9. The Chinese Ideology

December 30, 2018 by Q. Lei in blog

One day I am going to leave everything behind, I thought. I will leave behind everyone who is dear to me, and move to a place where people won’t know my name. They won’t even know how to pronounce my name when I tell them. This way they cannot prescribe me a future—a university, a job, a marriage, a husband, and a child, nor lay down any laws for my everyday life. I will be free to wake up when I want to, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, just as how Karl Marx describes it in The German Ideology, without ever again being a woman who is given a family name. I will step fully into a name that’s mine.

8. How I Learnt to Lie As A Child

December 12, 2018 by Q. Lei in blog

In the adult world, there’s a saying that the best and worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. We children knew it too—the very essence of lying, which was also how I began to acquire this quintessential skill for surviving in the adult world.

7. Unaccustomed Earth

November 18, 2018 by Q. Lei in blog

When I moved to Shenzhen to reunite with my migrant parents in the early 90s, we lived in a temporary hut with a tin roof. Every time when there was pouring rain, I would have to make myself earplugs out of cotton balls. The children TV shows I watched before the storm would instantly turn as mute as the battle of rain and thunder on the other side of the tin roof. It came as a surprise to me how quiet rain had become, since we moved to an apartment with concrete walls.

6. “Cinema Paradiso”

November 03, 2018 by Q. Lei in blog

But somehow I felt shielded from the angst of “the prosperous 90s,” partly due to my parents’ quiet rebellion against the rigid education system—“Go play!” my mom would always tell me. Her constant affirmation of my right to play had set me free from the worldly worries that had infiltrated our world from the adult’s one. But on a deeper level, I wanted to believe that all children are secretly protected by fairies. Us back then, children today, and in the future. I wanted to believe that the little paradises of play children create for themselves could be so much more powerful than any agony, angst, Weltschmerz, or ideological crisis that happened to be prevailing at the time.