Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

Cruelty and mercy are one and the same. Existence in this world relegates good and evil to the exact same status. Cruelty and evil are only natural, and together they are endowed with half the power and half the utility in this world. It seems I’m going to have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of my own fate.

People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money. The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fact that I was pure carrion inside.

The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

old motto was I’m sentencing her to the guillotine, my new motto contained a revelation: The power to construct oneself is destiny.

Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.

My time was gradually consumed by tears. The whole world loves me, but what does it matter since I hate myself?

A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence.

No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago. All that you know is that you’ve been crucified for something, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life feeling like no one and nothing will help you, that you’re in it alone. Your individual circumstances, which separate you from everyone else, will keep you behind bars for life. On top of it all, humanity tells me I’m lucky. Privilege after privilege has been conferred upon me, and if I don’t seem content with my lot, they’ll be devastated.

The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit.

She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.

she wasn’t supposed to have such feelings but because she was telling me about them. Because femininity meant having to hide one’s true feelings.

College—now there’s a system. Though it’s not quite death, it’s a pretty close second. It’s the nexus of three major institutions (compulsory education, compulsory labor, and compulsory marriage), and these three institutions happen to be the greatest achievements of human civilization.

For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I’d rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean.

What is the human race, anyway, but a multitude of outlets for desires? There’s no suppressing the truths that arise from our experiences. Desires teach us lessons, and we have to go forth into the new worlds that we construct for ourselves.” Chu Kuang’s voice trembled. “When you can’t, that’s when you die.”

Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.

do to lessen the pain, no source that I could pinpoint. Secretly, though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn’t have a whole lot going on.

‘Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.’

On how to love well: Instead of embracing a romantic ideal, you must confront the meaning of every great love that has shattered, shard by shard.

Unhealthy love is two people stoking a shared fantasy of desperate beauty, weaponizing passion and desire. Real life is filled with twists and turns, changes, recurrences. Before you even know it, you’ve become a deluded romantic who denies the consequences of time or destroys the very thing that they love.

we brought out the ugliness in each other, as if hatred was the seed of our love.

The deeper you love, the deeper your compassion grows and the more you realize that the other suffers just as you do.

There was no right or wrong here. In the end, the world didn’t owe me anything, not even half a chance. That was the hand I’d been dealt in life, and while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.

“But when you decide to love someone, how do you keep thinking of commitment as a choice, when you’re closing yourself off to opportunities that might lead to even greater happiness? And if you continually demolish your old internal structures, then how can you preserve enough of yourself to keep the same relationship alive day after day?”

A certain part of me has died as I’ve learned to leave behind the qualities of my youth—the overanxiousness, oversensitivity, and self-consciousness, not to mention arrogance and idealism, that diminish with life experience.

I no longer think of myself as an unhappy person—quite the opposite. Admitting that I have problems is a mode of optimism, since every problem has a solution. Unhappiness is a lot like bad weather: It’s out of your control. So if I encounter a problem that even death can’t solve, I shouldn’t care whether I’m happy or unhappy, thereby negating both the problem and the problem of a problem. And that is where happiness begins.