Remembering Illness While Ill

8,123 characters2009.04.06

The previous stretch was all nostalgia; it seemed even my body had gotten nostalgic, too. A bout of the flu has risen and fallen with the fluctuations in temperature, dragging on for more than two weeks, and even today it still hasn’t fully cleared up……

Although I’ve had quite a few colds in recent years, they usually pass in three to five days, and I’ve never had that up-and-down relapse of getting better and worse again. That sort of condition was actually quite common when I was little.

As a child I had very poor constitution; I caught colds all the time, took sick leave more than a few times, and never once passed physical education. Getting sick became an indispensable part of my childhood experience. So perhaps because my earlier memoir-like articles didn’t mention these matters at all, the old plague spirit got displeased. All right, then, I’ll make up for it now……

Whether it was being spoiled from birth that led to chronic weakness and illness, or chronic weakness and illness that fostered being spoiled from birth, can no longer be verified. In any case, the two seemed to reinforce each other and form a vicious cycle…… This cycle was broken for the first time in third grade, thanks to the intervention of traditional Chinese medicine. As a child I was long without any appetite at all, pale and skinny, and I still remember that in kindergarten I could never finish lunch, or even if I managed to swallow it down I would certainly vomit it back up. In the lower grades of primary school I was picky and anorexic as well. In the end my family thought of taking me to a traditional Chinese doctor to get “golden needles” in hopes of opening my appetite, and as it turned out, the great traditional Chinese medicine really was too effective, to the point that from then on my appetite opened and never closed again: I ate well and happily, and quickly transformed into a heavyweight. Until I finally succeeded in losing weight in senior year of high school, I had always been the number-one person in the class by tonnage. Of course this also had great significance for the development of my personality, though the specific effects are not so easy to sum up.

When I was little, catching colds was a matter of daily routine, and with my aunt working in a hospital, going to the hospital was like visiting next door; I was extremely familiar with the place. Needles and medicine need not even be mentioned; being hooked up to an IV was also common. I remember the longest time was when I got bronchitis and spent two weeks on an IV, both hands swelling up terribly.

But if one ignores the pain of the needle, lying in a hospital on an IV is actually quite an enviable thing: no need to go to school or do homework, I could read manga like Doraemon and Little Ding Dong by myself, and I could also have my grandfather keep me company playing chess and telling stories. It was probably during one of those IV sessions that Grandfather began telling me stories from the Three Kingdoms. He would tell of Zhuge Liang setting fire to the Battle of Red Cliffs, or of the seven captures of Meng Huo; I never tired of listening to those stories. So later I bought a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, first letting Grandfather read it so that he could tell me more of the plot, and later reading it myself. This should have been the first book I read that was densely packed with nothing but text and no pictures. Before senior high school, I reread it at least once a year on average; in senior high school, I then read through all the other various Chinese historical chapter-novel “romances” as well. My impression of “storytelling” was formed in much the same way.

After third grade in primary school, I no longer got sick every few days, but a new situation began to appear: whenever there was an important competition, I would often first come down with some illness, and then recover just in time on the eve of the competition. And the more serious the illness, the better I would perform in the competition, always exceeding my usual level. By the time senior year of high school came around, my body really had been trained up, and I didn’t even get the slightest illness before a math competition; as a result, I failed utterly in the competition in the end.

I’m not sure whether there’s any logic to this, but at the very least, it can be confirmed that being sick can relieve stress. I could righteously waste my days without nervously cramming, and I also had a way to comfort myself: anyway, I was sick—if I performed poorly and flunked the exam, that would be understandable, wouldn’t it? Going into battle so lightly burdened, I actually performed better than usual. Of course, this may only apply to subjects like mathematics, which rely entirely not on last-minute memorization but on the practice one has accumulated over time. I passed all the way through on recommendation and never actually experienced any truly decisive major exam, nor had I ever even thought that I would need to face such things.

In senior year of high school I played table tennis several hours a day, which not only helped me lose weight quickly, but also greatly strengthened my resistance, and then once I got to university I insisted on taking cold showers. This virtually eliminated colds altogether. During the first three semesters, every time I returned to Shanghai and had to take a hot shower, I would catch a cold; sometimes I would recover right there in Shanghai, and on a few occasions I fell ill near the end of the vacation and brought it back to Peking University.

The worst one was the cold during winter break of sophomore year. That winter break can be said to have been the most vigorous period of my entire undergraduate years: within a little over twenty days I read through more than thirty books, and what mattered most was that I also typed up 150,000 characters of reading notes, such enthusiasm and immersion being extremely rare.

To be frank, the source of that vitality at the time was romance, but good times do not last. It was at the very end of that winter break, during my last two days in Shanghai, that I began to feel as if a cold was coming on; my enthusiasm began to weaken, and I gradually became blank-headed and powerless all over, unable to summon any spirit. In the end I did come down with the illness, and at the same time my relationship came under suspicion. I wanted to defend myself and remedy things, but I still couldn’t shake myself together, and in the end I chose inaction and let it drift away. At the very same time, I again encountered a spiritual crisis: the meaning of life, my own existence, all became vague and unreal. I began trying to negate myself, yet I kept struggling, but it always felt as though I had lost interest in everything. It seemed that this cold had never truly healed.

Which of these “at the same time” events came first, which caused which, is really impossible to distinguish. In short, it was as if I had suddenly fallen from the clouds to the bottom of a valley, and from then on my mood remained depressed and unsteady; climbing back up to the surface again was almost something that happened two or three years later.

Of course, I could shift the blame onto this or that. I could say that my breakup was because of the cold, that my cold persisted because I was in low spirits, and that my low spirits were because of the breakup, and so on. But in fact, in the end, nothing at all had done anything wrong; all the problems were my own problems, though it wasn’t as if I myself were at fault…… Once you ascribe one confusion to another thing, and then transfer your inner blame onto it, it’s actually quite easy to get out of the tangle. Yet I stubbornly insisted on solving my confusion in the way of a philosopher: that is, I had to personally take responsibility for everything, and at the same time absolutely not deny myself. So it was only in the past two years that I was finally reborn from nirvana; that is a story for later.

In the first place, even when I was in a high-spirited state, I was not good at casual small talk just to fill the silence. I am not the kind of person who can always chat and laugh with ease; I am clumsy. Even if I said nothing at all, merely looking at her, or thinking about her, would be enough for me. That is just the way I am. Although everything is mutable, change will proceed over the long term, through mutual participation…… What I want to say, and the background circumstances surrounding it, on the one hand involve private matters, and on the other hand entail too many considerations, so I won’t say much about them here.

In short, one of the bad side effects brought by illness is its influence on the emotions, leading to a lull in desire and passion. But this also makes being sick serve as an excuse for shirking: other people ought to care for the sick, while the sick person not caring about others is perfectly normal. Yet in the end this is just self-deception. After all, although illness does indeed affect mood, a genuine and reliable feeling would never be shaken by a minor illness. And now I have already mastered the art of continuously and reliably drawing on magic power; no enthusiasm for anything will be interrupted by a temporary suppression.

So this cold, apart from allowing me to slump for two weeks without shame, and causing me to miss the originally planned cycling outing, will not make me lose anything.

After recovery, I’ll have to deal properly with all the heavy tasks of this semester…… But whether sickness or tasks, neither will ever extinguish my enthusiasm again.

April 6, 2009