遇见20岁的自己Meeting Your Twenty-Year-Old Self

At twenty, facing this world, life still holds infinitely many possibilities and choices

Yet time will make you step into it without asking, and the world will step into you as well

You will be swept along toward an exit determined by one entrance out of countless many

No stopping, no going back, no choosing again

So do not grow lazy in your thinking, and do not lose yourself in the dazzle before your eyes

Find the right entrance and walk on. Do not hesitate, and still less turn back

Time Flies

The following is from Caobian Wangshi; the author is Hecaitou.

If at this moment I could pass through the fog of time and stand before my twenty-year-old self, what would I say to him?

It would be Nanjing, 1996, No. 22 Hankou Road, the classroom building at the end of the tree-lined avenue of the North Garden. It is time for the Fluid Mechanics lecture; Professor Jiang is at the blackboard explaining the law of conservation of vorticity, pointing at the chalk lines and asking the students in their seats to understand how a vortex tube curls itself through space. White chalk dust crumbles away in flakes under his thick fingers. The main classroom building has two kinds of chalk: one extremely coarse and brittle, which is white; one extremely fine and dense, which is colored. All the chalk looks a little dim in hue, because the sunlight refracts into the classroom out of the shade of the huge parasol trees outside, together with the din of the cicadas, and the air holds countless shades of green.

I am not listening to the lecture. It’s almost twelve, and I’m hungry. I’m working out whether there’s any hope this week of getting a turn to go play on the computer in the rented room of my buddy from the computer science department. Best if it isn’t Saturday; that day has my favorite film appreciation class, where we can watch A River Runs Through It. Of course, if I do go to the rented room, I’ll have to buy a salted duck. I’ve just been paid last month’s tutoring wages plus the work-study stipend from the library, so the money should be enough, maybe with some jellied pork and a few bottles of Jinling dry beer thrown in. Can’t spend too much, or there’ll be no cigarette money again this month, and Shancha is not a cigarette fit for humans. Oh right, tomorrow night is oral English class, so I get to see GII again; after class he’ll probably take us to the bar again for whiskey, then off to the disco to dance. Damn it, I’ve finished all six books I borrowed from the library; when I go to the dining hall later I’d better grab a few more on the way. I don’t feel like afternoon classes anymore…

I watch him wolf down a whole jin of rice and two big pork chops, sparing not even the cabbage stems laid underneath or the last of the sauce; I watch him use the convenience of his work-study post to borrow six books from the library every two days and read them in the dorm all night by candlelight, the mosquito net scorched full of gaping holes by the flame; I watch him pack his schedule to bursting: odd jobs, travel, chess, music, movies, social practice programs, arranging for a brother who’d gotten into a fight to skip town… like a mad spinning top that whirls and whirls and cannot stop for even a moment. He opens his greedy eyes wide, wanting to take in every dazzling color this world has to offer, wanting to lay his hands on everything, to lean in and take a bite of everything. His interest in this world, like his forever-growling appetite, never knows a moment of satiety.

He cannot see me. He is simply too busy; even standing right in front of him, our faces so alike, he would not notice me. For him, this world holds too much that is marvelous for him to ever stop, and even amid so much marvel he still often feels bored and listless. How would he ever notice an ordinary middle-aged man---the very kind of grown-up he despises most, carrying his self-satisfied fat and the odious smell of the adult world. He passes right by me without pausing for an instant, his stride in flip-flops still swift as the wind. His baggy shorts flap; the sandals slap against his soles with a crisp “pah-pah.”

I want to call out and stop him, to tell him:

Go ask Jiang from the physics department, in Room 206, to have a meal with you, because in your last year of university the two of you will become good friends, and the friendship will hold for a lifetime. But what you don’t know now is that he will never have a fortieth birthday. This is the longest stretch of time you will ever spend together; afterward you will lose each other on the streets of Beijing again and again, and find each other again and again. And then, all at once, there is no more “and then.”

Spend more time with your girlfriend. The countdown on your days together has already begun, and you don’t know it at all. Right now you find it tiresome how she clings to you, less fun than going off to play computer games with the guys. You both still think days like these will be long, that they can simply go on and on. Wrong. In a little over two years, after you part at the train station, you will never see each other again in this life. For many years afterward, the guilt will take on human form and appear in dream after dream, interrogating you over and over: Did you do everything you could? What did you ever change for her?

Watch out for those bastards from the physics and computer science departments. A year from now, they will take you climbing over a wall in the middle of the night into the physics building, to get onto the Internet on your thesis advisor’s computer. This event will change your life permanently; from then on you will be bound to the Internet. In the years to come, you will gradually turn into a strange creature, half man, half network. By then you will be calling yourself “Hecaitou,” believing it no more than an ID or a handle. But it will slowly devour your personality and accustom you to existing on its terms. You will search the web and refresh your phone without a moment’s pause. You will hop endlessly through a bottomless stream of information, manufacture untold content for that world, and stay drunk on it, sustaining the fever for more than a decade, with no sign even now that it might ever burn out.

Because of it you will be able to do what others cannot, and because of it you will lose the life that others get to live. So please be careful of that night; when they extend the invitation, do me the favor of thinking one second longer. Even if that means I vanish completely, you should still linger that one extra second. It is a fork of enormous consequence. If you do not answer the invitation and go that night, you will live another kind of life, one with more human warmth in it. Not so much pain, and of course not so much rapture either. You will need others, and be needed by others. Your life and other people’s lives will tangle together in the manner of living itself, not of network cables and repeaters. You will be an ordinary, unremarkable fat man, but you may well be far happier than you are now, and able to taste more of what normal people feel.

About one thing you are right: you believe you will not be a mere onlooker of this dazzling world. You will step into it. Yes, just as you fantasized in your heart back then, it happens. You will enter those worlds you now see in the newspapers, on the radio, on television, rather than gazing at them from far away and accepting whatever that world hands you. Before that day arrives, everything you currently worry about, the life you find meaningless and utterly flat, in fact has its own purpose. Compared with twenty years later, this moment is already brilliant and shining enough; it is only that you lack the means to partake of most of it, which is why you so often feel dejected and powerless, and find the life in front of you tedious and dull.

Twenty years on, you will understand that the real pleasure lies in making this dazzle yourself. The longings suppressed in your early years will, once you have the power to create, burst forth under your hands. That process is far longer than appreciating and savoring, and far more grueling. It takes years upon years of trying before you notice, almost by accident, the smallest bit of progress, and even then you will not know whether it lies in the right direction. Defeat, dejection, despair, and self-doubt will keep you company the whole way; they are the ordinary weather of this road. But precisely because they are there, the joy at the end turns into rapture, and within that rapture you will at last feel a vast stillness. I must admit there will be a few such moments, when you truly find peace within, and that night you will sleep deep and sound.

What I must remind you of is this: along the way, keep your heart, and do not lightly swerve off your path. Whatever road you choose, the best choice is to walk it to the very end. Do not hesitate midway, and still less wallow in hesitation, for that squanders too much of a life. By the time you find your way back to the road, eleven whole years may be gone. Then the time left for you to taste life will not be much. If a voice inside you calls, you should answer it, not weigh gains and losses, success and failure, like some middle-aged man. Otherwise you will sooner or later discover that every today you wasted in indecision is consuming, a hundredfold, the human happiness you might have had in the future. The fear you feel today about tomorrow will mostly never come to pass once you act; but if you stand silent and still, then when tomorrow arrives, fear will appear wearing the face of punishment and disaster, and that is the thing most to be dreaded. Because by then you will no longer have any possibility of resisting---your yesterday has already been wasted by you.

And yet I will say none of this to you. Because stumbling and staggering just as you are, you will still make your way here to me. What is meant to be lost, you will lose anyway; what is meant to be missed, you will still miss; the pits you are meant to fall into, you will still fall into, and fall into again and again. But you will still come through; you will still arrive at me. Even if I could speak to you, rewrite every parameter of fate, give you subtle hints or outright warnings, you would not save a single moment by it. Because in the furnace of life, we are copper. However we carry on, the time spent hammering us will not be shortened by one second. I can only watch you with sorrow, watch you walk once more through all those regrets, and witness them happen. And daydream about whether, had there been another road, there might have been another view. I watch you there on the far side of the fog of time, and I want to tell you: though you are heartbreakingly stupid, I love you still.

Last of all, the only thing I am willing to tell you is this: whichever possible life you choose, you will still be a fat man. On this matter, please don’t waste any more thought; just accept it calmly.

Hecaitou

June 6, 2016

In Beijing