Where the Blog Began: Chasing a Dream, Only to See It Shattered

This is a journal entry I’ll never finish, never ever finish, because human desire is endless. I think it can stand for what I think. I’m made up inside it, but in reality I exist. I’m writing this to myself: I won’t cry anymore. I’ll face everything with strength, give up on nothing, shed no more tears, and look at myself with a smile… The dream within a dream is the most real, because nobody bothers me there. While I’m awake, the me in the dream is still dreaming that dream. On street after street, people brush past me. After the rain, filthy muddy water splashes everywhere. I know there’s nothing I can do about it, so all I can do is dodge it and face the street, a thing that has nothing to do with me. Taxis park wherever they like. As long as you have connections, ha, everything is easy. That’s society. It’s heartless, and yet it has its own goddamn kind of heart. Chinese people, people, are all like this. I walk on. Why should I try to understand people who have nothing to do with me? People should live a life that’s worth something. I think I’d make a pretty good public speaker. Being a legal pyramid-scheme salesman is what I consider the ideal job. Or maybe I’ll be a software salesman, or a happy programmer. I wish I could be a politician, a successful politician. In this society, in modern China, it seems that in this city called Huainan I’m living in America of the eighties and nineties. It seems I’m living twenty years behind the times other people live in. Some people still live at ease. Let me ask you: are you miserable living through all the backstabbing and scheming at your company? I think you’re torturing yourself by living like that, unwilling to change. Yes, you’re living, and what the hell does that have to do with me? You live at ease, and it makes me uneasy to watch. Fuck the gaokao. I think the whole thing is a joke. Screw the gaokao, goddamn it, and those teachers. Living in this school is torture. I know, not change, it can’t be changed. I know my online friends say this fits our national conditions. I know that’s right. Hundreds of millions of young Chinese are striving for China, and some of them have to be weeded out. I wrote about Chinese politics in one of my journal entries. I don’t want to talk about it, and there’s no need. Peace and unification are what development needs, and what the people hope for. I hate the gaokao, a pointless exam. Chinese people, so many have bet their lives on it. Yes, some have. But afterwards, don’t they go on living just fine? China’s gaokao is the imperial examination of the Sui and Tang dynasties: it pulls in huge numbers of intellectuals, and then… I won’t say… I’ll walk my own road and do my own thing. Why bother with so-called other people’s business?