I love the winter afternoon sun, the warm-all-over kind. Doesn’t matter if it’s up north or down south — sitting in the sun after a meal and zoning out is one of life’s most contented experiences.

😑 Insomnia Notes

This post was created on January 12, but I’m actually writing it on the 19th. The past few weeks, because my apartment has terrible soundproofing, falling asleep has been hard. Just as I’m drifting off, the ceiling above me erupts into a series of heavy, sharp footsteps and yanks me wide awake. Then once I finally do get to sleep, I get jolted up again at three or four in the morning by some noise from who knows where, and the insomnia kicks in for good. Not sleeping is suffocating and there’s no clear move to make. At one point I started to suspect I had genuine noise sensitivity — I was scrolling Xiaohongshu looking for people who’d been through the same thing and seeing how they’d solved it. I tried complaining to the property management as a third-party intervention; they posted a notice reminding people upstairs about their heavy footsteps, but it basically did nothing. My sound sensitivity has gotten to the point that hearing certain noises sends me into something like a cat’s startle response — like a switch flips and my eyes are immediately open. The cost of poor sleep is that during the day I can barely do anything, I have no interest in anything, my eyes are perpetually half-closed, and I don’t have the energy to leave the house.

Shenzhen is genuinely a city that will never be quiet. Roads get built and rebuilt, buildings go up one after another, the metro is forever being dug, and along the sidewalk an endless stream of e-bikes whooshes past with their incessant beeping. Pure noise, all the time. Every time I transfer through Shenzhen North Station, the dense crowd surges toward me like a flood and submerges me — I can’t make a sound, I can’t move, so I have to duck into the bathroom to recover. Three years ago in some chaotic, crowded place, I had a panic attack — heart racing, can’t breathe, couldn’t see the road in front of me. How do I describe that day? I don’t even remember how I got home. It felt like drowning, my legs were filled with lead, and I just kept sinking. Was anyone coming to save me? Since then I avoid heavily crowded places. Crowds generate noise — clamorous, irritating, chaotic noise — and none of it has anything to do with me, but it’s draining.

📕 Reading Diary

In two weeks I think I finished three or four books, which honestly shocked me. Most of the time my reading runs on novelty, and the novelty of any one book has a daily expiration date — usually an hour a day at most, and once that day’s spark is gone, I won’t open the book again, I’ll wait till tomorrow. What I didn’t expect was that on January 9 and 10, I spent 6 hours and then 9.5 hours respectively, and tore through The Story of a New Name: Neapolitan Novels 2, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Neapolitan Novels 3, and The Story of the Lost Child: Neapolitan Novels 4. What I’d expected to finish by the end of the month, I finished in the early hours of the 11th — thirty-eight hours total to get through a million-character series, and through the entire lives of Lila and Lenù. I can’t articulate why, what drive was pushing me. Maybe it was a way to occasionally remind myself: as long as I decide I want to do something, I can do it.

Honestly, I’m not particularly clever or gifted. But I’ve recently realized I do have one important capacity — I’m good at spotting the bright spots in other people, picking the parts I can practice myself, and slowly imitating them until they become a part of me. I’m a homebody, and the people I encounter in everyday life are limited, so books are an important entry point into other worlds, where I get to know people. Through the Neapolitan novels I got to know Lila and Lenù. Lila’s life is a life of struggle — she never bowed to her fate, she was always hunting for a way out. Forced to drop out, she didn’t stop reading and practicing writing on her own; she designed Cerullo shoes the market had never seen; forced into a marriage, she fought her way out of it; she became a sausage-factory worker and then taught herself programming and turned into a programmer. Lila is shrewd, sharp, and tough. Even though we don’t get her interiority directly in the book, every once in a while — through Lenù’s descriptions, especially in book three — we glimpse her in her fragile, broken moments. But Lila’s combativeness gave me endless strength.

Lenù’s life, in her own book’s language, is “my entire life — just a vulgar struggle to climb the social ladder.” The Neapolitan novels are told through Lenù’s perspective, with vast stretches of her inner activity, and we get to peek into the gray side of her: the inferiority complex, the jealousy of Lila. The unflinching honesty of Ferrante’s writing about that inner life doesn’t put me off in the slightest. If anything, Lenù’s stubborn, brave streak is the more enchanting part — she’d study till deep at night and then get up early the next morning to keep studying, she left the Naples neighborhood and went off to Pisa for university. Like that scene when they were kids and they cut class to go see the sea, and on the way it started raining and Lila wanted to turn back, but Lenù wanted to keep walking toward the ocean — she was the braver one. Sometimes I think Lila and Lenù are the same person — they blend into each other, intertwine; each is the other’s brilliant friend.

Let’s drink a toast to a new year, full of beautiful, happy things.

No matter what happens, you have to keep studying.

But you’re different — you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be better than anyone, boy or girl.

Every choice has consequences. A lot of the time our lives get pressed into a corner, waiting for an opportunity — and the opportunity always comes.

He married me because he wanted a loyal servant. Every man marries for the same reason.

The other one, the essay collection Eight Square Meters in Tokyo, I finished on the 15th. I read it at a pace of about an hour a day for five days and finished it. Maybe because the previous series had been so long, my reading speed had picked up — the essays didn’t drag at all. Compared to the heaviness of the Neapolitan novels, this one is bright and light. While I was reading it one day, I suddenly felt incredibly fortunate that I could see other people’s lives, other attitudes toward living, other experiences, through books.

🚶‍♀️ Walking Notes

Since the gap was so long, I dug out the journal entry I’d written on the 9th. I go out and walk during the day, and in the evening I occasionally jot down a kind of stream-of-consciousness journal — what I saw on the walk, that kind of thing. There’s no pressure to it — I write when I want to, and when I run out of things to write I close the notebook and go to sleep.

That day the sky was half cloudless blue, half veiled in gray haze. I looked up several times to verify what my eyes were seeing was real. You really do need to get out of the house. The things that frighten you fade away with each step, and you start to notice that everything is interconnected. On the 9th I walked a road I never normally walk, and I walked farther than usual. Heading into the unknown felt like an adventure. I didn’t even know where I was walking to, but the things were there, waiting for me to discover them. I love durian pizza and I order from the same restaurant constantly, but I’d never actually known where it was located in the real world. On my “expedition” that day, I stumbled across the actual building, and my eyes lit up. I quietly congratulated myself, as though I’d uncovered something monumental.

The wind through the leaves makes a xī-xī-suō-suō sound — not a shā-shā rustle — probably because the leaves still have weight, they haven’t yet dried into “mummies.” Those lush green leaves are stirred by the wind, and some of them can’t resist the lure of freedom — they spring loose, pirouette through the air, dance a tango, and land on the ground. I lost track of where I’d walked to. I ended up at a huge intersection. A red light is choice — which road I take and what scenery I get to see is mine to decide. But my sense of direction is terrible, so most of the time I just follow the crowd across the street. Outside the sunlight on the trees was a platinum-white, bright and warm. In the end I picked an open sidewalk to keep walking down — no e-bikes to worry about getting hit by, the trees lush on both sides, a feeling of safety. Just as I was approaching another intersection, there was a patch of grass lit up by the sun and seemingly glowing, and I pictured myself lying on it, rolling around in the sun. I decided to go into the little park.

This park had more of a human warmth to it. Kids playing everywhere, having a blast, and even more older folks bursting with vitality — dancing, playing Chinese chess, practicing the erhu, practicing the saxophone — none of which I have. I often wonder, if my own energy were a little more robust, could I also achieve some small thing in some domain? I walked a loop around the park. There were trees with little pink flowers, and trees that stood tall and straight like bamboo. The green space isn’t huge but it’s a pleasant walk. I watched the people around me as I went. They were all immersed in the moment, enjoying themselves, living life well — kids playing unrestrained, the elderly absorbed in their practice or their pastime. Something in that atmosphere is contagious, and I felt the urge to start doing things that make me happy, to really enjoy my own life. After that I sat down on a step and sunbathed for half an hour. As long as the sun shows up it’s the most equitable thing in the world — everyone gets some. Spacing out, daydreaming, watching drones zip around in the distance, and then eavesdropping — and I really didn’t mean to eavesdrop.

Sitting on the steps to my back-left was a woman on her own mat, sunning her back. After a while her husband came storming over and started berating her loudly. His voice was so loud that even an auntie far away with her kid looked over.

“Are you coming or not? How many times do I have to ask?” the man spat out furiously, like he was trying to drown her in saliva.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” the woman said weakly.

“…”

“I’m not fighting with you, I’m reasoning with you. You’re a woman. Acting like this, no man is going to like you.” The man looked ready to detonate, his temper flammable in a single spark, no give in him at all.

Eventually the woman gave in, packed up her stuff, and followed him out. Men so often dedicate themselves to treating women as their property, to controlling their behavior, attacking them with ridiculous and untenable lines of reasoning — like a monster with its blood-red maw gaping open, trying to dismember them, drink all their blood, leave nothing behind. The so-called crazy women — were they driven crazy? When I was little I disliked my mom. I thought she was fierce, she’d hit me for the smallest mistake, and I preferred my dad. As I grew up and started reading more, I realized my dad would only briefly appear to play “good dad” and I’d think he was great, but he was always hiding behind my mom, pushing everything onto her. My mom carried the entire weight of taking care of two kids alone, day after day, and her patience got worn down to nothing in all that minutiae. Maybe back then she too longed for the world outside, instead of being trapped at home.

🎨 Books, Film, Music