthy, debased morality, they dream of their own fairy-tale kingdom. Loving stubbornly, guarding that love stubbornly, their inner world feels like that of sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds running and shouting after a dream. Seen this way, I can’t help but find them magnificent.

I think their world is not of this earth, but should exist within the rainbow — that place where heaven is built inside a dream.

Above is an old photograph of a late-Qing execution by torture that I came across today. This form of punishment is called lingchi — death by slow slicing. The person being executed was a “licentious woman.”

Xunzi once said: “A bank three feet high, an empty cart cannot climb; a mountain of a hundred ren, a laden cart can ascend. Why is that? Because of the gentle slope” (Xunzi, “The Right to Sit”). Originally the term meant “a slope that rises gradually,” but it later came to name a form of execution meaning “to die slowly.” I find myself wondering what force, what mindset, drove humanity to invent such a punishment — one that lets the executioner watch the condemned’s life ebb away slowly amid acute agony.

The woman in the photograph is just a “licentious woman” — a woman who stood up for the liberation of sex and love. But do you see it? She holds her head high to the very end (perhaps from the pain, but I’d rather not think that!), and her disdain, her transcendence, are more than enough to ward off the dread that the very word “lingchi” inspires.

Anyone who endures such torture is a great warrior. When the dark side of human nature lays itself bare through so cruel a method, when the crowd looks on coldly, when the body is dismembered piece by piece — by then you have already been liberated, and that is more than death, because the “you” being destroyed is no longer merely physical. You have transcended everything and become the person Plato spent his whole life searching for in his ideal realm.

This torture, lingchi, liberated humanity.

I finally finished watching I’ve Loved You So Long, which I’d downloaded an entire vacation ago, and I feel I should write something down. This seemingly quiet, understated film deeply struck some of my most sensitive nerves. Its subject matter is very similar to I’m Not a Murderer, which I watched last semester — both can be considered moral meditations on euthanasia. What the characters do is, by moral standards, considered an unforgivably evil act of murder — something I once wanted to do but never dared. Perhaps that counts as one of the film’s effects on me, too.

In the film, the mother says her son’s whole body was wracked with pain and convulsions, until he suffocated. Watching her own son tormented by illness with no relief in sight — what must that mother’s state of mind have been? I can only partly understand it. I remember a friend once told me he had stood at the bedside of a relative who was critically ill. The patient’s body was full of tubes — inserted wherever there was already an opening, and where there wasn’t one, cut open by hand. Looking at his dim gray eyes and sallow, sickly face, my friend said he truly wanted to rip out all those beeping machines attached to him.

The hopeless outcome had already become clear by then. I honestly don’t understand — were people in that moment waiting for a miracle, or simply waiting a little longer before having to look death in the face? In that state, does a person still have consciousness? Probably not. Or maybe they do, only they can no longer express it in their own words (which would be the truest suffering of all). Something that happened afterward taught me that for a person to be conscious, to want to die, and yet be powerless to end their own life — that might be the most unbearable thing in the world.

Was it my friend’s story mixed in that struck a chord in me, or did the story itself resonate with me on its own? I don’t know. But the mother in the film, who “loved” her son so deeply, moved me. Her resolve was the same as Mizushima’s resolve in The Burmese Harp, when he parts ways with his fellow soldiers — both defend some unwavering core of humanity, heedless of others’ persuasion, obstruction, anything at all. Driven by the demand of atonement, Mizushima firmly gives up his chance to return home, and quietly departs with his harp. Driven by the demand of love, the mother firmly kills her son.

Will she repent? Maybe. But the judgment of the law, the demands of ethics — on this particular question, they absolutely have no business weighing in. Whether it is right or wrong to end a patient’s suffering through euthanasia is not something I dare comment on, nor something I’m entitled to comment on. You could say love clouded her judgment — but does she really need to atone for it? And if so, to whom? To the bewildered family members? Or to the child who was killed, yet also delivered? “Death has no excuse,” the mother says in the film. But to my mind, the iron bars erected by this so-called civilized society aren’t fit to hold this kind of “criminal.”

There’s a moment in the film worth mentioning. The protagonist’s sister discovers the medical report on her nephew’s condition from fifteen years ago, and asks her doctor friend to look into the details. When that doctor makes the phone call, we never hear what’s said on the other end — but the sister’s tears, which she cannot hold back, tell us enough. Filling that “gap” is the voice of the sister’s daughter reading a fairy tale aloud… The truth lies hidden beneath an innocent, pure reason: love.

Some people kill with their own hands, and yet are not murderers. The truly tragic ones, though, are those who never lay a hand on anyone, yet kill countless people all the same.

What remains in my mind of Rimbaud now are just scattered, fragmentary memories. Either bits of poems, or stories of his unrestrained, dissolute life, or photographs from the first few pages of a biography of Rimbaud. After death, of course, everything dissolves into nothingness—all the more so for a poet from a century ago. Rimbaud wished for so many things to die (I think), and he himself truly does linger, like a mist, in my memory. After the modeling competition ended, I skimmed once again through The Complete Works of Rimbaud (translated by Wang Yipei, 2000), and unexpectedly found myself thinking instead of Rimbaud’s mother.

She was probably not poor, but that her life was a bitter one is beyond doubt. Raising several children alone, she also had to constantly deal with all the trouble Rimbaud brought her, and in the end had to face his strange “decrees” (such as the reading lists he later drew up). She must have been a woman of very strong character—one can almost faintly sense the severity and coldness she showed Rimbaud. He may once have been her pride, but the defiance that grew with his age must surely have robbed her of sleep and appetite. And yet it isn’t hard to see that she still carried heavy hopes for him. Rimbaud’s elder brother was clumsy and inept, his beloved little sister died young, and another sibling was a devout religious follower. To this poor mother, Rimbaud was singular, yet precious. What more is there to say of her?

When the ink of China, a pleasant fragrance, spreads black perfumed powder gently over my night—I lower the lamplight, leap onto the bed, and turning sharply round, see you there in the darkness, my girls! My queens! —Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

A word is dead. When it is said, Some say. I say it just. Begins to live. That day. –Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

The poem carries none of the worldly (some say) anxiety, fear, and anguish about death; instead it views death from the angle of rebirth, a starting point. For the poet, contemplating life, death, and love is like a woman’s lifelong pursuit of slimming and whitening her skin—it never ends. For most people, the span between life and death is nothing more than a straight line segment, with “birth” at one end and “death” at the other. But under such a view, the deeper meaning of death is often obscured. Life should in fact be a straight line, and what extends from both ends is precisely “death”—the very thing human civilization has so often treated as taboo.

The 1999 film Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich, interprets certain deeper meanings of death and desire from the perspective of a necrophiliac woman.

The protagonist, Sandra, loved burying small animals as a child, performing special rites for them before they went into the ground. Her only friend was frightened away by these rituals and by the menstrual blood she shed. After that she returned to a state of solitude. As an adult, Sandra found work at a funeral home, which became the place where she continually released her desire onto the dead.

This naturally brings to mind Nekromantik (1996), but compared to that film, Kissed replaces bloody imagery with the inner desire of its character. Sandra’s desire is genuinely strange—intense, luminous, even carrying a faint whiff of the sacred when underscored by the music. In our own words, this treatment is very literary, very poetic. (Compared with the raw, unflinching realism of Nekromantik, I can’t really say which approach is the more accomplished one.)

On another front, Sandra falls in love with her classmate Matt at school. When Matt learns of her necrophilia, far from objecting or being shocked, he treats it with great respect. Yet he can never quite reach harmony with her in the act of sex. He wants to help turn her desire toward the living. But despite the enormous effort both of them put in, it ends in failure—Matt submits to Sandra’s way of expressing love, turning himself into a corpse.

I think Sandra’s desire resembles what the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras called “nous”—a force that, under any circumstance, points back toward itself, occupying a position of mastery unconstrained by anything else, and through this the spirit is set free. As the film puts it: looking at a bright light without being blinded. Indeed, neither Sandra nor Matt acted out of mere sexual desire; if they had, they could easily have satisfied each other. What no one expected was that genuine desire should prove so hard to attain.

When desire gets entangled with death, many people find it strange, at most dismissing it as the fantasy of poets or the confession of misanthropes. But as said above, both the starting point and the endpoint of life ought to be death. In aesthetic terms, death is open—an eternal work left behind by biological evolution for humankind. What it gives us is never something prescriptive, but something expandable: the cry of birth cannot prove that you have lived; only death proclaims to the world that you once “lived.”

David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash is a work full of tension—the form of the splash contrasts sharply with the flat, straight lines of its surroundings. Its shape sets the mind wandering: some think of diving, others of a waterfall… It carries on an exchange of creation with the viewer, but you will never know what exactly caused the splash—only by diving in yourself could you find out. Isn’t death exactly like this?

I’m reminded of another line of Dickinson’s:

Until moss has reached our lips, and obliterated half our name.

I love lines like this—beautiful because of death, dead because of beauty.

Against a backdrop of mottled, crumbling walls, the dirty (I can’t find a better word for it) female body on display departs sharply from the usual conventions of refinement and delicacy, and in doing so reveals “woman” in a far more truthful light. Most of her works are self-portraits, and this one is no exception.

In some of her works, you find a recurring fishbone-shaped pattern — or rather, actual fishbones — which can’t help but remind me of the fish-and-human-face pottery basins of China’s Banpo culture. I’m not sure whether this counts as a kind of return to the primitive, or perhaps an even deeper impulse to return to the womb.

Francesca Woodman, master of feminine photography click here for more information

I once heard someone say that when she loves a person, she wants to kill them and eat them, to possess them entirely. I can understand that much, because it’s still rooted in love for a “living body” — but back then I couldn’t make sense of necrophilia, that strange, eerie feeling. At the very least, I’d find it nearly impossible to fall for a corpse I’d never even known when it was alive — I mean, really, with so many living bodies available, why would anyone want to make love to the dead? But looking at it now, necrophilia, as a way of channeling sexual pressure and sexual impulse, isn’t actually such a bad outlet.

Besides that, this film also lets us glimpse some exploration of the meaning of “eternity.” Since childhood, society has fed us a certain message — that having children lets love continue, lets life continue. But honestly, what the hell does my offspring have to do with my love? Confused romance, as confusing and nauseating as it may look, is still at least more honest than some of the high-sounding rhetoric out there. If you really love me, would you still treat my corpse that way after I die?

“Echoes of the Rainbow” — even just hearing the Chinese title, “Time, the Divine Thief,” sounds like such a melancholy phrase. And indeed, the film Echoes of the Rainbow really is a film filled with quiet sorrow, its sepia tones beautifully rendered, like a carefully arranged little vignette of time passing. It doesn’t actually do anything to help anyone’s own sense of time, but it still gives me a sliver of hope — that time can let everything slip away, even though that, too, has nothing to do with me now.

The film shows us the texture of life for Hong Kong people of that era, and for viewers and nostalgic types alike, it offers a kind of comfort. The family endures the “baptism” of one storm after another — the lover emigrates to America, the family fortune declines, the older brother dies of leukemia, and in the end even the father, the pillar of the household, passes away too. After everything, the mother and the younger son finally find peace, and looking at a rainbow on the horizon, remark that the older brother was always “a big talker.” You could also say this is a film that teaches people how to forget sorrow.

I’ve heard a lot of phrases built around “carrying something through to the end” — Mao Zedong said the revolution must be carried through to the end, and some TV drama wants to carry love through to the end too. I used to just take note of the phrase without ever really thinking about what “the end” actually meant, because no one can really say what “the end” is.

In primary school, watching the animated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I used to wonder what the bottom of the sea was. Pass through the water, peel back the mud and sand and rock, and isn’t that the bottom? But later, in geography class, I learned about the structure of the earth, and learned that the earth is wrapped in thick layers all the way through — even if you could keep digging down, you’d never reach a “bottom,” you’d just come out the other side of the planet.

Once upon a time, some marvelous piece of software on the computer would have me utterly absorbed, though never for too long; street racing is every boy’s dream, and I too once played Need for Speed obsessively, though I’ve stopped now… There’s a method people use to teach themselves to forget — write down the people you once cared about in a diary, and after some time, look back and find everything has changed, the people are gone. I’ve done this myself, and got the same result. Later, even the notebook itself went missing. That’s when I understood: I’m someone who can’t stay focused on one thing for long.

Sometimes I make myself a hypothesis: if I fell in love with time itself, right up until everything in the world froze solid or vanished, what then could I possibly do? At most, I’d climb into some vehicle and travel the earth in lonely company with the air. I really do want to know — can the years truly become a divine thief, and steal everything away, right down to the very last thing?

No era has ever been as fascinated by androgyny or intersexuality as our own. People are forever coming up with strange and wonderful ideas about gender, like the “third sex” and “queer theory” that scholars have since proposed. I’ve also read articles before calling for the removal of the gender field on ID documents, the promotion of “standing toilets for women,” and so on. The existence of gender itself is facing more and more challenges — why should the labels “male” and “female” alone be enough to divide several billion people into two camps? I’m against this kind of binary division.

The 1997 film Ma vie en rose tells the story of a boy named Ludovic coming to terms with his own gender. At home, he plays with Barbie dolls and copies the graceful dances he sees on TV; at a party he puts on heavy girl’s makeup, and at the same time falls for a boy at school, innocently wanting to marry him. Paired with that face only little boys have — pure, intoxicatingly so — calling him the “Rose Boy” really couldn’t be more fitting.

On the other hand, the neighbors find his strange behavior unsettling, and one after another keep their own children from associating with him. Finally, when he secretly plays Snow White in a school stage performance, it provokes the other parents’ anger, and they sign a joint petition to have him expelled from the school. His family, troubled on his behalf, brings in a psychologist to counsel him — but is he himself not just as anxious about it? Lovable Ludovic believes that an “X” chromosome must have fallen into the trash, that he’s a hermaphrodite, a scientific error.

The film never offers a real resolution. Even by the end, though his family gradually begins to accept him, under the dominance of society’s binary stereotypes, Ludovic still has a long road ahead. Growing up is never easy for anyone, and the exploration of gender is no exception. The shaping of a concept as complex as gender is accomplished jointly by history, culture, and psychology, and so a great many problems still arise when trying to weave an idea like gender equality into everyday life.

Indeed — you’ll always hear someone hurling “tomboy” or “sissy” at others as an insult. As Kevin Tsai put it so well: discriminatory words that hurt people are like a samurai sword that wounds — you can tie as many pink ribbons on the blade as you like, and when it’s swung, it’ll still cut just the same. Facing these traditional customs, only a shift in awareness can ever overpower the force of language — gender is, in the end, nothing more than one of a person’s traits; no one is absolutely male or absolutely female, and so however someone is, they deserve respect.

But as far as I can see, gender equality is wildly out of place in China. Take, for instance, the kind of “equality” manufactured by public opinion, which always leaves people with the impression that women are “rising up” to snatch men’s rice bowls; or take the popularity of terms like “fake girl”; worse still, schools set standard hairstyles for boys and girls alike… What I want to say is, we should all hold at least one basic conviction: everyone’s growth deserves care and concern, and all the labels society piles on will only collapse of their own accord once truly understood.

For someone like me, who’s always wanted to learn to cook but has never had the chance, and is too lazy to make the chance — watching a film about food is the best substitute. In The Chef of South Polar Station, a handful of men stranded in the ice and snow of Antarctica find that their daily meals are the best way to dispel the loneliness of their long stay. As I’ve said before, cooking is a state of mind. Through this kind of communication that’s almost like language, the protagonist finds his own happiness in seeing everyone else satisfied.

The film is full of “treasured” foods — out in Antarctica, where ingredients are never in short supply, the men feast freely on steak, lobster, rice balls… I’m not much of a glutton myself, but even I felt my mouth watering.

This is the scene I found most amusing. The men pour fruit juice onto the ice to mark out the boundaries for a baseball game, but the mixture of juice and Antarctica’s pristine ice crystals turns out to make excellent shaved ice. Watching three grown men, like children, lying flat on the ground scooping up “shaved ice” with spoons — wouldn’t you want to try it too, come winter?

Maybe it’s because I love ramen myself, but the uncle in the film who can’t go a single day without a bowl of ramen struck a real chord with me. Looking at it now, cooking isn’t just what I used to think it was — there’s also the mood of the person eating wrapped up in it. See something delicious, and your spirits naturally lift. In the film, when the uncle has no ramen to eat, his face goes gloomy. The so-called communication of food and drink is, more or less, exactly this.

Speaking of cooking, it reminds me of Still Walking, which I watched last year (see “Nothing Out of the Ordinary”) — if Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film is like a refreshing little snack, then this Chef of South Polar Station is a rich, hearty feast you simply can’t turn down. The “sentiment” it carries goes even further than Still Walking — it dissolves a barrier that humanity has never quite managed to overcome: loneliness.

Drifting Flowers is a 2008 work by Taiwanese director Zero Chou. I imagine no one needs an introduction to Zero Chou — her 2007 film Spider Lilies, a fairly well-known queer-themed film, probably owed much of its fame to Rainie Yang and Isabella Leong. The scattered subplots of Spider Lilies offered almost no real pleasure, but this Drifting Flowers turns out to be a rare, genuinely good queer film.

The film is made up of three stories — “Meigou,” “Shuilian,” and “Zhugao”: eight-year-old Meigou doesn’t yet know what love is; Shuilian, her best years behind her, spends what’s left of her life searching for her late partner; and the teenage Zhugao gradually comes to understand her own love for women. A line from the film’s introduction on Douban captures its essence perfectly: When the time of youth has passed, what meaning is left to life, and what are we supposed to do?

Yes — these three women are not like the women of Women Who Flirt, suppressed by patriarchal society yet still chirpy and bright; nor are they the sexy, fashionable women of Sex and the City living it up in some big metropolis; still less are they the women of certain Taiwanese or Korean dramas, living carefree lives tangled up in complicated love affairs. They belong to a small group of women I find utterly adorable and love dearly — lesbians.

Like the recent First Love, this film too is about love, but a love that is neither heavy nor distant — the director paints, in the plainest of strokes, a truly authentic love that exists in this world. Watching Shuilian board the train to go searching for Ahai, I found myself in tears as well. If you still think love feels too remote and uncertain, maybe try the approach Drifting Flowers takes: just love freely, without restraint — youth won’t let you drift for long.

What is this film actually about? It’s genuinely hard to say. I walked out of the theater yesterday, and was still thinking about it past five this morning. To me it feels like the howl rising from the depths of life within Laura, the pitiable mother, the moment she discovers she herself caused her son’s death; it also feels like the rise and fall of the orphanage — a grand baptism from desolation into decay. After her son’s death, Laura is utterly consumed by the grief of losing him and the hope of finding him again — she stares at his photographs, restores the orphanage… I’m certain there were many more details that never made it onto the screen.

When a person’s mind is on the verge of collapse, what most often takes hold of their thinking is a single belief, a single hope — to me, this is humanity’s most uncontaminated garden, the truest expression of human feeling. In the end, Laura dies amid her own delusions, having taken too many pills. The film’s most beautiful moment comes when Laura embraces Simon, the children come walking toward her one by one, and even Tomas removes his mask and smiles, as they all gather in Laura’s arms. The lighthouse flares back to life — and even though it’s only a fantasy, that light feels as warm and bright as sunlight itself, illuminating the heart.

In the eyes of many people, ghosts are exactly what Laura’s husband believes them to be — simply nonexistent. Su Xuelin, in her commentary on Lu Xun, said that during his lifetime he turned himself into a kind of idol. Aren’t the spirits in this film exactly what Simon and Laura themselves fabricated? The irony is that the ones fabricating these spirits are, on one hand, a lonely boy near death, and on the other, a pitiable mother “guided by pain” in her desperate search for her son. They both carry love and feeling in their hearts, and through certain “fabricated” things, they manifest life and bring it into sharper relief.

After Sex (2007) feels less like a single film than a collection of short pieces. It’s made up of conversations between eight pairs of men and women after sex — lovers, a divorced couple, a gay man questioning his own identity… all of it aimed at exploring the relationship between sex and love. For Chinese audiences who tend to be obsessed and disoriented by sex, this is a film quite different from Lost in Beijing — and far better suited to thinking seriously about sex and love.

Some viewers online found the stories a bit strange, or not quite believable. Even I found myself doubting whether the gay couple’s discussion of who tops and who bottoms was a bit too far-fetched. But on second thought, we always try to judge how reasonable or credible a story is using logic — yet in reality, things that lie entirely outside the bounds of rational thought happen all the time. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is impossible — that, it seems to me, is closer to absolute truth, and it’s especially true when it comes to sex and love.

Sex and love — sex in particular — appear, on the surface, to be purely physiological. Some people think of it as no different from urinating or defecating, which crudely and brutally strips away the entire psychological dimension of sexuality. But I say this without any intention of moralizing, because everyone carries some bias about sex and love, and “prejudice is the everyday fare of those without ideas, and the Sunday entertainment of those who have them” (Qian Zhongshu) — no one really escapes it.

I watched the French film The Piano Teacher back in high school. At the time it didn’t move me much — I let the plot drift past in a kind of daze, and simply thought the woman in the film was a thoroughgoing pervert. Most people who analyze it from a sociological or psychological angle arrive at the same conclusion. The “love” depicted in the film was something I couldn’t understand — I might even say it wasn’t love at all.

But looking at it now, this is a film about “love” — though it’s a love far removed from anything psychology could ever account for, utterly different from the love described in literature, and nothing like the love society demands of us, centered on lineage and reproduction. This love is the female protagonist’s own subjective experience, and that makes it exceedingly rare and precious.

A piano teacher in her forties, her clothing and daily life strictly controlled by her mother. She is musically gifted, a strict and excellent teacher, yet utterly unremarkable in ordinary life. She experiences her sexuality by cutting her own labia with a razor blade and watching the blood, or by renting pornographic films, sniffing tissues with the rank scent of semen, and sneaking peeks at couples having sex at the drive-in to console herself.

A music student (Walter) falls in love with her, and is tormented by her in turn. She demands that he treat her sadistically; in the end he does, but it brings him none of the pleasure it’s supposed to. This pitiable teacher, in the film’s final scene, plunges a small knife she always carries into her own body and disappears into the street.

Is she a pervert? Is her love wrong? That’s the question I keep turning over.

Everyone has their own way of loving, and on that level, there is no right or wrong. He loves her, and she loves him in her own way — so it is right. What most people fail to notice is another kind of perversion: that everyone follows the script written in books, meeting someone at some corner of the city, falling for each other, marrying, having children, growing old together. Not everyone realizes that this perverse, terrifying ritual is itself something many people regard as deep “happiness.”

I would say love is, without question, an utterly willful thing — especially when you are facing true love: love that is eternal, that never grows old.

These past two days I watched several of the 2010 Oscar Best Animated Short winners and nominees, and each one left quite an impression! I’d especially recommend these two:

1. The Lady and the Reaper, 2009. Production company: Kandor Graphics and Green Moon.

The soul of a dying old woman is about to be led away by the Reaper. She isn’t afraid, because she’ll get to go to heaven and see her late husband again, finally ending her lonely life on the farm. But a meddling doctor revives her, and the Reaper, unwilling to accept this, launches an all-out battle against the doctor.

This raises the question of euthanasia. It’s worth noting that our country still has no law on euthanasia to this day – although NPC delegate Yan Renying once raised the issue of euthanasia at the Seventh National People’s Congress, it was never passed. People insist on forcibly intervening in the deaths of those who wish to die, when death, for someone enduring agony on their deathbed, is precisely the best release. Looked at from another angle, in today’s economic downturn, couldn’t we at least cut back on emergency-rescue costs? Clearly, confusion never goes away.

2. French Roast, 2008. Production company: Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films.

An arrogant businessman, after finishing his coffee at a restaurant in Paris, suddenly realizes his wallet is missing. To save face he hatches a series of dishonest schemes, all of which fail again and again, nearly landing him in real trouble – and in the end, the one who saves him is the very beggar he had looked down on. In the film, the characters’ true inner selves overturn their outward appearances: the seemingly simple, kindly old woman turns out to be a wanted criminal; the seemingly wealthy businessman turns out to be penniless; the seemingly destitute beggar turns out to be a philanthropist; the seemingly bull-strong policeman turns out to be an indifferent drunk. (Douban)

Drama is real life, a strange, somber, and painful kind of existence, where men and women expose the evil within their hearts beneath the merciless gaze of the crowd: a lovely face conceals a corrupted soul; gentlemen and ladies use virtue as a mask to hide their secrets; the seemingly strong, for all their outward show, gradually reveal themselves as cowardly because of their own weaknesses; the honest man is not honest at all; the seemingly pure and noble turn out to be the harlot and the libertine. (Of Human Bondage, Maugham).

So then, can you really tell the difference between drama and life?

2010 Oscar Best Animated Short Collection Verycd Download Link

Pixar and Disney joining forces really has produced no shortage of great work – toys that talk and move, a charming little clownfish, a superhero who just wants a normal life… every one of them is a masterpiece worth talking about. A friend recommended WALL-E (2008) to me last summer, but it sat unwatched for a long time before I finally downloaded it. Having now seen it, it really is a fine piece of work – mountains of trash piled high on Earth, ships drifting through space… every scene rendered vividly and richly, and even the OST is top-notch! The little plan to rebuild Earth at the end of the film was warm and moving too.

What I admire most in the film is the love between the two robots. Wall-E, the garbage-cleaning robot, and Eve, the probe robot, simply fall in love – no gender, no race, no time, a love that crosses the universe, truly earth-shattering. Someone might say, well, those are just two machines off an assembly line, just a combination of parts – but then again, aren’t humans just a combination of water and protein, products of the very same kind of manufacturing process? Of course, thinking this way might be oversimplifying the question, or it might be overcomplicating it.

Ah, never mind – watch an animated film (a fairy tale) and let it cleanse your spirit a little, wash away some of your fixed assumptions, and feel something fresh, like morning dew! Still, it’s nice to see the model of love has made some progress – no longer just a prince and princess. That, I find most reassuring.

From the understated, unremarkable beauty of Still Walking (歩いても) to Air Doll (空気人形), adapted from a manga, Hirokazu Kore-eda tells his stories slowly, gradually peeling back delicate layers of human nature. Once again his films have left me thoroughly enchanted. Maybe I’ve become addicted.

In the film, an old man says that people with cold hands have warm hearts. I’ve had cold hands since I was a child – in the language of Chinese medicine, that’s explained as poor circulation of qi and blood – but I can’t really say my heart is all that warm either, ha. It makes me think of the person who used to warm my hands for me in winter, long ago, and how touched I was by that.

“I am just an air doll, a tool for humans to satisfy their sexual desire.” Every time I hear her say this line, I think of the lyrics Miriam Yeung sings: I want to cry, could you please stay awake with me a little longer, stay by my side like when we first met, when I wasn’t yet afraid of being tired. I want to be an air doll too, staying by her side, the two of us becoming, together, a “tool” with a heart.

No birth, no death, no brilliance, only eternity. OST download – listening to it, I can’t help but feel a quiet sorrow.

Take Me to a Distant Place is a rare, excellent film. Taiwanese directors know how to move an audience with limpid emotion. Especially the film’s ending, where A-Gui holds up an umbrella to look at the rainbow in the blue sky – it struck deep into my nearly shattered nerves.

A-Xian is a rather sensitive, artistic gay man. He loves to fantasize, falls for backpackers, falls for sailors. He plans out a life with his lover and recites it all to himself, detail by detail; he wants to go to a distant place and settle there quietly – but where is that distant place?

I wondered, and guessed – maybe what he loves isn’t any particular person, just the idea of somewhere far away.

Just as he says: I confess, I weep, the distant place is somewhere I can never reach. In truth the distance isn’t far at all – a person is already standing in the distance, so how could the distance be distant? But once you arrive at that far place, where then is the next far place?

My mind in a muddle, I can only think of a poem:

I think

I have already walked very far

Don’t look at me

Really, don’t look

I have already walked very far

“The Other Side of the Mountain,” Luo Yufeng

The protagonist of Changeling is a woman I admire. In an America where women’s status was still low, she dared to seek truth and justice without fearing power. Although by the end of the film she still hasn’t found her son, she goes on searching, full of hope. Over two hours telling a simple story, yet it never feels drawn out – I was drawn in by the plot, my curiosity piqued, and infected by her hope.

Looked at from the angle of human rights, Changeling is a stirring film. It can show Chinese people – so numb, silent, and dulled when it comes to politics – what power is, what resistance is, what a protest march is. But setting all that aside, I just want to talk about women’s rights.

Thinking back, the earliest work I encountered that touched on women’s rights was The Legend of the New White Snake. Bai Suzhen, though a snake demon regarded by the mortal world as something other, crosses the so-called “boundary between human and demon” in pursuit of her right to love, doing good deeds and bringing benefit to the people in the human world. At the same time, she fights against the pedantic, prejudiced Fa Hai. Although the White Snake’s model of love is still built on the foundations of a patriarchal society, it was something she won entirely through her own struggle.

Works concerning women’s rights are too numerous to list – well-known examples include the Korean drama Jewel in the Palace (everyone says it’s a classic!), and the Hong Kong film Green Snake, also based on the Legend of the White Snake, among others; I won’t go through them all. But I think the feminine spirit each of these works projects brings them close to the first woman God gave humankind – Pandora, who can serve as the archetype of woman herself: curious, innovative, strong, and just a touch obsessive.

Monday was International Women’s Day, and I don’t know how women everywhere spent that day. But I imagine that on this “imported holiday,” the most women can enjoy is a few hollow well-wishes or a day off work. The deeper feminine spirit underneath has been thoroughly castrated.

In The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham says that some people, in this world, are born in the wrong place. To that place, they are nothing more than a passerby. Among friends and family such a person may remain forever withdrawn and unhappy, and even in the one environment they know best, they stay solitary. This sense of being a stranger in their own homeland forces them to wander far away, searching for a dwelling where they might finally settle for good.

I have always felt that Rimbaud was exactly this kind of person. He had “wind beneath his feet,” fleeing people and things again and again in pursuit of the dream in his heart, and even when the dream shattered, he went on searching for a new “vision.” But this passerby, as Mallarmé put it, was a passerby worthy of respect. True, he was unrestrained, yet he left tenderness behind; he wandered, yet he cried out to be kept; he was infatuated, yet never settled; he understood, yet refused to admit it. This was Rimbaud, a man fated to wander his whole life.

His love affair with Verlaine once stirred his inspiration and gave the world brilliant poems, yet in the end it turned him into a great bird burdened with a thousand pounds, no longer able to spread its wings and soar. Despite their almost heartless breakup, I believe he truly loved Verlaine, not merely liked him a great deal. He once imagined they might stay together for life, that everything might come to a stop. But unfortunately, for someone of Rimbaud’s temperament, love could never make him stay in one place – only ceaseless leaving, ceaseless searching, could soothe this genius’s restless, drifting heart.

What stays with me most is the film’s ending, where Rimbaud runs toward the sea. He found it. Found what? Eternity – the sun and the sea shining together as one! And yet I find myself wondering: did Rimbaud really find it?

Silent Light (Stellet Licht, also translated as “Silent Sunlight”) tells the story of an all-too-common marital affair – the third party. But I don’t want to dwell on who is the “wounded one” or the “one who lets go” in the film, nor debate whether the male lead was right or wrong. What I think is worth mentioning is only the six minutes of footage the director used to “record,” with such honesty, at the beginning and end of the film – the sky breaking into dawn, the afterglow dissolving away. For those people who get “earth-shattering” over matters of the heart, the light that pours out at sunrise and sunset is the best medicine for silence and peace.

In reality, many people turn a blind eye to the various troubles of marriage and love, and I admit this kind of life can bring a sense of calm and warmth. Think about it – waiting at dawn for the first ray of light, the sunlight silent and wordless, unmoved by sound or color, holding and swallowing all the darkness. And yet, I still don’t want to spend my life this way. A life like that always feels like it’s missing something – no change, no unpredictable thrill. I long for a free, unfettered “journey,” and the happiness of calm and peace only unsettles me.

This moment reminds me of a saying: marriage is the grave of love, but without marriage, love would have nowhere even to be buried. I’d like to add one more line: why must we find love a grave at all? A love left exposed in the wilderness, left for others to curse and spit on, to disappoint, to grieve over, to suspect – isn’t that far better than a love quietly enshrined in a memorial hall? The title is “Do Not Be Silent,” because I may already have been placed long ago on some long assembly line, flowing on, day after day, in a great surging tide toward some distant place, and have already been silent far too long.

Great Letters: From A to Z, the Glorious History of the Alphabet is a book on the history of language that’s both scholarly and accessible. It not only explores the pronunciation and evolution of letters, but also answers fun questions like “why does x represent the unknown?” — the reason being a compromise made by 17th-century printers due to a shortage of French y and z type pieces — and even resolves a few puzzles found in linguistics. For instance, “ma” is said to be the most basic sound infants first produce, true the world over. When a baby says “ma-ma,” it carries no meaning of “mother” at all — it’s adults who absorb it into their own vocabulary. And so, in Mandarin Chinese “妈” (ma), Hindi “maa,” Vietnamese “me,” Malay “emak,” Hawaiian “makuahine,” Swahili “mama,” Finnish “emo,” Hebrew “ema,” Basque “ama,” Quechua “ma” — across all these utterly unrelated languages, you can still hear the flavor of “ma.”

Beyond that, the author also includes the symbols of some minority communities. For example, “Q” stands for “queer,” and StageQ is a queer theater troupe. Even the fact that “Zorro” means “fox” in Spanish is dutifully recorded. Truly, the book reaches into every corner, leaving nothing out. The pity is that the book’s design and binding are a major letdown.

The Chinese edition’s cover appears to inherit the base color scheme of the English edition, both trying to convey that sense of the vast culture embedded in written language. But the illustration chosen for the Chinese edition is quite problematic — you can even see jagged, pixelated edges (not ruling out that this might be some intentional pixel-art style). At the same time, the text alignment is also done poorly, giving the feeling of an unfinished proof copy.

The design of the English edition’s cover, while not going for a flashy visual style, uses an interwoven grid and decorative text symbols of various colors, and the overall color scheme (including the text colors) gives off a strong sense of cultural weight.

The cover issues might be secondary — the interior page design is even more dreadful.

I dislike the cloud-pattern background in the table of contents, and the margins at the foot of the body pages are too narrow, creating a visually oppressive feel. As a result, you can find readers on Douban saying the more they read, the less they want to continue. And it’s not just the headers — the body text throughout is also quite small and cramped. This might be due to cost considerations for paper, but it’s not very comfortable on the reader’s eyes.

In addition, the chart designs all come across as rigid and lifeless — though this is a common ailment among many mainland books. For instance, comparing the “World Script Genealogy” chart on page 8 with the “Text Network” found inside the cover of Yukimasa Matsuda’s Zerro (Taipei: Net and Books, 2007), the difference in quality is plain to see.

Lastly, I’ll mention that the translator did a truly excellent job! Many thanks for the wonderful translation — I gained a great deal from it.

A few days ago I bought the Shanghai Translation Publishing House edition of The Art of Loving, which has a real edge in binding and layout over my old Jinghua Publishing House copy, making it much more pleasant to read, and sparing me the annoyance of missing pages. The pity is that the translation feels less fluent than the earlier one — in some places it’s less clear, less easy to follow than what I’d read before. Picking it up again, I found new things to take away from it, so I’ll use this as a “hook” to rethink love, and that magic-trick-like thread of ours we call emotion.

As for love — biologists say it’s a kind of biological hormone, sociologists say it’s an economic relationship, mathematicians might think of it as some kind of functional relation, and political scientists would treat it as a form of interpersonal politics. Fromm, meanwhile, holds that love is an art, something that can be treated as a “discipline,” one that can only be mastered through continuous, diligent study. But all of this is just one school of thought, a “one-sided construction” — not enough to capture the whole, but more than enough to reveal love’s complexity.

Even more interesting is a French film I once heard about called C’est la tangente que je préfère (1997), whose heroine is a math prodigy who sets the footprints she shares with her lover as coordinate points, using them to build a coordinate system and a function. But who can be calculating while they’re in love? Even an already-complicated function still can’t trace the trajectory of love — no one will ever know which quadrant lovers will slip in from, or which quadrant they’ll tumble out of.

But really, love is just one of our many emotions. When it comes to human emotion, we’re not only unable to predict it, we often can’t even describe it. Give you a past relationship, and can you be sure you could explain it clearly? We always grasp at the big direction, the big trend, hastily labeling things good or bad, thereby overlooking countless small details — and these are usually the very “essence” of the thing. It’s like looking at historical figures: don’t just look at the major events and outcomes, look at the small details, because they’re the ones that radiate the full, dazzling spectrum of human nature. Interestingly, when we root our focus in these “trivialities,” we can actually see a “small scenery” entirely different from the larger world.

In the world of emotion, whatever you believe will always feel right to you. No one has ever agreed that emotion has anything “objective” about it. To put it plainly, everyone is groping at their own part of the elephant, holding forth grandly while occupying just one local patch — and when you laugh at someone else’s attitude toward emotion, they can perfectly well counter with a completely different “touch” of their own. I think that if we occasionally swapped heads and took a look, instead of clinging to our own “worm’s-eye view,” we’d probably gain more feeling, and see a much wider world.

I think there are films you don’t want to watch before you’ve even started, films you don’t want to write about after you’ve watched them, and films you don’t want to watch again after you’ve written about them. The Free Will (Der Freie Wille, 2006) happens to possess all three of these traits at once. After letting it sit for a very long time, I finally picked it up and watched it; and after watching it, more time passed before I decided to write about it. But I’ve made up my mind that I will never watch it again — the reason for all this tangled hesitation is that it is simply too human.

The film is about a rapist who, after treatment in a psychiatric hospital, returns to a normal life, but finds he seemingly no longer feels sexual desire toward women. Later he falls in love with a woman who has an ambiguous relationship with her own father, yet he still cannot escape the temptation rooted in his past as a rapist. In the end, on a beach, before that woman’s eyes, he slits his wrists and kills himself.

The whole film feels long and unflinchingly real to me. Scenes like masturbation and rape appear with no concealment whatsoever. This deserves credit — we “hairless bipeds” spend our entire lives trying every means to release our sexual energy. To avoid sex is to avoid humanity itself. This isn’t some Freudian pansexualism (pansexuality) — that theory merely breaks things down into fine pieces and slaps a “sexual” label on each one; what I’m thinking of is that sex is the very foundation that holds humanity together, because it’s through sex that emotion exists, and that’s what ultimately keeps us from becoming purely rational animals.

Some say this film explores the “evil” of human nature, but I think it’s more than that — how can the good and evil of human nature even be separated? Among the population of rapists, as long as you’re willing to set aside all your preconceptions and get to know them, they are absolutely, every one of them, human beings, brimming with hot, vivid “humanity”; they are not “perverted,” not “deviant,” and certainly not “frightening.” Likewise, in those events that supposedly display the brightest side of human nature, who knows how much evil is also folded in. The protagonist’s “evil” is nothing more than a lost lamb wandering a grassland where he doesn’t belong. His mode of sexual release — rape — is not the “evil” of human nature, but its protrusion, its raw exposure. Under certain circumstances, in certain special conditions, the deviance of some people instead becomes the prophet who leads the way, rather than the lost lamb.

Speaking of human nature, one cannot overlook Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). By comparison, The Free Will goes even further — it has already conceived of a method for liberating human nature, for achieving “free will”: suicide. It’s just like what Natsume Sōseki wrote in I Am a Cat — that in the future there will no longer be such a thing as natural death for humans, and everyone will resolve their lives through suicide instead. Many people will surely think that suicide is an affirmation of the “evil” within one’s own nature — but that’s wrong. Aside from suicide, is there any other way to achieve “free will”?

(youtube link)

This noon, Lin Xi’s book So You’re Not Unhappy After All finally arrived in my hands. Honestly, this kind of book is rather bourgeois-lifestyle, and such books rarely make my reading list — but since the author is Lin Xi, I bought it to take a look anyway. As expected, it turned out exactly as I anticipated: Lin Xi’s prose reads as if he piled up all his lyrics together and turned them into complete sentences, dressed up with current affairs, yet still unable to shed his characteristically delicate touch.

This book dissects all sorts of small things in life, framed around the pursuit of happiness, but really it’s teaching us how to face the various unhappy factors in life so as to find peace within it. It carries a touch of Zen, almost like it’s guiding us toward enlightenment. Of course there are many similar books — the ones that come to mind are The Book of Life and After Ecstasy, the Laundry. But I feel Lin Xi’s book falls far short of those two in depth, whether in its overall structure, its details, or the insight it offers — it’s told in a gentle, meandering way, but lacks any distinctive substance.

And yet So You’re Not Unhappy After All has already gone through four printings in a year — just look at the comments on Douban to see how many people are chasing after it, while other books attract far fewer readers. This brings to mind the issue of the power of voice. Of course you might say you don’t know Lin Xi, but surely you’ve heard Faye Wong’s “Red Bean,” Sandy Lam’s “At Least I Still Have You,” or Eason Chan’s “Love Transferred” — at the very least, you’ve heard “Beijing Welcomes You” — all these lyrics came from Lin Xi’s pen. His influence is clear to see.

Precisely because Lin Xi possesses such enormous power of voice, the book most people end up seeing is this So You’re Not Unhappy After All. So often it goes this way — the “latecomer” easily overtakes and replaces the “first to arrive,” and this is exactly the power that having a voice grants.

Whether the earth would really tremble three times at someone’s roar, I don’t know — but ever since old Mao said that famous line, it really has, under certain circumstances, become “truth” for some people, forming an invisible yet immensely powerful force. Things like “all Chinese people the world over roar as one, the earth trembles three times,” or “oil workers roar as one, the earth trembles three times,” and so on. There are many similar phrases like this, repeated endlessly by us or by certain institutions until they became so-called “science” — and we owe all this to the power of a strong voice.

But if you think carefully about what these people are actually saying, is it really useful? In my view, far too many people bask in the spring breeze granted to them by their power of voice, prattling on endlessly all day, when in fact it’s not worth listening to at all — pure nonsense (this reminds me of high school…). These people are nothing more than yes-men under the sway of that power, the oppressed beneath the powerful, and the nonsense they spout is stale and old, utterly devoid of original insight.

As Li Yinhe put it (see “Keeping a Diary Like Thoreau”), one should make good use of one’s own power of voice, think with purity, and speak according to one’s conscience. This is really something many “leaders” need to understand — when speaking on behalf of a student union or a school, must it always be so full of self-congratulation? Less boasting, less exaggeration. But in the end, there’s still a great deal that cannot be said, no matter where you stand or what position you hold. I wonder if this counts as one of the saddest things under humanity’s rule?

Still Walking was named one of the ten best films of 2008 by Japan’s Kinema Junpo. Compared with the so-called visual feasts that come out of Hollywood, it feels more like a delicate, fragrant little snack. You could say the whole film plays out like a home video shot casually by a family.

What stuck with me most was the mother, devoted to cooking, which reminded me of the scenes of my grandmother making meals every year when I went back to Taiyuan. Cooking, at its core, is made up of trivial chores: buying vegetables, washing vegetables, rolling out dough, kneading dough… and the delicious meal that finally emerges looks simple, yet takes so much effort. All I (like most people) ever cared about was my favorite knife-cut noodles, while overlooking the feelings my grandmother put into the meal. Some might find it strange to say that — what does food have to do with feelings?

I think cooking is also a kind of language — communicating with the eater’s taste buds through prepared ingredients. Every time I ate noodles, my grandmother would ask if they tasted good, and looking back now, there was emotion folded into that bowl of noodles — she knew she couldn’t give me satisfaction in other material ways, so the most she could give me was the food I loved to eat. A finished meal is like a letter, carrying feelings that words alone can’t express, feelings no master chef’s skill could ever fully convey.

The mother in the film is just the same — preparing meals for her son’s family as they arrive, slicing vegetables quickly with her knife, turning the beef simmering on the stove, shucking corn kernels, turning it all into delicious dishes, all while talking about what everyone in the family likes to eat. It makes you realize how great housewives really are — with sincere hearts they tend not just to the food but to so much of the time that makes up family life, and they never think of themselves as quiet, unnoticed presences — how could someone who carries love and devotion in their heart ever truly be unnoticed?

Then there’s the stern-faced father, who isn’t especially likable in the film — rigidly set in his ways, unwilling to let others interfere, refusing to carry the shopping bags, scolding the kids for damaging the plants, walking off unhappily during the group photo. He’s exactly the rational image of an old-fashioned father rooted deep in our minds, everything about him so stiff and formal. But looked at from another angle, this is simply the way social gender roles interfere with how fatherly love gets expressed — look closely, and aren’t there warm moments in the film too? Talking with his little grandson, missing his eldest son — they reveal that restrained, melancholy fatherly love.

After the film ends, close your eyes and you’ll picture that winding mountain road — years apart, it’s the son and the mother, the mother and the father, the son’s own family, walking slowly along that road. The son’s gentle narration reveals the continuation of life, accompanied by Japan’s lush greenery, the deep blue coastline, a butterfly rising up to echo the one earlier in the film, set against soft guitar music — what lingers in the heart is a long, drawn-out tenderness, one you keep returning to in your mind.

Many critics describe the single day this film portrays as a microcosm of life, with the story in between expressing the son’s regret and life’s unpredictability. But I’d rather understand it this way: the love that exists within a family never stops — it gets passed down generation after generation, and the misunderstandings of the past turn into understanding, the resentments of the past turn into forgiveness. A person walks a long road toward understanding how to live within society, and that road is hard — it takes time to accumulate and digest.

I won’t stretch Still Walking any further than this, though I could — I just don’t want to. Because it’s sincere, and it moved me in a real, grounded way; mixing too many extra thoughts into the warmth it left behind wouldn’t do it justice. And I’m glad to have felt moved like this — it makes me feel that I’m not too far removed from “myself.”

The Mutants ought to be seen as a manga about portraying human nature. The lines in this manga feel like a pair of eyes watching you from behind. The series isn’t finished yet — the first nine volumes already contain the spiritual and physical hand-to-hand combat between Nagoshi and the mutants — conveyed through sex, through blood, both primal and real.

The protagonist is a vagrant, a celebrity, an actuary, a mutant — or perhaps just an empty shell after plastic surgery — and isn’t he, covered in labels, really just like one of us? Once he peels off his own labels, he’s left bewildered, even unhinged — and what about us? What would be left once we peeled off the labels stuck to us? Would it amount to nothing as well? Below are some excerpts from the original text. Note: Homunculus refers to the little person inside one’s head — twisted around, in our own words, it’s something like an inner demon.

Between birth and the age of about a year and a half, a human skull still has gaps in it — meaning it remains in an open, perforated state — before it seals up as the person grows into adulthood. By opening holes in the sealed skull of an adult, the pressure inside the skull changes, allowing a large amount of blood to flow into the brain, restoring it to an active state — at which point a person may gain a kind of sixth sense. The protagonist underwent surgery to open holes in his skull, and through it gained the ability to see the mutations within the human heart — the mutants.

When humans feel something intensely, they reach for the mouth and the hands — put in the most extreme terms, this means sex. Beyond touch, humans also have sight, hearing, smell, and taste — all information arrives through the five senses. Gathering information through the senses is what we call experience. Experienced events, together with time, become memory in the brain. When the experiences humans gain through their five senses, accumulated as a memory map inside the brain, are given three-dimensional form, the result is a pure Homunculus. The places where a person sinks and twists deep within themselves become all manner of monsters — and what you see there is the Homunculus. Physical pain doesn’t turn into a visible Homunculus; it’s emotional and inner wounds — psychological distortion — that become Homunculi visible to be seen.

Everyone has a self-image different from their outward appearance. This so-called self-image exists in an unconscious state. For this original self to emerge, it has to happen in dreams. In dreams, the self appears in unimaginable forms — it can fly, it can melt.

Humans are made up of consciousness and the unconscious. The unconscious accounts for 95% of a person. When a thought entered into consciousness doesn’t match what was originally there, the original thought gets suppressed in the unconscious, frozen and sunk into its depths. Because it’s buried so deep, consciousness can no longer recall it, producing what we call forgetting. But simply hiding it away doesn’t make it disappear — it keeps tangling itself up in places consciousness can’t understand, which is why unexplained binge eating and vomiting, obsessive thoughts, fear of eye contact, and even symptoms of mental illness can appear. The original thought retains the emotional temperature it had at the time, spreading through the unconscious. This entity then keeps looking for a chance to resurface into consciousness and find release. The way to achieve that release is to pull the frozen emotion buried deep down back up into consciousness and thaw it. Humans take in all kinds of information through the body, grasping it with extraordinary precision: the body’s subtle tension, the contraction of muscles, shifts in the center of gravity, twitches in the facial muscles — together with the unease, anger, joy, and desire that a person’s body and expressions reveal — and, without even realizing it, we come to understand living beings by reading these constantly shifting emotional states within the body. For example, when you receive a gift from someone and open it, you smile and say thank you to show your delight — but were you really, genuinely happy in that moment? We’re all fooled by that word, “feeling.” In truth, the body unconsciously lets out an enormous amount of information, which is unconsciously received by the other person. Relying on the five senses, humans exchange information at this unconscious level, in places we can’t see, all while dressing it up with polite phrases and friendly smiles — animals of a rather base sort, when you get down to it.

Everyone has their own behavioral patterns, and because of the interference of these patterns, people end up doing things they never expected, without even realizing it. Every person’s body has two sides: one is the conscious side — the side turned outward, the one that understands social niceties, that knows how to lie, the side that follows the rules, though it can feel a bit rigid. The other is the unconscious side — representing the real you, the side whose emotions can be read at a glance, the side you want to protect from other people’s prying eyes, the side that isn’t rigid at all. We use both sides without even noticing. Human eyes don’t just see the world in front of them — within that visible world, there’s also something that reflects yourself back at you. When you look at a Homunculus, the Homunculus is looking right back at you.

Topology is an extremely important and fascinating field within mathematics. In the course of studying this subject, you not only encounter new concepts and methods, but also find them tying back into things you’ve already learned, such as continuous functions. But that alone isn’t enough to convey how important topology is — its real importance lies in the fact that it has a clear influence on almost every branch of mathematics. If you want to become a mathematician, whether your interest lies in algebra, analysis, operations research, or statistics, topology will be relevant to all of them. In modern mathematics, certain concepts from topology — compactness, connectedness, denseness — are as fundamental as sets and functions are in mathematics generally.

Topology has many different branches: general topology (also called point-set topology), algebraic topology, differential topology, and topological algebra. General topology is the introductory course for the field. In this book, the basic concepts of general topology will be explained in detail.

If you haven’t previously studied an axiomatic mathematical discipline like abstract algebra, learning how to construct proofs can be difficult. So, to help you learn how to prove things, the proofs in the early chapters will include some “asides” — these asides aren’t part of the proof itself, but they sketch out why the proof proceeds the way it does and how the underlying idea arose.

The book contains a great many exercises, and only by working through a large number of them can you really master this subject. Solutions to the exercises are not provided at the back of the book — though this is an unpopular choice, I’m sticking with it. The book already contains enough examples and proofs to help you work out the problems yourself, so there’s no need to provide additional solutions. New concepts are often introduced within the exercises themselves; generally speaking, I’ll bring up again later whatever concepts I consider important.

Finally, I should note one thing: the best way to understand why a given piece of mathematics came about is to read the history of mathematics. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t go into that in full. Appendix 2 offers some excerpts introducing famous figures in the history of topology, most of them selected from “The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive.” Readers would do well to visit the website itself to read the complete articles and learn about other important figures. Bear in mind that understanding history through a single source is never enough.

Translated from Topology Without Tears / Sidney A. Morris [Oct. 14, 2007]

Mention Rimbaud, and what flies up in my mind are scattered blocks of memory — homosexuality, the vagabond, the desert, absinthe — all of it so far removed from our own lives. The first things I encountered were just fragments of the story and poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud, and I tried to understand the homosexual relationship between them, but the more I understood, the more contradictions arose, and the less I understood at the same time — for instance, why did Rimbaud give up literature? How did Verlaine really feel, deep down, about Rimbaud? Question after question that wouldn’t go away — it would almost be easier to just explain it all away as a soul devoured by dark capitalism.

Over summer break I read a thick biography of Rimbaud, and it helped me a great deal. The book didn’t chase rumors, nor did it fixate endlessly on Rimbaud’s homosexual relationship; compared to other biographies built mainly around ideology, the Rimbaud in this book is simply a poet, pure and plain, his poetic nature saturating every fragment of his restless, wandering life. The image that stuck with me most vividly is Rimbaud drinking absinthe late into the night, arguing fiercely with his friends. I wished I could step right into that scene and feel it, a glass of “the green fairy” in hand, letting time slow down, watching closely what this literary young man was doing and thinking at every single moment of that period. Unfortunately, history won’t let us know, and Rimbaud himself didn’t want us to know either — he personally burned a good number of his poetry manuscripts. Thinking about it now, he lived as if he wished many things dead, and that may well be why he gave up literature. What he left us are scene after scene, image after image — or is it all just emptiness in the end? Every bit of it is worth pondering.

Mallarmé called him “a passer-by worthy of respect.” That phrase fits perfectly. He once studied grammar earnestly, once wrote poetry with utter abandon, perhaps even truly loved Verlaine and wanted to spend his life beside him, and perhaps even dreamed of becoming a fabulously wealthy merchant, wandering for twelve years to bring honor to his family — but in the end, none of it became eternal. Strip away the labels the world has stuck on Rimbaud, and he is truly “the giant who stole fire from heaven.”

Strictly speaking, In the Womb isn’t really a great documentary — it doesn’t capture any astonishing scenery, doesn’t use dazzling 3D technology, and doesn’t even have a pleasant-sounding narrator. But I like it a great deal, because what it records is the process by which an individual life comes into being from nothing — the footage feels grounded and sincere, and in this sprawling, chaotic world, it’s precisely because of life that everything seems endlessly wondrous. It’s divided into two parts: one on animals, one on humans. The animal section covers the development of dogs, dolphins, and elephants in the womb, while the human section focuses on the more unusual cases of triplets and quadruplets. There’s not much point saying more about a documentary — you have to watch it yourself to really feel it — so let me just jot down a few facts I found interesting.

Dolphin sexual behavior, like that of humans, isn’t only for reproduction — it’s also always a way of bonding with companions; dolphins can mate 365 days a year. Dolphin foreplay is very long.

This reminded me of a question that’s puzzled me for a long time — why is it that only human females experience sexual pleasure? There are many explanations — for instance, that most animals use the “doggy” position, which doesn’t stimulate the clitoris; that the duration of penetration is short, with dolphins, lions, and the like ejaculating within seconds; or that animals simply don’t experience sexual pleasure at all. I lean toward the second explanation, because humans also feel pleasure in the doggy position, while the last explanation denies humanity’s animal instincts altogether — meaning human sexual pleasure would be something that emerged in the course of human development, and if that were true, why would our means of achieving pleasure be rubbing genitals rather than, say, fingers. But I think animals are pursuing sexual pleasure too, otherwise it wouldn’t be called being “in heat” — just watch dogs shaking their heads and tails, or watch dolphins engage in foreplay dozens of times longer than the act itself, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s also a creature called the fruit bat, where the female performs “oral sex” on the male to prolong mating time (Sanlian Life Week, 2009 issue 41, p.24) — of course this behavior might serve reproduction, but who knows if she just wants it to feel better?

Of course, my thinking here is mixed up with a lot of human assumptions — not being a biology student, I can only reason about it logically — but humans are probably like animals in some respects, at least when it comes to reproduction; it’s just that humans got lucky enough to discover the “wonder” of mating. Or maybe — other animals have discovered it too, and this is just our own self-indulgent fantasy — on the wondrous chain of life on this planet, what couldn’t happen?

Dolphins cannot breathe automatically — breathing must be controlled by will.

This means dolphins can never “pass out” — losing consciousness would mean suffocating, in other words, they can never truly sleep for the rest of their lives. Reading this, I found dolphins rather pitiable — even with muscle ratios and strength humans could never match, I still think a creature without sleep is something to be pitied. See, once again I’m looking at it from a human point of view.

The probability of quadruplets is one in 64 million.

That probability is incredibly low! It amazes me who gets chosen by God like that — and National Geographic actually found such a case! Setting aside the amazement, what concerns me more is the mother’s body — as the film says, quadruplets can’t stay in the womb for the full 10 months (7 months in this case), which creates a lot of risk (I assume to the mother), and each baby weighs less than 1 kilogram at birth, meaning many of their bodily systems aren’t fully functional yet — most notably, they may not be able to breathe on their own. Looking at it this way, being a quadruplet isn’t all that lucky after all.

IPv4: addresses represented by 32-bit binary data, grouped into four sets of eight digits, then expressed in decimal. As is well known, today’s internet protocol is IPv4, now 26 years old. When it was created, IPv4 was more than enough to connect the few thousand computers of that era, and its inventor believed that 4.3 billion IP addresses would be enough to meet humanity’s needs forever. But 30 years later, in today’s world of computing devices, 4.3 billion is no longer enough — and the reason is that within that theoretical 4.3 billion, far too many IPs sit idle. Many campuses hold huge numbers of IP addresses but only make them available to people within the school, which creates enormous waste. At the same time, many places are facing IP exhaustion — Germany’s IP supply will only last another 4.5 years, and once the last IP is used, new users will have to access the network by sharing addresses, with multiple users unable to get online simultaneously — imagine the inconvenience that would cause! IPv6 was born out of exactly this situation. IPv6 represents addresses with 128-bit binary data, grouped into eight sets of sixteen digits, then expressed in decimal. Its notation is far more cumbersome than today’s IP addresses. But it can allocate 667×10^15 addresses — with this system in place, we can assume that even a thousand years from now, humanity still won’t be able to exhaust it.

In terms of usage, IPv6 offers higher security and optimization for VoIP. The security features it introduces include payload length, next header, and hop limit. IPv6’s advantages for mobile use are also self-evident — every mobile device can have its own unique IP, so it can use the same IP to get online no matter where it is. At the same time, operating systems have already prepared to welcome IPv6’s arrival. Support for IPv6 was provided as early as Windows XP SP1. If XP was the foundation, then Vista is the towering building on top of it, because Vista offers full support for IPv6 and can automatically switch between IPv4 and IPv6, making this transition far more convenient. And it’s not just Microsoft — Mac and Linux have also prepared for IPv6. However, because server manufacturers aren’t yet ready, we won’t be able to use IPv6 for the next few years. But there’s no doubt that IPv6 has raised the curtain on the internet of the new century — in the future, the internet is bound to become even more tightly woven into human life.