On the road I saw several enormous cranes, cordoned off with red traffic cones, hanging lanterns on trees. The area enclosed by the cones seemed to exist outside this world, oblivious to the tides of traffic ebbing and flowing, earnestly and solemnly hanging lanterns.
This once again made me feel the fundamental childishness embedded in every enterprise of our world, no matter how adult, how grand. At night the city wall lights up. Somewhere in this city there is an institution, and within that institution sits a group of deadpan adults who walk the streets with faces as grave as heads of state, worrying more or less about making a living every day, meticulously designing the contours, brightness, and colors of the lights arranged on the city wall—and all of it simply to make things look pretty. It's like a child—an entity that persists in the adult world as a kind of idea, a will threaded through the system, whose kernel is human childishness.
Like a crane hanging a lantern on a tree—crane, lantern, tree: among these three words lies a deep, anthropomorphic comedy. The funniest moment is when the crane finishes hanging the lantern and drives away, and the lantern is lit by someone hidden in some unknown corner, pressing a switch. Driving past, I can't help but marvel—in fact, anyone passing by can't help but marvel: how did it just light up? How strange. This is something beyond nature, different from the sun and the moon and the stars. It is something controlled by a person, and by human childishness. I can't help but imagine a burst of laughter from some hidden corner.
And then there are the crane operators themselves, cigarettes dangling crookedly from their lips, fine-tuning the angle and distance of their smoke rings to keep the smoke out of their eyes. Their physiques and the clumsiness of the machinery complement each other perfectly, embodying a single phrase: treating the light as heavy—like a child cradling a treasure, a small, shabby treasure, in their arms.
Seen from above, at night I traced a lopsided circle, with a tail stretching all the way home. When I lay down, I held this crude balloon by its string, and inside it was Xi'an's millennia of brilliance, the joys and sorrows of countless souls.