Sleeptalking
"In those earlier years, though Zhao Dong often tagged us with "completely useless," we had coordinates for what we were doing. Now you need to learn to be a completely useless person."
The layout of Tongzhong’s south campus differs from the north campus: both bristle with the same dead-eyed seniors and the same rust-red buildings, and even the trees breathe a kind of deadness. So we would mostly head to the north campus, where there was at least a faint sign of life. I thought at the time: the south campus feels like Hengshui. Though later a roommate from Hengshui High School told me their school was actually quite wild; that would make even Hengshui look better by comparison.
In any case, I have at last made it out of Qiu Garden and have enough standing to write about “the old days on Zhongxue Tang Street.” But if someone asks what I’ve accomplished in a year at university, my legs would probably start shaking.
At JLU you see all manner of people every day: the obese ones rolling their shoulders in a way that evokes panting dogs; groups of three walking in lockstep, intimately entangled; people selling plush frog toys but not wearing thick-rimmed glasses; people daily cruising the Tree Hole for same-sex, opposite-sex, or no-sex companions—companionship possibly in the plural. This richness of biodiversity is, forgive me, beyond the comprehension of a physics student.
There is a sensation of being Fang Hongjian, which intensified when my old man showed me his diary entry from June 7, 2022; I thought: the university I attend must at least be better than Klaideng. Apparently this is called impostor syndrome. At JLU I’ve also met many a Zhao Xinmei type—some even share his surname; top rankings in GPA, class cadre, attractive girlfriend; in my resentment I can only compare the length of our skirts. Sigh, just like Zhao Xinmei’s withering verdict on Fang Hongjian: “You’re a good person, but completely useless.”
In those earlier years, though Zhao Dong often tagged us with “completely useless,” we had coordinates for what we were doing. Now you need to learn to be a completely useless person.
Recently on the ChaFan platform I read Zhang Zhen’s review of Funk Yifei’s Record of Progress of Bai Feili, and reading it I felt almost suffocated, barely able to finish. If the JXU Survival Manual is the coldest description of the harshest university reality, written by the best students in China’s best university, then Record of Progress is the most universal 985-university-in-a-sinking-field narrative. But it goes beyond even that. Bai Feili has always been a vanity-driven creature: studying hard in high school only for the vanity of rankings; choosing a sinking field at a top university only for vanity; wanting to study abroad but not knowing why—also just vanity. As for JLU and every other university, from top to bottom: maybe only Guanghua and Yuanpei would refrain from saying “too bad you got in here.” The malformation of Chinese high school education lies in using vanity to drive students; Chinese university education’s malformation lies in not driving students at all; China’s malformation lies in using vanity to drive students into sinking fields and then letting them fend for themselves. A complete waste of effort.
If saying that a completely useless self must discover the uses of uselessness would make this essay drift toward a gaokao composition topic, I’ll be blunt: the university you got into is your capital, so use it fully to maximize your interests. Know what you want.
Setting aside the 25–30% recommendation rate for graduate school that even a mid-tier 985 like JLU has, university life is actually quite interesting—different, of course, from the fantasies many classmates had in high school, and not full of rainbow bubbles either. Everything must be sought out and created for yourself. I still remember looking for clubs when I first arrived, finding a mystery fiction club; I rather naïvely offered all sorts of suggestions to the president, who grew increasingly impatient—ever more reminiscent of a rumbled Cao Yaning; the result was that both she and the group disappeared from my QQ list. I suspect this kind of encounter is actually quite interesting. But the night of the school camping festival, on the sports field with a canopy set up, sharing mulled wine and skewers with friends from JLU’s outdoor club while the music society played in the distance; a bit short on cicada sounds, but just playing board games and singing was fine too. Perhaps this intoxicating atmosphere is simply the smell of interaction and socialization—the joy of everyone being in their right place.
The moral of this story: love the outdoors, stay away from the hikikomori lifestyle.