Shock. I remember when the pandemic first started in China, everyone was wary of people from Hubei and Wuhan. A truck driver from Hubei drifted on the highway for several days before our kind-hearted people in southern Shaanxi took him in, providing food, hot water, and a stable place to sleep at a service area. There must have been many such drivers from Hubei. Many also fled by car when the lockdown came. They all eventually settled down somewhere in this country.
That was our country, our people, recovering from shock. I felt it took about a week before we came back to our senses—before we realized we hadn't treated our Hubei brothers and sisters well enough, before we understood that in the face of the virus we are one body, like it or not. We had to unite, to be kind, to be decent, to cheerfully persevere through all the hardships of life.
Today, when we reflect, I think many of us would think: eating wild animals, traveling to other regions without protection—it wasn't great, but it's understandable. We're all ordinary people, with human strengths and weaknesses. Craving delicacies, fearing loneliness and death—these are things people can hardly avoid. As long as humans live together as a whole, something like a pandemic can never be entirely prevented. When you look closely, it's hard to say who exactly is to blame. What matters is that when problems arise, we help each other, stay united, and keep fighting.
Another thing I've been thinking: we Chinese generally live in this anxiety of having to be something. In internet speak, it's "involution"—everyone abandoning everything to throw themselves into a single track called Success. This is terrifying. I see residents of Beijing talking about their children, using terms like "elite kids." Is that really necessary? Brilliant children do exist—take Terence Tao as a child, for example—but do most children need to be evaluated this way while they're still kids? Isn't this a form of humiliation? I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be judged this way as a child, and I would never judge my own child like this. Every child has their own gifts, and at the end of the day, they are each unique in the world—it has nothing to do with being "elite" or not. I've even heard that kindergarteners compare their parents' corporate ranks—something like Alibaba's P-this or P-that. What a magnificent inheritance of corporate culture.
I think this pandemic might remind us a little: we programmers, we internet industry workers, are fundamentally unimportant. Or maybe some individuals are important, but as a whole, the best thing we can do is stay home obediently. There's nothing wrong with staying home. People in the workplace rack their brains to manipulate users, competing frantically—what's it all really worth?
I heard Wang Lu write that when doing things for your own benefit, going to six out of ten is enough. That's exactly the point. During the pandemic, didn't we notice while staying home that the world was basically fine? The earth kept spinning? A little less cutthroat competition, and the world doesn't fall apart. Crops keep growing in the fields, machines keep running in the factories, and JD.com still dares to deliver to your door.
So this is a good opportunity for Chinese society to reflect on its values and way of life. When values are too singular and utilitarian, it's very hard to be happy, and very easy to waste one's life.
This too is a kind of shock, I suppose. I believe our country will recover from this shock of the success-obsessed value system.
The last thing I want to address is the shock on Twitter and other platforms. I see many Chinese-language comments under Trump's tweets, expressing their endorsement of Trump's phrase "Chinese Virus." Not "Wuhan virus," not "China virus," but "Chinese virus"—the phrasing is about nationality and race. This is very undignified.
Of course, people are bound to experience shock, and during shock they forget kindness and dignity. That's perfectly normal. So I also understand why some people link the virus to China—we started out doing the same thing with Wuhan and Hubei. Shocking? Understandable. But I get the feeling that many Chinese speakers on Twitter seem to live in a state of permanent shock. And they broadcast that shock to the entire world. And I can't even block Chinese content on Twitter.
Of course, none of this really matters. I'm shocked by their shock—I suppose you'd call that karmic entanglement.