I'm not good at writing about real, concrete things, because it stems from an urge to describe something, and in the face of such acute unfeeling, I hardly have an urge. What drove me, when I opened the computer, to type in my blog address into the Internet Explorer I don't know. It's just a subliminal impulse, an instinct, to put something on the page. I view it as an opportunity, an occasion I should grasp - my grandmother has a stroke, a cerebral infarction so severe that she's been in the emergency room for over a day and a half. Surprisingly, I'm not sad, or involved with anything negative - I'm just an observer, of her feeling so unknowingly painful, and of her innocent, colorless eyes gazing through me - I even took the leisure to kill 2 mosquitoes and play something Virtua Tennis and Leo's Fortune on my iPhone. I've certainly witnessed death. When I was 4 and my grandfather died, I said to him, why're you still around here; and when I was 14, and another of my grandfather died, I cried. Now, it's her turn, so unacceptably natural, even liberating as a wife finally finding out her husband cheating, and a soldier getting hit by a bullet. I pretend to care, and I'm convinced that my aunt has the same pretense as I do - when she's down, we sent her to the hospital and pay the fees, and in the hospital, we change the diapers, monitor the heart rate for her. But deep beneath this solicitude, there's indifference and chuckling that oh, this is not me, and this will never be me. My grandma gave me 5000 yuan for my studies abroad when she was still conscious weeks back, which presumably I have written about, 5000 yuan from her hard labor for the factories when she was 6. She's illiterate - there's no such thing as a word processor in her brain, but when she talked about her youth, the times when cannibalism and political deceit are rampant, an enthusiasm rarely seen in the eyes of an elder emerges - she was in northern Jiangsu when she started working, and she spent the rest of her life speaking in northern Jiangsu dialect to everyone coming outside of the Wuxi city - it's evident that the fact is not, and she's aware of it, but she persisted, as determined as an office worker seeking for promotion and a student seeking for acceptance - it's her creed, her mode of life, as trivial and pathetic as it virtually is, she's not inferior or superior to the rest of human beings. She smokes, coughs, urinates; she has adored, loved, suffered, copulated before; she will ruminate, memorize, and then, eventually, perish - that's the process of living, or dying, what's in between are irrelevant and doomed to be forgotten - she's enjoyed this process; she's got kid and completed her task as a creature. She doesn't read Chinese, not to mention English, but she lives. And I, who may decry, grunt, complain, masturbate, am never as alive. Therefore I envy her, even though she's probably never waking up again.
I went back home at 9:39 PM. That means I missed the last bus, so as usual I walked home, singing Wake Me Up When September Ends, 21 Guns, Good Riddance, 風の日 and 高架線 repeatedly like I did departing from the snooker room promising my classmate we'll meet again and have never done so since then, and was run over by the exact same haze. Life's is continuing outside, whether I'm happy or not, contemptuous or not, it's not changing. Someone just got married, someone just had their child, someone's grandmother as well had a stroke and stayed in the emergency room, some naïve grandchild of her sits in front of the computer writing about the same event, in English, Arabic, Korean, Russian, Hindu while their neighbors' asleep, for God's sake.
