A familiar tragedy. But, why does it happen again and again?
This article was first published "Cicero by the Sea", and the author authorized the push
Hello everyone, at the request of some readers, today I will talk about Liu Xuezhou's suicide.
1
On January 24, Liu Xuezhou, a boy looking for relatives, posted a long article on Weibo, and later committed suicide and died after rescue was ineffective. In the suicide note, which is more than 10,000 words long, he complained about his tragic experience, saying that he was sold by his parents as a bride price when he was born, that his adoptive parents died at the age of four, that he was a victim of bullying in school, that male teachers were molested, and that he was "violently attacked by the Internet."
After the incident, I saw that many netizens expressed sympathy for Liu's tragic experience, and when I read his suicide note, I had a very strong, multi-layered sense of déjà vu.
First of all, I think that leaving aside the different life experiences of two people, Liu Xuezhou's death and Lu Dawson, who also chose to commit suicide a few months ago, have too many similarities:
Both of them chose to bid farewell to the world in the form of a long suicide note, and the narrative style and emotions of the suicide note are very similar, and the overall structure of the writing is exactly the same.
Even Liu Xuezhou used a "labeling" opening that was almost the same as Lu Dawson's:
Liu Xuezhou wrote: "To describe myself: a strong boy, born to be sold by his parents as a bride price, four-year-old adoptive parents died, a victim of bullying in school, abandoned by his biological parents for the second time, added oil and vinegar to black and white, internet violence, fake laughing boy." ”
A few months ago, Lu Dawson wrote: "How do I introduce myself to you: rural, left-behind children, mountain children, school bullying experiencers, photographers, young people living alone, dreamers." ”
And they also have a lot of similarities in the arrangement of the property behind them, the place of death they choose, the way they die, and so on.
These alone, we can almost conclude that the latter is almost a "mimic suicide" that is deeply influenced by the former.
Looking at Liu Xuezhou's Weibo, you will find that the only thing he pays attention to is "Lu Dawson", and he has also liked the suicide note of "Lu Dawson".
These things make me feel very sad.
As early as when the Lu Dawson suicide case detonated public opinion, many public accounts on the Internet were sympathetic and even "praised" to Lu Dawson (I had to use this word that seems very awkward here), I took the risk of writing two articles:
Deer Dawson's kind of suicide note, I have also written, but I still have to say...
Please don't "understand" the suicidal Deer Dawson too much, this will only hurt more people
In these articles, I have said that I am not sympathetic to Dawson's suffering, and even when I was a young man, I had very similar ideas to him, but I do not approve of his use of his own death as a way to solve the problem in general, and I am more opposed to some people arrogantly portraying his death as too great in some emotions on the Internet. Because I was afraid that such behavior might lead to the imitation of "The Troubles of Young Werther".
I said that at the time, based on the judgment that Lu Dawson's suffering is very worthy of sympathy, but judging from the experience described in his Weibo suicide note, is there a teenager in China today who has a more difficult life and suffered more unfair treatment than he did? Definitely there is. If Lu Dawson had exchanged his death for so much attention, so much sympathy, so much positive evaluation of him and the anger of the people who forced him to die. Will there be teenagers who feel more unfair treatment than he did choose to go the same way?
Unfortunately, these questions were not answered at the time, but now they are.
Liu Xuezhou is a teenager who is younger than Lu Dawson and suffers more misfortune. In his suicide note, Lu Dawson expressed his dissatisfaction with his parents for not fulfilling some of his wishes and scolding himself as a child. However, these encounters are compared with Liu Xuezhou, who sold the infant Liu Xuezhou for a bride price, and then abandoned him again after his son came to find relatives, and his parents seemed to be good parents who could be called "moving China" - at least Lu Dawson's parents had worked hard to raise their sons and borrowed money for their children to go to college.
So I would like to ask, at this moment in China, on the other side of the Internet, are there any teenagers who have encountered or feel that their encounters are more tragic than Lu Dawson and Liu Xuezhou? What are they thinking at this moment? After the tragedy occurs again, what kind of way should our public opinion prevent the recurrence of the next "imitation suicide"? Is it still based on sympathy or even "praise" that is highly similar to that after the Deer Dawson case?
I leave this question to all readers and self-media peers who pay attention to and speak out on this matter.
I just want to say to teenagers who have similar ideas to Lu Dawson and Liu Xuezhou: Please stand up straight, don't lie down. No matter how unfair you think the human heart is, or if it really is so unfair, it is not worth dying! If you think of yourself as a good person, a righteous person, then your responsibility is to live and fight against these injustices. And use your strength to encourage and help more good people to live bravely.
This is our responsibility to the world, and it is very hard to carry this responsibility, but this is how people live.
I write these words at the top of this article, and I hope that the most people can read them: save children, do not instill in them a false sense of suicide "tragedy", do not let the suicide of teenagers become a trend. Otherwise we will be responsible for the deaths of more Lu Dawson and Liu Xuezhou.
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If the biggest difference between Liu Xuezhou and Lu Dawson's suicide is that his life is more pitiful, that is, his death actually has a stronger purpose.
Unlike Lu Dawson, who said he didn't want to blame anyone, Liu Xuezhou made a direct request at the end of his suicide note: "I hope that the traffickers and my so-called 'parents', as well as those who have lost their conscience on the Internet, will get the punishment they deserve." "Hopefully, Uncle Policeman can also draw a perfect end to my life in the end."
From these words, it can be seen that there is an estimate of what kind of public opinion storm Liu Xuezhou will cause about his death.
Speaking of suicide, Durkheim once divided suicide into egoistic, altruistic, out-of-paradigm and fatalistic in "Suicide", and pointed out that in different cultures, people try to achieve different goals through suicide:
The ancient Greeks and Romans saw suicide more as the end of their own fate, the medieval Christian church regarded suicide as a sin against God, and the Japanese culture after modern times regarded suicide as the highest way of atonement for its own actions and mistakes...
But I think that suicide in Chinese culture is not the same as the above, the American anthropologist Lu Huixin (Margery Wolf) once did a study on the common suicide phenomenon of rural women in China, and then she pointed out to the point: typical Chinese suicide, in fact, with moral condemnation, because "Westerners usually ask about suicide "why did he die"? And Chinese may be more concerned about "Who forced her to die?" (Women and Families in Rural Taiwan)
In other words, in Chinese culture, a person can gain social sympathy for his own death, and temporarily be in a moral high position, turning the spearhead of public opinion anger to the person who forced him to die. Suicide became the last weapon of mass destruction a person could possess. And this tradition may have begun in ancient China, when it was recommended that "Wen Death Advice" and "Widow Death Festival" began.
Based on this understanding, we can understand why suicide was once such a common phenomenon in rural society on the mainland, especially among rural women. Even paraquat, the "king of pesticides", was drunk until it was banned. Li Dejun, the "father of paraquat", once said: He really can't understand why so many people in China drink pesticides that are clearly labeled as highly toxic and have been deliberately added with warning dyes and odorants.
But in fact, the answer is very simple, imagine what can a woman living in a traditional Chinese village do when she encounters husband and wife quarrels, concubines, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflicts, and even chews the root of the tongue from the whole village for something?
Theoretically, there may be a way to solve it, such as litigation against infringement, claims, or simply relying on the most primitive brute force and violence to win. But for the vulnerable groups in these villages, these ways are too far away, too powerless to achieve, the most popular solution, is still to buy a bottle of pesticides and drink "death to show you". Suicide, or even just a gesture of suicide, will prompt a swift turn in the spearhead of public opinion to punish her opponents.
Therefore, the phenomenon of suicide in rural China when encountering unfair or simple disputes has always been abnormally high. And the more vulnerable groups (women, children, and the elderly) lack other means of relief, the easier it is to choose this way to complete the final "self-help relief" - the four words "die to show you", which really summarizes this logic most vividly.
And if we refer to the Summary of the Lu Dawson case and the Liu Xuezhou case, we will find that they and the audience are still using similar suicide logic, but the platform has changed from the past countryside to the Internet, and the audience is more (both of them are considered "Internet celebrities" before committing suicide, and there is a certain amount of attention), which means that suicide can cause greater public opinion effect.
At the end of Liu Xuezhou's life, he must have made such a trade-off: after encountering the abandonment of his biological parents and the Internet violence of some people, he felt that he was already in a desperate situation of public opinion, and this desperate situation was in stark contrast to the reversal of public opinion that he could detonate with one death - the cultural experience and Lu Dawson's previous events also made him feel that he could complete a "Jedi counterattack" with one death, and complete revenge on those who had hurt him. For a teenager whose mind is not yet fully mature, this temptation is difficult to resist.
From this point of view, Liu Xuezhou is indeed very sympathetic. Because he is caught in a trap created by our ready-to-have culture and the Internet age.
And this trap is insoluble for a child whose mind is not yet mature.
If we want to save Liu Xuezhou, what we need to change is that this vulnerable group has no way to ask for help, and must exchange their deaths for the "reversal of public opinion".
3
Finally, let's talk about Liu Xuezhou's parents, and their attitude towards their biological son Liu Xuezhou reminds me of Seiichi Morimura's famous novel "The Proof of Human Nature".
The novel, which became a household name in China because it was remade into the movie "Human Witness", tells the story of kyoko Yasugi, an accomplished fashion designer and critic of family problems, who did not hesitate to kill her black mixed-race son, Jonny, who had traveled thousands of miles from the United States to seek maternal love, in order to preserve her reputation and status.
Also for their own life, regarding their own son as a burden, the mother in the novel stabbed into her son's chest with a realistic sharp knife, and the real parents hurt their son's heart with the sharp blade of language. As a social mystery novel, the biggest bizarre thing that Morimura Seiichi designed for readers is that no one could imagine that a mother would actually kill her own flesh and blood in order to "not be disturbed" in her current life.
However, the incident of Liu Xuezhou makes us see that the most bizarre idea in this novel is the most real - there are really parents who will do this, actually!
I have to think of the words of another Japanese mystery writer, Kotaro Isaka: The thought of parents who did not have to pass the exam made my spine chill.
In the original work of "Proof of Human Nature", Morimura Seiichi had a concept that impressed me deeply, that is, the Dongju criminal police investigated to the end, in fact, there was no direct evidence of Kyoko Yasugi's murder of her son, and the Dongju criminal police finally used the method of indoctrination to restore Kyoko Yasugi's humanity, remembering that she was Jonny's mother and actively confessing her crime. Thus completes the "proof of human nature".
So at the end of the novel, the author writes:
In the end, she lost everything, but after losing everything, she still retained one of the most precious things, and only one police officer understood that it was human nature. ...... Dongju's practice shows that he is still willing to believe in human nature in his heart.
I think it is time to send this passage to Liu Xuezhou's parents - after the death of their own son, in the face of a hot discussion on the Internet, the parents seem to be silent so far. I hope they can stand up and say two words. Did Liu Xuezhou "want a house" with them, and who was at fault for their face-turning with their own son? Is it because their son, who was previously accused of wanting to hype and appeal too much? Or did they treat this sold son as a liability?
Now that my son is dead, I hope they can ask themselves, clarify, argue, or repent, as Kyoko Yasugi did after she restored her humanity, and make clarifications, arguments, or repentance in the hearts of her parents—because we are willing to believe in human nature.
Parents, all adults, please let us complete this proof of humanity. And don't let the children finish it again, because their proof may pay for their lives.
End of full text
There were still some words about this matter, but today there is not enough time, and it is too painful to write. I'll have a chance to say it again.
But I hope that such "opportunities" will never be repeated, and that such déjà vu tragedies will never happen again.