The Dangerous Adolescent Years and the Complex Jianghu of the Internet

Waking up in the morning, I saw the news that a teenager from Xingtai, Hebei who had been searching for his birth parents, Liu Xuezhou, had died by suicide, and my heart was stung. This fifteen-year-old was one year younger than my son, right in adolescence. His life was wretched: in his short life he was sold by his biological parents, lost his adoptive parents to death, endured school bullying, sexual abuse, and cyberbullying. To him, life was not beautiful. So he fell ill with depression, and under the stimulus of multiple external factors, he chose to take his own life.

Had he not killed himself, his remaining years would likely have required difficult psychological repair. I read his suicide note; it was well written, with delicate feelings, but he could not escape the mental dilemma brought by economic pressure and emotional confusion. Being in adolescence, which itself carries many adolescent problems, he easily went to extremes. Suicide is the number-one cause of death among adolescents; every year great numbers of young people die by suicide like him, which is especially heartrending.

I rarely comment on such hot events. First, because I do not want to be drawn into trending events and disrupt my work and life; second, because in my twenties I was also a fairly influential writer on Tianya Community, and I witnessed firsthand how cyberbullying can turn a living person into a corpse, reducing an otherwise normal person to insanity.

My experience on Tianya made me realize that everyone who joins a hot topic—whether so-called supporters or opponents—inevitably ends up with others blood on their hands. The best way to handle such things is for everyone to say a little less, let the situation calm, and let the fragile people caught in the whirlpool return to peace. Those who care can privately give them some care and help them out of the shadows. I have used this method to help several people deeply harmed by cyberbullying through their hardest stretch; what they need is not the crowd screaming support or opposition, but only the delicate care of one person who truly cares, for a period of time.

So now I keep a fairly safe distance from the internet, isolating myself as much as possible in a quiet corner to avoid being drawn into the whirlpool of public opinion. Many people ask me why I do not open comments and replies on my articles; today I can answer them: it is because I have deeply experienced how much harm the irrational voices online can do to people.

As an adult, I cannot even bear the various violences of this complex internet jianghu; how could a fifteen-year-old with a wretched fate, caught in a nationwide online maelstrom, avoid death? I have not counted how many suicides are linked to cyberbullying, but I have personally witnessed several, so I care deeply about this issue.

The internet is not a fair place. A few days ago I recommended an excellent surgeon to a family member of a liposarcoma patient; after looking this doctor up online, he told me the doctor reputation did not seem very good. I told him: if you look carefully, my reputation may not be very good either.

All kinds of people can easily post their views online; some are true, some false, some are the unverifiable grievances vented by extremists, and some may even be malicious defamation from competitors. Vast amounts of garbage information are mixed with useful information, making it hard to rely on online information to distinguish right from wrong. Even the UN Secretary-General recently said that this information highway humans have built is already full of hate speech and fake news.

While researching cancer, I occasionally also provide parenting-education consulting for some parents of adolescents—out of their esteem, they think I may be able to help. Not long ago, a child and his parents were tense and opposed because of internet issues; his mother consulted me on how to resolve it and paid for my time. After two conversations, I eased the parent-child relationship and, by the way, used Gan Mai Dazao Tang (Licorice, Wheat, and Jujube Decoction) to reduce the child anxiety and insomnia. This made me very happy. I especially hope that these children, around my son age, can all grow up happy and healthy, and that no tragedy befalls any of them.

This teenager misfortune was special: his life was too wretched, lacking basic love and care. But without those chaotic verbal attacks online, he probably would not have killed himself; time might have healed his wounds. After all, many people grow up in hardship, and some end up exceptionally strong. Unfortunately he was drawn into such a whirlpool and lost his life.

We live in the information age. While enjoying its conveniences, we also suffer its drawbacks. How can we keep these troubles from becoming our nightmares? Personally, I think the best method is to keep a safe distance from the internet.

Some of my readers are especially eager to drag me into various group chats; I have never once agreed to join. A close friend who loved doing this thought I was too conservative, unwilling to learn new things through interacting with others. Only later, after she herself debated and quarreled with people in various groups and developed anxiety and depression, even occasional auditory hallucinations, did she realize that so-called online communication also has great harms. By then she understood that my keeping a safe distance was not without reason. On my advice she quit all group chats; after half a year, the above symptoms resolved on their own without treatment.

Some of my cancer patients also often cannot sleep. In fact, the main reason for their poor sleep is not their disease but smartphones. Smartphones let them be too affected by the true-and-false information online, so they easily stay tense. I generally advise them to reduce smartphone use, especially staying away from the phone for two to three hours before bed, to exercise more, and to use no sleep aids or only minimal ones; this works far better than merely taking sleeping pills.

We all have problems that need the internet, but we should also see that while this thing brings convenience it also brings great harm; do not treat it as a lifeline. Practice has shown that the internet is making a generation shallow and restless and dulling many people intellect. So living in such an era, we must have our own ability to think and to self-regulate.