The 1998 World Cup meant climbing over a wall to squeeze into a video room in town. Euro 2000 meant scaling up to a third-floor classroom at school with our bare hands just to catch the match. By then the weather was already turning hot, and a bunch of us wrapped the TV tightly in curtains so no one would notice the light, then sat there sweating inside that little cocoon, completely fired up.
Sixteen years later, a few of us high school classmates met again in Wuxi, just a small reunion, nothing grand. And we realized something almost immediately: the most irresistible topic at a gathering like that is the "wrong" things you did back then. If you think about it that way, maybe parents shouldn’t try so hard to raise children who are too obedient. Otherwise what will they have to brag about at reunions decades later?
Back then, before anyone called young men "fresh meat," we were all exactly that. Sixteen years passed, the baijiu gave way to beer, shirts got lifted, and what appeared was not youthful flesh but its grandfather: middle-aged weight gain.
In a small town in northern Jiangsu at that time, there was still a gap between rich and poor, but even the rich weren’t rich enough to make much of a legend out of it. A group of kids ended up in Puxi Middle School for all kinds of ordinary reasons: some had been clever in junior high but didn’t work hard, others worked hard but were never especially clever. Somehow fate pushed us into the same place, and we became high school classmates.
It was like everyone walking down the same road, staying together at one stop for three years, and then setting off again. Only after that second departure, no one was really on the same road anymore. The seven people at that table had each gone into a different industry. The good thing was that everyone seemed to be doing well. There was none of that scene where, after a few rounds of drinks, people start sighing about how hard life is. No awkward "accidental" probing about salary either.
Han Han once said something along these lines: someone told him that in college he had been a literary youth, dreaming of becoming a writer or a journalist, and in those days that kind of person was considered attractive. If you could also write a little poetry, play a little guitar, pick a few flowers, girls would be charmed. But now, he said, girls no longer like that type. Han Han asked, well, do you still write little poems, play little guitar, and pick little flowers? The answer, of course, stalled there. And that was the point: the world works like this. Men change the world; women change men’s view of the world. But some worldviews stay standing there stubbornly, foolishly even, untouched by reality, setbacks, mockery, or disappointment. In the end, people still need to hold on to some ideals.
In the middle of a fast-moving, practical world, the way we were that night hadn’t picked up much dust. Maybe "ideals" is too grand a word for it, but without trying to force anything, our conversation kept circling back to things like poems and guitars.
Someone once said that study and socializing are the two great tools of success. There is something a little too calculating in that sentence, which is probably why people now talk so much about "cutting down on ineffective socializing." I’m broadly in favor of that idea. But talking nonsense with the brother who once slept in the bunk above you should never be included in that category. That ease, that freedom, that ability to curse and laugh without restraint—that is what real feeling looks like when it comes out naturally.
And the thought that kept surfacing was simple enough: if we didn’t study properly when we were supposed to, then when life finally gives us a rare chance to let loose, we ought to do that properly too.
If that kind of freedom can be compared to looking at the sea, then the question is this:
How long has it been since you last saw that sea?