Plato’s Café

Lately I’ve been haunting Plato Cafe quite often.  

It’s a newly opened cafe, next to Wan Sheng Bookstore, on the same floor as Bifengtang.  

This is a rather unusual coffee shop. To be honest, I’m really worried it won’t be able to stay open. I come here often precisely because of how empty it is—such a sharp contrast to the Bifengtang next door!  

What does it feel like to walk into Plato Cafe? Hmm… strange… really… it’s almost like a study room in a library! Besides the arrangement of the tables and chairs and the bright lighting, there’s even a whole wall of books here! There’s also a poster on the wall, advertising a cultural salon—about Laozi!  

The name Plato isn’t just for show; this is a cafe with the air of a cultural salon. The owner is probably well connected in cultural circles, and can often invite well-known cultural figures and scholar-professors to give lectures. Every single book on the shelves is a signed copy.  

The environment here is very suitable for my studying, but it really can’t be compared with the elegant atmosphere of an ordinary cafe, and the food is both expensive and not tasty. After all, there aren’t many suckers like me. Of course, the owner seems to be gradually figuring out how to run the place, so there’s no need for me to worry too much.  

Most of the owner and the waitstaff already recognize me, and whenever they see this sucker coming through the door, they’re always all smiles. Seeing them happy makes me feel pretty happy too, quite cheerful—well, I am a sucker after all!  

The cafe’s wireless internet was malfunctioning and hadn’t been fixed for several days, but the owner brought out an ADSL connection and let me get online by cable, which shows he really is a good person (the sucker’s line of thought keeps on running)!  

Studying here may not necessarily improve my efficiency all that much, but it does feel pretty good. Studying in the dorm often makes me irritable. But in a study room or a library, I feel it’s too quiet.  

I like the feeling of inner peace and quiet, but when the surroundings are at their quietest, it isn’t necessarily when I feel most at peace. People are a kind of scenery too—and scenery that’s very worth appreciating, never tiresome no matter how often you look at it. There are always people around talking, and they become the “background.” Listening, deliberately or not, to human voices and conversation, as if I’m hearing them say something yet not knowing what they’re saying, that kind of feeling is nice. Of course, too much noise is unquestionably irritating. The noise in a cafe is probably just right.  

I don’t know when it started. I’ve actually become this extravagant. In the past, when I ate noodles with topping outside, I would struggle for half a day over the difference between 4 yuan and 5 yuan. But now, when I go to a snack shop for noodles with topping, I probably still have an internal battle over 1 yuan. Yet in a cafe, I’m battling between 28 yuan and 38 yuan; after all, I’m not the type to spend money lavishly without a second thought.  

In the past, I didn’t dare enter these high-end places alone. Once I even made a special trip to the legendary Sanqianyuan, wanting to experience it, but after reaching the entrance I lost my nerve and backed out, then ended up taking several turns and eating shengjianbao instead. Now, on my own, I can sometimes spend fifty or sixty yuan at a time, and once even splurged 100 yuan at a Mexican restaurant! A year ago, that would probably have been pure fantasy for me—in the past, I would only spend lavishly when treating others to a meal; alone, having an occasional KFC meal was already the height of luxury.  

I can’t really say why. Perhaps, as I said long ago, I do have a bit of petit-bourgeois taste. Maybe now it’s finally starting to come true.  

The main trigger was that I recently bought a secondhand laptop. My parents gave me more than 3,000 yuan, and I bought one for 1,850 yuan; thinking about the money I saved, splurging a little doesn’t feel too guilty. Of course, if I really wanted to splurge, I wouldn’t need to pinch pennies from the cracks between my teeth—whenever I ask my parents for money, they never refuse, and if I ask for 2,000, they’ll hand me 3,000. But precisely because I’ve had such freedom, I learned very early on to spend responsibly—be generous without a word when generosity is called for, and not spend extra when thrift is called for. Of course, my recent extravagance has already gone far beyond my usual style.  

I don’t think extravagance is a bad thing; people who are too frugal are actually placing too much value on money. Leaving a chest of gold for one’s descendants is not as good as leaving a shelf of good books they’ve read, leaving behind a kind of positive spiritual wealth. Likewise, people who are spiritually poor are no less common than those who are materially poor. Of course, when I indulge extravagantly, it is necessary to retain a certain degree of guilt. But that doesn’t affect my mood for enjoying life freely. Both poor people and rich people can enjoy life in their own ways; having more money doesn’t necessarily mean a better kind of enjoyment than being poor. But rich people deliberately pursuing a poor lifestyle is just as unrealistic as poor people pursuing a rich lifestyle; neither is a positive attitude. No matter what level of consumption one is at, the happiest thing is to worry less about petty calculations, follow one’s true feelings, and consume and live naturally, as a matter of course.  

On the one hand, I struggle between 4-yuan and 6-yuan noodles with topping; on the other, I can walk into and out of cafes without changing expression. I buy a laptop a bit cheaper, then “save” the money and splurge with it—doesn’t that seem a little hypocritical? I don’t think so. Why bother fussing over such things? I remember a story about Marx: it said that one time Marx discovered a cheaper brand of tobacco than the one he usually smoked, and then proudly told a friend that every time he smoked a box of cigarettes he “saved” one and a half shillings; therefore, the more he smoked, the more he saved. If he could smoke one box a day, then when necessary he could use the “money saved” to cover his daily expenses… Of course, Marx was not foolish enough not to know this was merely a self-deceptive joke, but that was precisely a real, lovable Marx.  

Heh… after all that, it’s nothing more than making excuses for my recent extravagance, basically self-soothing, I suppose. At least in this respect it seems to work pretty well; in a couple of days I’ll come to the cafe again~  

Late night of April 16, 2006  

At Plato Cafe  

＾＾＾＾Well… from now on I can add this line to the end of my articles~ It looks better than writing “at the student dormitory” on such-and-such a day, doesn’t it?^_*

Latest comments

• Xiaoqian

  2006-04-16 23:42:30 

  Where is Plato Cafe? Is it in Beijing?
  I want to go there too

• Xiaoqian

  2006-04-16 23:43:54 http://www.ycool.com/trackback/0/1199001

  It sounds really nice

• Li

  2006-04-17 09:21:01

  Mm
  My friend’s philosophy of spending money has always been: spend the money you want to spend. As long as you’re not a particularly extravagant or willful person, you generally won’t go too far off the rails.

• Xiaochong

  2006-04-18 22:43:40 

  You… you… wrote too well…

• Ming

  2006-04-22 14:48:13 

  T T I hadn’t come for a few days and almost missed such a beautiful piece!
  Xiao San…… @_@

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.