Dialogue(s): Perhaps Humour

There are real real real dialogues that I came cross with in the past two or three weeks, although random, they made me laugh, so I think I’ll share them.

Dialogue 1:

大概三个礼拜前吧，反正是六四纪念日后没两天，我去王府井买书，就是Moscovici的《群氓的时代》。找了许久找不着，我就去了总服务台。

我：请问这里能帮忙找书么？

服务员（面无表情）：书名？（问号是我加的，她说的是降调）

我：《群氓的时代》。

服务员（面无表情）：哦，“群狼时代”啊！

我（着急地）：不是！是《群氓的时代》…那个…流氓的氓…

服务员（还面无表情）：哪个qún啊，裙子的“裙”？

我（更加着急地）：不是不是！人群的群，群众的群…

服务员（依然面无表情）：哦，没这书名！

我（汗流浃背）：哦，那麻烦您了。

服务员（终于面部肌肉动了动，但仍一本正经地）：没事，不客气…

A Banquet for Hobbs, Machiavelli, and Moscovici

This is another topic that I am eager to write on, I’m putting some fragments here simply to kick it off, so I wouldn’t forget or be too lazy to finish…

Plato held arguably the most famous banquet in human history that discusses erotic love. And if I could, I would suggest a similar one that includes Hobbs, Machiavelli, and Serge Moscovici, authors of Leviathan(利维坦), The Prince(君主论), and L’âge des foules(群氓的时代) respectively, and set the topic to be the state and its leader.

Exodus

I’m trying to make a start here and will finish writing this tomorrow.

What I want to say links directly to an article on the 10th issue of the banned journal Huang Hua Gang(黄花岗), banned in China that is. The title translates literally as Crossing the Red Sea. Although the Red Sea here refers to its symbolic meaning of communist dogmas in China, but I feel the journey of crossing it is no less difficult than that of Moses’, as told by the Old Testament, and as well, requires no less than another miracle, as the one Moses and the Israeli were blessed by.

Some fragments

I got different friends complaining to me that my blog reads, well…not really boring, but somehow distant and impersonal, which is to say, that I don’t talk about myself. I never considered these two urgent shortcomings of any blog. However, since only my friends read this, it is equally important not to upset them! However, the problem is, I get bored pretty soon when I start to write about myself, what’s there to say? I’m just an average person who would rather live her life without being talked about too much. So every time I do start gossiping about my own life, it never finishes and renders a completely something worth blogging, hence I can only show/reveal/confess some unfinished fragments that I scribbled in the last week or so, when I was drunk/depressed/felt some sudden rush of adrenalin, etc.

Fragment 1: 3rd June 2009

The date is approaching, 3rd June already, one day left to go. Two friends of mine are talking about going for a walk to the Square tomorrow, and probably drinking from a large bottle of Sprite, I think that wouldn’t be long before we get cuffed and sent to the public security bureau.

To the Square, to the Square

I wrote this during the day, on the mobile phone, while walking through the site of June 4th Massacre, on its 20th anniversary.

I’m on the way to the square, and today’s date is 4th june, 2009, 20 yrs after the night of the massacre. 4.30pm is the time, i’m on the tube, expecting to pay my condolence to those murdered, and without their death being dignified for two decades.

Even a police dog is present at the tube station of tiananmen east. the atmosphere is damn tense, with uniformed police or plain cloth patrolling every 5 steps. one needs to pass the seciruty check in order to enter the square, and every bag is opened after being machine checked, and hence double checked again mannually. my little bottle of coffee is taken out, shaken a few times and examined carefully before i sighed that “it’s really just coffee”! i entered the square from its northeast corner, what is facing me is the great people’s hall, with the dozens of stairs leading to the east entrance left empty. i’m then saying to my friend, pointing at these stairs, “that’s where they went and knelt down for hours in exchange for a conversation with li peng, but without any success”. this girl then asked me to describe in details what heppend there in every corner of this square, the night 20 yrs ago. i tried my best to recall everything i read from everywhere, the south side where the armed soldiers entered, how these drugged (according to some rumour) monsters held rifles and fired them against students and citizens, marching from the west to the east, with their backs to the great people’s hall, where guo haifeng led for the silent plea to talk to the authority. then i see the street side where a burnt bus was abandoned, on the morning of the 5th, and a bit further, the widely known rank of tanks, stopped by a single man, with two plastic shopping bags in his hands, a poster now hanging in my living room, for rememberance’s sake. we march againt the killing route, from east to west, then turn to the south, finishing entouring the entire square, picking up the almost lost memory of where the statue of liberty was, where the speeches were made, minibus was burnt, and where hanger strikers were interviewed.

Germaine

On cherche toujours un responsable de la naissance de la nouvelle nouvelle nouvelle, etc, chanson française. Nul doute que Thomas Fersen, dès son premier bal (un Bal des oiseaux) y a été pour quelque chose. Il ne tient peut-être pas à endosser la paternité et de la vieille dame, et de ses jeunes collègues ; disons plutôt, alors, qu’il a renouvelé l’art mineur, y a glissé des folies, des fables, des noirceurs, des bêtes pas bêtes, des hommes bizarres, des femmes fatalement fatales, et des ukulélés. Lui a une préférence pour le ukulélé soprano, qu’il juge teigneux. N’en concluons pas hâtivement que Fersen l’est également. Surprenant, en revanche, il ne cesse de l’être.

Some quick scribbling

Despite of all the wrestles with Internet in this vast country, I still manage to realise that BBC Radio Four has just launched a new series of documentries titled The Lost Voices of Tiananmen Square, which, only too obviously, prepares for one of the heaviest twentieth anniversaries of human history. I am proudly downloading the first part and cannot wait to hear it in about five minutes, when the downloading is finished. From my experience that anything from Radio Four promises that it is what can save a long tedious working day of mine from being too eventless, or spiritless.

Less than two weeks to go, time apparently always marches faster than one wishes, I still have a picture frame to buy, and cannot help thinking how much I would have done as last year if I were not trapped where I am. Even the Britons remember it, and constantly revalues it, what about us? Réne Descartes’ statement famously claims, I doubt, so I think, hence I exist. This is to say, if we don’t wake up our conscience, we would really soon cease to be existing at all, if not yet.

I was looking at the picture in a poster which someone literally, and bravely, smuggled it into China for me, I suddenly realised that we owe so much to the inventor of modern toilet, that was where the original negative of this picture was hidden, to avoid being destroyed by the media control. If toilets did not exist, perhaps we would not even have an anonymous hero to look at and admire.

Twenty Springs Later

I cannot possibly let go by of date of today’s under my very nose, without addressing it. I feel obliged by the due melancholy and the burning urge to acknowledge the past. Two decades ago, 26th March, a poet, on the very day of his 25th birthday, surrendered his body between a train and the rails. The suicide manifested such long repressed fury and force of violence that soon was his uncompromising idealism immortalised. Two decades later, on the same date, of the same age, the least I can do is to acknowledge it, not at all for talking about the deceased, but only for showing some humble respect, with the words unsaid.

Instead of his best known poem, which has been prefered for its, in introspect, slightly hesitating touch on opitimism, his last poem is what I’d rather choose.

春天，十个海子
春天, 十个海子全都复活
在光明的景色中
嘲笑这一个野蛮而悲伤的海子
你这么长久地沉睡到底是为了什么?

春天, 十个海子低低地怒吼
围着你和我跳舞、唱歌
扯乱你的黑头发, 骑上你飞奔而去, 尘土飞扬
你被劈开的疼痛在大地弥漫

在春天, 野蛮而北上的海子
就剩这一个, 最后一个
这是一个黑夜的孩子, 沉浸于冬天, 倾心死亡
不能自拔, 热爱寒冷而空虚的乡村

那里的谷物高高堆起, 遮住了窗子
它们一半用于一家六口人的嘴, 吃和胃
一半用于农业, 他们自己的繁殖
大风从东吹到西, 从北刮到南, 不论黑夜和黎明
你所说的曙光究竟是什么意思