How light our lives could have been, all dragged down by the filth of this flesh and its various desires. I remember, Tai. The flesh is to be used, not to be served.
This is a passage from the opening chapter of Tsai Chongda's "Skinny" about Mrs. Ah's reflections on life. Ah Tai is a hard or ruthless person, when her grandmother left Ah Tai did not cry a word, Ah Tai even threw her uncle directly into the water and almost drowned. In Cai Chongda's eyes, A-Tai may be a godmother who transcends the human world, and ultimately, she has to abandon her physical body to travel the world, so one of A-Tai's favorite sayings is: It's true that if you serve your skin all day long, you won't get ahead, and only those who know how to use their flesh will become successful.
Although I read the book "Skin", but I still do not understand what is skin. Is it flesh, is it face, or is it our false pretense? That's why I didn't call this article "Skin" as well, I simply called it "Small Town in Skin", because what I can see in the whole book is Tsai Chongda's memories of small towns, memories of being in small towns about his parents, his godly friends, Zhang Meili, Ah Xiao, and so on. Maybe this is the life that Tsai Chongda wants to get back by abandoning his skin in the city.
The first few chapters of The Skin are all about Tsai's father's illness, whether it's his mother's insistence on spending the family's only money on building a house after his father's illness, or Christmas in the ICU, or my godly friends. All show a kind of mother to father, my deep love for the family.
From the description of these chapters, we can see the helplessness of my mother and me towards the disease, just as in the chapter on my father's disability in the book, my father always thought that he could regain his sense of control over his body through constant exercise, which was the logic that he always believed in. But as Tsai Chongda said: I also know that the longer my father practiced this logic, the harder he tried to stick to it, and the more intense it was when he finally hit rock bottom. But I don't dare to dismantle this logic of my father's, because, for the life of me, I can't find any other way. Someone has to provide a set of hopeful logic for the whole family to carry on.
This is perhaps the real kind of helplessness, knowing there is no hope, but still struggling to find a reason for everyone to carry on. In fact, our lives are full of helplessness, but we many times simply do not know it, as the father in the article firmly believed. Society, movies, and celebrity autobiographies have always instilled in us something called dreams. But life is never a very good viewer, it's like a harsh director, pointing at us with one reality after another, and even adding a lot of drama, as if trying to help us find the right state for each of us.
What struck me most here was Tsai Chongda's simple and direct description of illness, pain, and hope as he traveled around the hospital. He said: On the first floor of the hospital is the outpatient hall and the morgue. Diseases that can be dispatched at will, and bodies that have been abandoned by disease, live next to each other. Life and death bloom simultaneously on this floor. Like that Christmas night, when my father made it through the surgery, all the young man with me could do was set off the last fireworks of his father's life.
Maybe I'm still young, and I don't have a realistic sense of what it's like to lose a loved one. But when the mother in the text is praying to the gods to let her husband die before her and not let him drag her children down. And to Tsai Chongda, "As for you, study hard, get a good university, earn your own money, marry your own wife, live your own life, your father will be left to me, he lived a year, I will certainly carry hard to live one more year, and I will serve him food, clothing, and living."
I felt like my mother was saying this to me, and probably a lot of parents in small towns live like this all their lives for their children. Just like my parents work hard to earn money, but they don't spend money on themselves, and they can't afford to wear new clothes every New Year's Eve. Now that I'm earning my own money, when I buy something for my family, they always say don't spend the money, they can't use it anyway. And I hope they do not have to work so hard, have time to play mahjong, square dancing can also be, they said, now can still do, to save you some money to buy a house with.
We always say that when the child graduates and works, he or she will be able to enjoy the happiness, but after that, living in the big city, we are still faced with the need to buy a house and buy a house, to have their own children, and to have their own children because they do not have time to bring them up, they need to be brought up by their grandparents. I can see parents living in small cities living their whole lives, not for themselves, but for their children.
I'm a selfish person, I hope I won't do much for my kids in the future, I don't even want to have kids, I hope I can go my own way and don't want to carry so much responsibility. So I also hope that my parents can be a little bit more selfish, don't work so hard to earn money anymore, and take that money they saved to buy new clothes, to travel, and to enjoy their life. A lifetime is so short, it's time for the kids to suffer and walk on their own.
In the article, Tsai describes the memories of a few childhood friends, about the two Ah Xiao, the genius Wen Zhan, and Hou Pu. They are the ones who tried to escape the fate of this small town, but all ended up being unable to do so.
Especially Hau Park, who has a dream of "the world" of music, he wants to be rebellious, wants to be different, but he is not what he wants to be. After being kicked out of school, he is not a bully in the eyes of others, but a lowly man in his own private life. Life is more than what's in front of you, there are poems and faraway places is not for the young people in small towns, but for the elites who think they work hard and struggle in big cities. The leap in class is not as simple as the movie portrays, and the occasional success is just lotto luck.
Here's how Tsai Chongda describes Hau-Pu: He's not pretending, he just doesn't know how to deal with all the cravings in himself, he just can't find a way to get along with the world he loves. There are so many conflicting ideas in everyone, and he's just na?ve and hasn't figured out who he really is.
But in reality, how many people can figure out who they are? We are all just a small microcosm of Hau Park in reality.
Perhaps we can see in these chapters a stark contrast between Tsai Chongda and these small-town youths. Maybe Cai Chongda is successful, but maybe he himself doesn't think he's much better than anyone else, and he himself has always been bound by his own skin. As he said after Houpu's death: An indescribable sadness quickly swelled in his chest. I opened my mouth and tried to get something out, but there was never a sound. I realized then that I had been so successful in controlling myself over the past few years that I was concerned about upsetting my neighbors by venting out loud at this time of extreme sadness.
The last few chapters are really Cai Chongda writing his own thoughts about the city, about himself. Perhaps he himself has already written very simple and straightforward, and I'm not qualified to add anything more for him. So here simply put a few excerpts from the text, but also to leave you a little space for their own reverie.