Flourishing Tree Book Club, Session Twelve: Knowing the Ending, and Living Ardently Still

Opening

In this session of our book club, six of us from Flourishing Tree sat together and journeyed from the forests of the far north to the old streets of Malaysia, from Zhou Enlai’s choices to Ted Chiang’s cyber-universe, from the methodology of reading to the ultimate questions of sex, money, happiness, and death. The topics seemed wildly different, yet they quietly converged on the same estuary: when we know for certain that the end is waiting there, how should we spend the journey?

The Ewenki say that death is not an ending but a return—to the wind, to the snow, to the forest, to the cooking smoke of the ancestors. The alien civilization in Ted Chiang’s fiction chooses to keep exploring even at the moment the universe is destined to go dark. At countless crossroads of history, Zhou Enlai chose to be the “mender.” In A Land of the Ordinary, Yinxia the blind girl simply accepts all of life’s indignities with a quiet calm, feeling that it is enough to live it out slowly, day by day. The book Joyce shared puts it this way: love as though you will never be hurt; work as though you have no need of money; live as though today were the last day of the world.

Precisely because there is an ending, the journey has meaning. Precisely because we know how it ends, every choice becomes an affirmation of the self. May the sharing of this session help us find, between knowing and doing, between staying and leaving, that composure which is at once clear-eyed and ardent.

The Last Quarter of the Moon

Reader: Hanbing

Today I’d like to share Chi Zijian’s novel The Last Quarter of the Moon. The book won the seventh Mao Dun Literature Prize and has been praised for “the character of an epic and the depth of cultural anthropology.” Dong Yuhui once recommended it warmly on his livestream as well.

The Argun River runs through Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia and forms part of the border between China and Russia. The ancestors of the Ewenki people originally lived along the Lena River basin near Lake Baikal; driven east by the invasion of Tsarist Russia, they eventually settled on the right bank of the Argun. The novel unfolds through the first-person perspective of the last female chieftain of this people, recounting nearly a century of the Ewenki’s vicissitudes.

The book is divided into four parts—“Morning,” “Noon,” “Dusk,” and “Epilogue”—as if an old woman were taking a whole day, from dawn to nightfall, to tell you the story of her entire life. The imagery of a lifetime’s hours is gently laid within the long river of time.

The section titled “Morning” describes the tribe’s early, tranquil life, threaded through with one parting after another. Her elder sister Lena falls into a deep sleep on a cold, snowbound journey and is found frozen stiff. Her father, protecting a startled herd of reindeer, is struck down by lightning in the forest. The fierce Dashi is inseparable from his beloved falcon, Omulie; later, seeking revenge, he goes alone into the mountains and perishes together with a pack of wolves, his falcon dying at his side. The boy Jinde, introverted and stubborn, is pushed along by a marriage that was never truly his, and in the end chooses the most resolute way of ending his own life. The Nidu Shaman, the tribe’s spiritual leader, silently loves his younger brother’s wife, never marries, and guards that unspeakable feeling across decades—only to depart this world when she does.

These deaths are heartbreaking to read, but by the end you realize they weave together an utterly distinctive web of life. The Ewenki’s attitude toward nature is not reverence from above but the equality of merging into it. Reindeer are not merely a means of production to them; they are family, companions, spiritual anchors. In winter, everyone grinds the grain they have saved into powder and mixes it into feed for the reindeer, while they themselves gnaw on dried fish and freeze-dried berries. When a doe struggles in labor, “my” mother keeps watch beside her for three days and nights, warming her with her own body heat. They believe that to protect the reindeer and the forest is to protect themselves.

What moved me most is their view of death. The Ewenki believe in the cycle of life; death is not an ending but a going home—a return to the wind, the snow, the forest, the cooking smoke of the ancestors. Because of this openness, they mourn death without being wounded by it. It reminds me of the way generations in One Hundred Years of Solitude reuse the same names—an expression, really, of the same understanding of life’s continuation: the vanishing of the individual is never the end, only existence continuing in another form.

There is one passage that left a deep impression on me. Because the natural environment could take a life at any moment, the Ewenki live each day as if it were the last, spending each one to the fullest—and their hearts, paradoxically, are all the more at peace. This way of life is the exact opposite of the anxiety so many of us carry today. We are forever fretting over the future, forgetting that every present moment deserves to be truly lived.

After finishing the book, I often think about how different cultures shape different ways of knowing. When the Ewenki see themselves as part of nature—like a single branch on a tree, which will sprout again next year even after it snaps—they cease to fear death. Perhaps it is precisely this view of life, fused with nature, that let them keep their inner freedom through nearly a century of violent upheaval.

Exhalation (Ted Chiang’s Science-Fiction Collection)

Reader: Liam

Today I’d like to share Ted Chiang’s science-fiction collection Exhalation. Chiang is an extremely low-output writer—he has written nothing but short stories his whole life—but each one is like a precise thought experiment. His best-known work is Story of Your Life, adapted into the film Arrival. I picked two of the most interesting pieces from Exhalation to share.

The first is “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” It tells of a group of artificially raised digital life-forms—a bit like Digimon or Pokémon—trained from scratch by a company called Blue Gamma to think, perceive, and socialize like humans. The protagonist, Ana, once worked at a zoo and becomes a trainer of these digital beings at the company. Early customers buy them and raise them, but once the novelty wears off they find the creatures’ needs growing ever more complex—raising them becomes as agonizing as raising children—and the business gradually withers. Later a more advanced virtual-world platform appears; migrating the old digital beings over to it is possible, but the cost is staggering. In the end, to raise the funds for migration, Ana and her companions must face an almost unbearable choice: to sell the licensing rights to the digital pandas “Marco” and “Polo” they had poured their hearts into raising to a company that provides sexual services, using that money to buy a ticket into the new world.

This seemingly absurd story raises three very sharp questions.

The first is the problem of identity continuity. At the moment a digital life is downloaded from the old server and uploaded to the new one, is it still the same being it was? The core structure may be identical, but after a reconstruction, is that “self” the same “self,” or a copy?

The second is the problem of the rights of digital life. Marco and Polo gradually absorb human culture through training, begin to become aware of their own existence, and even ask their humans: I have done so much for you—why can I not have the status of a legal person? When AI truly awakens to this point, what rights should we grant it?

The third is the problem of brain-computer interface compatibility. If in the future our consciousness can be uploaded to a brain-computer interface, then when the interface is upgraded and old versions are no longer compatible with the new, the old consciousness will be sealed off from the new world—becoming this era’s “leftover,” forever unable to reach the world that has moved on.

These issues sound like science fiction, but they are not as far off as they seem. Not long ago there was a news report that scientists can now completely scan and upload every neural signal in a fruit fly’s cerebral cortex to a server, after which the virtual fly can move, forage, rest, and excrete autonomously, just like a real one. That is not programmed, simulated behavior but spontaneous vital activity. Musk was very excited by this, because it means that when server computing power is strong enough, we really might scan and upload all eighty or ninety billion neurons of an entire human being—and at that point, digital immortality would no longer be merely a concept.

The second piece is the title story, “Exhalation,” set in a completely closed miniature universe. The intelligent beings there are made entirely of metal and stone, sustaining their thought and action through high-pressure gas flowing inside them; when the pressure runs low, they detach their “lungs” and refill them, like swapping a battery. One day an anatomist among them dissects his own brain from a third-person vantage and discovers, to his horror, that their universe is a closed system governed by the second law of thermodynamics: pressure will gradually equalize from high to low until all the energy in the universe is spent and every living thing dies. He writes his discovery into a journal and posts it on the network, leaving it for whatever future civilizations might exist.

They know exactly how it ends, and know there is no way to change that ending. So what do they do? The answer is: keep enjoying life, keep exploring the world.

This is precisely Ted Chiang’s central theme. Using different science-fiction premises to probe the limits of the universe and the meaning of life, the view he arrives at is this: even if you foresee the ending, free will is itself the first cause, and every choice is an affirmation of the self. Just like the heroine of Arrival, who—knowing full well her daughter will die young—still chooses to bear her, raise her, and love her, because those moments are themselves the meaning.

It also brings to mind Heidegger’s existentialism. He said the history of Being is the history of Being forgotten; the human being is the only being that concerns itself with its own existence, yet we so easily sink into the trivia of daily life, evading the question of existence itself. Ted Chiang’s science fiction, with its most distant premises, pulls us back before the nearest question: when all will return to silence, what do you choose to do right now?

From Reading to Output

Reader: Richard

Today I’d like to share a practical book on reading method, on the theme of how to turn reading into output. I chose it because, in the age of AI, the way we read has actually changed at its root, and I wanted to use this book to rethink how, exactly, we should read in this new era.

The book cites a statistic that startled me: at present, about 50% of adults worldwide have finished only one book in the past year. In other words, anyone who still reads regularly each month is already a rare exception. But on the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of “hundred-books-a-year” checkbox reading, flipping through dozens of pages a day yet retaining almost nothing. This numbers-game reading is, in essence, no different from zero. The meaning of reading has never lain in how many books you finish, but in whether you actually put what you read to use.

The author shares several methods I found genuinely enlightening; let me pick a few of the most practical.

First, compound-interest reading. Spend just 15 minutes a day reading 10 pages, and over a year you can finish more than 70 books. The key is not how much you read in one sitting, but making reading a steady rhythm in life, accumulating slowly like compound interest.

Second, read with intention. For practical and knowledge books, always read with a clear question in mind; before you open the book, work out “what problem am I trying to solve,” then, as you read, sweep for relevant content like radar. Enjoyment reading—novels, philosophy—is the exception; it calls for immersion rather than a goal.

Third, the “100 minus your age” page-judgment method. When you pick up a book, if you are, say, 30 this year, read only the first 70 pages; at 40, the first 60. If by then you still don’t feel the book is worth continuing, drop it decisively. The older you are, the sharper your judgment, and the fewer samples you need. This method sounds a bit radical, but behind it is a respect for time. Life is finite, and a bad book isn’t worth finishing.

Fourth, cross-disciplinary linking. New viewpoints arise only when knowledge from different fields meets in the mind. The book gives an example: combine “intermittent fasting” with “delegation management” and you can invent an “intermittent delegation method.” Everything you have read is raw material for future creation.

Fifth, mark lightly, organize heavily. Don’t take copious notes as you read—that breaks your train of thought. Fold down a corner or make a digital bookmark, then organize it all at once after you finish.

Once we enter the age of AI, our reading methods need some new adjustments.

You can let AI read non-classic books for you, but classics must be read yourself—and read repeatedly. AI can help you map out the core reading list and main thread of a field, letting you get up to speed quickly along that thread. But the most important point is to keep accumulating your own digital notes day by day; this personal corpus is the foundation of your distinctiveness in the age of AI. Because when different people ask AI the same question, the answers tend to be much alike; but add your own background, thinking, and notes as context, and the result is entirely different. Luhmann’s slip-box method has become very easy to practice today with AI assistance, but differences in fluency will open enormous gaps. This is something that requires continual practice.

Finally, I want to say that this very form of ours—the book club—is itself excellent. Reading alone is a private conversation; reading together is a collision of ideas. Every book shared today will leave a new link in my own later reading, and this mutual sparking is something solitary reading can never give.

Zhou Enlai: A Biography

Reader: Andy

Recently I read two versions of the biography of Zhou Enlai: one by the American journalist Dick Wilson, the other from a Chinese institute of literature and history. Having finished both, I think the Chinese one is better—not for its stance, but for its richer material. The domestic author had at hand a great many of Zhou Enlai’s letters, poems, and meeting records, so the portrait is more three-dimensional; the foreign journalist’s version wins on the relative objectivity of its distance.

For this sharing I used a small trick. I photographed the book’s core content and threw it to AI, asking it to help me lay out the stages of Zhou Enlai’s life and his key choices, and turn them into a slide deck. Today I’ll talk about this man—whom I admire more the more I read—around four of these key choices.

Childhood: a talent for coordination forged in absence. Zhou Enlai was born in 1898 and, before he was even one year old, was adopted out to a dying uncle. His adoptive father soon died, and he and his adoptive mother relied on each other; she came from a scholarly family and taught him the Confucian classics from an early age. Later, his birth mother won ten thousand dollars in a lottery and brought the whole family together to live. His birth mother was skilled at mediating family conflicts, and young Zhou Enlai often stayed by her side, watching as she listened first to one and then to the other, slowly untangling the knots between them. This early immersion laid the groundwork for his later gift for coordination. His adoptive mother died when he was ten and his birth mother when he was eleven; at twelve he went to his eldest uncle in Shenyang, and later followed him to Tianjin and enrolled at Nankai School. At Nankai, his essays were always ranked first in the school, and it was then that he wrote the line “to study for the rise of the Chinese nation.”

First choice: embracing communism during his years in France. After graduating from high school, Zhou Enlai first went to Japan; because of Japan’s invasion of China he returned home, arrived in time for the May Fourth Movement, and met Deng Yingchao, who at just fourteen was already a leader of the women’s revolutionary movement in Tianjin. Later he went to France on a work-study program, seeking a path to save the nation alongside people like Deng Xiaoping and Zhu De. He could have taken the smooth road of an elite scholar, but in the end he chose the communist faith and joined the Chinese Communist Party in France. From that moment he bound his personal fate entirely to the Chinese revolution, and never betrayed that original choice for the rest of his life.

Second choice: yielding supreme command at the Zunyi Conference. Many people don’t know that, before the 1935 Zunyi Conference, Zhou Enlai was in fact the de facto supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party’s army. He had risen all the way from director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy, established the army’s political-work system, and was the substantive leader of the Nanchang Uprising. But at the Zunyi Conference he voluntarily gave up supreme military command, championing Mao Zedong as leader and content to occupy the number-two position for more than forty years. This act of “yielding” is exceedingly rare; most people’s instinct is to grip power tightly, yet he saw clearly who was better suited to shoulder that burden in that era. The more than forty years of cooperation that followed vindicated his judgment.

Third choice: “seeking common ground while reserving differences” at Bandung. The 1955 Bandung Conference was the most perilous and most brilliant moment of Zhou Enlai’s diplomatic career. He was originally to take the first plane to Bandung, but that plane was blown up by Taiwanese agents, killing several diplomats; he arrived only by taking the second. On arrival, the conference was thick with hostility toward China, with many nations closing in. He set aside the speech he had prepared and put forward four words—“seek common ground while reserving differences”—abandoning ideological argument to look for a common foundation. It was those four words that turned the entire Asian-African situation around and won China its most precious friends.

Fourth choice: staying within the system during the Cultural Revolution. During those years, Zhou Enlai’s position was extremely difficult. He did not agree with the radical policies, yet he chose to remain within the system and bear humiliation, using what power remained to him to protect large numbers of officials, scientists, and intellectuals, and to keep the machinery of the state running at a minimum. In 1972 he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, yet in his final stage he still received hundreds of meetings and diplomatic engagements from his hospital bed.

Having finished both books, a summary of him slowly surfaced in my mind: he was “history’s ultimate mender.” Between grand vision and stark reality, someone always has to fill the crack; between the extreme politics above and the people’s livelihood below, someone always has to be the buffer. Zhou Enlai took on this most thankless of roles, and with immense resilience and self-sacrifice, stitched the broken things back together, one thread at a time.

There is a line that puts it beautifully: history is made not only by those who wield the great hammer to shatter the old world, but also by those who, amid crisis, bear humiliation and piece the broken pieces back together.

A Land of the Ordinary

Reader: Carolyn

Today I’d like to share A Land of the Ordinary, a novel by the Malaysian Chinese writer Li Zishu.

First, about the author. Li Zishu is a highly unusual person. Her father was a Muslim who took four wives, and she is the daughter of one of them. Her father was away from home for long stretches, and she shouldered the burden of the family from a young age. One childhood experience left a deep mark on me. One night, only she and her younger sister were home when a bad man climbed the large tree outside and came in through the window. They called out to the neighbors all night long, and not a single person came. The next day a neighbor even said, “I heard you calling; I thought you were playing.” Afterward the two of them wanted to saw down that tree, but two little girls were, in the end, powerless. This experience left a deep imprint on her and shaped the “life is simply like this” quality of her later writing.

Li Zishu is an exceptionally honest writer. She once said that from a certain day on she decided to be a thoroughly honest person, doing away even with the polite ornaments of social life. She insists on writing in Chinese in Malaysia, walking her own path with this lonely courage. Read her books and you immediately feel a personal coloring that cannot be replicated.

The heroine of A Land of the Ordinary is a blind woman named Gu Yinxia. The author says she chose a blind woman as protagonist because a woman who cannot see a man’s face will, in fact, feel the world more attentively. Yinxia is intelligent by nature, clear and calm in temperament, and makes her living as a switchboard operator at a taxi-radio company. Because she is articulate, has a lovely voice, and possesses an astonishing memory, she can name precisely where each passenger got in and where they got out. In her mind she holds a map of the city.

The structure of the book is very unusual. It does not follow a timeline but strings the whole book together through one image of place after another. Each chapter unfolds around a location—perhaps a temple, a street, a building—and once the people and events of that place have been told, the next place is drawn in. There is no explicit chronology, yet through the shifting of images you can clearly feel the times changing. The book even includes a map of Ipoh, Malaysia; every place mentioned really exists, and reading it is like touring Ipoh with a map in hand. Through the paper you can feel that humid, sultry climate, those rain-soaked streets, the large shopping malls that were already there in the seventies and eighties (where locals would duck in to escape the summer heat)—the sense of scene is remarkably vivid.

Yinxia has two good friends. One is Xihui, an ethnic Chinese boy who has had asthma since childhood, nicknamed “Sickly Hui”; ordinary in looks and mediocre in gifts, he nonetheless stays by Yinxia’s side, teaching her to read one word at a time in a stairwell no one knew about, until Yinxia could later recite the entire Xinhua Dictionary backward. The other is Raju, of Indian descent, brilliantly gifted and always first in his class, who grows up to become a lawyer fighting for the rights of the poor. The three children grow into one another’s light on that low, humble street. Xihui never treats Yinxia as disabled in his care for her; in his eyes she is simply a normal girl. Reading those details, I felt that the highest form of love is perhaps just this: in your eyes, the other person has never lacked for anything.

Yet the turn always comes in the end. Xihui finally marries someone else, Yinxia is raped, and later she marries an old man. It is hard for a reader not to be heartbroken here. But what most struck me about this book is that Yinxia herself is not saddened. She simply feels that life is like this, and it is enough to live it out day by day. The author does not play up her suffering for drama; on the contrary, she lets Yinxia keep a near-Zen calm. That “life is simply like this” attitude toward life is like a blunt needle, pricking the heart of every reader.

There is another detail that moved me. Yinxia’s mother spent her whole life obeying her husband’s arrangements, with no voice of her own. But one year, this mother suddenly awakens and decides to buy a home entirely her own, to not depend on her husband, to live her own life. I later saw in an interview that the author actually wrote that stroke for her own mother. Her mother lived her whole life under patriarchy, and she wanted to use the novel to complete, on her behalf, the awakening her mother never could.

The book also unexpectedly made the Xin Long Yuan white-coffee shop in Ipoh famous; many readers flew there just to drink a cup of coffee on the street from the book. Li Zishu’s touch is like an Edward Yang film—faint, shadowed, damp—and it simply, naturally comes to its end. Once you finish, an aftertaste lingers in the heart for a very, very long time.

Reading it to the end, I suddenly understood that perhaps this is what reading is for: in some moment of being moved, your heart softens a little, or grows brave once more, or a touch more resolute. It is at these small nodes that your life is gently nudged forward.

Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death

Reader: Joyce

The book I’ll share as the finale today is Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death. Its author is the Dutch scholar Manfred Kets de Vries, who combines the roles of clinical psychoanalyst, leadership coach, and professor. This book is his scientific look back, from the angle of psychoanalysis, at the four core questions of human life.

On sex. The author unpacks the matter of “sex” along three dimensions.

The first is the psychological dimension: attachment lasts longer than desire. A good sexual relationship ultimately transforms from desire into intimate attachment, and true intimacy is not using sex to perform strength, but daring to expose one’s vulnerability before the other.

The second is the evolutionary dimension: men favor appearance in choosing a mate for the sake of passing on their genes; women favor loyalty for the sake of securing the raising of offspring. Monogamy is a product of social evolution, not a biological instinct. Male jealousy is, in essence, the fear of “paternal uncertainty”—the fear of raising another man’s child. But a truly lasting relationship ultimately transcends this gene-level calculation and moves toward a fit at the level of values.

The third is the creativity dimension: sexual energy can be sublimated into creativity. Being creative is itself a kind of sexual attraction, and sexual energy can be converted into the drive for art, career, and exploration. One line in the book struck me deeply: many people who frequently chase brief romantic relationships do so not because desire is strong, but because they are empty inside and need this way to prove their own existence. Sexual energy is life force; to suppress sexual energy is to suppress life force, and suppression brings anxiety, inner friction, and a hollowing out.

On money. In the unconscious, money symbolizes power and control. Freud even, at a deep psychological level, associated money with the symbolism of excrement. Those who lacked in childhood fill the hollow inside by hoarding money; those hungry for recognition buy a sense of existence by squandering it; some use money to buy out intimate relationships, and some who shout “Fuck your money” are, in essence, all saying “no” to the world—which is really a defense mechanism against powerlessness.

More interestingly, many people, after earning more than enough, still keep pursuing more, finally falling into “wealth fatigue syndrome.” The book’s advice is that a suitable amount of wealth—enough to cover life—is enough; there’s no need to let money kidnap every inch of your life’s time.

On happiness. One of the greatest misconceptions of modern people is equating happiness with wealth and status, so that the more they pursue, the less happy they become. Happiness actually depends on the gap between expectation and reality; let expectations swell without limit and you will suffer forever. True happiness comes from the small things of everyday life—a cup of coffee, an evening breeze, a conversation in which you are truly heard. It comes from inner growth, human connection, and giving back to society—not from fame and fortune.

On death. This is the part of the book that moved me most. The author says death is the backdrop of life; precisely because there is an ending, the process has meaning. People’s fear of death is, in essence, not fear of death itself, but fear of “never having truly lived.” And there is a line I especially love: no one grows old because of age; one grows old only by losing interest in life.

At the end of the book, the author leaves three lines as the exit for the whole work:

Love, as though you will never be hurt;

Work, as though you have no need of money;

Live, as though today were the last day of the world.

I’d like to offer these three lines to every friend present today.

Closing

After the sharing ended, we talked for a long while around the question, “What do you want to leave behind?” Everyone’s answer was different, yet they echoed one another in wondrous ways.

Carolyn said that if she met a moment of national survival, she would want to be a protector of civilization—like those who escorted the Forbidden City’s treasures westward during the War of Resistance—one small pebble among them. She also wants to donate her organs, so that a part of her body can keep functioning in this world.

Joyce said she wants to open a café, collect the story of every guest, and finally compile these stories into a thick book, leaving behind the traces of these ordinary people who once lived, loved, and struggled.

Hanbing said she wants, in any form whatsoever, to pass energy to those around her—a single sentence, a passage of writing, one warm backward glance. She said she doesn’t cling to form; as long as someone, because of some sentence of hers, figures something out, feels a moment of joy, or feels a little warmth, that is enough for her.

Liam said he might break his property and his body into many, many parts and give them to many, many people, and in this way keep participating in—or keep watching—this world.

Andy said that what he most wants to do now is to settle everything that ought to be settled with those around him: to have a clear conscience toward family, toward friends, toward clients. That is the simplest legacy he can think of right now.

And what came to Richard’s mind was an image from Buddhism: many practicing monks, at the end of a day, will wash clean the cup they drank from and set it upside down on the table, because they do not know whether they will wake again tomorrow. Live in the present; there is no need to force yourself to leave something behind. If you live rightly, you will naturally influence others—and that is what you leave behind.

Joyce brought the book club to its close. She said that people who are on the same frequency and sincere are not, after all, so easy to meet. The six of us sat together in deep conversation from a little after seven in the evening, talking from the Argun River to the cyber-universe, from Zhou Enlai to the streets of Ipoh, from sex to death. Every book seemed to tell someone else’s story, yet in the end each held up a mirror to ourselves.

The Ewenki teach us that death is not an ending but a going home. Ted Chiang reminds us that even knowing the ending, we must still actively choose. Zhou Enlai tells us that history is made not only by those who wield the great hammer, but also by those who mend within the cracks. Yinxia shows us that life is simply like this, and it is enough to live it out slowly. The methodology of reading reminds us that in the age of AI, the corpus you have personally accumulated is the very reason you are you. And the four cards of sex, money, happiness, and death tell us: love, work, and live, as though today were the last day of the world.

The world is so vast, the ending so far away—yet every present moment truly belongs to us.

May we all be like that anatomist in the miniature universe, who—knowing the pressure will finally equalize—still chooses to keep breathing, keep writing, keep leaving the thoughts of this moment for a further future. May we all be like Yinxia, who, within an imperfect fate, still lives out every tomorrow with quiet calm. May we all be like Zhou Enlai, who, in the crack between ideal and reality, was an earnest mender.