On 2020 October 19th night, a close friend of mine, Jah Jah, decided to end her life in her flat in Shanghai. My life has since changed in one night. They way I see the world has become inevitably darker. The second wave trauma is from some “know of” friends’ gossip and rumours. They act as if they care, but merely gossiping about the alleged “truth” behind the seemingly mysteries.
Depression is the enemy in many of our lives, but the world itself presents to us in a twisted and doomed way, and eventually contributes bit by bit to our mental health.
R.I.P Jah Jah. You will live pain free in the other side.
On August 13, ShanghaiPRIDE, the only officially recognised pride organisation in China, has announced that they will cancel all their events in this year (supposed to be in June, but postponed) and will not have any events in the future. In another word, ShanghaiPRIDE will not practically exist, any events relate to the queer community in China, such as colour run, screenings, panel talks, group dating, gay parents help groups, etc. will have to go “underground” in the future.
Also, today, a friend of mine who works in an art gallery told me that their upcoming exhibition is cancelled/censored by the authority, after they reviewed the exhibition plan and checked the background of the artist (being gay). Before she submitted the plan, she was “already being very careful about the censorship almost in an insane level”, yet still, being a gay artist means your exhibition might be cancelled. How far are we from “might be” to “definitely be”?
The queer community in China has already been experiencing restricted conditions. Only until 2001, homosexuality has been officially removed from mental diseases. At that time, the queer community had felt that this day came too late but it came eventually, and were hoping for a more open-minded environment out there to come in the 21st century. But things didn’t unfold as the way as expected, especially since 2010. The recent 10 years are suffocating. We’ve seen the “converting therapy” is still being practised in some places, we’ve seen gay erotic writer being arrested for “creating and distributing porn materials”, we’ve seen gay characters being removed from TV and movies, we’ve seen the Chinese version of “Three billboards" event ended unsettled and to nothing, we’ve seen the last gay pride organisation stop functioning. These incidents didn’t happen in one night, but slowly and slowly it is encroaching on people’s daily life. It is so slow that people can tolerate it little by little. The encroaching process is almost like a dedicated designed programme, as if it has calculated and planned in a perfect schedule.
“The future will be better”.
Maybe it’s the right time to think about new ways of making profit, rather than on material items, since the economy could shrink so radically due to a pandemic. Consumerism-based economy is essentially not healthy. Everyone had purchased so many things that they didn’t even need at all. If capitalism has driven people to work and produce things people don’t really need, but feel the anxiety to purchase, of course the economy shut down will cause unemployment on a huge scale.
The pandemic has proved that people could live a much simpler life. Time to produce and consume more intangible “products”.
About several years go, the whole art world and tech world were steeped into topics of artificial intelligence, big data, anthropocene, post-human, totalitarian surveillance, etc. It has almost convinced us that the technology will rule human in a short moment.
When the plague has already spread around the world in 2020, all the discussed topic and content sounds like a faraway dream and gibberish, a drunk talk, a piece of a broken fantasy book.
Proper Chinese Movement
There needs to be a #SpeakProperChinese movement. Not just an invoke, but a real movement.
Chinese language has been enormously impact by official propaganda and lingo, or as it is commonly being referred as “CCP Chinese”, with strong words and paralelism as its feature. The official way of wording resonates its root since the Yan’an era.
For common people, in order to avoid censorship (dated back to 2008), the online Chinese has developed to another way, with homophonic, metaphor, ancient reference, dismember characters, mixing with other language, rhetoric, innuendo, meme, internet lingo, etc., the current Chinese has come to an embarrased situation where almost all the online content is hard to read, not necessarily uncomprehensible, but with a discounted experience, especially when talking about politics, the tones in the language seems twisted and by no means sounds serious. It is almost impossible to sound serious, if not sounds CCP-ish “official”.
Chines social networks are full of such content after about 10 years of “cultivation”, and the influence is inevitable and long term. It even injects its influence to real life. It takes a long time for me personally to “detoxicate” myself from using such language. It is a slow process but not impossible. I am in no intention to “purify” Chinese or any language, but just consider that it is time for everyone to use proper written Chinese, which means,
use any words you want to use rather than thinking about a metaphor, construct your sentences like you mean it rather than playing a riddle game, stop using popular meme text/word as they will be outdated soon thus hard for people to understand in the future, treat the internet as an archive that everything will be documented permenently rather than treating your text as “temporary and could be removed soon”, find a synonym of a certain word when you realise the text sounds “CCP-ish”, read more content published by Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore or any other Mandarin regions to refresh your reading experience, read more translated text which naturally filtered the language, …
The New Culture Movement had been past about 100 years, and we have seen its influence on modern Chinese in a very positive way.
The buildings are being built, then suspended, leaving empty frames in the unnecessary venues of the cities. They were built to fill the void. Yet they left with more void. No one knows who built them or who suspended them. They were being built in an epic speed as if they are hiding some ugly truth. No ones know when did they come and when or how will they go, like alien spacecrafts lost their way and desperately landed there.
Taking things seriously is struggling against the reality. And struggling is trying to survive.