I have always loved old Chinese writing. There is a pictorial quality to it, as if the words could place you among green hills and clear water, or give you a particular mood that ordinary language cannot. Reading them is like tasting a landscape. Their deeper resonance feels like a conversation with some ancient mind, each side speaking of what lies closest to the heart.
In the old usage, a man of twenty was said to wear the 'weak crown.' The phrase is awkward on modern ears. It carries the rawness of a boy of seventeen or eighteen and, at the same time, a certain masculine force. Writing those words, I thought at once of Wang Bo. Among the Four Talents of the Early Tang, he was the most gifted; a single piece on the Pavilion of Prince Teng made his name known everywhere and startled the ages. Yet this same man, with all that was in him, drowned at the threshold of twenty. When I first encountered his name, I paid no attention to the shape of his life. I simply stared at those brilliant lines, astonished by the talent before me. I would not call it the finest under heaven, but it is rare enough in any age. I am surely not alone in loving Wang Bo. Xiao Duan, a wuxia novelist of our time, took lines from him for Chang'an Guyi. When I went back to Wang Bo, it was the 'Deng Tan' section of Chang'an Guyi that I was reading. How many men and women in this world are remembered, their names kept alive across centuries? And a boy of twenty could leave the essence of his writing carved into the minds of countless later readers. How difficult is that? 'Where is the prince in the pavilion now? Beyond the railing, the long river flows on by itself.'
But what I meant to set down today is a particular stretch of years: on a certain month and day this year, I too will be a young man of twenty. Twenty years old. The days have slipped quietly away, flowing to some place without a name. They make me think of worn-out time, of scattered details...
Twenty years. What have I done? What have I loved? Perhaps because I have not remembered for too long, when I suddenly sit still and think, I find that I have had so many interests! So many that I cannot count them. And all those interests have left me with nothing. I truly have nothing. I once thought, and for a long time kept thinking, that I had a good foundation in writing. But when the restless surface settles, the only word for my connection to writing is 'stiff.' Empty, powerless. What I imagine I cannot express; what I put down is stiff and lifeless. It is like a palace built from countless boulders: not a palace, only a tomb. It has buried all my years...
What did I once dream of? Being a writer, producing countless works, one astonishing book after another. And now I cannot even produce a decent piece of writing. When I saw writers taking piles of money from Qidian, other websites, or publishers, I thought my future had appeared, because I could do the same. I could write those low-quality things that still earned great piles of money... I know I was dizzy with commercialization. When the dream cleared, I began to do other things I thought were practical, and those practical things threw me into hell. They cultivated the essence of the angry young man in me. I could not stand anything in the human world; I felt that ugliness had made the whole world and that light was only a phantom. Writers were farther and farther from me. After I left writing, what remained was a crowd of bookish men who still loved words, chatting about pointless things in QQ groups, talking east and west, passing one spring and summer after another. I know I was escaping reality. I do not know how many people have escaped that same reality...
The thing I am least good at is probably persistence. And I will never persist. The same thing, done too long, loses its flavor. Perhaps that is also why I did not go to university. After so many years of studying, I was tired of it, sick of it. I always felt I should do something else, go somewhere else. So I began a drifting life, running here and there. Two days in this place, two days in that. Youth ought to be brilliant, and that brilliance should be made of countless vivid fragments. With a bag full of searching, I set out toward tomorrow. To pass through the next stretch of time!
The year of the weak crown. The beginning of the third decade of my life. Let me salute tomorrow with words.