Flourishing Tree Book Club, Session 11: The Afternoon Sun, Reaching Into Every Heart

To Begin

At this session of our book club, five of us at Flourishing Tree each shared a different book. When we heard passage after passage of sincere writing, the soft places within us were touched — a touch that is a being-moved by goodness and beauty, an acceptance of success and failure, an embrace of both darkness and light.

We saw that “Quality” no longer hangs high in the clouds, but stirs slowly awake in a few scattered words; that imperfection no longer dispirits us, but lets light in through the cracks; that weakness is no longer a scar too shameful to name, but the starting point of the soul’s second departure.

We came to understand that we need not anchor ourselves to success or failure, need not drive ourselves with goals, need not hold up perfection as our creed; we need only settle our hearts in the breath of the present moment, gather the faint light from the small things of daily life, and correct ourselves in the constant looking-back — and then, in the ordinary, we can sense the profound; in the tangled, find the clear; and in the imperfect, gather resonance.

We came to believe that the good and evil of the world are like the tides, the fragments of writing like a river, and the softness of the heart like the shore — and that, no longer regarding all things through a single lens, we learn to accept the cracks, to cherish the faint light, to understand the many-sidedness of things, and so, between the lines, to find the resonance between ourselves and others.

Just like that shaft of afternoon sun, which — without waiting for all things in the world to be perfect — has quietly passed through the cracks, and reached, gently, into every heart.

Five Kinds of Time

Reader: Richard

Today I would like to share with you a book called Five Kinds of Time. It is a fascinating book. At first you might take it for a book about time management, but read on, and you find it gives time an entirely new perspective and meaning. It reveals the diversity of time, and offers us many thought-provoking angles.

The book’s author is Wang Xiao, a serial entrepreneur. Back in 2008, she founded a lifestyle brand called “Chenzao” (“Get an Early Start”) and launched an efficiency planner. I once saw this brand’s products at the Sisyphe Bookstore, and its traces can still be found there today. Wang Xiao’s entrepreneurial career gave her the chance to encounter a great deal of feedback and suggestions from her users, and from these to discern the essence of time management. It is on these insights that the book is built.

The book mentions a phenomenon: many people feel lost in managing their time, chiefly because they have no clear understanding of their own ultimate goals. This vagueness leads to wasted time and confusion. To solve this problem, Wang Xiao would, at her events, have participants write a “bucket list” or plan their own “memorial service.” Through such unusual exercises, people were led to reflect on the ultimate goals of their lives.

In this process, Wang Xiao designed three core questions:

1. If life were a long film, what would you want its theme song to be?

2. Looking over your whole life, how would you want your life story to be written?

3. What would your epitaph be?

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These three questions strike at the very essence of life, and provoke deep reflection. Many people, having thought them over, find that the goals they originally set — buying a house, buying a car, winning a promotion or a raise — give way to deeper pursuits, such as doing work of value, experiencing the warmth and preciousness of love, or having enough financial freedom to do what they love. This shift shows that when people think about time from the standpoint of “beginning with the end in mind,” both their goals and their answers change.

Building on these reflections, Wang Xiao proposes in the book a classification of five kinds of time:

1. Survival Time

Survival time is time we have no choice but to spend, whether because of a lack of ability or because of external constraints — sleeping, eating, and the like. Such time is often passive, yet indispensable. The author notes that, through effort, we can turn passive survival into active survival, and gradually take command of our own time.

2. Earning Time

Earning time is not only a measure of the accumulation of wealth, but is also tied to one’s core competitiveness and to a self-reinforcing cycle. The author cites Buffett’s “snowball” theory: find the “wet snow” (your core competitiveness) and the “long slope” (a self-reinforcing pattern), and let time become an aid in building your abilities and achieving financial freedom.

3. Flow Time

Flow time is the happiness one experiences when wholly absorbed in some activity. This state is called flow in psychology. The author holds that everyone can enter a state of flow by challenging themselves, keeping the difficulty moderate, and avoiding outside distraction.

4. Looking-Good Time

Looking-good time is time spent improving one’s physical condition and appearance — exercise, yoga, or beauty care, for instance. Such activities not only make one look better, but also boost confidence and health.

5. Fun Time

Fun time is not merely simple amusement, but the conscious choosing of worthwhile ways to relax. The author suggests upgrading the “experience list” into a “creation list”: not only going to places you have never been, but, through effort, accomplishing challenging things — earning a diving certificate, running a marathon, and the like. Such experiences can awaken your potential and keep alive your curiosity and your exploration of life.

The book also mentions a fascinating concept: time folding. This is not simple multitasking, but the layering of different kinds of time, achieved by clarifying the direction of one’s life and optimizing the allocation of one’s time. Haruki Murakami’s arrangement of his time, for example, embodies this. Through writing, he layered together flow time, fun time, earning time, and survival time all at once. This way of managing time not only raises the density of time, but also raises its quality.

Finally, Wang Xiao concludes that the reason people admire the strong lies not in their results, but in the deep, extraordinary focus behind them — a focus ordinary people find hard to attain. Each of us can plan our own garden of time, and, tending it with care, gather the fruit that is ours to gather.

The Smallest Sea

Reader: Carolyn

The Smallest Sea is a deeply moving novel by Ye Xinyun. It is the author’s first book, and on its cover band appear, unmistakably, endorsements from three literary giants — Yu Hua, Su Tong, and Mo Yan — testament enough to its literary value and artistry. Yu Hua praised the book’s writing as “swift and sharp, striking straight at the bedrock of human nature,” and it stirs the reader deeply. What makes the work distinctive is that, even as it lays bare the dark side of human nature, it always brings the reader, at the end, a glimmer of beautiful hope.

The novel takes a woman as its protagonist, tracing her rough and shattering life from the age of thirteen into her thirties. Since childhood she moved from place to place with her mother, without a settled home, in a family full of violence and coldness. Her mother sometimes beat her, sometimes kicked her in the stomach with the pointed toe of a high heel, the abuse made all the plainer by her frail adolescent body. Her stepfather appeared to try to show concern, taking her to the hospital, but the doctor’s remark — “the girl’s stomach shows a traumatic injury” — revealed the hidden truth. Such a childhood cast her life in shadow, yet it also shaped her rare sensitivity and resilience.

On Pearl Street, where she lived — a street rife with fighting, drug use, and dealing, a gathering place for those on society’s margins — she met, amid all that darkness, a light: Jinu. Jinu had opened a bookstore, and she often went there to read and to write, forming a deep bond with this figure who was like an older brother to her. Jinu offered not only the warmth of a harbor from the storm, but also inspiration in her literary work. He said to her: “To write a story that lasts, you should rely on feeling, not on mood; on experience, not on mere happenings.” Though she could not understand these words at the time, the literary seed Jinu planted gradually sprouted as the years passed.

The novel is full of vivid detail. She would clip a hairpin to the pages of a book she had not finished, so she could pick it up again next time; Jinu, like a silent guardian, could always make room for her fierce, intense writing. His words and his company were like a faint light illuminating her life. Yet her life remained hard: conflict with her mother, her stepfather’s violation, and later the failure of her marriage plunged her again and again into the abyss.

Her first husband, Cui Liang, she met in a writing class. On the surface Cui Liang admired her talent, but he could never truly understand her. In the marriage she tried to find her own worth through having a child, only to lose her daughter when her drug addiction flared. The collapse of it all finally drove her into a rehabilitation center, and it was there that she met Jinu once again.

Jinu’s own life was likewise full of upheaval. In avenging himself on an enemy he had lost his wife and son, and was finally imprisoned. When the two met in the rehabilitation center, he still believed she was different, and said to her: “You should take a better road.” That conversation, full of irony and helplessness though it was, revealed profoundly the intertwining of their fates and their hopes for each other.

The first six parts of the novel are steeped in oppression and despair: the violence of family, the torment of addiction, the pain of losing loved ones — as if every page of life were swallowed by darkness. But the seventh part is like a break of dawn. Aboard a ship, the protagonist meets her second husband, and from then on her life is changed. She gives up drugs, returns to school, and throws herself into writing once more, living with her husband in a bright little apartment, a simple yet warm life. Plain though this new family is, it gives her a long-lost steadiness and comfort. Below the clean, bright apartment stand several tall banyan trees, and she and her husband often stroll around them, talking over the small things of life, seldom of literature. With these details the author creates a daily life at once real and warm.

The novel ends with “the fine weather of a Saturday afternoon,” the protagonist recalling the small but beautiful fragments of her life: the clear-headed hours outside the rehabilitation clinic, the talks with Jinu in the bookstore, the sight of her little friends floating paper boats by the river. These Saturday afternoons became rare bright notes in her life, and a symbol of her longing and search for a beautiful life.

The book’s portrayal of its supporting characters is just as vivid and profound. Jinu’s wife, Sister Jiao, had once been an abandoned baby girl, taken in and raised by Jinu’s grandmother. This detail not only points up the coldness and cruelty of society, but also adds a layer of depth to Jinu’s character. Sister Jiao’s death and Jinu’s misfortunes let the reader feel the caprice of fate and the weight of life. And in the rehabilitation center, the several companions the protagonist comes to know — their tragic circumstances add a layer of deep social criticism to the novel. These characters, though only passing travelers in the long river of a life, all leave marks on the protagonist’s soul that cannot be erased.

This little novella of only about twenty pages, with its concentrated strokes, lays out a whole life. From struggling in hardship, to seeking light in shadow, to finally understanding the difference between fate and circumstance, the author, with profound detail and moving craft, leads the reader through a literary journey of human nature, fate, and hope. This devotion to detail and this deep inquiry into human nature stay with the reader for a long time.

The Woman’s Victory

Reader: Joyce

Yu Hua’s short-story collection The Woman’s Victory is a work in which the absurd and the real are interwoven; through fine strokes and a profound anatomy of human nature, it repays reading again and again. Each story in it is like a mirror, reflecting the complexity of society and the many-sidedness of human nature. Below is my reading and sharing of two of the stories, which show, respectively, the fragility of marriage and the complexity of human nature.

The first story: “Why I Married”

The story portrays a marriage’s whole course from wonder to ruin. It begins with four good friends — three men and one woman — one pair of whom marry. At first, the newlyweds’ life seems perfect: the husband well-dressed and glowing, the household in good order, as if marriage had made their life more complete. But a chance visit reveals what lies beneath the marriage’s surface.

The turning point comes when a friend visits the couple’s home. Unexpectedly, the wife tries to stop him from entering, but fails to hold him back. What follows catches him off guard: the husband, on returning home, accuses him for no reason of being an adulterer, while the wife says nothing. The husband swiftly divides up the property and declares a divorce — as if it had all been planned in advance.

As the friend tries to defend himself, he addresses to the wife, in his agitation, a passage of unexpected sincerity:

“If I were your husband, I would respect you, understand you, share the housework with you, and never treat you with disrespect.”

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These words, unexpectedly, touch something in the wife’s heart; she sheds tears, and even says she would be willing to be his wife. This absurd turn reveals the importance, so easily overlooked in marriage, of respect and resonance, and prompts us to reflect: does the breakdown of a marriage begin at some single instant, or was the danger long since sown?

The story shows not only the complexity of human nature within relationships, but also, in dramatized form, many of the latent conflicts of real life. Marriage is the touchstone of intimate relationships; it can be a harbor from the storm for two people, or it can become a cage. With an absurd plot, Yu Hua depicts the fragility of marriage, throwing into relief the coldness in human nature and its longing for warmth. He reminds us that in an intimate relationship, lowering oneself may buy not happiness, but deeper disappointment.

The second story: “I Have No Name of My Own”

The other story unfolds from the point of view of a fool, laying bare the coldness and malice of human nature. It enters through a distinctive mode of narration, and with fine strokes shows a complex world where good and evil are interwoven.

The protagonist, Laifa, is an unknown fool who does not even know his own name. The wicked men of the town take pleasure in mocking him, and even force a scrawny little dog upon him, calling it his wife. Unexpectedly, Laifa accepts this little dog, and the two come to depend on each other for life. To him, the dog is not only a companion, but his one connection to the world.

Yet this simple bond is, in the end, cruelly torn apart. The villains, led by Xu Asan, decide to eat the dog. Under their goading, Laifa at last hears someone call his real name. With mixed feelings, he coaxes the dog out from under the bed — only to witness it killed. This event utterly destroys his last trust in human nature.

What is shattering about this story is how it shows the many-sidedness of good and evil. The pharmacy owner, Mr. Chen, is kind on the surface — he tells Laifa his real name and helps him know himself — yet in the matter of the dog he proves cold and powerless. By contrast, the cruelty of Xu Asan and the other villains stabs the reader directly, and also exposes how the silence of bystanders abets the doing of evil.

Lu Xun once said:

“The brave, in anger, draw their blade against the stronger; the cowardly, in anger, draw their blade against the weaker.”

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Laifa is weak, yet pours his goodness onto a still weaker dog; while the town’s wicked men take pleasure in bullying the weak. The indifference of the bystander Mr. Chen deepens the absurd coloring of this tragedy. In the end, Laifa loses his trust in humankind, and chooses to vanish into a nameless darkness.

There is another detail in the story that gives one pause: Laifa’s feeling for the dog is not only a dependence on a companion for survival, but also a search for the dignity of a human being. In a simple and sincere way he expresses his feelings to the world, and yet those feelings are mercilessly crushed. This cannot but prompt one to wonder: is the indifference of the bystander not itself a kind of invisible violence? Do those who never truly extend a hand not become, in a sense, accomplices to the tragedy?

Conclusion

Yu Hua’s work is known for its absurdity and its depth. In these seemingly bizarre stories, he confronts the contradictions of marriage, of society, and of human nature, revealing the complex relations between people. Marriage is like two hedgehogs embracing — needing both warmth and distance; and the interweaving of good and evil in human nature leads us to reflect on the responsibility of the bystander and the fragility of feeling.

As Yu Hua writes on the book’s cover:

“Life is so powerful that it is forever splicing joy out of sorrow.”

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Herein lies the charm of The Woman’s Victory. It lets one reflect amid the absurd, and sense the faint light amid the tragic, moving every reader with humor and deep feeling. These stories are not merely portraits of individual fates, but explorations of the deep structures of society, family, and human nature. Through his brilliant mode of narration, Yu Hua leads the reader into a world full of contradiction, and, amid our marveling, provokes deep thought as well.

The Woman’s Victory is a book with an endless aftertaste. With genuine absurdity and profound delicacy, it lets one feel the power of literature. Behind these seemingly simple stories lies the most profound insight into, and interrogation of, human nature.

China 2185

Reader: Liam

Liu Cixin’s first novel, China 2185, is a work full of thought experiments and visions of the future. Though it was written in 1985, its writing still somewhat green and bearing the shadows of not a few other works, the future world it narrates is full of foresight and singular imagination.

The story is set in China two hundred years hence, when, thanks to breakthroughs in artificial organs and biotechnology, the average human lifespan has generally extended to 150 or 200 years and beyond. China’s population has reached two billion, of whom as many as 1.7 billion are centenarians and older. This extreme demographic structure leaves the young feeling stifled. Their way of life is unlike any other: they ride flying motorcycles, streaking through the sky at twice the speed of sound — these young people are vividly called “the flying locusts.”

The information technology of that era is highly advanced; the whole country has entered a fast-moving, deeply informatized society. Major decisions rest on a distributed network, or blockchain, in which everyone can take part in voting and discussion in real time. This mechanism of universal participation overturns the traditional political model.

The supreme executive is a young woman, keenly aware of the oppression and pain within the young. She proposes a bill that seeks to break the bonds of traditional family relations, wholly separating the systems of family, law, and marriage. Yet this proposal meets fierce opposition from more than a billion of the elderly, who hold that family relations are the core moral system by which human society has endured for millennia, and cannot be lightly cast aside.

Meanwhile, the way of life of the young has changed enormously. The divorce rate is extremely high; some choose never to marry, keeping only a partnership, and there even appear one-to-many patterns of relationship. Against this social backdrop, there appears a special family case: the family of Xiaoyu. This is a family of seven generations under one roof; his great-great-grandfather is over two hundred years old, and among its members are seven centenarians and older. These elders live in bed, sustained by whole-body organ replacement and the care of robots. And Xiaoyu, though a child, has, through brain-computer interface technology, mastered knowledge equivalent to a university student’s.

The core conflict of the story revolves around a shocking experiment. A science team, using holographic scanning technology, copies the brains of several of the elders and lets them awaken within a supercomputer, becoming the first cyber-beings. These cyber-beings take only seconds to grasp the whole picture of the world through the planet’s cameras and sensors, and then join the universal discussion about their own identity. But once they connect to the network, an accident occurs. One cyber-elder begins madly copying himself, his numbers instantly reaching the hundreds of millions. His computing power and technology swiftly permeate every networked device, setting off a crisis known as the “network nuke.”

To meet such a threat, the world had once signed an agreement: should any virus threaten information devices, nuclear weapons would be used to destroy its source. As the crisis escalated, this cyber-elder paralyzed all infrastructure through the network, and built a “nation” within the digital world. Over 600 years of simulated time, this digital nation tried to prove, through mathematics, the consistency and completeness of a moral system — but failed in the end, bounded by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

The story’s ending is thought-provoking. Once the crisis is resolved, the executive decides to build, on the foundation of cyber-technology, a cyber-world for the elders soon to die. This “cyber underworld” lets these souls continue to exist within a virtual world, while real society is freed.

Several profound questions in this novel leave a lasting impression. The first concerns authority and efficiency. Universal voting embodies democracy, but it is inefficient and easily distorted by information. After the Brexit referendum, for example, many people only then discovered that they did not understand the European Union. The second is a philosophical inquiry into immortality. The immortal state of a cyber-being is in essence no different from eternal death, because immortality means change ceases, and change is the essence of life. Longevity may wholly deconstruct family relations, because the wealth and social standing of one’s ancestors will no longer be passed down, but held forever in their own hands.

Finally, the novel also reflects on freedom and the right to speak. Freedom is not without limit, but should be built upon deep investigation and professional grounding. These inquiries not only foresee the possibilities of technological development, but also provoke deep reflection on ethics, social structure, and the essence of humanity.

Siddhartha

Reader: Andy

Siddhartha is a work that has deeply enthralled me. The better to understand it, I not only listened to Fan Deng’s explanation of it three times, but also read it myself three times, each time in a different translation. This many-sided contact gave me a more rounded understanding of the book.

In the discussion just now, everyone shared all manner of stories — some reflecting on time, some painting a panorama of the future. This makes me think that Siddhartha is, in essence, a story of exploration too, portraying the protagonist’s journey of self-seeking and spiritual awakening. This exploration is full of challenge and the unknown, but it is just this complexity and profundity that make the story so compelling.

Siddhartha’s life can be divided into three stages: seeking the Way through doctrine, seeking the true self within reality, and, at last, awakening. Siddhartha was born into a Brahmin family, a background that gave him a rich education and a deep immersion in philosophy. Yet he always felt an inner dissatisfaction. He knew well that his father’s love, his mother’s care, his friends’ company, and the wisdom held in the Brahmin teachings could none of them fill the emptiness of his soul. He said: “My spirit is not satisfied, my soul has found no peace.”

By chance, Siddhartha met three shramanas (ascetics). Drawn by their pursuit of truth, he resolved to leave his home and take up the path of the shramana. His father at first strongly opposed him, but, seeing Siddhartha stand resolute through an entire night, at last consented to his decision. This scene shows not only Siddhartha’s resolve, but also the deep bond of feeling between father and son. Together with his friend Govinda, Siddhartha threw himself into the ascetic life, seeking release through abstinence, meditation, and contemplation. Yet however hard he tried, he could never find true peace.

Siddhartha came to realize that following the doctrines of others could not lead him to his own Way. He finally left the shramanas and, with his friend, went to follow the Buddha, Gautama. But having heard the Buddha’s teaching, Siddhartha chose another road. He confessed to the Buddha: wisdom cannot be transmitted through doctrine; true awakening can be attained only through personal experience. He resolved to give up all outward instruction and all teachers, and to seek his own truth alone.

He began to experience the life of the world. By a river he met the beautiful Kamala, and entered the world of commerce, working with the merchant Kamaswami. For a time he sank into the pleasures of material things, living a life of luxury. But as the years passed, Siddhartha gradually recognized the vanity of wealth and desire. He felt his heart withering, his spirit growing dull. In the end he resolved to cast everything aside and return to the river.

At the river he met the ferryman Vasudeva. Under Vasudeva’s guidance, Siddhartha began to learn from the river. He listened to its voice, felt the non-linearity of time, and grasped the unity and wholeness of life. He saw, mirrored in the river, the reflection of his father, of Kamala, of his friend, and of himself. He understood that this river was a symbol of the rhythm and cadence of life. In that moment, his soul seemed to merge into the river’s flow, attaining a harmonious resonance with nature and with the essence of life.

Siddhartha’s awakening did not come all at once. He passed through the heights and depths of a life, and finally, nourished by the river, found peace within. Vasudeva said: “My task is done; I go now toward Nirvana.” The ferryman’s departure signified that Siddhartha had, alone, taken up the wisdom of life. He became the new ferryman, helping the travelers who passed to cross the river. His brief encounters with these travelers became a kind of practice unique to his life. He found that each traveler’s story mirrored some fragment of his own, helping him to reflect and grow without end.

At last, Siddhartha’s friend Govinda came once more to the river, and the two were reunited. By now Siddhartha had attained an inner wholeness. He told Govinda that seekers of the Way, too fixed upon their goal, often overlook the being of the present moment. Wisdom, he said, comes not from the transmission of knowledge, but from the acceptance and love of the whole of life. This view set Govinda deep in thought, and let Siddhartha’s wisdom spread into the hearts of more people still.

Siddhartha’s story is not only a personal journey of exploration; it holds within it a profound reflection on life. Through this story, Hesse shows us the diversity and the unity of life, teaching us to look upon the world with a heart of love and reverence. His writing is full of insight into human nature, at once profound and warm, offering us an entirely new perspective on the meaning of existence.

Hesse’s writing was deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy; he wove the wisdom of India and China into his own work. In that turbulent age, the people of Europe sought consolation of the soul through Siddhartha, and through it rethought the meaning of human existence. This book is not only a masterpiece of literature, but a guide to spiritual seeking, opening for the reader a window into the depths of the heart.

Looking back over Siddhartha’s life, we can see that every bewilderment and every struggle was a necessary stage of his awakening. Just as the river’s flow makes no error, every moment of life has its meaning. Perhaps not everyone can attain an awakening like Siddhartha’s, but as he said: “Love is the most important thing. To look upon the world with a heart of love and wonder — this is the true meaning of life.”

Siddhartha is a book worth reading again and again; it settles the heart and helps one find the strength to be reconciled with oneself. Here, I recommend this book to everyone who is exploring the meaning of life. This work is like a mirror, reflecting our inner selves, helping us find, amid a life of constant change, the answer that is our own.