In the Chronicle of The Sandwich Ditch, the author recounts such an escape:
At the time of the anti-Rightist movement in the 1960s, many intellectuals were exiled to the desolate Jiabiangou for labor reform because of the anti-Rightist movement.
In time for the great famine in the country, the rightists naturally received less food as prisoners of labor, and with the daily overload of manual labor, many people starved to death in that remote place.
After death, they are buried haphazardly, and after a few days of burial, it is impossible to find the grave, because there is no tombstone, and no one has the strength to dig the grave, but just sprinkle some sand on the corpse, there are many wolves in the field, and as soon as the mourner leaves, the body will soon be eaten by the wolf.
Therefore, some people are desperate and think of fleeing.
But most of them failed, because the guards were tight and there was nothing to go around, and if he escaped to the train station, someone would catch him there.
One of them, after careful calculations, calculated the time when the train started, fled at dusk, and fled to the train station without rushing to get on the train, because he knew that the railway station was ambushed by the guards who caught the fugitives.
He hid in the shadows and waited until the train started slowly, then immediately ran out, picked it up, and finally managed to get into the carriage.
After entering the carriage, he found a vacant seat to sit down, and when the conductor came to check the ticket, he pretended to be a non-local leader who had come to inspect, and passed the customs in a confused manner.
After a few trips, he returned home to be reunited with his mother and sister.
But because of his sensitive identity, he had to leave quickly. His sister used a few packs of cigarettes to help him get a ticket back to his hometown in the countryside, and in those days, he didn't need an ID card to take the train, as long as he had a ticket.
In this way, after all kinds of hardships and thrills, he returned to his rural hometown, where he was sparsely populated and he could hide his name. Coupled with the fact that the police on the other side of the ditch mistakenly thought that he had been eaten by wolves, so they did not go after him, and he was able to live safely and secluded until the day of rehabilitation. During this period, his rural hometown made his escape from the city.
In the Bible, the fleeing city was established by God's instructions to israel to protect those who have broken the laws of the world but are actually innocent.
"The LORD told Moses, 'Thou shalt command the Israelites, saying, 'When you cross the jordan river and enter the land of Canaan, you will divide up several cities for you, and make a fleeing city for you, where those who have killed by mistake may flee. These cities can be used as cities to escape the avengers, so that the manslaughter will not die, and he will stand before the congregation and listen to the judgment. (The Book of Numbers)
In addition to the geographically spatial escapes, God also instructed every seven seven forty-nine years later, the fiftieth year as the jubilee year, to release prisoners: "The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is in me. For the Lord anointed me, that I might preach a good message to the humble, [or to preach the gospel to the poor], to send me to heal the broken, to report the release of the captive, the release of the prisoner. Report on the year of grace of jehovah, and the day of our God's vengeance, and comfort all those who are grieving. ”
In modern society, the spatial escape city is no longer found, and people sometimes design the system to minimize the occurrence of grievances, but such design is often only reflected in the search for justice, rather than in line with the deeper original intention of the escape city and the Jubilee - to show God's grace.
Therefore, sometimes, the formation of a virtual escape city in today's society often comes from those things that are outside the social order, or the flaws in technology and system.
In "Paddington Bear 2", Paddington Bear saw the righteous and brave but was mistaken for a thief, and all kinds of evidence in court were against him, and eventually he had to go to jail.
After losing hope for his family, in order to restore his innocence, he chose to escape from prison with several fellow inmates.
After escaping from prison, in the face of the danger of being hunted, he ran to a remote corner, hid in a dilapidated telephone booth, pulled out a coin in his ear, threw it into the telephone set, and called his home.
The call allowed him to regain contact with his family, which gave him a chance to be exonerated, end his prison days, and return to normal life.
The director of this London city propaganda film may not have imagined why I, who is thousands of miles away in Shanghai, would associate it with "escape" when I saw the scene of the telephone booth.
Because in my eyes, a nostalgic London and a forward Shanghai form an interesting set of contrasts.
It's not that London doesn't move forward, but the British love tradition more than we do.
In Paddington Bear 2, the telephone booth, a major symbol of London, is in tatters in a dark alley, while the steam train at Paddington Station (symbolizing Britain's glorious Industrial Revolution) is abandoned in the opening part, and it is these two "scrap" things that play a key role in winning the protagonist's innocence.
Just imagine, if unfortunately, the protagonist encounters a high-speed train with a round appearance and amazing speed, then is it possible for them to successfully intercept the villain and win the final victory by picking up the train;
If the intellectual in Jiabiangou had encountered a high-speed railway with a round appearance and amazing speed, I am afraid that he would not even know how to start, let alone smoothly pick it up when the train started, and it was very likely that he would not even be able to enter the railway station.
Even if he successfully returns to his sister's house, because he needs an ID card to buy a ticket and take a car, he will have no difficulty as a fugitive, and finally he can only obediently wait for the police to arrest him.
There are also telephone booths in Shanghai, but I have never seen anyone use them in so many years. As mobile phones become more popular, phone booths will eventually become a thing of the past.
Interestingly, in Paddington Bear 2, the phone booth is associated with a coin as the protagonist's unexpected help in times of crisis;
In today's daily life, mobile phones and Alipay are bound together, jointly dominating and monitoring our every move.
There are often young people who lament that China's progress today cannot be compared with those so-called developed countries. Many people in the so-called first-class cities in developed countries are still using traditional cash, and in shanghai, you can see that in just two or three years, mobile payment has spread throughout all areas of daily consumption, from various stores to street vendors. Unless you want to give alms to a beggar, you don't need to bring any change with you when you go out.
Now, even the subway can directly scan the code into the station.
When Alipay pulls out a statistical analysis of my annual consumption at the end of each year, a wave of nausea comes to my mind - when I am analyzed by big data, I myself am slowly degenerating into a set of data, I am no longer a person, but a dietary preference, an icon that moves in different places, an integral part of a certain level of consumption level, and finally, I am a behavioral law.
Not only that, but even if I say that I, as a human being, have places that they cannot calculate, personalities that they cannot analyze, and have accidental actions that they cannot predict, but when one day all my actions depend on a mobile phone, and all the functions in the mobile phone rely on one company after another, and those companies are controlled by some power, then where do I go to spend my dollar and coins, and where do I go to find my phone booth?
So I imagined "London" and "Shanghai" outside of reality.
In this "London", the city is not so "perfect", there are many things left over from tradition, there are good and bad technologies, there are Paddington bears living here, he can find a telephone booth, he can hide coins, and when he is wronged by a certain part of the city - the law - the other part of the city - tradition, dilapidation and technological loopholes - will provide him with shelter and help;
And in this "Shanghai", the urban development is perfect, technological progress is impeccable, all backward things have been swept away, people's lives are unprecedentedly convenient, all my life-related affairs are covered by my mobile phone butler, no need for me to worry, and my mobile phone housekeeper belongs to a huge network system, the existence of this system allows the entire city to operate efficiently, so as to achieve the convenience of my life.
Even though I am already an independent adult, I am cared for like a baby. And when I am wronged by the laws of this city, I will find myself so lonely, because I can't find anything else outside of this system that convicts me.
A technologically mature and even perfect society is only beautiful, and we fantasize that we are leading to heaven in the progress of technology, but inadvertently go to the hell of totalitarianism.
In a society where technology is imperfect and public affairs are retarded, these "imperfections" serve as cracks and cracks in society, but they often open up the living space for some exceptional people, so that like the intellectual in the sandwich ditch, as a fleeing city or grace befall him.
And in a totalitarian society, everything is so complete, as complete as a rigid iron barrel, except for necessity or necessity. Perfect technology provided great convenience for totalitarian rule, and people gave up their dignity as complete human beings for the sake of momentary greed.
But here, we have not fled the city, nor the Jubilee of amnesty.
For a closed world, grace is a superfluous or even harmful thing.
We don't feel unfree because we automatically degrade ourselves, and as our delicate brains create more and more technological inventions that have reached the pinnacle of perfection, we have gradually degenerated into animals that are subordinated only to necessity.
In London, which loves traditional telephone booths and steam trains, the bears there are living as human beings.
Welcome to follow my public account: Little Diamond Wind Film Base