Diary

This afternoon, the house was very quiet. My wife and child were asleep in the bedroom. The child was born last year and is still very small; when asleep, there is a kind of completely unguarded peace on that little face. My parents are still healthy, too. Three generations of the family can still live together like this, safe and sound. There was nothing dramatic about the day. It was an ordinary weekend, so ordinary that if a certain feeling had not suddenly arrived, I might have forgotten it very soon. ...

About the Move For personal reasons, I deleted my Google account earlier this year. As a result, my old GitHub account could no longer pass 2FA, which meant I could no longer update articles at my old blog address . So I registered a new GitHub account and moved the old posts here. I wonder how many people had bookmarked the old address. From their point of view, I may have simply stopped updating forever. That is one of the biggest drawbacks of publishing personal writing on a low-social static blog: there is no real way to contact readers. I cannot forward this migration notice to any old reader, which is a real pity 😞. ...

For me, 2023 was without doubt a long year. At the end of the year, media outlets and independent creators made their usual year-in-review pieces. Whenever I saw those summaries and happened to read news from early 2023, I was surprised that it had happened in 2023 rather than earlier, in 2022 or 2021. That is unusual for someone about to turn thirty. In my memory, time only felt slow when I was a confused and idle child. ...

In 2022, many things changed in our lives. For example, the sound of firecrackers, absent from cities for years, finally returned. The authorities kept issuing strict bans, but neither people’s long-repressed emotions nor an ancient tradition that has lasted for thousands of years on this land can simply be erased. In 2022, we witnessed a low point of civilization. The great bell was cast aside while the clay pot rang; countless people suffered under the crushing weight of power. Fortunately, thunder still comes from silence, and the curve of civilizational decline still has temporary rebounds. Perhaps no one expected the fire in Urumqi to spread across the whole country. Between people and their long-lost courage, there was only a blank sheet of paper. ...

Perhaps there is no such thing as an unbreakable tradition. Five years ago, Lunar New Year’s Eve in my hometown still passed in the nonstop sound of firecrackers that lasted until dawn. Under the government’s “strong encouragement,” however, this ancient tradition, carried on for more than a thousand years, disappeared in just a few short years. And now, on this silent New Year’s Eve, I sit alone remembering 2021, still holding on to the usual ritual feeling of saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new. ...