I write less often than I used to. Still, whenever the May Day holiday comes around, it tends to leave me with one or two thoughts that refuse to disappear. When I finally have time, I sit with them, rearrange them into sentences, and send them out into the world. This year, a major event in my life took me to Chongqing during the holiday. Between the rush of work and travel, I happened to notice something that brought back memories from many years ago.
On April 28, my wife and I squeezed in a visit to several of Chongqing’s most famous sights: Jiefangbei, Hongyadong, and Chaotianmen. The crowds were so dense that moving through them was tiring in itself. Eventually, we found a pavilion where we could sit for a while.
A photographer arrived soon afterward and began taking pictures. The scene in front of me triggered a thought, so I took out my phone and captured it as well.
A life covered in layers of disguise: makeup, performance, filters...
A world in its most unfiltered form: fatigue, abandon, lying still...
The contrast was perhaps too sharply drawn, but those words described my state of mind at that particular moment.
This was a pavilion in the middle of a hugely popular tourist attraction. Yet someone who looked rather like a homeless man was stretched out on one of its benches, completely unconcerned about how he appeared to everyone around him. People often say that, once you leave home, you are the one who decides who you are. Perhaps everyone has moments in private when they stop caring about appearances. In public, however, most of us still pay attention to every small detail of our behavior.
When I first entered the pavilion, I was startled. But after walking under the blazing sun, my legs were weak and my body was exhausted. I wanted nothing more than somewhere to sit, so I stopped worrying about appearances and took the bench opposite him. As I sat down, an earlier memory returned. The last time I had felt something similar was in Guiyang, back in 2009.
The people resting at the edges of the city
Guiyang in 2009 was still a small, somewhat run-down provincial capital. Like Chongqing’s bangbang porters, the city had people known as beidou—workers who made a living carrying goods for others in large baskets or packs. When they had no work, they would lean against their baskets or simply sit on the ground wherever they happened to be.
I had only recently left school and entered society. I was confused about the future, so I wandered around the city, watching how other people lived. When I saw groups of these workers tucked away in corners, while passersby treated their presence as perfectly ordinary—and the workers themselves seemed equally accustomed to it—I felt an inexplicable sadness.
At the time, I did not understand that what I was seeing had something to do with differences of class. I only felt that people should not have to live that way. Dying one day is not the frightening part. What seemed frightening was having no idea what one was living for, then mechanically repeating the same existence day after day, like a tool.
I had grown up in the countryside and wanted to escape my parents’ monotonous, physical life of working under the sun and bending over the soil. If moving to the city only meant exchanging one form of mechanical routine for another, then what had been the point of coming?
It took me many years to understand that the value of a life does not depend on whether it is lived in a city or in the countryside. It depends on the choices a person makes. If you are content to drift with the current, with no real idea of what you want and no purpose beyond joining whatever is lively around you, the noise will eventually leave you with nothing but boredom.
In that sense, people who openly desire money can seem more admirable than those who merely follow the crowd. At least they are working toward a goal. We often talk about respecting life and loving life, but rarely do we learn what life actually is, or what it means to live. Those meanings take years to understand.
A quiet sleeper beneath Hongyadong
Once I settled into the pavilion, I mentally stepped away from the rush of the day and began looking for stillness inside the noise.
A large bell stood near one entrance, blocking part of the seating area. On the bench opposite it were footprints left by visitors who had climbed up to take photographs. The sleeping man had occupied the side facing the river, so my wife and I sat across from him.
It was a good position from which to observe him. He was curled up on the bench, with a bottle of mineral water beside his feet and a pair of black leather shoes on his feet. Perhaps he had a job; perhaps he did not. I had no idea why he had come there. The only thing that seemed certain was that he was exhausted. The voices of tourists, the traffic, and the wind did not disturb his sleep.
I have been tired enough to fall asleep in public places too, if buses, high-speed trains, airplanes, and cars count as public spaces. To go further back, there was also the courtyard of my childhood home.
My parents were busy with farm work, and my assigned task was to look after the cattle. I usually returned home before dark. My parents, meanwhile, worked until the stars were out and the fields had become impossible to see clearly. While waiting for them, I would lean against a wall, a haystack, or a tree. Before long, I would fall asleep. When my parents came home, they would wake me.
Once, for reasons I no longer remember, I fell asleep inside a haystack. When my parents returned, they could not find me anywhere. I did not hear them calling. They thought I might have gone to play at a neighbor’s house and spent nearly two hours looking for me.
I felt terribly guilty. If I had not delayed them, they could have finished dinner, washed up, and gone to bed much earlier. Instead, they had wasted all that time searching for me.
At that age, I did not yet understand the love and happiness contained in having someone waiting for you, someone who would make the effort to wake you. I only understood it years later, after working for so long that I once slept for nearly thirty hours. When I woke, my mind was foggy and all four limbs felt weak. That was when I realized how fortunate it is to have someone in your life who is always there to call you back from sleep.
I did not wake the man in the pavilion. I am not a particularly proactive person, nor do I possess an instinctive, heroic desire to help strangers.
For about half an hour after we sat down, no one else entered. Then a photographer arrived with two young women, and the silence was broken. Sweat covered the photographer’s face, but it could not conceal his experience. The moment he stepped into the pavilion, he began directing the women where to stand and how to pose.
Behind them was one of Hongyadong’s most recognizable views. It was an excellent location for photographs. The women had carefully applied makeup, and every pose was deliberate. With a high-resolution camera, a professional photographer, and later some retouching, the result would probably be a series of polished images preserving their trip to Chongqing.
Watching them, I suddenly understood something else about life: perhaps the reason living feels so exhausting is that we keep disguising ourselves.
We are like spiders spinning webs around themselves. We weave a delicate structure, call it our life, and then become trapped inside it. The web restrains us and leaves no room for the dreams that once wanted to carry us somewhere far away.
By comparison, the man across from us seemed almost pure in his indifference to appearances. Even in a famous and crowded tourist district, under the gaze of countless strangers, he slept when he wanted to sleep and lay down when he wanted to lie down. I took out my phone and photographed the scene.
Who would willingly lie in full view of everyone, becoming a background figure in someone else’s bright and carefully arranged life? Perhaps he simply could not endure any longer. Perhaps he was exhausted, crushed by life, and had given up struggling. Or perhaps he had never seriously considered how he wanted to live and had always moved wherever circumstances carried him, without much concern for the consequences.
If you have decided to set out, it may be worth asking yourself first what kind of life you actually want. Only then can you choose a direction. Otherwise, you may be swept along by the crowd without ever knowing where you are going.
Desire, exhaustion, and choosing another road
I have always believed that desire is one of the greatest forces behind the development of human civilization. People sometimes joke that lazy people push the world forward: because we want to avoid effort, we invent tools and machines. More broadly, desire gives human beings something to move toward.
In East Asia’s particularly intense competitive environment, people have both powerful desires and tremendous capacity for action. The result is relentless competition in almost every field. It has brought faster rhythms and heavier pressure, leaving people constantly tired. Some eventually step away from the competition. Others want to stop but are pushed onward by family and friends. When they can no longer keep walking, some people make an irreversible choice.
I consider myself a person with relatively few desires. I am not very competitive, and I rarely compare myself with others. I prefer doing things I genuinely like, but even then, I do not measure my progress against anyone else’s.
When I was in the eighth grade, a teacher recommended me for a school writing competition. I won second prize. I did not show much excitement or disappointment, and the teacher said I had the temperament of someone who was neither elated by gain nor saddened by loss. In truth, I was happy. Winning was, after all, a pleasant thing. But one prize could not prove very much, so why should I be excessively proud of it?
That is still more or less how I live. Whether at work or in my personal life, I prefer to move forward steadily: set a small goal, then make a serious effort to reach it.
My effort does, however, need to have some value. I do not want to spend myself on things that have no meaning. Even when I am willing to try and fail, there is a limit. If I know in advance that something cannot be completed, I do not insist forever.
The world is large. There are countless things to do and countless people to meet. If one road does not work, we can choose another and keep moving. Life is ours to live, not a performance staged for other people.
That is also why I cannot help mentioning the much-discussed “Fat Cat” incident. A young man in the prime of his life ended it by jumping into the river over a woman. It was not worth it.
Boats continued to pass along the Jialing River, and the crowds continued to make their noise. A person’s death may provoke an outcry for a moment, but the sound is eventually washed away by the current. We do not come into this world to live for one single person or one single goal. We are allowed to try different goals and different ways of living.
If a job is unbearable, we can look for another. If a relationship no longer suits us, we can leave it and meet someone else. If a place makes us unhappy, we can move somewhere new. None of these choices is guaranteed to solve everything, but remaining trapped is not the only possible response.
We used to say that each of us is the protagonist of our own life. Perhaps it is time to look at things from another angle.
We are all background figures in one another’s lives.
My existence may simply be there to set off someone else’s beauty or greatness. Seen that way, perhaps the pressure becomes a little lighter.
Still tired? Then sit down for a while. Rest, regain your strength, and continue when you are ready.