Usually by this time of the day I will be reading extensively on various academic website to get inured to the relatively obscure English they use, so that during the test (I know, but defiance of the education system is not an option for me) I can read those passages with ease. But I said few hours ago that I needed to write several candidate versions of the Additional Information, and one particular memorable scene is one bus trip last November that made me who I am and what I'm doing right now, and stop whining "what I want and what life has made for me!"
It was a random Friday, and the dusk in Wuxi city was just like any dusk in the past few thousand years. And I was walking towards the school gate, feeling certain that everything was going to be doomed the same way it'd started, miserable and unnoticed. For me, figuring out education, work, family and death or simply how to live covers all topics in my consideration, and I haven't figured out any of them. While witnessing myself sliding from stupid to cynical to numb, and eventually, snobbish, I was comfortable to leave my yearning and the reduction of its fever to whatever capacity that fulfills them, and whatever destiny that they're fulfilled.
The 5 days at school was a constant process of being paralyzed, and the other 2 days was no more than preparing for another. But in fact, I was always unusually agitated at this time of the week, especially when apocalypse was said to be approaching. Just like when death itself is not worth fearing, people's excitement over the assumption of dying, it gave me a perfect reason to forget all the important things for 2 days as if they'd never mattered.
Everything was beautiful from across the river, so was the ecstasy of being released from school. But when it's near, I didn't care anymore. At the end of the station I was waiting for the bus. Without anyone to accompany, I had nothing to do. So I stared at the distinct lights on cars. Because of a fatigue, I didn't adjust my eyes, so those shining beads on cars gradually mal-focalized into amorphous pieces, like myriad broken parts of an enormous ice wall.
I was then amused by my extension of association when I had nowhere else to extend myself. And I smile, ironically, to nothing, because I knew long enough that something ephemeral was made more ephemeral for me because I was neither willing to confront, nor willing to confess.
The acoustic mixture of rumbling traffic and noisy pedestrian was withering my nerve, yet I didn't bother to differentiate them. What was in my mind, at that present, was the deathly stillness I perceived in it, in the uprising of humanity, which was, more often and easily erased.
Fortunately, the thought was interrupted before long - the bus arrived. I walked into it, found the seat by the window, put my bag down, and abruptly the buildings of my school were immediately identical to those of the Political Bureau, which I might never enter.
The bus started.
Intentionally sitting above the wheel of the bus, I began to enjoy the little massage that the combustion engine gave me, that the traffic on the other side of the window gave me, and that my own lifeless body gave me. At that moment, with regard to the invisible camera above my head, this little massage was everything I was demanding from God.
Signs at every street corners were leading me, and the bus in which I was contained, to somewhere out of my range, somewhere not photographic or cinematic because it's real, somewhere nowhere but an indefinite one-dimensional point on a two-dimensional line. To me, unlike the bus route, the line had to terminus.
"This could be heaven or this could be hell." Maybe there's so few western name familiar to me, I quoted the Hotel California, or maybe I felt like I was living in the Hotel California. And I was befuddled - the bus 765 could no more suffice me - I wasn't sure if it's going to my home, I wasn't sure where it was going, wasn't sure where I was going. Just like all the people in this confined non-air-conditioning compartment, I languished into an aimless fear, of falling off, of a colorable resistance, of a futile disappointment, of a grief. Although nothing could be interpreted from my countenance, nothing was to be interpreted from my countenance, as well as theirs.
I assured most of the people on the bus know freedom - they watched movies, it's just assorted under the category of idealism, together with perfection, and communism.
"A red banner reading 'I have something to dream for' chained to their wrist was an enough alibi." I gloated contemptuously.
But all of sudden, just like a scalding cartridge case stirred up a blue fly, a radical disquiet penetrated me "My absurd audacity couldn't enfranchise me the right to ridicule other people, because compared to qualified members of the society as they were, I was merely an incompetent worker, who complained being exploited just to vent his twisted perspective of the world sinned and corrupt for not satisfying his own grandiose avarice.
For some time, I calmed down. The view on the other side of the window got changed, changed to something same-old but fresher than the prior. I began to feel nauseated of the weekly trip, to and from home - it was always the same-old outside, the only variable was the direction - or there was no variable at all…
Under two occasions, time presumably goes slower, the first is when the head is full, the second is when the head is empty. I was both, I didn't know what I was thinking, didn't know if I should think. Like Van Gogh's golden on his deathbed of a French cornfield, I was also capable of ignoring any conception that agonized me.
One week's curriculum were completed, the 17-hour working system, it was so engrossed, deeply fixed in my brain, however the inability to recall why I was being taught remained. I thought time would go faster when I was not in the classroom. I was wrong. It did not slow down or speed up in any sense. Those Chinese characters in my soul were still struggling to drag me down to somewhere I disliked but innately decreed, turn me to someone I didn't want to be yet constitutionally decided. I was eroded by something I'd been fighting against; it was further determined that ambivalence was the end of the journey.
Reasoned sadness cannot be fixed with consolation, so this time I didn't bother to ease the gush of my emotion - I always considered myself a rationalist, and in fact, no exception like this was made before.
Modernistic architectures lined along the road manifested into my eyes, and bulged, with a triumphant attitude - that didn't make any sense to me, because under all those changes, I saw something fundamental carved in the bone of this 5000-year-old land, something so incontrovertible that everyone takes it as the root of their security, of their pride.
After getting off the bus, I saw the safeguard of our community sitting around the gate, - he was reading the newspaper - he had to, like what he did, unlike what he will do; and Kedi - the Chinese version of 7-11, so far they're identical, to my relief.
However, beside the immobile qualities of my circumstances, thoughts hovering in my mind got somewhat different from what it was one week ago – I sensed a sort of strangeness form everything I saw, but I got out of it before long, because my reason then reminded me the place where I pertained. I repressed the delirious sensation, and climbed into the apartment. Following a warmth spreading through my heart, I smelled my own sleeping bunk not covered with an authority delivered blanket, and the silica gel of my new computer, which was intended for tech fetish like me.
Nevertheless, apart from pressing the button, as usual, I was out of things to do again, because this week and last week, every week of the year, had been allocated to do something essentially the same, checking emails and feeds, updating status, chatting with people who I almost didn't care, remembering and disremembering what I had been inculcated at school. It's relentlessly the same and I was still doing it, only for the sake that there's something dictating it's what I should do, or have to do.
Like the menial people of the social class, I kept reticent till my patience ran out, because it's not justified to comment on Yelp.com when I can't afford to use the item, because powerlessness was the major contribution to my politeness.
I opened the curtain to let in the moonlight, and the city light, different, but equivalently outward to my existence. I wished something would wash my eccentricity away. But nothing was going to stop for me, by me, as far as I could see, and beyond, was the ultimate blankness everything is going into, while I, was inexorably jostled unwittingly among.
I didn't know how many people on the Earth suffered this planet. I was thinking that being successful must have something to do with happiness. But I didn't know what it took to be successful, because I didn't know what success was. I knew nothing had meaning, so I could only have faith of my own creation. But how? I swore if there's a storm outside, I would be pleased to yell anything towards it. But the cloud was not thick that night - It was far from rain, and maybe farther from the sun. Without the monotonous but jaunty pattering of rain, without the religious and inspiring representation of sunshine, I sighted where the word cloudiness got its meaning, sighted that my pains were just repetitions of those of a saint, of a writer, of a musician, of a beggar, of any passer of life, in their respective brilliant ages.
I was just a sacrificial piece of a chess game without checkmate – there's no excuse for the useless and meaningless surrender of my ensemble. So there's no excuse for the membrane established between me and other stuff I deemed is either mediocre or noble. It's so thin but so inviolable - the threshold separating inside and outside of the school, the stair of bus stipulating insecurity and indifference, the piece of thin glass of my bedroom window – I can easily pierce it with my bare hands, and the spiritual and material encumbrance that towers over the Great Wall.
A peaceful anguish out of nowhere obsessed me, possessed me, desiccated me, and dissipated me. I consecrated my last shred of strength and dignity, consecrated my obedience where I had grudgingly floundered. Something that rang in each of my dream and daydream became louder and louder, became inextricably tangible from the verge of my faith. A ray of my own foreignness shimmered in front of my eyes, guided me the direction to where befall the truce, with God…
It said "Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
I heard it, every word.
I'm here.
P: After writing this long and tedious article, I'm further bewildered by the prospect of my effort. I hope in the next few months the quality of the piece can be drastically improved. As I might not have any time to write another piece with desirable volume.
P: Have turned this article into Personal Statement.
