Some random thoughts 3

I feel so muted. So muted that many things I thought would stay with me forever have left only faint marks on my heart. Maybe everyone is like this, with a tendency toward self-protection. Or maybe my reason outweighs my feelings. Or, more simply, perhaps I am just not an emotional creature. All my life, I have been moving farther and farther from my actual “home.” In elementary school, I only had to explain to my classmates which part of the town my home was in. In middle school, I had to explain which town I was from. In high school, which county. At university, I had to say which province and city I was from. Now all I can say is “somewhere near Shanghai.”

I have been saying goodbye all along. Parting is easy for me, and yet it is also hard. In the few days around a goodbye, I fall into an enormous sense of emptiness, like a computer that has frozen. Then, once I come back to myself and regain a sense that life is real, I go on living as usual.

What makes parting difficult seems to be a lack of belonging. In other words, the place that anchors me keeps getting bigger. In elementary school, I was right there in the village. I knew everything in it, and the village was where I felt rooted. In middle school, I was still fairly familiar with everything in the town, and the town was where I felt rooted. But in high school, I only knew the area around my school. Was that area where I felt rooted? It was part of a larger area—the city—and perhaps I knew nothing about the city. University and my PhD have only made me less and less familiar with the places where I live. Can I say that China, or, more radically, the entire Earth, is where I feel rooted? Clearly I cannot. As grand as that claim might sound, it would be an illusion. I am just a child who walked out of a village. I know nothing about the world.

Before fate, I am like duckweed in the wind. Drifting, drifting—what am I like? I grew tired of the monotony and repetition of life back home, so I left my homeland, crossed the globe, and traveled far. Seeing a wider world is tremendously exciting, but it also plunges me into an unfamiliar void. Is this a dilemma? I lean neither way. I only ask.

Looking deeper into my heart, perhaps this is why I have always longed for friendship or love. Like searching for an invariant under a change of coordinates, I am searching for another piece of duckweed to drift alongside me. Perhaps that is my present attempt at solving this dilemma. I do not know whether friendship or love can do this, but I keep hoping.

All along, I have been trying to live a life that makes sense to me, and that means resolving my own contradictions and difficulties. Until I can resolve them, I can only draw on a little strength of spirit and keep moving forward, carrying those painful contradictions with me.

Let me recite a few lines to encourage myself, from the great man: “I have resolved to leave my home; until I have learned and made my name, I vow not to return. Why must my bones be buried in my native soil? Where in this life are there no green hills?”

That seems a little too heavy. Let me recite something gentler: “Where this heart finds peace is my home.”