The Loving Hearts of Parents

A photograph of schoolchildren in a poor mountain area stirred up my childhood memories. I can still vaguely recall the blizzard on the way to school as a child, and that mud pit we had to pass through. Before I knew it, my mother's voice and a bowl of warm soup were back in my ears. The old classroom was webbed with cobwebs, and the schoolyard was covered in mottled moss, as if telling an ancient story. The highway out front, from the day it was planned to the bustling traffic of today, has quietly marked the passing of six years. There is a touch of Lao Lang's "Winter Campus" in it. Just a small stretch of the past, and it can move you to tears. Fragmented memories, it turns out, are strung together on a single thread — pick up any one of them at random, and the rest sway along with it. Like tossing a pebble onto a still pond, the ripples spread out, and at that moment, there even seems to be the sound of glass breaking. After reading the Dao for hours, one is suddenly reminded, without meaning to, of the dearest people in the world, and a kind of loneliness, a kind of impulse, comes over you. Racing against your own shadow — what a foolish thing to do. Yet we know it is impossible, we know we shouldn't, and still we try every way to do what cannot be done. Is that not the height of folly? Sitting in a spacious, bright classroom, listening to a teacher speak at length while our minds wander elsewhere — have we ever thought about who gave us the chance to skip class, and who lets you sleep drowsily the whole day long in the comfort of your dorm? I remember that in Shi Tiesheng's "Me and the Temple of Earth," he mentioned a writer friend of his whose ideal was to let his parents live well. What about our own ideals? For a better future? And who, exactly, is the standard of that "better future"? Toil for money and it ends in an empty dream; struggle for power and you easily sink into a bottomless mire; and among those who chase fame and fortune, is there a single one who did not scheme and plot like the east-flowing river... If you do not even know why you are alive, then even amid the neon and wine, the gilded decadence, the lifelong toil and loneliness, the squandering of a fortune just for a smile from a beauty — what meaning is left to speak of? You are like a stone; it travels down the river, having seen shrimp at close range and sharks at a distance, but what does it matter? It is still a stone, being polished and ground down, breaking into sand that sinks to the seabed. Perhaps this too is a kind of fate. Not every person born with talent will be made into a ridgepole; not every person is destined to have ideals and ambitions. Some people spend their whole lives achieving nothing, clinging to life like ants. A single mistake — is repentance for it, too, something beyond one's control? Everyone has their own measure of happiness, of different scale and different understanding — what is it, then, that can make everyone under heaven celebrate together? When are the ten thousand things "the finger," and when are they "the horse"? You are not a fish — how do you know the joy of fish? How do you know they are not joyful? A youthful face, painted beyond recognition, the bejeweled girl barely past her teens. Heavy makeup does not necessarily mean impure, and a pure face does not necessarily know how to chant verse. Some things have no principles they ought to follow, and the absence of a way is itself a way. With or without the way, it is all the way — in all things, simply follow the heart.