Following days of gloom, the sun finally revealed itself in the morning.
Just past 8:00 AM, the Starbucks barista began scrubbing the ground at the entrance with a bucket of water. Wearing only a green short-sleeved T-shirt, his thin frame faced the north wind, yet he seemed impervious to the cold. A slightly chubby girl sat leaning on a chair brushing her teeth; the shop hadn’t opened yet, and the U-lock still hung on the handle of the glass door.
A long queue formed on the sidewalk in front of Yan Laoyao’s Siu Mai Shop, with customers waiting for the fresh Doupi (bean skin) to come out of the pan. The old man making rice noodle rolls spoke with a distinct Northeastern accent.
Three young grandmothers pushed strollers and gathered in the open space at the mall entrance, basking in the sun and chattering noisily about their family affairs. Several young grandfathers stood six meters away, holding onto strollers, listening to the women’s clamor while the sun warmed them comfortably. Uncles and aunts walking their dogs evaluated each other’s grandchildren, discussing whether they were well-behaved and adorable.
A clean-cut grandfather held his six-month-old grandson, humming an unknown tune. He inspected the construction progress inside the plaza’s enclosure and explained to his grandson which young lady on the cluttered bulletin board photos was the prettiest.
At Huayuan Primary School, the P.E. teacher leading the morning exercises issued simple commands listlessly. The boys in the back row simply grooved to the beat of a street dance they had just learned, while the female teacher at the end of the line followed the instructions most earnestly. In Lin Song’s view, decades have passed, yet the collective exercises between classes remain sloppy and lackluster.
The senior students had to organize formation running. The P.E. teacher began trying hard to keep the students quiet on the playground. The homeroom teacher said, “We need to run for 20 minutes. Slow is fine, but you must keep running.” The playground came alive, with children weaving back and forth in an orderly fashion.
When the run finished, it wasn’t the scattering of birds and beasts that lived in Lin Song’s childhood memories; now, they returned to the classroom in class order. The homeroom teacher stopped a student and checked his heart rate by touching his neck; the young lad’s face was flushed with excitement. Junior students jumped rope and played hide-and-seek in a corner of the playground. On the wall of the teaching building hung four characters: “Love Life.”
Uncle Liu drove his 2005 Ford Focus and parked at the intersection of Xinwan 5th Road. He took three bundles and a small folding stool from the trunk. He spread four advertising sheets on the ground, white side up, and laid out his wares: colorful socks, insoles, various nail clippers, 502 super glue of all specifications, blue plastic combs, hair clips large and small, rubber bands long and short, and red calendars.
An elderly woman came to ask, “What can this glue stick?” “It sticks everything. Long shelf life, only 6 yuan a bottle.” After laying out all his sundries, Uncle Liu took off his jacket, and then his vest.
Lin Song had done similar things when he was in junior high school. He had bought ill-fitting shorts from a street stall. The next day, specifically when workers were getting off work, he spread an outdated newspaper on the roadside in front of the grocery store at Xinhua intersection, threw the worn shorts on the ground, and waited. Soon, an old lady asked the price, bargained slightly, and the deal was done.
The Ele.me rider had changed into a new McLaren-style uniform from Taobao Flash Sales, with the pull-tab on the back broadcasting several Alibaba advertisements. Lin Song met Director Xu in the elevator; he was going downstairs to buy betel nuts, his daily routine. Lin Song made small talk: “You get up quite early every day.” “I go to sleep before 9 PM and wake up naturally around 4 AM.” Director Xu’s two Chihuahuas had passed away one after another, leaving him to come and go all by himself, a solitary figure.
The world is becoming less and less disciplined.
If you have a new product, I don’t care about you; if your new product starts to gain market share, I will copy it. Against your factory, your channels, your brand, and your customers, I will offer a lower price.
Former customers are aging and declining; even if they remain loyal to your brand, it is merely the persistence of twilight years. A new generation of consumers is thriving, and they will only choose goods and services based on their own vision and experience. Whoever can speak with the most extravagant eloquence becomes the darling in their hearts.
In whatever way rules were established back then, they will collapse in the same way today. Those “relics” who once established the rules can only be buried in piles of old paper, sticking to established practices. They enjoyed the maximum benefits brought by creating the rules, but when new rules are established, the old ones are inevitably discarded.
The consequence of being unruly inevitably brings about new rules. Whatever it is, this is the inevitable law of metabolism.
What will the future hold? The value of prediction speaks for itself.
Why is prediction so seductive? In the simplest terms, if one were lucky enough to know tomorrow’s lottery numbers, or trivially, to know whether it will rain tomorrow, one could prepare by bringing an umbrella or not.
Some people travel frequently. If taking a high-speed train, one might have a habit: arriving at the platform exactly 7 minutes before departure. He can tolerate missing the train due to traffic congestion, but he cannot accept arriving early at the station every time and waiting like a fool.
Another person might never have experienced missing a train or a flight. Lin Song has experienced both. He finds missing the train absolutely more painful and troublesome than waiting foolishly in the waiting hall. The reason is simple, to borrow the words of Nobel Laureate George Stigler: “If you have never missed a flight, you are spending too much time at the airport.”
The revelation of this sentence lies here: any perfection comes with a cost. Sometimes, the price paid to pursue perfection exceeds the damage of imperfection itself. Redundancy seems unnecessary, but it is the best shield against accidents. Why do humans have a greedy nature? Because ancestors from the primitive age experienced countless disasters before discovering the profound lesson of “maintaining an army for a thousand days to use it for an hour”—being prepared involves no peril.
However, nowadays, any activity involving women seems to be unpunctual. Dragging on, rambling. Those who tolerate women being late are usually women who are often late themselves. Since they delay each other, the concept of delay ceases to exist.
What is the experience of having both presbyopia and myopia? You can’t see clearly far away, and you can’t see clearly up close; only at a fixed distance can you read the text in a book comfortably. The best way is to adjust the distance of the book with your hands to accommodate your eyes, or to constantly switch between myopia glasses and reading glasses.
In summer, Auntie He goes to the nearby Fanyue Mall to enjoy the air conditioning, and in winter to enjoy the heating. When it is neither cold nor hot, she goes to the mall to find a public sofa to doze off. At Gate 2 of the mall, a family of three passed by: “Daughter, look, are there clothes for sale in that mall?” “There are clothes for sale, but there’s no business. It looks like it’s going to collapse.”
Some people are born poor at expressing themselves with language. They write a speech and read it until they can almost recite it. They walk onto the podium looking full of confidence, but when they speak, they stammer and halt sentence by sentence.
Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan chatted about the time spent writing a song. Dylan said he needed about fifteen minutes. Dylan asked Cohen how long it took to write a song lyric. Cohen said, about two years. Actually, he was too embarrassed to say that sometimes it took five years.
In Lin Song’s view, there are two types of people in the world: those who have listened to cut-out tapes (Dakou tapes), and the others.
At the Curtis Institute of Music, a professor asked Lang Lang, “What do you think allows a person to go further?” The answer is: You must be a good observer to enhance your insight into your profession.
The National Games are over, and there is a visceral feeling: all sports events aiming to challenge the limits of the human body should be abolished in the name of the law.
When Lin Song went to RT-Mart to buy shredded beef, the brother at the deserted meat counter was chatting with an auntie: “Weekends used to be the best time for business. Now, there are barely a few people in the entire hypermarket.”