January 15, 2026. Sunny, Shanghai.
With nothing much to do in the morning, I opened WeRead again and noticed that Life Is Meant to Be Enjoyed was still unfinished on my shelf. I could no longer remember why I had stopped halfway the last time, so I went back and started over with a little more patience. Reading it again, I found that it felt different.
What first drew me in was a line on the opening page:
Love is not a professional matter. It is not a skill, not an ability. It grows the way flowers and trees grow, with a kind of affection for time and the seasons, and a stubborn devotion to them. One must love something. It makes us resilient, tolerant, full. To love, amateurishly.
I do not read a huge amount, and a lot of the time my reading probably stays at the level of collecting striking quotations. But some books really do begin with just a few sentences that catch the eye and pull you in. This one does that immediately, especially with the line at the beginning:
As long as we are alive, we still ought to do something. We have suffered all kinds of wounds, but today we should still be cheerful.
For ordinary readers, I think the greatest motivation to read is pleasure, more than study. If you read only for the sake of reading, it is often hard to keep going. But if you read because something feels interesting, the experience can become happier and happier as it unfolds. I have often read books this way. Because I enjoy listening to Guo Degang’s crosstalk, I went on to read his Guo De Gang Hao, and even Education Fanatic Chen Zhonglian, which is almost entirely rated one star on Douban.
The pleasure of learning words
One of the purest pleasures in opening a new book starts with the words themselves. Life Is Meant to Be Enjoyed contains quite a few uncommon characters:
掼, pronounced guàn, meaning “to throw or smash with force.”
筇, pronounced qióng, a kind of bamboo.
蠖, pronounced huò, the larva of the geometer moth.
…
The more I read, the more language seems to escape me; the more I read, the more aware I become of how shallow my knowledge is; the more I read, the less certain I am of what I know. That is precisely why learning characters, pronunciations, and meanings through reading feels so wonderful. There is something deeply satisfying in realizing what you do not know.
Other people’s lives, and our own
A book may be about the writer’s own life, or about the lives of others. But in the end, what readers encounter are different versions of life itself.
In the section about barbers, the author complains about modern barbers and says something I strongly agree with: A person should not be too stubborn. To live in this world, one needs seriousness on the one hand, but sometimes one can only shrug things off. Tragic indeed.
That feels true. As an individual, I have the freedom to decide what kind of person I want to be, but that freedom is always relative. Inside society’s furnace, there are times when some freedoms have to be surrendered. Sometimes you have to accept being pushed into situations you cannot control, even into a version of yourself you do not especially like. Even he could only compromise in the end: he would often step into whichever barbershop was nearby, and when the barber asked how he wanted it cut, he would simply say, “As you like,” and hand over his head to be dealt with.
There is another section, about a restaurant waiter, where he writes that he stopped going to Dongfuju because he disliked the waiter so much. The reason is memorable: it was not that the man hated customers, nor that he looked down on them. He was simply disgusted by them. Or perhaps even disgust had faded. It was as if, after being bitten by mosquitoes all night, one no longer cared very much. He makes me think of death.
When I read that passage, a line surfaced in my mind: some people are dead but still alive; some are alive but already dead. It is abstract, yes, but it also feels uncomfortably close to reality.
A broad and lively way of living
To me, the book can roughly be divided into three parts. The first is about widening one’s taste for life. The second is that only with a sense of life’s pleasures can one be happy. The third is that life requires us to actually do something. That is only my own summary, and perhaps not a perfectly accurate one, but it seems close enough.
The range of the book is part of its charm. It begins in Beijing, with hutong culture, birdcages and pet birds, painting and writing. Then it turns toward plants, insects, fish, and animals: mountain lilies, crape myrtle, ladybugs, cats. After that, it moves outward through travel, to places like Sichuan, Yunnan, and Fujian.
What stayed with me most was the part about life in the orchard. He says he was not able to do heavy labor, but he could at least spray something called Bordeaux mixture. He even explains what it is: copper sulfate, lime, and water in a certain proportion. He sprayed so much of it over one summer that all his clothes turned light blue.
And the ending of that bit is delightful:
Last year a friend of mine went to France. I asked him where he had been, and he proudly said: Bordeaux! I’ve been to Bordeaux too—only mine was in China.
That kind of humor is exactly what gives the book its ease and vitality.
Why it is worth reading
I do think this is a book worth reading. In some ways it feels like an excellent model for essayistic writing: large sections, small subsections, rich content, precise description, and ideas that belong unmistakably to the writer himself.
On one side, I am amazed by how many flowers, grasses, trees, and creatures he knew, and by how much cultural knowledge he carried so lightly. On the other, it is hard not to admire the sheer craftsmanship of a writer often associated with leisurely prose. Of course, there are also certain views and attitudes that belong to a different era and a different background. If we read everything through a strictly contemporary lens, misjudgments are inevitable. But taken as a whole, the book still leaves a strong impression.
And then there is this sentence, which lingers:
I am not someone untouched by ordinary life, nor someone without feeling. I do not like the kind of person who never comments on others, never discusses public affairs, has neither love nor hate, neither right nor wrong, is timid and afraid of trouble, and cares about nothing except the price of pork and cabbage after retirement. There are plenty of such people.
That sharpness is also part of what makes the book alive.