What Better Time Than Now?
Right, let’s get this thing rolling. Over the years I’ve made plans for a number of blogs relating to one subject or another; some of which I started and managed to keep going for a while (my original, first-year blog, my Tumblr photo blog, and my Chinese writing blog all started off strong before dying out slowly); some I gave up on almost immediately (my first attempt at a blog in Chinese from my days in Chengdu); and at least one (my most recent and most ambitious) that never even made it out the blocks.
I had such grandiose plans for that last one as well. It was to be a blog of life, love, language, literature, and lvyou (the word “travel” kind of lets the whole trend there down). One where I could talk about my favourite books from the world of modern Chinese literature and spur myself on to actually learn something beyond the most shallow of interpretations in the process. I made plans, a schedule. There were dates for articles, a cyclical rota of topics covering a wide variety of things, from holidays I took in rural Hunan to the contrasting reactions to the immutability of fate between the protagonists of To Live and Camel Xiangzi. Every post was to be a carefully structured article and every article was to have at least some semblance of a point.
Alas, I know nothing about literature, and learning about stuff is hard, like, really, really hard. So my plans of well-thought-out, if decidedly shallow, essays on specific themes fell apart under the weight of my own self-disparagement and a lack of confidence that I had anything interesting to say about anything.
And then came my move (more on that later), to a new life in a new city, and the realisation (or remembrance) that I’m not obliged in any way to be insightful or knowledgeable, or even particularly interesting, in everything that I write; I don’t have to make sure everything is polished and perfect and fits an exact schedule; I can not post anything for two weeks or write about how I enjoyed reading 沉重的翅膀 (Heavy Wings?), a novel about the tentative capitalisation of heavy industry in the early stages of Reform and Opening Up that I imagine most people would find tedious at best without having to be able to concisely explain why. I can write when I want, about what, in any way, and for no one but myself.
So I figured I’d do just that. It certainly seems like a far more achievable plan than the pipe dream I had before, and besides, I’ve just moved to Shanghai, a truly global city, and despite a hell of a lot of uncertainly and the stress and worries that uncertainty brings, I’m feeling decidedly optimistic about the future. As part of that, I’d like to finally get around to doing some of the things that I’ve been saying I will for a varying number of years now, and one of those is writing a god-damned blog, whether it’s dull as crap or not.
And so, I’m sitting here in my freezing cold, over-priced, one third-scale studio apartment sipping my warming buckwheat tea and writing the first blog entry of what I hope will be very, very many. And somehow doing this has got me into a combative mood. Tomorrow morning the guy from China Telecom will be here to set me up with internet and then I can figure out where and how to post this. And eventually, maybe even soon, I may end up writing something with a point.
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