Ah,Us!

It doesn't matter whether or not my eyes are open or shut, all I see are people, our Chinese people. I am also Chinese. I am one of them. For them, I gather all my emotions and understanding, I spent my past doing so and I am going to spend my future doing that too. Toward them, I experience both hate and love. It is they, no, I should say it is we who continually occupy my heart, my mind, and my eyes. Except for "We", what else should I be concerned about? Our past was glorious, too. "We were far richer than you before"(by great Chinese modernist writer, Lu Xun) I know that we are smart. Or that we are going to show that we are smart. But I am not certain whether we are already smart or not, now. I can only sense it, with the limits of my current intelligence. We are more than tens of hundreds of millions of people all packed together, we are living, we are moving, we are desirous, we are giving off heat again, the ground is shaking under our feet, and we are conserving ourselves. We haven't yet built up order, we haven't even talked of elegance, and we also don't understand harmony either.

We know only that we are living. We ought to be living. It is possible for us to be living. Given our past, given our present, we can surely live up to the future. As long as we are still capable of learning, we can certainly live better in the future.

-Yu Youhan, 1999