Chapter 4 my father caliban

One day, because of business, I sat in a cafe with Juan Morillo's daughter and recalled the shadows of my childhood.Morillo is a Peruvian writer and author of "The River Will Carry You Away". His daughter is now working for a European television station in Beijing.She said that when she was a child, she was sent to a school for the rich in Lima, and the children around her were too rich, which made her very stressed.I said, you also have something to be proud of, your father is a famous writer.She sighed and said, the problem is that the father is also afraid of comparison, since Shengyu He Shengliang, there is a boy in the class, and his father is Mario Vargas Llosa.This time, to use a popular silly saying nowadays, "I was struck by lightning"-she really couldn't be proud.Llosa's status in the world of earth literature is roughly equal to that of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the American political arena.Then she asked, what about when you were a child?I am very proud to say that there is a Chinese word called "Shizi", have you heard of it?I am the "children" of our family.My dad graduated from high school and is the most educated person within a radius of ten miles.

It's a pity the girl is still perplexed.As a foreigner, how can we understand the life philosophy of our Northeast people "I am nothing, so I am the best in the world"?Liu Yong's view is: "A gifted scholar and poet is naturally a gentleman in white clothes." We Northeast people think this way: Birds and poets count as a ball? This view of life, of course, verges on that of a rogue, and sometimes leads people to lose their sense of proportion.But it also has a good side, for example, it makes me think that the first criterion for a good world is level relaxation.

Cities all over China have become the same, but there are still a few nice small cities that I have had the opportunity to visit, once in a few quiet neighborhoods.What they have in common is that there are large areas of small houses covered by trees, simple and clean roads, and lazy people.I thought this was a good life, but we ourselves lived in Beijing's high-rise buildings and sun-baked real estate, which is really the worst life.Regarding the current life of Chinese people, scholars have a saying called "excess motivation for success", and I deeply believe it.We are all like passengers on the same train, and the fireman is working hard to fill up coal because we want to drive to the moon.Why do you always think about success?It's as if our intellect isn't strong enough to handle a life that doesn't seek success.

In my opinion, the most painful life in the world is someone marrying a Japanese wife, because in the morning when you go to work, she will bow on the back of your ass: "Li Sang, work hard!" I try not to work hard fuck you?Isn't the fun of life lies in not working hard? The problem is, a lot of the time life forces us to do stupid things.The same is true for children.I have a friend who is an ordinary civil servant and hopes that his son will become a success, so he spent a lot of effort to send his son to a famous kindergarten for the children of high-ranking officials in Beijing.On New Year's Day, the child participated in a theater rehearsal, rolled around on the stage like a ball with other children, and then suddenly stood up like a group of little zombies and recited: "Director Liu, you are our mother! "After the performance, we all praised him for rolling well, but he himself was disappointed because he was not the only princess.But I guess, he won't be able to get rid of the fate of the ball for a while.He won't be able to become a princess next year, and he won't be able to be the year after. When he enters elementary school, he may suddenly realize that even if the princess's father is not the emperor, he must at least be a deputy minister. Bi dad's life.

Here's a real puzzle: Why in a snobby kindergarten do every little boy have to be a princess? I believe that only those who have a sense of vulgarity can decide not to bird anything that is as beautiful as a fairy tale.Once I read a famous book about the past of actors. The author talked about how Shang Xiaoyun performed in the scorching heat without sweating: "Shang Xiaoyun keeps sweat in his body. When he relaxes, he is called It excretes." And I figured: aristocracy is such a nasty thing.Another time I saw Wang Shuo smugly fooling Liang Wendao on TV: "Do you know what we watched when we were young? The general staff made a training map!" I thought, if I had known his future like this, I should have let him go to the United States to go to elementary school , let Major General Matthew Ridgway's son talk to him about the 82nd Airborne Division.

Of course, dads are known to work better than anything when it comes to big things, but that's another issue we need to forget. When I was in high school, I read Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" and remembered a famous monster named "Caliban".I think of it now whenever I see something grand and majestic and stupid and ridiculous.He is ugly and powerful, cruel and cruel like livestock, and in the Western context is considered to "symbolize the cultural origin of the repressed and distorted Eastern world".Regardless of whether this is a Western culture-centric theory, hierarchy, power, desperate climbing, etc., are always the characteristics of our "world", right?So you don't need to compare your fathers at all. Culturally, we have a common father, Caliban.