写在23岁到来之际On Turning 23

"I keep my own stories deep inside — every gain and loss, every joy and sorrow and dream, written down by my own hand."

Looking Back

A birthday is mostly just a pretext — a convenient way to take stock of the time behind me and the world ahead. At a marker like this, I watch that kid's receding back grow up; I watch him keep going, and keep looking back. What the future holds, I don't yet know. Right now I just want to share how I feel in this moment. A person is the last to notice how they've changed, and yet the first to feel it.

On the whole, I'd call myself a pessimistic optimist. The pessimism: I think that once you hit a certain age you start subtracting, losing thing after thing, and past a certain age loneliness becomes unavoidable — your early twenties are exactly that awkward age. The optimism: I believe everything turns out to be a good thing in the end — even loneliness, which finally becomes a kind of powerful sense of presence.

Looking back on 22, I'll give myself a 60. The past year had its joys and its disappointments; its happiness and its restlessness; its confusion — and I'm still growing.

Ferocious

In every one of these cycles, time plunders it all from you — the skin once so taut you could pinch water from it, the youth you rode into battle in, the springtime of a heart with a tiger inside, the flutter of first crushes, the true feelings you treasured, the labels you wore with pride — and hands you back anxiety, fear, disappointment, knots, growth, maturity, equanimity. Time is far too precious a thing; you know that at any age it's hard to beat, you know how many people across the ages have fretted over its slipping away, and you don't have enough of it even to keep pace with your own daily decline.

"That year I was twenty-one, in the golden age of my life. I had so many hopes. I wanted to love, to eat, and in an instant to become one of those clouds in the sky, half bright and half dark. Only later did I understand that life is a slow process of being hammered — a person ages day by day, hopes vanish day by day, until in the end you become like an ox that's been beaten. But on my twenty-first birthday I foresaw none of this. I thought I would stay ferocious forever, that nothing could ever hammer me down." So wrote Wang Xiaobo.

I don't know what real ferocity is, and I don't know whether I have it — but I deeply envy the me of twenty:

a. Chasing freedom recklessly, throwing the fiercest execution behind anything I wanted to do.

b. A loner, self-assured; skeptical of every "truth," dismissive of every faith. Cold, with nothing I especially cared about.

c. As someone who had brushed up against death, forever "gazing at" it, selfishly treating my own subjective experience as the whole meaning of life.

d. Holding a pessimism of the purest kind, at certain moments so sincere and self-forgetful it was like Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly.

e. Curiosity as ravenous as appetite, a thirst for knowledge as intense as lust.

f. Every sharp, cool edge — so ferocious. Even as I clumsily relearned how to survive.

Whatever their age, these anxious individuals scramble to "claim their spot early" in the din and dust of the world, and only a rare few have the courage to wander at random. As the twenty-somethings prepare to go off the shelf, the thirties loom, and the forty-somethings sit "waiting for Godot" — standing at each turning marked off in tens, the passing of youth really is a thing to despair over. And in the fine-grained flow of time, people still eat, sleep, go to work, buy houses, sell houses. It makes you sigh: how good it is to be young.

Anxiety over age is nothing new — the ancients had it too. They said: "Thirty years of fame and glory, dust and dirt; eight thousand li of road, cloud and moon. Don't idle away, don't let a young head turn white and be left with empty grief." They said: "When the flower is open and fit to be plucked, pluck it; don't wait until it's bare and snap at empty branches." They said: "The years are a knife of frost, blade after blade hurrying you toward old age."

I once saw an interesting question: who has the higher quality of life, a modern white-collar city dweller or the Qianlong Emperor? Opinions differ. True, the ancients had no social networks to magnify the wealth gap, no livestreams broadcasting the fairy tale of startups striking it rich, no AI and new economy overturning the old ways of doing things — but they lost on lifespan. People today can, with the help of technology, buy time with money, yet they lose on an unprecedented transparency of information. Before you've even found yourself you're hijacked by others' good news; before you've stretched out a foot to root yourself in the ground, some "same-age" hotshot has you jogging to keep up.

Travel

I love that line: Life is not a destination, but a journey. Every year I go somewhere unfamiliar. It's a demand I make of myself, and a plan I keep. This past year I made it to a few new, never-before-trodden places. What travel means to me is the sense of presence you get shouldering a pack and hauling luggage through an airport or train station, watching the affected bustle of people coming and going — and hearing your own rhythm once you've reached some unfamiliar place. I've never loved taking photos; I prefer to record with my eyes and my mind.

I love meeting many people, and even if, after we go our separate ways, life goes back to being still water, there's always something a little different. Maybe the meaning of a trip lies in what you bring to it. When I think back carefully, these years of travel — the friends met along the way, the memories left behind — are some of the most beautiful memories I have. These people and events, when you recall them, feel like peeling an onion: you're overcome, tears streaming down your face.

One friend I met on the road. We ran into each other in Hualien. I'd run out of stamps and she happened to have some, so she gave me two — I was deeply grateful. Who'd have thought we'd meet again at the next place. We hung out on the road, and I learned she also collects postcards. Later we added each other on WeChat and became friends. Since coming home we've kept in touch, each of us having helped, supported, and encouraged the other. I often receive the postcards she sends me, and when I travel I think to send one to her. Every time I look back on it I can't help but marvel: what a strange and wonderful world. Maybe it really is fate that lets these people truly cross your path. And that, too, is one of the meanings of travel. May you wander the road free and easy and a little muddled, taking in the view — when memory is the last postcard you mail to yourself.

Love

I'm twenty-two this year. There was someone I really liked before, but in the end it didn't "come to fruition." Around me, friends fell in and out of love round after round, while I spent my school years in "secret crushes and open ones." This year's relationship finally made me understand the line, "she is my armor and also my weak spot."

More than once I've wondered whether I'd stay single forever. Later I understood: what I fear isn't being single — it's that when I finally meet the one, I'll have never dated, never gone through that growth, and won't know how to handle the problems and the relationship well, and will miss them in the end.

This relationship taught me a great deal:

1. Your partner is your best friend.

2. You click on many levels, and share many of the same or similar interests.

3. Being with the other person genuinely lowers your anxiety.

4. You can share a room, each doing your own thing, without disturbing each other and without the silence turning awkward.

5. Neither of you is with the other just because you wanted to be dating someone.

6. You work hard together, and grow together.

Interesting

I think the real secret to steering clear of the crowd is this: keep company with people who are interesting, not people who are useful; do what you want to do, not what others think is right; choose the life you love, not the one your parents, your friends, and all your aunts and uncles love.

There are usually two dimensions along which you feel like a failure: 1) I'm an idiot; 2) I'm boring. The first is just low self-regard. The second is the self-aware sense of being trapped in a small frame of life. For me, the moment I sense I've become boring — that's the real disaster. Like when someone cracks a joke and all I can manage is a dry little laugh. Or when everyone else is thrilled about something and I have no idea what's going on.

The Wishlist

1. Make the wish I make blowing out the candles come true.

2. Run a full marathon.

3. Go bungee jumping.

4. Camping + cycling.

5. Domestic travel: set foot on the rest of the land I've never trodden.

6. Start learning and improving my cooking systematically.

7. Finish the books and films saved in my Douban lists.

8. Keep collecting the original English Harry Potter books.

9. If the chance still comes, go to their concerts: Jonathan Lee, Rene Liu, Fish Leong.

The Future

To close, let me borrow a line from Gao Xiaosong: sooner or later life will defeat you — the only question is how far into the second half you hold on, until your substitutions run out, your stamina runs out, and life beats you in the end all the same. So while you still have the strength, be sure to give life a hard kick. Because life will never let you off just because you were timid and did nothing.

At 23, I hope I can stop being difficult and learn to cherish things. To be more mature, more empathetic, more sure of myself. To keep sharpening, keep hustling myself, keep experiencing life. To keep charging ahead — for what I want, and for the people I love and who love me — one step at a time, on and on without stopping.