Finding Joy in the Ordinary and the Plain

My wife is always on duty once or twice a month and cannot come home at night. On those days the child has to eat "bachelor's meals" with me, his father. My cooking is not great, and I have always liked light food, so the meals are hardly delicious. But the child eats with relish; watching my son enjoy this plain fare while chatting and laughing makes me infinitely content.

I remember my son wrote a poem as a child, with lines roughly like: "If a person can be ordinary for a lifetime, and content to be ordinary, that too is greatness."

Now the child has grown up, with his own hobbies and dreams. Loving mathematics, he dreams not only of entering Peking University's math department but of winning the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics. He has forgotten that childhood poem and always hopes for some extraordinary achievement.

Young people are inevitably arrogant; I fully understand his current dreams and passion, having once lived through such passionate times. Compared with my own middle-school dreams, I can only describe my present self as "unrecognized talent" and "down and out." But past middle age I have gradually realized that childhood me was typically a case of great ambition outstripping ability; setting one's sights higher than one's capacities makes it normal that ideals go unfulfilled. A childhood friend of mine calls this "defoaming of ideals." He works in finance now and is fond of jargon like "defoaming," and it fits here perfectly.

I do not want my son to live under pressure, so at meals I often tell him that his childhood way of thinking was better. But after encountering biology, I roughly understand that people in certain growth stages are easily influenced by environment, yet as age increases, inborn nature determined by genes will play the decisive role in thought and behavior—what the Chinese ancients called returning to simplicity.

So I do not worry that my son will fail to adapt to ordinary days; he will return to simplicity in middle age. Living a passionate, vigorous youth is also quite good. Without all this youthful exertion, where would the calm water of middle age come from?

I have seen many people lose their children. I have met children tormented by pediatric tumors who ultimately died, and children who jumped to their deaths from depression. Their parents are stricken with grief; in sympathizing with them, I am especially grateful to heaven for giving me a robust child. As long as he stays healthy in body and mind, I am fully satisfied and ask for nothing more.

I always tell his mother that we must be content, accept everything about our child, let him live more happily, be tolerant of hobbies we do not share, allow him leisure time, and not rob him of joy. Only someone who feels life's beauty will believe that life is beautiful. Children's lives have just begun; there is no need to make them lose interest in life. If life had only bitterness and no joy, they would doubt its value—which is why some young people choose to take their own lives.

People constantly post articles on social media to make Chinese parents anxious. Recently I saw someone share a talk by a Peking University professor about how amazing Israeli education is, how outstanding the Jewish tradition Israel inherited is, and how backward Chinese traditional education is.

I can hardly agree with such one-sided views. Many nations have risen and fallen in this world, but China has endured. Many peoples have perished again and again—the Jews' fate in particular has been harrowing—yet the Chinese nation has continuously reproduced on this warm East Asian soil, with flourishing descendants.

From a biological standpoint, the people living on this warm Chinese soil are very successful. Because a gene's greatest success is reproduction, not anything else. About a quarter of the world's people carry Chinese genes. According to anthropologists, Southeast Asians, and even the Austronesian peoples of Australia and the Pacific, are also descendants of southern Chinese; adding these populations together, our share of humanity is even larger.

Our Chinese nation has many shortcomings, but the survival wisdom our ancestors accumulated over history is second to none on this planet; no other people can match it, and there is no need to undervalue ourselves. Of course there is no need for arrogance either; the reason we have reproduced successfully is precisely that we are not prone to arrogance.

Love of ordinary life is the most striking feature of Chinese traditional culture. You may look down on an honest, plain Chinese person a hundred ways, yet you cannot help admiring their survival wisdom. They have survived in a world riddled with disaster and war and developed such rich spiritual wealth, enough for their descendants to live happily through ordinary, uneventful lives.

If a Chinese household owns just one book like Three Hundred Tang Poems or Three Hundred Song Lyrics—books accessible in China without much education—its members can accept the vicissitudes of life, because they can always find verses to soothe their hearts. That is a remarkable achievement.

Ordinary Chinese people live ordinary lives and find joy in rice, oil, salt, and soy; they invented mahjong to pass the time. Chinese literati have never spared praise for ordinary life—a mountain, a river, even a peculiar stone, can spark a poet's creativity. China's historical elites mostly dreamed of "returning home" and "laying down the plow"; to this day, the world's longest-lived scholars are mostly Chinese. As Fei Xiaotong said, wherever Chinese people migrate, they never forget to till the land, sow seeds, settle down, and be content with modest prosperity.

This is unique in the world. The elites of many peoples love conquest—Alexander's hooves, the Roman Empire's dream—all ended in the extinction of their descendants. Their passion and arrogance vanished; only the Chinese nation has never perished. In China, rulers are often overthrown, but China has never been destroyed.

So our cultural genes have many bright points, and I hope my son inherits them. I hope he can, like our ancestors, find joy in ordinary, plain life and learn patience and letting go. Lately I keep urging him not to set Gaokao goals or life goals, repeatedly stressing that I will exert no pressure and can accept everything about him, whether or not he becomes a great mathematician.

I urge him to let nature take its course and arrange his study and life according to his own nature and interests, unmoved by any outside hype, no matter what tall hats people wear. Take the long view: along the river of human history, along the river of life reproducing on Earth, what are human so-called successes and failures worth? These shortsighted professors see only a narrow cross-section of life, yet think they have discovered the truth; would I really entrust the shaping of my son's soul to them? I think not.