The whole month I’ve been tormented by the noise from my upstairs neighbor — heavy, sometimes piercing footsteps coming through the ceiling at six or seven in the morning and again at midnight. You can never predict when that distinctive “noise” is going to erupt next, and my sleep has taken a nosedive. I’ve always been sensitive to sound, and now I’m even more so. I’m still hunting for a fix.

Lately I’ve been reading Maugham’s The Painted Veil before bed. I figured I’d drag it out for weeks, but I finished it in just a few nights. Maugham’s observation and rendering of human nature is genuinely remarkable. A couple of passages I loved:

The world we live in is ugly and revolting; the only things to admire are what humans have created in the way of beauty — the paintings, the music, the books, and their lives. And among all of that, the richest and most beautiful is life itself — it’s a delicate, exquisite work of art.

Well, you know, women often vainly believe that men are madly in love with them. In fact, they’re not.

Lately I’ve actually been more obsessed with the Neapolitan Novels. Though I’m only halfway through book one (as of December 29 I pushed through and finished it, then dreamed about Lila and Lenù that night). I think this is going to be my book of the year. I love Lenù as Ferrante writes her — earnest, studying hard — and I love Lila as Lenù sees her — brilliant and brave. I love that friendship between them, full of chasing each other, secretly comparing, but caring about each other more than anything.

My Brilliant Friend

I came to the Neapolitan Novels sideways — I happened to catch the TV adaptation of the same name, My Brilliant Friend, on Bilibili. When I first started watching, none of the names lined up, everyone blurred together, and the Naples neighborhood Lila and Lenù grew up in looked desaturated and violent. I had no idea what the story was even about. I almost gave up. But after I’d worked out who was who, it grew on me. It’s a genuinely great show — eventually I became a one-woman PR campaign for it, pushing it on all my friends.

After finishing season three, I realized the original novels had been sitting on my WeChat Read shelf for ages. I probably added them after hearing them mentioned on a podcast or recommended by some book blogger and then forgot about it — that’s how my shelf ended up stuffed with books I’d never opened. Honestly, the show is already a faithful adaptation, but Ferrante’s prose has a kind of fluid power to it: the deep dissection of Lenù’s inner world, her love for Lila, the dark humor that surfaces every so often. In her work she keeps coming back to the dissolving of boundaries, and every time I hit that phrase — the dissolving of boundaries — I’d feel like I wasn’t quite getting it. So I scrolled through the comments and found someone had reposted a piece by Zhang Yueran on this exact theme.

About this dissolving-of-boundaries phenomenon, Ferrante said in an interview: “I’ve seen this manifestation in myself, in my mother, and in many of my female friends. We’ve been subjected to too many constraints, and these constraints will erase our desires and ambitions. The modern world sometimes places a pressure on us that we cannot bear.”

“Those women who dissolve can be read this way: in the face of a violent world, they’ve given up the fight, and this dissolving can also be read as a decisive refusal. There’s a particularly hard-to-translate phrase in Italian: ‘Io non ci sto’. It has two meanings — one is ‘I’m not here’; in certain contexts, the other is ‘I do not accept your proposal.’ Generally it can be rendered as ‘I don’t agree, I don’t want to.’ Refusal is being unwilling to participate in this game of oppressing the weak — refusing this dog-eat-dog world.” That’s how Ferrante put it.

This dissolving of boundaries probably corresponds to Lila’s eventual disappearance.

On December 24, I swapped the background image of my blog over to a still from My Brilliant Friend. Felt deeply, deeply right.

Can’t Lie Flat, Can’t Hustle Either

It’s been almost two months since I quit, and I still haven’t figured out what’s next. I’ve never been a very goal-oriented person — making plans is just not my thing. Usually I operate on “the road will appear when the car reaches the mountain,” one step at a time, wherever I end up is where I end up. I get the occasional bout of anxious overthinking, but walking down a road I never mapped out, I’m genuinely curious about what comes next, where fate ends up taking me — that pull of the unknown. The unknown is genuinely fascinating. Two years ago I never would have guessed I’d end up in a city two thousand kilometers from home; a year ago I never would have guessed I’d actually stick with a job for over a year and save up a little money. Back then I was broke and lost. If I’ve had any luck, maybe it’s just been accepting reality and continuing to move forward.

The reality is that at night I watch my savings drop and start interrogating myself: “Where did all this money go? How does it disappear so fast?” Hence the question, hence the opening of Coursera, hence the attempt to pick up some skills. I should be learning skills that actually make money, so future-me can lie flat for longer. Early retirement would be ideal — having a job is such an anti-human activity that if you can avoid it, you should.

On the afternoon of December 27, I opened The Surrender Experiment, which I’d previously gotten about a third of the way through. I’d bought the paperback back in June and had been reading it in fits and starts; before that afternoon I hadn’t even hit the halfway mark. Sometimes reading a book is a matter of timing. After half a year of barely making progress, I sat down that afternoon and tore through the rest in two hours. Michael Singer’s idea of surrendering to the flow of life is about letting go of the self and letting what’s meant to happen happen. It sounds a lot like go with the flow.

I do choose this from time to time. It reminds me of a solo trip I once took where I gave up trying to let my brain control everything and just wandered until I ended up at my destination. But the book’s instruction to put down the voice of your brain — that’s still hard for me. Thoughts and feelings come and go in my head, and being able to set aside personal preferences in order to, say, do something I hate, accepting whatever task the flow of life hands me — I’m not there yet.

Surrender — what a magical, powerful word. It often conjures up notions of weakness and cowardice. In my case, surrender required enough courage to follow the formless into the unknown, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Surrender didn’t show me where I was walking, and I didn’t know where it would lead me, but it did make one fundamental thing clear: my personal likes and dislikes were not going to guide my life. By relinquishing the grip those powerful forces had on me, I let a far greater force guide my life — life itself.

Through this stage of growth I came to understand that surrender is accomplished in two very different steps: first, you have to let go of the personal preferences arising from your heart and your mind; then, with the clarity that first step produces, you simply look at what the current situation is asking of you. If you were no longer ruled by personal preference, how would you act? Following a deeper guidance will take your life in another direction — completely different from the direction your preferences would point you toward. That’s the clearest explanation I can give of the surrender experiment, and it’s become the foundation of my spiritual and worldly life.

The Wet Market Is Heaven on Earth

Summer of 2021, I was sharing an apartment with friends in Shijiazhuang and we decided to cook spicy hotpot together. So off we went to the nearby wet market for ingredients. How could a clean, bright, well-arranged wet market not be heaven? Rows of perfectly stacked tomatoes, irresistible bunches of cilantro, a place where you can buy more or less any food you can think of. My fondness for wet markets comes from watching life happen there. You can stare at people without shame, comparing them as they pick produce — and sometimes I can’t tell what counts as a good tomato versus a bad one, so I watch the other shoppers and try to reverse-engineer their criteria. Which stall has the most people, which has the widest selection, which has the freshest stuff — all of it takes a sharp eye.

On the morning of the 27th I biked over to the supermarket. On the way out I’d glanced at the forecast — 19°C — and figured it wouldn’t be too cold, but the wind nearly forced my eyes shut. I love observing everything that enters my field of vision, except people. The unnameable trees beside the bus stop, leaves blown across the ground in a yellow drift, branches bare and shriveling. The pink flowers along the pedestrian-bridge railing have lost the soft glow they used to have and turned dull. Winter in Shenzhen comes for a handful of flowers and trees, and for the unemployed people like me — we all go into hibernation. The row of tall, dense, still-green trees across the street is a constant reminder of that fact.

The supermarket had been completely redecorated for the Lunar New Year — red clothes, giant posters dangling from the ceiling, festive holiday music. In the blink of an eye another year is gone. The decorations actually flashed me right back to when I first arrived here this year.

Good and joyful things always come from life itself. That’s one of the deepest things I’ve taken from this year. I’m forever telling myself I’m suffering, that I’m unhappy, waiting for some day or some year to suddenly come along and make my life bright and good. Living in the past while imagining a future, ignoring the present, telling myself it’ll get better later — muddling through with that attitude. But my life is really made up of countless present moments. The past was once a now, and the future will become now in turn. So all I really need to do is live this present well.

Books, Film, and Music

A few things I’ve finished recently, am currently reading, or am watching:

⭐ Reading: What I’m reading lately

📺 TV & Film: What I’m watching lately

🎨 Videos: YouTube / Bilibili

📝 Other