Postscript to 2022
"This year I settled one of the great affairs of life—the gaokao. Looking back now, it seems almost trivial."
On May 16, 2022, less than two months before the gaokao, I stayed up until four in the morning listening to music.
This year I settled one of the great affairs of life—the gaokao. Looking back now, it seems almost trivial.
I remember that at the start of this year I first learned to watch meteor showers. Several nights running, I stared through the window at the uninspiring sky. Occasionally one or two meteors streaked past, their light rather faint. The city’s night sky is not a deep dark—it holds no suggestion of heaven—more like a used sanitary pad.
The bright moon shines straight through; there is no heart left to guess. Life, too, offers little warning of where fate will fling you. The gaokao is terrifying, of course, but it is a necessity for everyone, much like death. After the gaokao I passed through a series of ridiculous misfortunes, leaving me deeply convinced that man proposes, God disposes. In the end, Jilin University—a school I had never known anything about—burst into my life with sudden, total insistence, destined to become a more indispensable part of my existence than anything before it. Nothing could be more absurd.
The second half of the year felt somewhat flat, at least for me personally. In mid-November my roommates and I went to Walmart for drinks and snacks; on the night of my eighteenth birthday I sat drinking and typing a blog post—a kind of self-incriminating confession. I thought: even Qu Qiubai knew his Superfluous Words were superfluous, worthless to anyone else; as for himself, he was already about to die, so it no longer mattered either way.
National epidemic policy underwent a dramatic reversal, and people wavered along with the general line. Three years of epidemic controls have bequeathed to posterity a rich archive of Chinese jokes—a precious gift from China to the world.
The days in Nantong were boring, even more so than Changchun. My mind always harbored an urge to write, to create a world. If 2023 does not get me killed by a car, I shall begin to do just that.