Seeing

Around 2018, a Qing poet’s lament once made the rounds: “A nation’s misfortune is a poet’s fortune; when one writes into the weight of years, each line grows deft.”

Yet the Qing, in truth, was among the cruelest eras for poets. Perhaps the line survived largely because of an old custom: the ruling dynasty writing the history of the one before it.

I once said I hoped I would not like to see such a day.

Now I have changed my mind.

I have chosen to stand far away, intact and unruffled, to see it clearly.

This is the burden and the gift the times have laid upon a generation.

It is also the deepest wish of those closest to my heart.