Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

“Why would you need another person to die with you? That’s horrible.”

Man’s greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.

I was dying to see if it was that of the Moon Goddess herself. “Waiting for the Sun, Waiting for You” and “The Wild Lily Has Its Spring, Too,” those were the songs that defined my high-school days. My favorite Sylvia Chang songs—“The One I Love Best,” “Flower on the Sea,” “Standing on Top of the World,” or “She Goes Walking by the Sea”—capture the mood of each of her major eras. “Love Song 1980,” “Love Proverbs,” and “Little Sister” were Lo Ta-Yu’s biggest hits.

Look up these songs?

The crocodiles thought: What was everyone after, anyhow? If that many people secretly liked them, that’d be totally embarrassing.

There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected.

Convinced that it was possible to change, I went about it all rather nonchalantly, and during that phase, I basically behaved as if I had sold my soul. I felt no personal attachment to anyone. Nothing fazed me.

Strikes close to home a bit

How is biology going to help us to understand man’s nature?

When the boundaries are nearly nonexistent, who has the heart to impinge on the other?

“But Anti-Croc, you’ve never even seen a crocodile before. How can you start talking about what kind of influence crocodiles will have on the future of society?”

“Crocodiles are not humans,” Anti-Croc said. “According to you, all crocodiles should be preemptively thrown in jail, just in case you have a child who might become a crocodile. What if you suddenly woke up one day to find that you’d turned into a crocodile, what would you do then?” Pro-Croc said.