No One Is Unquotable #1

Freedom is a thing that attached to Art. When the power of art meets the power of country, freedom is in danger and art not the only victim.      — Heather Cai

Yesterday Was A Drama

Strangely yesterday I asked myself, how many Yesterdays have I had so far and how many do I remember? Thus, it seems too many to count and too few to remember. Then I tracked it down to my personal diary. There was one day written in 2013. And the mood of that day was as complicated as yesterday.

It says: Oct.25, 2013

Yesterday, a dramatic woman made an odd day. All the way to the market, all the way home and all day long, she covered her mouth with a hand, laughing and crying with smiles yet without tears, feeling like going to marry tomorrow, acting like the secret of American Dream.

Reading through each word, it seemed as if what happened on that day just happened now. The noises from the market, the faces in the crowds, the aimless footsteps on the way home, the broken laughter and the crying smiles, the hungry eyes and the wandering mind, the complex power of the deep inside waves – all these images were still vivid as a dear heart. And yesterday, there was no fewer dear moments than that day. In the morning, I posted a moment of my mind:

After all these days of building a blog and creating some material for the site, I feel my mind floating high and feverishly, my feet walking on the water, my heart rumbling violently, my passion lying restlessly to the mess, the anger, the pain, and even now my period bleeding abnormally.

My Birthplace Stays Green Green

You know? Since ever China opened the door to the world, many of the poorest and the most remote Chinese villages began to die one after another. So has my home village.

This is the house which was built exactly the year I was born in 1986. It still looks new from the outside, doesn’t it? It was built up with rough mud and stones with black tiled roof. Outside the house, is a small shelter without a door. It’s the toilet made of two giant wooden buckets with only one short stepladder, and two pigsties. Between them, there is small space to store the pig shit and any other shit that could be used for fertilizer. Beside it in a small corner, there was a home for many lovely rabbits. But not now, not when I visited back in September 2014.

There are only my uncle and my auntie still living inside the house. All my side of the family moved out in 2008. Now all the wooden furniture has been eaten by bugs, all the metal farm tools rust in the damp, all the wooden floors are spread with rat shit and dead bodies of cockroaches, all the rooms are covered with a certain smell of dust, all the doors, windows, poles, beds and each corner have spider webs with different spiders building their homes. And because of frequant strong windy storms coming with big floods in summer, the mud walls gradually lean towards the right side. God knows when, the house will break and collapse to the ground, and if ever anybody would afford to build another one or just let the village completely die in silence.

No matter what season and no matter where, there are always many places with dark green, light green, grass green or pure green. But due to less and less people using the wood burning stove, the chimney with the purple smoke gradually becomes more and more attractive to me. Living for about 15 years in a house surrounded by green fields growing rice, green trees rising to the sky, green wild plants and flowers and green wild fruits, with the smoke moving freely in the air, I feel the conception of freedom, much like a baby coming to the world naked. Unfortunately, it’s the high technology and money that drives the villagers away from their original place. They live far away from their birthplace. They now mostly live somewhere in a city with pollution, sighing to the cold wall made of concrete with grey or white paint falling now and again. They would question themselves, “Where do I belong?” Maybe many out there have some money, own a house out of downtown, buy a car driving around, marry to someone blindly and carry their family lines by having another son or even another illegal child. But really, are they all happy in the city? Happier than the old time when there was no single bridge to connect to the big cities?

See the road? It’s a place located at Xiadang Township(This link -released old photos reveal Xi’s experience in Fujian, my hometown),where the current chairman, Xi Jinping, had work experiences before and visited again last summer, there is still corruption and corrupted feudal thinking. It has taken so long to build a proper road and it is still not finished. It’s definitely not lack of money but where the money has gone.

As a village on the edge of China, any idea for the good of its own might go nowhere. Just like no one knows how the cock communicates with the hen and how it is possible that the oldest woman still survives in my home village with her bound feet. Look at her, isn’t she like a model or something for a painter or photographer?

Look at the chickens, it seems they don’t even bother to talk to each other. They are the victims, just like those villagers who have moved to big cities and who also don’t bother to talk like they did before in the village.