"Sometimes I hear myself speak Chinese, and it's like who is this person? I've crafted a version of myself in the past three years. At least you belong here in some way, I don't. I go through moments where I think, what am I doing speaking Chinese and dating Chinese girls? How did this happen?" "It's like I've finally secured a spiritual base, only to realize it's build on..." "...sand." "Sand, and it isn't real. This place isn't real."
Yet, what is real? If not this place where I've lived, worked, completed projects, kissed, cried, burned bridges, torched moments, then where else? Where else? Dear friend. We've prided ourselves on having the audacity to cross continents, to embrace a place so different from the soil we stood, yet all of a sudden, the shock of it all shook us at the core.
"这一切都是虚的。”
"Have you read Murakami's 1Q84? It took me two years to finish it. 1Q84 is a world with a complete different set of rules and constructs. It reminds me China, somehow."
Nothing like a last minute existential crisis on top of everything. The silence between is suffocating because there's so much to say yet there's nothing to say. You laugh and say, "I think I've figured out what our disadvantages are. My problem is I'm not you enough, and your problem is you're me not enough." In my addled mind filled with expensive drinks, I think, that almost almost sounds you and I complete each other. That is where we started from, but in the end, we end up not as 青豆 and 天吾 looking at two moons. This revelation is not filled with hope, but some dangerous taste of being on the wrong track of the wrong train going in the wrong direction on Mars.
Mars.
But what if we choose to believe in 1Q84? What if there are realities beyond New York City, Brooklyn, overpriced apartments, brunches, and graduate degrees from self-affirming institutions. What if choosing the right way doesn't always mean what other people are doing. What if 青豆 and 天吾 needed 1Q84 to find their greater happiness, and that when they were ready to leave it and face a world of order, where everything stands on concrete, they might break apart in some other way, shape, or form? What if this is the only place that's real because nothing here, not your boss, your colleagues, your friends, or your lovers are real and that you must take all this on your own, your whole self, bare and alive and true.
The whole world might turn upside down and shake you to the core, but remember what you stand for, remember that at the end of the day, all that is real is what you believe in, and those beliefs aren't based on others you love, but only yourself. The greatest battle are fought inside your mind. Conquer yourself first, and whatever 1Q84 or 2013 may bring, oh let it come with the ferocity of great cannons, for I will not be beaten down, here or anywhere else.