Words are beautiful trap

My alarm about the Word came more than a decade ago. It was in my third year of practice, the last year of my medical career, when there was a typhoid pandemic that summer. I spent the entire summer talking to all the typhoid patients in order to trace the source of the infection, but I still did not find the source. One day it dawned on me that the root cause of the failure to find the source of the infection was that all the patients' complaints were intensely personal. The percentage of people who lie is not large, but people don't have to lie, their words combined are a huge untruth, and in this untruthful discourse of doubt, all the verbal fronts point to multiple digressions, with the result that the searcher is bound to fall into a trap. My main reason for abandoning medicine for literature was, of course, my preference for literature, but that did not exclude my boredom with the spoken word and my trust in the written word.

A deeper awakening came late, in the mid-1990s. I met a long-lost friend in Germany. She had married a German man in the early 1990s. Her story was a big deal at the time. The reason was not that she married a foreigner, but because she didn't know a word of German and because she was ugly. We had no way to understand the foreigner's choice, so we tried to understand hers. But she was a girl of few words, and after some of our friends persistently asked her, she simply told us that the reason she chose this foreigner was because she could not marry such a handsome, elegant and considerate man in China; and her dream in life was to have a considerate man, a comfortable house and a small garden full of green vines, so she would rather give up her words. At that time, we all thought that her sacrifice was too great and too big. We all agreed that she had paid the worst price of her life for her ugly looks and ideals that bordered on the obsessive. It was the mid-90s when I saw her again. This time it was no longer a sensation but a shock. She still had not become beautiful, but she had given birth to two very beautiful mixed-race children. We were sitting on wooden chairs in her large garden drinking coffee, and the vines were really climbing her fence. On the far side of the garden, her youngest daughter was swinging and her son was happily playing soccer with his dad; on the near side of the garden was her oil painting easel. My friend, who still speaks only the simplest of German, has changed her demeanor as profoundly as if she had lived three lifetimes of wealth and stability. It was clear that not only had she not paid the most painful price in life, but that she had successfully achieved her ambition. She said to me with deep appreciation: "Talking is not important; the simplest conversation works well enough. Between intimate people, what matters more are the eyes, the expressions and the actions. What do you think?"

I think my friend's life lesson is a truth or close to one. That day, I went back to the hotel where I was staying, sat in front of the window and thought for a long, long time looking at the quiet, tree-lined residential area of Germany. I thought: Aren't the most common conflicts and troubles in this world caused and created by words? A person's words are true only for a moment when they are spoken. But that moment passes in the blink of an eye. Repeaters and transmitters use their own understanding and tone, and receivers have their own context of understanding. Any one of these subtle elements can change the smooth flow of the discourse and give it multiple meanings. Thus, our lives are filled with ramblings, explanations, gossip and gossip, disconnections and attacks, and name-calling and bullshit. Think how boring it is!

In fact, in a person's life, the person with whom you have no relationship, you talk with him more is also nonsense. But anyone who is related to you, your presence can awaken all his feelings. You don't need to talk. Even if you talk, it is a pile of bubbles, colorful and beautiful looking in the sunlight, but in fact it is only a derivative of your emotional communication, which passes and disappears. What happens and never goes away is the embrace, and the promise is destined to pass with the wind. Yes, that's how things work.