Life's sink lake

Author: Qian Liqun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: The professor's lectures are just so engaging, no wonder there are so many students. We only have a few required courses, yet the classroom, which seats over a hundred, is always packed. With the sunlight shining outside, listening to the professor's lectures every Wednesday morning in the beautiful sun is truly a blessing. I love when the professor reads articles to us. At those times, we can listen in a relaxed, even lazy manner, getting lost in the words or drifting off a little. Seeing the sunlight makes us dance with joy. – From the Peking University "New Youth" website article "Wishing the Professor a Swift Recovery"
I've heard students say I'm "lovable" more than once—honestly, among all the evaluations of me, this is what I like and cherish, and I even hope these words will be inscribed on my tombstone: "This is a lovable person." This is the lifelong great pursuit of mine. I do often sharply criticize Peking University, and I won’t deny my profound disappointment in today’s university. Because of this, some at Peking University despise me, but those who truly understand my deep love for the university and support me are also its people. Peking University will always be my spiritual sanctuary.
I want to write about the "Chinese Story" and "My Story" of the 20th century, with the two serving as references and supplements, perhaps forming a coherent system. At my age, I have an advantage in completing such work: compared to my younger friends, I’ve entered old age but possess experiences they don’t. In the community of the elderly, I’m still a "little brother," so I still have the energy to do some research.
Yes, I exist. I’m striving. And we support each other like this. – That’s enough. To put it simply, over the past 20 years, the work I’ve done boils down to "talking about Lu Xun" and trying to "continue the story," in hopes of transforming the century’s suffering of the nation, family, and individuals into spiritual resources.
—Qian Liqun
Back then, the gunshots at the gate of the Executive Government Building shook the souls of all intellectuals. Lu Xun stopped his ongoing writing, furiously writing: "The bullets fired were the blood of the youth," "What difference does it make if it’s written with a pen?" He called this day the "darkest day since the Republic," and predicted: "This is not the end of an event, but its beginning," "The longer it’s delayed, the higher the interest we’ll have to pay."
And Zhu Ziqing, who witnessed this massacre and crawled out from the pile of corpses, felt it was a "terrible day." He wrote "Record of the Massacre by the Duan Government" with a determined pen, urging the nation to "see this grim China of March 18, 1926, in the 20th century."
This book is a collection of the author’s thoughts and academic written around the turn of the century.