The sky was overcast, like a giant lead plate pressing down on the city of Beiping, suffocating its inhabitants. At the entrance of the old street's alleyway stood a newly built wall, gray bricks and cement, exuding a sense of rigidity and finality.
When we talk about Japan, what are we talking about? Is it the exquisite cuisine, the busy subways, or the predicament of an aging society? The incident of a Japanese elderly man falling into a sewer and not being rescued for 35 days may give us some deeper thoughts. This is not just an individual tragedy, but an echo of the entire era.
Mr. K stood on the platform, enveloped in a restless crowd. The mechanical female voice repeated over and over again on the loudspeaker: "Train G2985 is temporarily stopped due to an incident. The resumption time is to be determined."
Mrs. Wang was a shrewd woman, shrewd almost to the point of being harsh. She could argue fiercely with a vendor in the market over a price difference of two cents, and she could accurately find the best value-for-money goods in the supermarket's discount section. In the digital age, she took this shrewdness to the extreme – online shopping.
Recently, Mrs. Wang ordered a batch of garbage bags online, 100 pieces, and the store solemnly promised that the quantity was sufficient. But when she received the goods, on a whim, she counted them and found that there were only 38. This instantly tightened Mrs. Wang's shrewd nerves, as if someone had stolen her beloved gold coins.
These days, numbers haunt everyone like ghosts. Would you call this "progress"? I don't see it that way. At least, for this elderly man lying on a stretcher, the numerical password is more fatal than his illness.
Pushing the stretcher is the old man's son, his face a mask of anxiety, beads of sweat larger than soybeans. The old man, meanwhile, is semi-conscious, tubes snaking across his body, occasionally convulsing. Doesn't this scene resemble a postmodern painting? Absurd, yet so real it makes your heart clench.
Li Tiegen felt like a sardine stuffed into a can, squeezed into the classroom of the "International Space Station Chinese Intensive Course." Outside the window was the dark universe, dotted with a few "worthless" stars. He thought, this thing isn't even as bright as the light bulb hanging on the electric pole in his old village.
"Classmates, today we are going to learn the word '奋斗' (fèndòu - struggle/strive)," the teacher, with a thick northeastern accent, shouted at the top of his lungs, "Repeat after me, 奋——斗——"
The Spring Festival is approaching, but I'm not excited at all.
These days, even celebrating the New Year is like abacus beads – you have to flick them to make them move. It's called a holiday, but it's more like "shifting" days. It's always the same number of days, but they insist on piecing them together, calling it the elegant name of "Tiaoxiu" (adjusted rest days). Ha, Tiaoxiu, Tiaoxiu, it adjusts people into anxiety and rests them until they haven't rested at all!
Li Weiming stared at the calendar. The bright red characters for "Spring Festival" were surrounded by dense annotations of "adjusted holidays," like a solitary island encircled by an endless cage. He felt a wave of dizziness, as if the entire world were spinning, the dates like runaway horses, galloping towards an unknowable black hole.
Old Li is a honest and down-to-earth programmer. He lives a nine-to-five life, and the only thing that makes him anxious is the "little red dots" on various apps on his phone.