Summer Solstice is one of the old seasonal markers, a day that once carried ritual, celebration, and a sense of order. But in an age that has grown indifferent to tradition, even a day like this cannot escape dispute. The ancient rites are long gone. Even customs that once remained lively among ordinary people now trigger resistance and conflict. A date that should have belonged to harvest and gladness can easily turn sour, and not only because of one controversial custom. To be honest, on most days people do not seem especially happy anyway.
By all appearances, this should be an era of prosperity. The country is stronger, people are wealthier, life is supposed to be improving. Yet the feeling many live with is not ease. Public tragedies fade from the headlines before they are truly resolved, and justice or compensation for the dead seems forever delayed. Other incidents come and go, each stirring anger for a while, then sinking into the background. These things are real, but they are also far away from me. What unsettled me on the day of the summer solstice was not world affairs, but the ordinary troubles close at hand.
I have always thought of myself as a rather cold person. I like to say that I believe in facts, in survival of the fittest, in natural rules, in the idea that whatever exists must have its reasons. But the longer I live, the less certain I am that what exists is therefore justified.
I have worked in architectural design for nearly two years, and if I am honest, I am still a novice. The freshness is gone. Lately I have even begun to dislike the work. At times it feels as though what I do helps the wrong side win. I love the natural world and dislike reinforced concrete, so I cannot bear seeing fertile fields buried under roads and buildings. Sometimes, even on a bus, I hear people sigh over a stretch of good farmland that has been taken over by construction. They say that land once fed a whole town, and now it cannot even feed the people living on it. I may not have personally designed those particular buildings, but I still feel ashamed of my profession.
Turning farmland into concrete is easy. Turning it back is almost impossible. Everywhere, cities are expanding. In Guizhou, the provincial capital built a new district, and Zunyi also pushed forward with its own planned expansion. Even where some plans were later denied on paper, the buildings had already taken root in reality. I have never believed that modernization depends on grand, glossy architecture. Nor do I think people must live in opulent buildings before their lives can be called moderately prosperous. If our houses rise higher while our conduct drifts further from basic morality, then we are not moving closer to modernity at all.
Not long ago I went to Shatu in Bijie to look at a site for a new residential building. Once we had examined the terrain and started sketching an initial plan, the developer proposed the same formula seen almost everywhere: underground parking, storefronts on the first floor, commercial space on the second, apartments above. The pattern is the same across the country because it is the pattern that makes money. Developers are not charities. They will not include cultural facilities out of goodwill, and they will not sell housing cheaply to public-interest groups.
When old neighborhoods are torn down and rebuilt this way, and new projects all follow the same commercial template, the environment around us inevitably changes. Entertainment venues multiply, while any sense of a spiritual home recedes. And housing shapes life more than people like to admit. If your neighborhood is ringed by clubs, bars, karaoke parlors, and similar places, then your spare time is likely to flow in that direction too. Reading, chess, calligraphy, painting, music—the old forms of cultivated leisure gradually move farther away. The modern lifestyle can make people more passive, more isolated, more inwardly empty. Is that not one of the things wearing down family life?
I learned Chinese chess when I was young. Back when I was in Shenzhen, I could still spend long evenings with colleagues over a chessboard. Three or five people sitting together, talking and playing—however tiring work was, that feeling was deeply satisfying. After returning to Zunyi, that kind of life became hard to find. Most people around me prefer mahjong. At gatherings with colleagues, at business meals, whenever people have a little free time, someone wants to start a round. Most of the time I just sit there watching stupidly.
I used to have chess friends in school, and I still keep in touch with some of them. A while ago I suddenly felt the old urge to play and asked one of them out. We had once been evenly matched, each winning and losing in turn. This time, though, I beat him every game. In the end he sighed that time spares no one and that his mind was no longer what it used to be. Then yesterday I happened to see him online, and his status showed that he was playing Sichuan mahjong in a game room. In my memory he had never been a mahjong player. I asked him when he had picked that up, and told him I did not know how to play. He answered that it was just a way to kill boredom, that mahjong was simple, and that he could teach me sometime.
I have no liking for mahjong, and gambling is something I keep at a distance. Because of that, I seem to drift further and further from ordinary social life. When I attended a classmate's wedding in May, old classmates sat around talking and laughing together, but I felt more like an outsider. Not knowing how to play mahjong has cost me chances to socialize and deepen friendships. Yet I would still rather lose those chances than force myself into it. I have closed myself off in that way, and I do not know whether that is right or wrong.
The erosion of inner life does not stop with adults. It reaches the next generation too. My nephew used to love cartoons. Now even that interest is fading, replaced by games. Whenever he gets the chance, he wants to play games on a phone. I have to admit that children of his generation are very clever. Give them a device and, without being taught, they will figure out how to use it. He is only four years old. I do not even know what I was doing at four. If I remember anything at all, it is probably playing with mud.
Yes, mud. There was a brick kiln near my home back then. Yellow clay would be shaped and left to dry before firing, and my friends and I would sneak away with a soft, damp brick and knead it into little things. I liked making cars from clay. They were easy enough to shape, but they bent out of form easily, and in hot weather they dried fast and broke. Later, a boy a little older than me made me a wooden car and gave it to me. That was probably the first gift I ever received.
I have forgotten where his family originally came from, and I cannot remember his name now. He had come to our village with his father after his mother remarried. He was around thirteen then, very skillful with his hands. He could make bamboo hats, brooms, and many other things, and sell them at the market for money. He had become the backbone of his family while still a child himself. My mother was a warm-hearted person who liked to associate with decent people, so she often visited his mother, and that gave me the chance to know him.
I never expected him to give me that little car. It was something I was completely incapable of making at that age, and far sturdier than the clay cars I shaped myself. I think he said many things to me when he handed it over, but I heard none of them. I was too absorbed in the excitement of owning a wooden car. Later he left, and I never heard news of him again. He was a hardworking person, one who had taken responsibility early, and I want to believe his life turned out well.
Children in those days, limited though our lives were, tended to think more in terms of responsibility. What mattered was carrying a share of the burden. Today the emphasis seems to have shifted toward enjoyment: students wanting phones, wanting fashionable clothes, wanting the right accessories. We had none of those concerns then.
Of course, not everything changes. Some things remain exactly the same. In our student days, we buried ourselves in textbooks and endless problem sets. Students now still fight the same war in the sea of exercises. Education, meanwhile, has also been reshaped by commercialization. In class, many teachers simply go through the textbook, assign homework, and leave. Their real energy is often reserved for private tutoring after school, where they can earn extra income. There are still a few conscientious teachers, but even they often teach with methods that feel stale and rigid.
In many ways I feel like a refugee produced by that system. In the second half of my first year of middle school, our class had a change of teachers. The new teacher had just graduated from university. Under his guidance, my grades steadily declined from near the top of the year. Even though I still ranked near the top in a mock exam in my third year, the broader trend had already set in. My attitude toward studying had begun to harden in the wrong direction. Natural ability may carry someone for a while, but it cannot determine what becomes of them afterward.
When I had nearly given up, I encountered that same teacher again in high school. He had gone from being a mathematics teacher trained in that subject to teaching geography, and later ended up as the school gatekeeper. It is hard for me to imagine what he is doing now. By the time I clearly recognized my own mistakes, I lacked the resolve to change myself. There were too many examples around me that I could not emotionally bear. A university-educated teacher could end up reduced to guarding the school gate. My older brother graduated from university and left home, never really returning, still living away to this day. Looking at people like that, I could not see what future studying at a university would promise me. In the end I withdrew, and even when I later had a chance to pursue higher education, I chose to avoid it and go far away instead.
I have accepted reality now, and I do not spend my time regretting or complaining. Even so, I still wonder: if back then there had been someone able to guide me properly, someone who knew how to teach and lead, might I have chosen differently?
Whenever people talk to me now about teachers, I almost want to laugh. Anyone can recite from a textbook. Many of my former classmates also went into teaching. I believe they take their work seriously, but I cannot easily imagine what kind of students they will produce. These days, it sometimes seems that as long as a teacher does not commit some disgraceful abuse, that alone is enough for people to call them a good teacher. Why are there so many twisted people in the world? Outdated teaching methods instill dead patterns of thought, and what kind of future can students shaped that way really have?
Sometimes I wonder whether, if I were not working in architecture, I might have become a teacher instead—someone who could help students think differently, learn more independently, and stand on their own more capably in the future.
But I am not a teacher. I am still where I am, still absorbing the blows of reality, still making my peace with life as it comes. The summer solstice has arrived. The weather grows hotter, and my temper seems to grow more restless with it. When the heart is unhappy, everything it looks at appears unhappy too. These are difficult, knotted days.