On Tuesday, I went to see “Chang’an” with Chao. The movie is set in the Tang Dynasty and tells the story of the chaos in Chang’an after the An-Shi Rebellion, where Gao Shi recalls his past with Li Bai.
The film features many well-known figures and famous poems from our school textbooks, familiar yet distant. As a Douban user commented:
The words and phrases we hastily memorized in our youth strike us deeply now.
I wasn’t good at Chinese literature, and I only had a general grasp of poetry. In fact, for those poems that required recitation and dictation, I just crammed at the last moment. So, when watching the film, I often felt in my heart: “Oh, so that’s how it was.”
After the movie, I watched many videos about Tang Dynasty poets on Bilibili. Honestly, even though it’s been over a thousand years, the stories from that era still feel vivid today. The romance or empathy in the poems still touch me.
As long as poetry exists, Chang’an exists, it’s always there.
I’m grateful that the words of our ancestors have been passed down to this day, and I appreciate the open-mindedness and inclusiveness of that era, which created such great poets.
The power of words
It reminds me of last month when I took my mom for a physical examination in Hangzhou. After work, I took the high-speed train to West Lake. At about ten o’clock in the evening, the rain stopped, and with nothing else to do, I decided to walk to the White Embankment. The West Lake at night after the rain was quiet, a stark contrast to its usual bustle. There were only a few occasional passersby, and a gentle breeze replaced the daytime heat, making it very pleasant. The last time I visited Hangzhou was three or four years ago on my way home with a high school friend, for a short half-day stopover.
As I walked along the White Embankment towards the center of the lake, I suddenly recalled Zhang Dai’s “Watching Snow at Lake Pavilion”. That prose left a deep impression on me during my middle school years, perhaps because the sense of isolation it depicted resonated with my young heart. Although it wasn’t snowing at that moment, as I stared at the distant Lake Pavilion, I thought of the snow-covered pavilion from centuries ago and the emotions and scenes from that text vividly came to mind.
Damn these words, they have such a lasting impact!
Art exhibition
On Saturday, I visited the “Return to Nature” exhibition at the Mingzhu Art Museum. I had been there once more than a year ago, and this was my second visit. The exhibition wasn’t large, but it had a variety of forms, including painting, installation, sculpture, video, photography, and performance art. How can I put it? I didn’t quite understand it. Compared to words, concrete forms of art limit the reader’s imagination frame, and this frame is two-way, making it difficult to establish a channel of empathy between the creator and the audience.
I still didn’t quite get it. Never mind, let’s go eat1!
Inescapable daily record
This section will document some of the work and study progress of the week, as well as list books and audio-visual content watched or listened to, interesting purchases, etc. It will be relatively journal-like.
Technical learning
- Mainly organizing process-related things
- VCAST unit test cases
- DOORS templates and management strategies
Books and audio-visuals
Podcasts
- Dialogue with Chartered Financial Street: CFA is not just a certificate to me
- The real issues about money, answered long ago in “The Psychology of Money”
- From the duel with Snowflake to how humans coexist with AI
- How was your summer: Let’s keep imagining the good together
- How could ByteDance dominate overseas, but fail to “imitate” Xiaohongshu?
- Dialogue with Jia Yangqing: The open-source battle and application era of large models
Videos
- 57-year-old migrant female worker in Beijing paints in a 3 sqm pipe room: Here lies my soul
- A movie from forty years ago revealing why Chinese scientists went to the US, still sarcastic now
- Is this the Huizhou in your dreams?
- A long article deeply analyzing the poem Easter eggs in “Chang’an” and the deviations from historical facts
Movies
Investment
- In the past two weeks, stock yield +0.55%, underperforming the market +0.70%
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Mitao’s rice is not tasty at all, a disappointment ↩︎
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