1
Cai Jun’s The Room for Ten Million People.
The prose is so good that I want to smash my life to pieces and assemble it into a new continent, so no one can tell it was once an ordinary stream found everywhere.
I never imagined that fragmented fantasies and borrowed ideas could blend so perfectly, becoming a bowl of beef rice noodles I love.
Death never announces itself, yet urges me to live every day. These days I have fallen into the time-space tesseract from Interstellar. My eyes can see nothing clearly; jazz from every age echoes beside my ears. It is free, but it will not let me drift. Sometimes I remove my headphones to catch the sounds outside. The noise-cancelling headphones keep the saxophone beside me, blowing every river into song. The river does not plan to push me into the Yangtze. It lifts me up, then slams me down at the gate of my southern hometown.
I still went home for the Dragon Boat Festival. The ticket was bought while a person was alive, and remained in the cloud after that person died. Now it is two in the morning, the second morning after returning to work. Since I have to work tomorrow, I think I should abruptly stop everything and go to sleep.
Time still laughs openly in my face. More than thirty thousand days of life flow through my fingers in an instant, while I remain, as now, without memories of the past or the future. I know only the present: a madman pulling himself apart. He will fall asleep, she will wake up, and I have never closed my eyes.
Disordered time and needless pronouns do not prove how clever an author is. I still have to practise, deconstructing and constructing again and again, until death greets me and lets me be a proper guest once more. The world need not wait for me to wake. I will open my eyes in anger, then pretend to be careless as I scatter traces of existence.
—— Written 2024.6.13
2 / N
Last year and this year, May and June, must differ somehow. Even for someone once accustomed to anxiety and pain, saying that I have already grown numb would be both cruel and hypocritical.
No one wants too much contact with negative people or things. So to this day I remain deeply grateful to the relatives and friends who knew what I had truly been through over the past year, and who were willing to listen or stay beside me. Perhaps these were not the hardest days of my life, but from the corner where I stood, even a thread of connection was enough to keep me happily alive.
To the friends I hurt, directly or indirectly: I know the apologies you have seen cannot repair the cracks between us. All I can do is make myself try harder in the future to care about how others feel, especially the people I value. Thank you to those among you who are still willing and able to remain my friends.
As for the appalling malice and ubiquitous stupidity, I still do not have enough strength to fight them. I cannot do it alone; and it will take me a long time to think clearly about who, or what, the real enemy is.
Patience and solidarity remain indispensable.
Until then, I will keep living until the final moment. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to watch those fortunate people who thought they would never enter the void discover that they have long been trapped inside it. If, by then, I am lucky enough not to be among them, I will finally laugh at the sky.
What comes after that is for K-1647 to consider. No era can stop intelligence from developing (one might even say that intelligence developing is the era itself), nor can it stop countless moments from leaving their marks in our minds. If even one such moment can become eternal, that alone makes life worth living.
Keep going, so this journey will not have been wasted.
—— Written 2025.6.01