Unofficial Blog History S01E01

This is the third time I’ve changed my domain name and blog title. The content hasn’t diminished much, and my writing hasn’t undergone any qualitative leap, so it hardly counts as a rebirth. The previous name, “Kong Shan Xin Yu” (New Words from the Empty Mountain), was probably inspired by the line “After fresh rain in the empty mountains” — I had just returned from Meili Snow Mountain in the autumn of 2012 and was still immersed in the ancient, tranquil atmosphere of that rain-dappled mountain valley. Combined with my desire to write something different and stand out (“biao xin li yi” — striking out on a new path), and perhaps hearing a Sun Yanzi song or remembering the book A New Account of the Tales of the World (Shishuo Xinyu), I came up with that name.

Originally, my blog’s slogan was “Recording life and convincing myself.” Later I found a passage by Wang Xiaobo that expressed it far more profoundly. In the preface to The Silent Majority, he wrote:

"My main occupation is writing fiction, but I also occasionally write essays to express my views on the world. As an ordinary person, my opinions may not be worth others' attention, but they matter a great deal to me. They show that I have my own likes and dislikes, loves and hates, and so on. Without those, there would be no flavor to being human."

I used to be more restless (or perhaps just bored) than I am now, venting everything all at once. Later I realized that was rather pointless — much like a reader who starts out with grand ambitions but, the more they read, the more they feel their own poverty and insignificance, and end up becoming humble. Put another way, many people like me, when first encountering something new, feel their minds are wide open and their ideas abundant, ready to comment on everything they see. But as we experience and learn more, we realize there are plenty of people far more capable than us, and our earlier bravado was nothing but silly self-entertainment. After recognizing this, my productivity has steadily declined — but I’m not worried. If I want to be an interesting person, I can’t keep doing that anymore.

A lack of genuine humility is just another form of grandstanding. You might think the paragraph above isn’t sincere — so let me confess further. I like Wang Xiaobo. I bought six of his books and haven’t finished a single one, though I’ve re-read the famous passages several times. When the moment is right, I always remember a few lines. As for my current state of mind, a quote from The Golden Age fits perfectly:

"That year I was twenty-one, in the golden age of my life. I had so many extravagant hopes. I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, I wanted to turn into a half-lit cloud in the sky in an instant. Only later did I realize that life is a slow process of being hammered — people grow older day by day, and hopes fade away day by day, until in the end you become like a hammered ox. But when I turned twenty-one, I didn't foresee any of this. I thought I would stay fierce forever, and nothing could hammer me down."

I, too, have so many extravagant hopes. Even knowing that life is a process of being hammered, I’ll try to keep a bit of joy along the way.

(Last updated March 20, 2020)