Before the end of the 1990s, my adolescence had just begun.
A small-town youth who is moving forward in the Chinese metropolis of Lyon did not expect to write an article to commemorate it so soon.
The density of time is not homogeneous, and that grand end of the 20th century, which also quietly served as my teenage years, did not occupy a prominent place in my not-so-powerful memory system. Or rather, what happened after that was so dramatic and variable that I ignored this "prehistoric era" that had been completed and rested.
Beijing Streetscape in the 1990s
I tried to think about it, and it was like the air of my hometown in the south, faint and thin, gray. In the ever-receding scenes, this miss is almost like an imagination.
If I had been younger than I am now, or a little older, nostalgia might have come naturally. When you are young, it is difficult to satisfy, and you lack responsibility, you can only focus on the nearby life, and when you have age, the past has become experience, and the digestion of experience has become a substitute for the few remaining desires. Only the life in which you are in the present moment, driving in the middle lane, has once again stepped on the rhythm of the times, driven by the "illusion of progress", and does not have to stay too long in the past or the future.
Nostalgia is such a button, an objective and even dialectical braking device, which is pressed only in those moments of uncertainty and confusion. Sometimes we use it as a lollipop and borrow it to swallow the bitterness of life; Sometimes it is used as an alarm, pointing out that the right thing in front of you is not necessarily so correct, and that mistakes have happened long ago. More often, these flavors are mixed together. Memories and prospects, sweetness and crisis, all consciously or unconsciously masquerade as each other, conflated.
This confusion may be a fuller and more challenging reason to open up memories. Because the new life has not fully fulfilled its promise, today we are still constantly embracing the new chaos in the hope of ending the chaos, and the behemoth machines that have made their way from the 20th century are becoming less and less rival. In the blink of an eye, almost two decades have passed since the 21st century.
Beijing Streetscape in 2019
I have lived longer in the 21st century than I have in the 20th century, and my days in Beijing will not unexpectedly surpass my hometown in Hunan. That silent 1990s and its end seemed to have a real sense of division, and it was getting faster and faster, and more intense. The overall change of buzzwords, technology products, and modern lifestyles is flabbling with teeth and claws, as if ready to throw people to the other side at any moment.
Source: "I Went to 2000" Zhang Yueran, editor-in-chief