No Title

2021/03/03

Informal essay

政治挂帅 in the Old “House”

Photo taken in Putian

I don’t know since when we started to try to take care of every possible wounded heart, until every heart becomes vulnerable. We are against drawing boundaries among “the people”, yet we cling to another bunch of boundaries and don’t let go. We use those artificially constructed shackles to try to break through the injustices that these shackles create. When we tell the world “Nous ! Les femmes !” “We! LGBTQ!” “We! Asians!” in the hope of building a more equal and non-discriminatory society, are we not using a discourse that presupposes categories such as race, gender, religion, social class and even skin color? Where are we going in this fight? Maybe the whole human language is a trap.

I once had a nightmare in which there was a crying student who was on duty of cleaning the classroom and a class monitor who suddenly asked everyone to hand in the 第二作业 第三作业. This scene comes from my elementary school memories, but it’s a grotesque mutant one.

When I was reading The Three-Body Problem, what was I thinking? Perhaps only when aliens come and when another “other” emerges in opposition to human beings, will people realize that our lives are so different and yet so similar. And it would have to be the kind of aliens that want to screw human beings to death. Do we really care about aliens? Maybe the more important question is “other”, “the observer” and the second law of thermodynamics.

I heard that in Hakka, there is an expression/swear word called “black and white speaking (黑白讲)” which means that if something is either black or white, then it must be false or nonsense. In Puxian Min there is also a similar expression “gong wu gong bo (讲有讲没)”. I was quite surprised when I discovered so many “deviant” expressions in these ancient languages.

If I am Korean American, can I discriminate against Chinese Americans? If I am Chinese American, can I discriminate against Korean Americans? When we talk about “Americans”, “Koreans”, “Chinese”, and “Canadians”, we are referring to an abstract categorization. The categorization/division also means that there are abstract boundaries, and the presupposed condition of boundaries is “there is an observer.” This topic can obviously go deep into identity construction, but as far as this obvious problem is concerned, unfortunately, as long as this kind of categorization cannot exit the stage of history, this is not a simple question of “who am I”, because “I” exist in the “other”, and vice versa.

I never know what the American dream, the Chinese dream, the African dream, the European dream were. I can’t drink too much because of allergies, so I don’t know what it’s like to be drunk. Can anybody teach someone who has difficulty in sleeping how to dream?