At about 11:30 AM, I received a phone call from Nanjing that either comes from my sister who wants to instruct me on which university should I consider or some advertisement that curses the well-being of my family if I dare hang up at first. Neither of them am I happy to encounter, so I didn't pick up the phone.
My sister is a high-ranking consultant in a state-owned financial company, a much respected position that can easily enable her to buy multiple properties as investment in China's bubbled real estate market, and is partly responsible for the regulation of house prices. My sardonic tone in describing her situation stems not from my personal disappointment of her dilatoriness in responding to my request for assistance regarding my own future, but from a coherent disdain of the entire social hierarchy, the dependency of that hierarchy, and outside people's fascination with it. She thought that because I don't have a penny to pay for my university tuition fee and no relation in the State to help me with my life, and I've never been to any other country, I shouldn't think of applying for prestigious colleges despite my current high SAT score, which seems unimpressive due to her lack of knowledge. I'm totally aware the rationale behind her behavior. Since the circumstance has defined me as mediocre, I shouldn't even consider transcending it for that would be potentially troublesome to people like her, as she's a Chinese government official and that government is famous for its public education and strangling of nascent revolt. Her early moving away from the family, and absence in all filial activity beside wedding and funeral clarify something, which other members of the family don't have a clue and I totally understand, even will encourage if it doesn't involve me.
I sometimes feel emotions, and I learn to stifle them as quick as possible. All sorts of emotions, levity or bitterness, despondency or disappointment, cannot fit me. Happiness makes me concerned of other times when I'm not happy. Bitterness makes me uncosmopolitan. Despondency drives me away from hope and disappointment creates disharmony in my shallow social ties. But understanding isn't feasibility. I understand a lot of things, probably too many things, and most of them, cannot be done or cannot be avoided, and that I want them to be done or avoided instantly becomes a problem.
Few years ago, when I went to Nanjing for a military exhibition and suffered a hand fracture, my sister came visit me, and that was infinitely easier for me to communicate, my lack of sophistication and her lack of vigilance led to something magical. She even wants to adopt me from my own parents, thinking that my parents didn't have the capacity to make me who I was supposed to be. Now I've said no to both of her assumptions, and both of us no longer care. Her snobbishness is unpleasant to me and my vegetarianism is unacceptable to her, a mutual discomfort out of a mutual indifference. But I don't know the truth of it, she is my sister, and I'm I, both of us shouldn't have changed fundamentally, so there's a way to get it through, or there's a way of quicker oblivion, and the latter is perfectly compatible with the temperaments of us as well. I've accomplished a lot. If I go back in time and meet myself, I will be amused and myself will be astonished. I developed interest in politics and de-developed it. I self-studied English and almost replaced my native language. I'm unprepared for the changes so I weep for them, but I've ignored that those changes aren't independent of one another. I should first be interested and then I can be disgusted, and should first start to learn and then learn very well. There's unchangingness between and the very unchangingness enables to reflect on what's been changed. The bird my father bought me when I was a little kid, because I wanted to touch the bird and it turned out I'd never succeeded before its death. The bird died nameless and deprived of freedom due to my lack of considerateness and anthropocentrism. But I know it after it has died. For all several years since I'd started learning English myself, I pronounced the "t" in fountain, and later I knew it was un-American to do so. But I learned it after deciding to go there. There's not a definitive pattern in it and I also go for perfection at the very beginning, and there's no perfection and I suffer from perennial disputation of the preceding axioms. I cannot see the point of it, so I try to leave and maybe settle somewhere I don't have to see the point to be satisfied, for I will then have a satisfactory life, and that will not be philosophical principle that makes it. A clue is yet seen in 10 days, and the ending remains endless.
I'm alive and feel hurt when I'm hurt, but that's only because someone has died do I grab the chance to be consciousness. And when it'll be finally my turn to give out the chance, I try to refuse and change the rule of game, hoping for some good outcome. And my way to do it is contemplate and deplore everything, so nothing will be overlooked and I take the full control of it. It's impossible, and I'm perverse, it's still impossible, and I'm perverse. When one day, I have to give up, that will be the end of my time and I will know that I've completed it.
May God bless me and my dream, however absurd and unreasonable.
