A Travel Note

The journey was neither very long nor very short. In any case, I finally arrived here.

Entanglement churned into a river, and in the end I made my decision; everything returned to calm.

On the night it snowed in Beijing, I went to bed early. Early the next morning, wrapped tightly in my overcoat, head lowered, I hurried out for breakfast. The moment I stepped outside, a biting wind drilled into every inch of my skin.

As if a spring gale had come overnight, blowing open thousands upon thousands of pear trees! Looking from before my eyes toward the distance, the world seemed to have been washed in a layer of dye; everything was pure. I could not help stopping in my tracks.

The meaning of the past became blurred, and my soul drove my body here. I opened my phone and asked ChatGPT: How can I ease loneliness? It encouraged me to take part in more social activities. Following the methods it listed, I compared them one by one, only to find that they were precisely the activities I had done most often in my life since entering university.

Before me, snowflakes flew like cotton batting, dancing the sky into whiteness. I moved forward carefully; footprints of different depths made light, crisp sounds. Slowly weaving through the fine snow, I seemed to become one touch of it myself: ordinary yet crystalline, blooming without holding anything back.

This was my first encounter with snow.

Because I was pressed for time, that first meeting was not long. And over the next few days I encountered several more snowfalls, but none gave me the same feeling as the first. People always endow a "first time" with special meaning: first meeting, first love, first arrival in a place, a child's first words, calling out "dad" and "mom." Just as when the train arrived at Tai'an Station, something stirred in my heart and the plot of Ball Lightning surfaced in my mind. So I got off here halfway: this became my first night climb.

When I stepped onto Jade Emperor Peak, the east already showed a pale streak of dawn. Looking as far as I could, the mountains were covered with white snow. Around the mountainside, mist spread like a ribbon, and the city of Tai'an appeared and disappeared.

In the autumn of the thirty-ninth year of Qianlong's reign, Yao Nai, after more than ten years tossed about in officialdom, resolutely bid farewell to the bureaucracy, climbed Mount Tai with a friend to view the snow, and wrote the famous Record of Climbing Mount Tai. In the world of ice and snow, I struggled to unlock my phone, and the flat text suddenly became three-dimensional, clear and palpable. The great wind lifted accumulated snow and struck my face, but I had already forgotten the pain; all that remained was endless curiosity about Yao Nai.

The cursive script before me, though I could barely make out only the two characters "Yao Nai," still gave me a sense of unruliness rushing toward me, bold yet touched with a faint tenderness, like a sea breeze at night.

The sea breeze came straight at my face. Then another thought occurred to me: actually, I was not lonely in the sense of having no company; I was solitary.

The Tongcheng School took richness, uprightness, elegance, and precision as its foundation; and Yao Nai was the figure who brought the Tongcheng School to its fullest achievement, his prose all the more sincere, rigorous, and meticulous.

While climbing Mount Tai, I could also feel that every word Yao Nai wrote had been carefully weighed and researched. Thus, more than two hundred years later, the scene could still be reconstructed and experienced as if one were there. In the howling wind, I searched frantically for the life of this man.

The ninth year of Yongzheng.

I was born in Tongcheng, Anhui, into a family of scholars. My ancestors had risen through the imperial examinations, but by my generation the family was gradually declining. My uncle Yao Fan held me to strict standards, hoping that one day I could restore the radiance of our forebears.

In the fifteenth year of Qianlong, all the hills of Tongcheng were red, the layered forests steeped in color; clear autumn had arrived. After three years of studying as though each day were the same, the young man had full confidence and wrote with ease. When the examination ended, the sunset had already dyed half the sky red. Dressed in white, he stood at the gate of the prefectural office, looking far toward his future: all was promising. That year, Yao Nai took the Jiangnan provincial examination and became a juren.

In the winter month of the same year, people streamed endlessly through the Yao household. Wearing a white cotton robe, I knelt in the ancestral hall as the elders of the Yao clan bound up my hair and placed the cap upon me. The young face had not yet shed its childishness, but the eyes were already full of resolve; he knew what heavy burden he carried. That year, Yao Nai was only twenty.

Fate was full of twists. At the turn of winter and spring, the young man whipped his horse northward to the capital for the examination. In the end he failed the metropolitan examination and returned home in disgrace.

In the twenty-third year of Qianlong, although his original aspiration had not been extinguished, Yao Nai, after repeated failures, had slowly lost the scholarly spirit of those earlier years. Bent over his desk in bitter study, Yao Nai looked back toward his age of twenty, when he had gained a degree by chance and his spirit had ranged freely. Now life was vast and uncertain; ten years had been squandered. The earnest gaze of the elders at home was a weight I could not bear, while the heavy snow outside the window was a lightness I could not bear.

By candlelight, I felt out a letter from my teacher. In it he comforted me: "For now, listen to the frost-bitten bird stumble; in the end, you will see furious wings take flight." A man should not shed tears lightly, yet somehow at this moment tears welled in my eyes.

That year, Yao Nai was already thirty-two; youth was gone, and he had tasted all the bitterness of study.

In the spring of the twenty-eighth year of Qianlong, Yao Nai sat for the Ministry of Rites examination for the sixth time. Ten years of persistence, day after day, were destined to make him write a weighty stroke in history. In that year's spring examination, Yao Nai passed the jinshi examination, becoming the starting point for the Yao family's later renewed prominence, and also a sign that the great synthesizer of the Tongcheng School was about to appear before the public. Compared with other great literary figures, Yao Nai's official career was not smooth. In fact, during the ten years of arduous study, Yao Nai had already been deeply drawn to the literary methods and principles discussed in books. It was only out of responsibility to his family that he had no choice but to walk the road of officialdom for a while.

After three to five years in office, Yao Nai deeply felt the danger of high official life, and human dealings exhausted him even more. In the thirty-third year of Qianlong, Yao Nai served as deputy examiner for the Shandong provincial examination. Watching the younger students write furiously, as if watching my former self, I was filled with emotion.

Tossed about in officialdom, long without promotion, full of learning yet shunted among the trivial tasks of compiling books, Yao Nai was bitterly disappointed. In the thirty-eighth year of Qianlong, Yao Nai was honored with entry into the Siku Quanshu bureau. Just as promotion seemed possible, the next year he resolutely bid farewell to officialdom.

"In the twelfth month of the thirty-ninth year of Qianlong, I set out from the capital through wind and snow, passed Qihe and Changqing, crossed the northwestern valley of Mount Tai, went beyond the boundary of the Great Wall, and reached Tai'an." In the twelfth lunar month of the thirty-ninth year of Qianlong, Yao Nai was already preparing to remove his official cap and return south. His friend Zhu Xiaochun invited him to travel together to Mount Tai.

It was the turn of the year. Traveling light, the two ascended from the southern foot, and by the time they reached the summit it was already evening. We sat knee to knee in the Riguan Pavilion, talking of official careers, talking of ideals, and spoke this way until sunrise the next day.

The accumulated snow lifted by the gale struck my face. I had to put away my phone and raise a hand to block it. Between my fingers, I vaguely saw a free back, singing loudly as it went away.

Life is too lively for me; only, the livelier it is, the more solitary I become.

The receding back gradually overlapped with that white-clad youth of long ago. After half a lifetime of wandering in circles, he finally understood why he existed. Yao Nai spent most of his life carrying a heavy family mission, and inevitably had to deal with all sorts of people in officialdom. Yet fame, rank, profit, and salary, entangling the body, could not bring a resting place for the soul. I imagine he too must have been deeply solitary.

Hurried footsteps, boundless life. He came through the wind and snow, and he departed through the wind and snow. Yao Nai devoted the second half of his life to teaching and writing. Looking back on his life, the waves in his heart and the ravines in his eyes all turned into plainness beneath his brush, became the three words "Tongcheng School," and became a light shining in the long river of history.

Gazing at the wild yet disciplined hooks and turns before my eyes, I suddenly understood: the white-clad youth had always been there. His experiences and his works lay quietly here, waiting for those fated to listen.

Life may be very short, turning into a handful of ash after a few dozen years; life can also be very long, leaving behind works, traces, and moving experiences. Moving through a museum is not only learning about history and culture; it is also conversing with the owners of the artifacts. Every crack in a collection piece, every stroke in a painting or a piece of calligraphy, contains a moving story.

If the feeling cultural relics give people is one of long continuity, nature leaves people shaken to the core. Boarding the train into snow country, all the language of appreciation became concrete: ice sealed a thousand li, snow flew over ten thousand li, and the pure white mountains seemed truly to flow, like a silver snake dancing. The scene inside the carriage was reflected in the window and, as in Kawabata Yasunari's writing, set off and merged with the snowy landscape outside, forming a transcendent symbolic world.

Accompanied by elegant pure music, I intentionally and unintentionally began reading Winter in Jinan.

"For a person used to living in Beiping, like me, it feels like a miracle if winter has no wind; Jinan's winter has no sound of wind. For a person just returned from London, like me, it feels strange if winter lets one see sunlight; Jinan's winter is brilliantly clear. Naturally, in the tropics, the sunlight is always so fierce, and bright weather can instead be a little frightening. But in the winter of North China, to have weather that is both warm and clear, Jinan truly counts as a treasured place..."

Lao She's delicate brushwork made Jinan leave me with a good impression in advance. The essay felt fresh to read; at the very least, it was not something "monsters and demons" could have written.

The imperial capital gradually receded, and the train slowly stopped. I opened my eyes and raised my head: stepping onto the land of the City of Springs, I felt the breeze brush my cheeks. This truly was an ideal realm!

But my readers were not here. They are in the past, in the future, across the rivers and seas. To let them feel Jinan's beauty, I planned to write this:

"Please close your eyes and imagine: an old city, with mountains and water, all basking in sunlight beneath the sky, sleeping warm and comfortable, only waiting for the spring breeze to wake them. Is this not an ideal realm?"

Walking by night along the shore of Daming Lake, anyone who encountered this tower would stop involuntarily.

In the Yuan dynasty there was a grand scholar named Li Jiong, who resigned after achieving success and lived as a sojourner in Jinan. Citywalking to Daming Lake, he suddenly felt that it had "the beauty of lakes, mountains, flowers, and bamboo," and decided to build a tower here.

What should it be called? Standing before the newly built tower, I began to think about this question. The waters of Daming Lake were calm; in a daze I seemed to see a lean figure. Back then, Layman Dongpo also seemed to have briefly held office in Shandong, did he not?

I still remember that while Su Shi served in Mizhou, he cared about people's livelihoods and development, and also set about urban construction, using public works as relief and repairing the city walls. Because the tower built in the Northern Wei at the northwest corner of the city wall had long fallen into ruin, he "slightly repaired and renewed it," and asked his younger brother Su Zhe to name it. Su Zhe took the meaning of Laozi's Dao De Jing, "Though there are glorious views, one rests beyond them in transcendence," and named it Chaoran Terrace. Su Shi loved the Lao-Zhuang view of transcending the external world, wrote the three large characters "Chaoran Terrace" in his own hand, and left behind the famous Record of Chaoran Terrace.

Even more coincidentally, Su Shi wrote in Record of Chaoran Terrace that when the tower was named, "my younger brother Ziyou happened to be in Jinan." Three hundred years later, I stood on the same piece of land as Su Zhe. Were we also looking at the same lake?

Why not call it Chaoran Tower, then?

Later and later still came the civil uprisings of the Yuan dynasty and the Qing armies entering the pass. Chaoran Tower endured the washing of war, destroyed and rebuilt again and again. Perhaps this is what Yu Qiuyu called the "historical layering" of Chinese cultural relics and remains. Of course, all this came afterward.

...

It seemed I had had a very, very long dream. Yao Nai, Lao She, Li Jiong, Dongpo, snow like goose feathers, mist-shrouded lakes...

It had snowed last night. But I had no time to admire the snow scene carefully; even breakfast was hurried. Because I had reserved a place at the flag-raising ceremony twenty minutes later.

I ran the whole way, and at the moment the national anthem sounded, I finally arrived at Tiananmen Square.

"The People's Republic of China, the Central People's Government, is founded today!" His words rang out with weight. Hundreds of thousands gathered here to welcome the birth of New China together.

Before my eyes, countless red flags fluttered restlessly, like sparks longing for dry firewood; frenzy, like an invisible flood, submerged the city, seeping into every corner and crevice. Several young people, their steps forceful, strode past me, presenting the image of mature young Bolsheviks. They were escorting an old man across the square toward the Imperial College.

"Move faster!" A young guard behind me pushed me impatiently, startling me. I looked at the Red Guards, then at myself: I was wearing a tall hat made of bamboo strips, with a large wooden placard hanging on my chest. My name was written on it conspicuously in black marker, and a red cross had been drawn diagonally across it. In my panic, I suddenly recognized the old man being escorted with me.

Lao She and I smiled at each other. So it turned out that we were both monsters and demons.

Looking back, Chang'an Avenue was packed with students' bicycles. They gathered on their own in the square, sitting in protest and going on hunger strike. The war machine roared past, and all that had gone before turned into the dust of history.

Now, people newly born from the dust are carrying out a solemn ceremony in the howling north wind. It is said that the gravity of reality is heavy, but Chinese young people are quite brave. They will seize every interval of lift-off, letting thought dance freely before it crashes heavily back to the ground.

Leaving Beijing, passing through Jinan and Tai'an, going south to Hefei, then by way of Fuzhou, I finally arrived in Putian. The journey came to a pause at No. 1699 Xueyuan South Street. The end of the journey was also the beginning of the dream; life completed a wondrous closed loop in this instant.

On the road of life, after going around and around, it seems we have gained nothing and instead lost much. When we return in old age to the place where we set out, compared with our former selves we have lost money, lost time, lost passion, lost dear friends. Linear life is nothing more than a train bound for death, and the passengers on it are only hurried passersby. A few people accompany us to the end, but most are still pushed along by life, just as in the line, "After dispersing, each has encounters as their guide." A superficial state of socializing left me deeply tired, and a fast-paced life of only brief tastes pressed closer step by step.

I had no choice but to decide to withdraw from that state.

But that night, I then asked ChatGPT a second question: If I want to ease solitude through means other than "socializing with others," what suggestions do you have?

It summarized several answers: good diet and exercise, self-reflection and exploration, getting close to nature, meditation and relaxation, music and reading, and so on.

What method could naturally string these answers together? Staring at the screen, I wished I could stare words out from between the words.

At the time I could not make sense of it no matter how hard I thought, and simply let fate guide me toward a direction whose correctness I did not know. A week later, when I typed this line at my computer, I confirmed that the choice I made then was right.

Only after circling around and around did I understand: travel would tell me the answer; travel itself was the answer.

My vision began to blur, and the crowds quickened their pace as they passed. I, we, lifted our heads. In the past, I had always been searching for a soul that could resonate with mine, but always ended in failure. Now I feel I was so foolish: clearly there are countless souls in this world resonating with my present self. They are myself: myself at different times and different places, the self that is forever exploring, forever on the road.

When the sequence of experiences no longer matters, beautiful memories have never vanished, and present pain is only passing cloud and smoke. Life is no longer planned linearly, and we are able to cross time and become travelers through life. When the subject of experience no longer matters, the distinction between others and the self is no longer clear. What others feel is also what I feel, and we are able to cross eras and become travelers through history.

A thousand years ago, when Mr. Dongpo chanted the line "Seen from what changes, heaven and earth cannot last even an instant; seen from what does not change, things and I are both endless," could he have guessed that a thousand years later there would still be countless younger people gazing into the distance, savoring his words carefully? Zizhan, Xibao, Lao She: as individuals, they have already passed away. One day, I too will pass away just like them, just as the me of the previous second has already passed away in relation to the me of the next second. But when later generations read my experiences and resonate with my soul, just as I resonate with my former self and my future self, how is that not a kind of continuation of humanity as a whole?

Lowering my head again, my gaze returned to the ground beneath my feet. Through the time measured by footsteps, I saw the past, the present, and the future. The past no longer blurred, the present within reach, and the future clear and visible.

By changing our way of thinking, perhaps we can all complete an ascent of the soul to a higher dimension.

Without realizing it, I quickened my steps.