On Faye Wong

While driving Xiao Yuan and Xiao Yu on a lap around the city, I played Faye Wong's "Red Bean." To this day, Faye Wong and this city give me the same feeling: that sharp, youthful pain—so distant and ethereal it seemed never to belong to us, yet so infinitely real that it once ruled over us, and will continue to rule over us still, carrying us into a world that doesn't quite seem to be ours, a world of which we have no bodily memory.

By "us," I mean the post-80s generation—migrants who came from the countryside to the city. When I took Xiao Yuan and Xiao Yu to Guangren Temple and to see the city walls, I thought: the children must feel the city very differently from us. For us, the city was first and foremost a concept—a set of social functions and historical achievements presented in textbooks. By the time we entered the city, our bodily memories had already been set; the city unfolded into our lives as an idea, not as lived experience. For them, however, the city simply is the world they inhabited before they ever separated from the world. Even when they finally grow up, it will still be their familiar, tender mother-body.

Xiao Yuan loves pulling radishes. We've visited many plots of land, quite a few simulated countryside spots, and some genuinely rural places. Wherever we go, Xiao Yuan starts pulling radishes. Land, vegetable gardens, and pulling radishes—for her, these are things full of novelty, phenomena she chatters about endlessly on the way home and long after. She loves pulling radishes because it is a "performance" of a nursery rhyme. The seemingly exaggerated scenes from the song are reenacted in reality; the nursery rhyme is the framework through which she observes the countryside, and the countryside is the "object" within that nursery-rhyme perspective. For us, during those long years, the countryside simply was life. Pulling radishes held no charm or novelty—it was a daily act of competing for survival alongside the animals and plants of rural life. It was only many years later, through the Beilehe nursery rhyme videos, that I discovered our lives, too, could be "objectified"—and once objectified, they could become wondrous.

This sense of wonder is exactly how city life revealed itself to us. As a child, I spent ages learning "Red light stop, green light go, yellow light means please wait a moment," yet I had never seen any traffic light at all (and could never understand why the yellow light existed). So even after living in Xi'an for many years, I was never one hundred percent certain: is this a childish dogma, or a social rule one should generally obey? Because we all know there is a distance between "you shouldn't do it" and "you really shouldn't do it." For instance, the rule against stealing someone else's peas—that rule was practically stated to be broken, just as Lu Xun wrote: "Why not steal from my family instead." Traffic lights, though, I was never quite sure about—I didn't know if they could even be written into an essay, because I also saw people who didn't obey them.

This is what they call culture shock. But it's really nothing special—who doesn't experience a bit of shock? Which generation hasn't? Earlier generations of Chinese people also experienced the shock of entering the city. But I think for the post-80s generation, this shock runs deeper than it did for previous generations, because in the fullest sense of life, we have left the countryside forever. We are not like those who came before. Previous generations certainly had people who moved from countryside to city, but society back then was still essentially a dual structure: the city was the administrative outpost governing the countryside, and the countryside was the city's vast hinterland. The more something was of the city, the more it was also of the countryside, and vice versa. Culturally and ideologically, the city's production of culture and ideas essentially drew on rural experience as raw material, industrialized it, and then dumped it back onto the countryside. For our post-80s generation, the city is no longer one pole of a binary structure—it has become virtually the entirety of our lives. In all our imaginations of life, the present and future belong to the city; only childhood and the other shore belong to the countryside. When we sing "That night I was drunk, holding your hand," what floats into our minds is the noisy roadside barbecue on a winter street, not the wine pot warming by a clay stove inside a snow-covered tile-roofed house. For earlier generations, when they heard "A great river, its waves so wide," the image was of rice paddies along the bank, the sweat of planting seedlings—these things were either their lives or the lives they fled in order to write about. We are very different.

For us, in the time of youth—starting around seventeen or eighteen—we already vaguely knew we would need to assimilate into a world of which we had no bodily memory, and that this world would become the vessel of our future lives. We were destined to live in a world at once alienating and full of wonder, tinged with a touch of dread. Faye Wong is the "bodhisattva" of this world; this world is her dharma hall.

Even now, when I listen to "Red Bean," "Book of Laughter and Forgetting," or "Sky," what floats into my mind is that distant seaside city—first, the azure ocean, of course seen from a city on the shore, that azure sea that peers of our generation so often used as their Baidu Space background, that surreal city space overlooking the sea. I have visited many coastal cities and have never actually seen such a place. They are so surreal, yet so real in my life. In our lives, it was precisely through these songs, through that city-space gazing upon an azure sea, that we loved, perceived, and came to know the world.

Driving toward Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, I imagined reaching the foot of the mountain and suddenly seeing that enormous snow peak rising like an ice cream cone, while listening to "A Date in '98." I said to Xiao Yuan's mother: this song is so full of a sense of the future—even now, it still is. Looking back, it was probably the first Faye Wong song I ever heard.

I don't know how the children will feel. Perhaps for them, these gorgeous melodies are simply a natural part of the familiar mother-body they were born into, a part of the culture that gave birth to them—I imagine so. But for us, in the distant past, in that distant village, what Faye Wong's voice carried to us was the imagined breath of the city. The reason it gave us that sense of the future is that we already vaguely knew: it represented the future we would leave ourselves behind to pursue. And because it was the future we would leave ourselves behind to pursue, it was destined to remain forever the future.