This week's video chat with family feels somewhat different because I decided to go back to China. My mother and aunt have welcomed it. My father doesn't think it's a good idea, saying that because of my returning, he's not able to work again, and that the new daily salary I will receive, 200 RMB by teaching English at the language instruction school, is merely a casual amount he can earn by working in an apparel factory. Of course, I'm aware of the fact that my failure to obtain either a campus job or an internship has disappointed him such that he doesn't consider it worthwhile for me to receive a university education if I were to teach English in the future. I was incensed, explaining that working on minimum wage won't do as much good as he thinks - my father belongs to a generation of people who are aware of the western prosperity and are educated not to accept this fact - and those subjective denials are enhancing his objective perception of what a western country is. He continued to laugh at the jokes I willingly told, so did my mom, aunt, and grandmother. And when my father then inquired if I have made contact with my Nanjing sister who had helped me with the visa application fee of 8000 euro, I lied to him. I have neither sent a text message nor emailed her. Because I have always failed to comprehend why she decided to help me in the first place and then became reluctant to acknowledge the ambiguity inherent in such help. I now have a clear thought on what I should do - earning money when I graduate (or fail to graduate) from here, paying back her help with a certain amount of interest, and involving myself no longer in this sugar-coated, insidious web of relationships. My mother excused me for being innocent, and my aunt told me that one has to learn to become a human being before anything else. I thought, if, the meaning of a human being is to become saponaceous, even to people who I consider friends and relatives, I'd rather retain my characteristics of an unsophisticated kid. For in a world that champions fame, success, and ability to earn a superior-than-average life, I would champion my own obscurity, failure, and a monetary disability.
I am feeling hungry now. I have eaten nothing since I woke up in the afternoon. Tenzin from the Tibetan Exile Government in India just messaged me for hot pot I had promised him days ago. But I did not prepare anything, nor are there any vegetable down in the servery, due to a logic that I cannot understand - it's spring break, and they have to remove all the decorations. I said another time, and he's got some vegetables in his fridge, broccoli, paprika, and tomato. Those weren't full-fledged preparations, but with some orange juice mixed with sausage and canned sausage I'll get from the servery, reasonably enough for me. And hence we are having hot pot tonight. Me and my girlfriend, both Chinese who are said to have invaded Tibet decades ago, are having hot pot with a Tibetan, hopefully three Tibetans if Dolma and Kolchak whose name I'm still clueless to spell. I'm here for university education. This is the best education one can hope for.
The hot pot is taking place at 6:30 PM, and there's nine minutes till the servery is open. I'm listening to Chopin's Spring Waltz following Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, and I'll be going down for sausages soon. Those sausages are not delicious. The seasoning soup in which they came from even has an unpleasant smell that I have to wash the sausages before I boil them. But somehow I enjoy the home-made hot pot here more than I did back home.
Now I'm going down to the servery.
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Tenzin is the captain of the Asian football team in Jacobs University. He also comes from Tibet and posts pictures of Chinese military police beating Tibetan people. From those picture only one shows the riot police hitting a monk dressed in red with a tree trunk, and the others are just arrests. I don't understand why the Chinese government decided to tighten their control of Tibet and then claim it an autonomous region, just like I don't know why the Tibetan people never accept the fact that they are a part of China, which means they play by Chinese rules. Nearly all westerners I know thought Tibet is still an independent nation floundering under the iron fist of my government, and nearly all Chinese I know didn't at all know there's any problem in that region, including my girlfriend who lives in a major province that borders Tibet. There are bound to be some problems, which the previous generation hopelessly failed to solve, and on which the current generation is, like any affair of the 21st century, either unknowing or divided. I sent the last package of hot pot ingredient to Tenzin though. He's a third-year student electrical engineering student about to graduate, and I'm a first-year economics student yet to be worn. In no way our route seems to intersect. And all of sudden I begin to envy him. I am not him and will never be. He's not me and will never be. And his life, from my point of view, in every way as wonderful as mine and even superior, represent an impossibility for me to trespass what is me. For every trespass, however genuine, is merely an imitation.
And later I played Battlefield 4 for slightly more than an hour on Operation Metro 2014, a map I choose most and have always chosen since six days ago. In a round I killed 110 Russians, died 28 times, did 138 revives, and earned a total score of 82410 - a whopping 1648 per minute. I'm one of those who are busy on the outside of the soul, externalizing convictions to convince myself that they are reality.
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It's already 1:38 AM in the morning, and my girlfriend is still watching an American reality show. This is rather rare of her since it is she who usually urges me to sleep early. There must be something attractive to her - likely the American accent people in the show have. She adores the hardcore American-style prosperity - skyscrapers, motorways and cars everywhere. Curiously, even I sometimes have positive association of the names of several US states - for example, Virginia for tranquility, and California for tech-savviness. After all, the United States is where I had previously wanted to go for university. Though it had denied me and subsequently I had denied it, I, as well, am deeply entrenched in the impressions of my own creation - they now have become a concave mirror of what I did, and a convex mirror of what I aspired.
