Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

For four years, that’s what I believed. And I wasted all my college days—when I had the most courage and honesty I would ever have towards life—because of it.

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.

That system had already molded me into a flimsy, worthless shell. It drove my body to retreat into a self-loathing soul, and what’s even scarier is that nobody knew or seemed to recognize it. My social identity was comprised of these two distinct, co-existing constructs. Each writhed toward me with its incessant demands—though when it came down to it, I spent more time getting to know my way around the supermarket next door than I did getting comfortable in my own skin.

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.

The power to construct oneself is destiny.

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.

She spoke timidly, not because 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.

Just hearing the few words you said, I felt as though you were the only one worth listening to. All that other garbage makes me sick. Coming here was a real waste of my time.” This pompous fool spoke as if no one else were around us. My heart was filled with utter disdain. I felt like scoffing but managed to indulge him with a smile nevertheless.

I made a mad dash in the opposite direction. I knew it was too late. I’d already gone down the wrong road too many times.

Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn’t, I’d have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal.