"Send You a Bullet" - Liu Yu

My memory is very bad, I can't memorize a few complete ancient poems, I don't remember what uses sin, cos or root number five is equal to a few, often watch a movie and see it at the end of the sudden thought of watching this movie, claiming that someone is his idol but can't remember his name, memory for me, is a completely crappy detective met a cunning criminal.

But I love to write. I have an obsessive-compulsive habit of recording life and the world. To a certain extent, words are not the way I record life, but the way I experience life, because it is the process of writing that closes the distance between me and the object being written, so that the tiniest things show facial features and expressions. Years of writing have made "memories" possible for me: re-reading the previous text, finding that I had read the book, knowing the person, and having such strange thoughts... The sunken world resurfaced, and like a wallet full of streets, I picked up countless past Selves.

When I was sorting out the manuscript this time, I had this kind of "picking up my wallet" surprise. Anyone who knows me knows that I write two types of articles. One is the political commentary, which is generally dry, without much emotion and color, but more precisely anti-emotion and anti-color. The other is life essays, which are more personal, capturing momentary feelings and putting them into a glass bottle like fireflies. The latter type of text collected in this book records the bits and pieces of my life around 2005-09 (especially 06-07). For me, whose memory is short-circuited, without these words, my life in the past few years is likely to be empty and there is no evidence. But because of these records, I had a small personal history museum. To say that the history museum is of no use, it seems to be of little use, is for the visitors to point out and say, Oh, those people lived that way at that time.

Of course, I hope this book is not only personally memorable. Over the past few years, my life has been very thin, without many people, events, or tear-jerking experiences. This may well have something to do with my living abroad, it may have something to do with my dull personality, and if I want to go online, it may also be related to the era or class in which I live. If the rich life was that the Red Army climbed the snowy mountains and crossed the meadows in the fierce battle with the enemy, then my life was more like a camel crossing the Sahara silently. There are no enemies, no snowy mountains and meadows, no bright ends in This crossing, only the patience to listen to one's own breathing, the patience to put one foot down and then lift the other.

The way I have accumulated this patience is to make up for the barrenness of events with feelings. To a certain extent, I believe this is not a way to spend a meaningful life. It is the only way to live a meaningful life. I believe that it is the richness of a man's feelings, not the density of the events that take place in his life, that determines the texture of his life; it is a man's eyes, not the scenery in front of his eyes, that determines the color of his life. It may seem idealistic to say this, but economists say that the value of a thing depends on its utility, and utility is always a subjective judgment. So I think, at least I hope, that this book will lead the reader and me to respond to Mr. Socrates' call to practice the attitude of life that is not worth living without scrutiny. The cottage version of this sentence is: there is no boring life, only a boring attitude towards life.

In this book, there is a jumble of things that are "scrutinized", from crazy old men on the street to roommates in the same dormitory, to love, movies and books, from institutions to rats. Since I don't start writing a book when I write these things, different articles tend to be very different in style, in different lengths, in uneven quality, and ups and downs with social situations, hormonal cycles, and the intensity with which I escape from life. This made it difficult to arrange the book, because it was simply a compilation of rock, folk songs, and operas into a single CD. For a time, I did not know how to classify them, and finally divided them into "on others that is, hell", "on myself as others", "on the unknowability of the meaning of life", "on the impossibility of love", and "on the unknowable and impossible of society". The titles sound gray, but reading the texts over the years, I've been surprised to find that anxiety is really the subject of all along—well, I'm not surprised. As a "party", I am this kind of anxious composer, lyricist, singer, and unlucky listener who has long been tired of it but has nowhere to refund. I think I'm too keen on "examining" life, used to hanging everything upside down and shaking off the hidden order. "Send you a bullet," that's exactly what happened.

From this point of view, perhaps the reader can think of the book as an anthropological note rather than a "spiritual essay," or as a encyclopedia of mental illness. One day I saw a sentence on someone else's blog: several manifestations of people who have not lost self-knowledge - depression, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, communication disorder, delusions, mania, anxiety... Listen, "not yet lost self-knowledge", anxiety should be celebrated. This book, then, can also be regarded as a secret congratulatory letter to all those who have "not lost their self-knowledge."

Many of the contents of this book were selected from my blog "love letters", and of course, many changes were made when the book was finally written. The content in the blog that is too trivial and too personal has no income; the current political content has basically no income; in addition, some print media articles have been added to the book. In these 4 years, my life has undergone many changes, from New York to Boston and then to Cambridge, from student to teacher, from leftover woman to marriage, so some of the texts are now outdated and do not represent my current views, moods and states, but are only exhibited as part of the "artifacts".

Over the years I have amassed a group of readers through the Internet and included, many of whom have given me encouragement, comfort or criticism, and more are just silent attention. I would like to thank my readers for their attention, which allows me to express my feelings while still having a little satisfaction in vanity, and letting me know that my anxiety, mania, depression, delusional pessimism or more often just the panic of facing the endless desert can also be productivity.