Life

Preface This week I took my time finishing Calvino’s Marcovaldo. I came away in awe of the author’s imagination and the sheer descriptive force of his writing — he seems to have constructed an entirely separate, full-color world inside his head that no one else has access to. Marvelous, really. By the end I felt like everything had been reduced to a blank page. Marcovaldo is a city laborer with a romantic streak, observing his neighborhood with sharp eyes. Through his vision the gray, threadbare life around him becomes interesting. And just when you’ve decided he’s a pure romantic, Calvino throws in a twist and lets Marcovaldo tumble back into the vulgar and mundane. Vulgar and luminous can exist in the same person at once. The dark humor of the writing kept making me laugh and grimace at the same time. ...

👀 Preface Second year in a row not going home for Spring Festival — but this year I’m not spending it alone. I came to Dongguan to be at my older sister’s. Because of the holiday, even my reading pace has slowed down. Every day I’m playing with my two nephews — a two-year-old and a five-year-old, both bigger troublemakers than the other. Even little kids can tell I’m the easiest pushover. They keep running at me to yank my glasses off and grab at my face. I think I tolerate all of it not because I particularly like them, but because they’re my sister’s kids. When I was little I used to trail along behind my sister everywhere. She’d bring me cute little cakes when she came home, take me clothes shopping, watch movies with me, lie in bed with me to chat and sleep, tell me things I didn’t know yet. Back then I thought she was an incredibly cool grown-up, and I loved her. ...

Preface A good life isn’t necessarily a life of material abundance. It’s about finding your own rhythm and your own freedom. — I May Be Wrong Walking through the deep night, if I look up I can still catch a few scattered stars, twinkling. In the last two weeks I’ve averaged finishing a book every five days — The Neapolitan Novels, Bright Night, Confessions of a Wicked Woman (which really should be titled “The Long Afternoon”). Reading them, something deep landed: womanhood is a condition. They’re all novels, set in different eras, different countries, different social backgrounds — but in how they write the unique kinship between women, the way women hold each other up and recognize each other, and in how they write the trauma women endure under patriarchy and male chauvinism, the books resemble one another extraordinarily. Reading one of them I could see several others in it. They left the same impression on me — occasional bright spots, but most of the time silent, oppressive. ...

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. ...

“Doing absolutely nothing” is the best description of my state this week. The weird thing is, even though I genuinely enjoy this slightly bored, nothing-to-do mode, I can’t bring myself to enjoy it with a clear conscience. There’s always this feeling that I should be using the time for something, that I shouldn’t stop learning or improving. I keep ping-ponging between “just enjoy yourself for once” and “I haven’t done anything and now I regret it.” ...

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. ...

Everything feels like it’s been put on fast-forward — it’s already the end of December. Everything that happened this year is starting to blur, as if coated in a layer of dust. Getting older and being addicted to fragmented information has left my brain rusty and locked up. Every now and then I have to knock on my skull and ask myself what year it is. Since my teens, I’ve been worrying about whether I’ll get Alzheimer’s someday. I used to occasionally write on my little WeChat public account, where I created a collection called “Memoirs of a Potential Alzheimer’s Patient,” recording things in that small corner from time to time, hoping I wouldn’t forget. ...

Everything feels like it’s been put on fast-forward, and suddenly it’s late December. All that happened this year has started to blur, as if covered by a layer of dust. Getting older and addicted to fragmented information has left my brain rusty and locked, requiring occasional taps on the head to remember what year it is. Since my teenage years, I’ve worried about potentially developing Alzheimer’s. Back then, I occasionally wrote on my little WeChat public account, creating a collection called “Memoirs of a Potential Alzheimer’s Patient,” where I would sporadically record things, hoping I wouldn’t forget. ...