June 18, 2024, at 2:50 P.M., I was returning to Shanghai from Ningbo. As the car crossed the sea bridge, the opposite shore reappeared after the gloom. The tidal flats stretched toward me, flat and endless.
I fell into a dream: landing on wet, muddy ground, I felt the briny water rising through my soles, needling the cold flesh; When I looked up, the concrete walls were already charging-towering, like a row of marching steel-armored riders.
I woke at the moment of impact. The tidal flats were behind me. My water bottle had fallen. Water had soaked into my shoes.
June 27, 2024, at18:02 P.M., I was in Jinhua, sitting on my friend’s balcony. Dark clouds hung low. When I narrowed my eyes, I could see ridges, ramparts, and banners lifting in the wind above. The sight pulled me unbalanced. The phone rang.
On the balcony, there was a tiny garden. Pplants scattered loosely, half-tended. I wanted to ask my friend about the phone, while noticing everyone in the room had vanished. I heard water running in the bathroom; I called out, but nothing answered.
The sky turned all dark when I looked back. Rain was pouring hard., All and the ridges and the ramparts collapsed. My friend came out of the bedroom, replying to me in drowsy.
Somedaytime at 9:30 A.M. in August, 2020s, I went through the third strange incident of the month in my home in Shanghai. The old lampshade began to churn like a boiling spring, and its crimson patterns burst across the living room. A few seconds later, everything settled back into place. I felt inexplicably calm.
I sat down at the keyboard and returned to work: before moving out, I had to sort and record items in every box, all in an Excel sheet. It occurred to me that I could assign each item a number with a single click. Then I could classify them by type, or by year. Then I could rank them by estimated value —but first, I needed to define the three forms of value old objects possess.
Perhaps, certain forms of trust have already begun to fail; perhaps, certain experiences have vanished, or were never given a proper explanation. Sometime in the 30th of a month in 2025, a junior fellow student from my high school told me he had finished reading The Cloven Viscount.
I wasn’t pleased when I read this at the first time: A cannon shell split the viscount into Good and Evil— I don’t like this dichotomy. But later I ponderedthought: however you blast a person apart, the halves can never truly stand alone; each is only thinkable because the other remains.
On October 1st, 2025, an upperclassman classmate told me: walk out into the world, make everything, and only to return to the days where you began—back to the cradle, as if civilization were walking back into its cave.
October 2, 2025, a staff member told me: the worst thing in theatre is criticism. You were meant to feel, but criticism is thought. You have a thought about how you should feel, and then you feel. From that moment on, what you feel is the thought, not the feeling.
August 4th, 2025, sometime at fifty-six, I went to Hangzhou to meet a friend. Passing the Yongjin Gate, the ripples suddenly seemed ornate and mannered. I thought about whatthoughtrecalled what another friend said to me: from here, if you keep heading south, the road slips straight into the mountains.
I then thought about the time, two years ago, when I saw sculptures of Five Hundred Arhats rising into motion in the temple after the lights went out and —the temple’s guard chaseding me from everywherehall to hall.
I slipped onto a barren hill, slept for a day, and woke up steppingwoke stepping on wet leaves to visit a monk friend. I drifted across the XihuWest Lake with a classmate, dropping into the sun, losing consciousness, and flickering in gold. The subway announcement cut through. I sent a message to my friend: I’ll be twenty minutes late, sorry.
But there are no boats on the XihuWest Lake, no monk friend, and I have never been to the Yongjin Gate. None of these can be found—neither in the heaven sky nor in the underworld yellow springs.
“The longing of HimHis longing is all imagination.” While that immaculate image almost brings people to tears.
October 8, 2025, 1:08AM, California. I was standing under a streetlight, recalling the time last year when a classmate walked by and talked for ten minutes. Then everything roared. The lawn burst into sprinklers. The mushrooms broken apart by the mower in the morning would grow back.
I saw my childhood in the mist, seeking mushrooms, crying aloudly at the mower’s noise as if it was a siege. I believed that I could sense some natural command, and that I was a devoted servant of some power beyond myself. But from the encyclopedia, I found nothing about commands, powers, or servants.
A friend studying psychoanalysis looked at me and said: You must never forget the mushrooms. It matters. I was confused, but still followed.
Mushrooms. Mushrooms?
If I go one step further, I will no longer be continuous, and what I held as touchstone guidelines will no longer extend itself. My body is resisting me.
“Come over to our side,” my friend said. “Magic.”
I crouched inside a book until nightfall, turning sixty pages, and I saw birds and wild boars in the spacing between the lines. They wandered the cleftsseams of the high city, escaping from darting through the escape routes of theoriesy––—the theory that could turn all-powerful under breathing.
Sometime at 12:13 AM, 2025, in the rain along the coast, I dreamed again.
I rode a white stag, holding a javelin in hand, searching among green cliffs for the ruins of a paradise….
The dream outran everything—every thought, every metaphor trying to be caught.
