Negative Emotions: Abandonment, Discrimination, and Hatred

There was an intellectually disabled child in my village; his parents were close relatives who married, so the child was born with an intellectual deficit. In the past, whenever I returned to the village I would see him wandering around, scavenging food from garbage dumps, but he was not so disabled that he could not find his way home.

A few years ago, on a visit home, I did not see him. Curious, I asked my father whether the disabled boy had died. My father told me he had not died; rather, his father had taken him to a faraway place—reportedly Xinjiang—abandoned him there, and come back alone.

This saddened me, but most villagers did not think much of it. We all understood the parents: they had three children in total, only one of whom was normal, and caring for two disabled children had overwhelmed them. Besides the disabled boy who was abandoned, they had another disabled child at home; we even suspected they might one day abandon that one too.

Although I was saddened by the boy's abandonment, I found it hard to blame his parents, and felt I had no right to. Living in the same village, I had never helped this family myself. Perhaps because I had grown used to their condition, I assumed they were used to it too, and that they did not suffer over it. In fact that was only because we had never entered these parents' inner world and could not know their true feelings.

After the chained-woman incident, I thought of this abandoned disabled boy, which is why I have never known how to judge that sensational case. From a medical standpoint, the chained woman's schizophrenia had been present since the womb; from the moment she became a fertilized egg, her life was fated to be tragic, and after both parents died, abandonment was a misfortune she could hardly avoid.

China has tens of millions of people disabled by mental illness, many wandering the streets nationwide, scavenging from trash cans, and at any time at risk of dying from poisoning or infection. We often see such people on the streets; I believe most people's reaction is numb indifference, and few think of them as needing help. Most of these people were originally abandoned by their families; now they drift on the streets, having become unidentified vagrants whose names no one knows.

When I was a child, there were two mentally disabled people in a nearby village who scavenged for food. In every village they passed, the children ran after them chanting nursery rhymes, mocking and cursing them, and some threw stones and sticks; the adults just watched for amusement. Now that I am a doctor myself, recalling such scenes, I cannot remember whether I joined in; if I did, I truly ought to repent. The absence of sympathy for patients in the wider environment is the greatest sorrow of our society; ignorance and numbness make us peculiarly cruel without knowing it.

Discrimination against the sick is everywhere. We discriminate not only against the ill but also on the basis of gender, region, culture, ethnicity, and more. This is opposite to most people's self-image: most of us think of ourselves as good rather than bad. The reason, as Mr. Russell put it, is that people fear public opinion; no one wants to be called bad, so everyone works hard to believe he is good, as a way of comforting himself.

The people I deal with most are patients and their families. People often say doctors see through life and death, but few know that doctors also see through human nature. With more than ten years of practice and careful observation, a doctor can roughly develop the knack of seeing through a person's soul in a few words.

We have witnessed too many abandonment cases. Each year I encounter no fewer than ten patients abandoned by relatives or lovers; those I can take in and help, I basically have. A few friends around me have long been doing this outreach work with me.

I once treated a young cervical-cancer patient. On the day she was diagnosed, her only close relative—her biological father—gave her ten thousand yuan and then vanished completely from her life, changing his phone number and never contacting her again until she died; relatives on both sides also kept their distance. So when people tell me that only parents are completely selfless toward their children, I just smile it off. In the end, fellow patients in a patient support group I had organized pooled donations to pay for her treatment. After she died, her relatives reappeared, checking her bank balance—money we had donated for her treatment and living expenses—eager to divide her estate.

Another female patient I treated, when critically ill, discovered that her husband was having an affair, chatting with his mistress on WeChat and hoping his wife would die sooner. The patient, deeply hurt, came to me to pour her heart out. Such phenomena are simply too common; many people try every means to divorce once a family member gets cancer in order to shirk responsibility. All the vows made in love turn awkward under real misfortune—this is the real human world. Two of my friends became monks; both were doctors before ordaining, and after seeing too many of these negative phenomena, they became depressed.

I often work on family members to treat the patient better, but this sometimes angers them. Many relatives abandon their loved ones not because they are truly poor; some earn over a million a year and own several apartments, yet still do everything possible to avoid and abandon their sick family member. Part of the reason is that these relatives themselves have psychological problems: under the influence of innate genes and acquired environment, they live in a state of "poverty delusion," feeling insecure no matter how much money they have and always convinced their own lives are miserable—a form of depression.

Still other patients and their families hate each other, with no love at all. My son once kept a litter of hamsters, which gave me a chance to observe a phenomenon that exists in animals. At first we kept only two hamsters with plenty of food; they were lively and cute and fought not at all. Later the hamsters bred many offspring, and competition for food became fierce.

Once we were away for a few days and left them what we thought was enough food. When we returned, some hamsters had been eaten by others, leaving only remains. Humans and hamsters share 99% of their genes, and behaviors seen among hamsters also exist widely in human society. When survival competition becomes too fierce, humans easily shift from a peaceful, loving mode of interaction to one of mutual hatred.

Hatred is pervasive in human society, and many people exploit it. Politicians, merchants, and even some mentally disturbed people constantly stoke public hatred; hatred is like gasoline, catching fire the moment someone lights it.

Nazism and Japanese militarism are typical examples of hatred stoked under the banner of patriotism. Sadly, today we see such hatred widespread across countries worldwide. Both democracies and one-party states have serious nationalism and hatred. Though we say we have always opposed Nazism, Nazi ideas haunt humanity like a persistent ghost; every war-mongering manifesto smells of Hitler.

It goes without saying that hatred is rampant on China's internet. Some think this results from hate education; that is indeed one cause, but not the whole story. I can access the internet around the world, and I find hatred in America too. Hate speech is rampant on Twitter, on par with Weibo in China; behind the rise of Trumpism lies the unvented hatred of the people left behind in America's Rust Belt.

Two books help explain the flood of hatred in America: one is *Percival Zhu on America* by the Chinese-American scholar Cho-yun Hsu, the other is *Hillbilly Elegy* by the American lawyer J.D. Vance. Both describe in detail the lives of people who fell from the middle class to the bottom, or climbed from the bottom into the middle, and let us glimpse the inner world of most Americans. In the final analysis, behind all this hatred lies the pressure of survival competition.

Behind the hatred flooding China's internet also lies survival pressure. I am among China's earliest internet users, going online over twenty years ago; my QQ number is five digits, the kind only true veteran early netizens have. I have a deep grasp of how hatred on Chinese internet has changed: twenty years ago hatred existed, but it was not as intense as now. Today hatred on China's internet has reached an extreme degree, robbing many people of their reason and leaving them anxious and depressed. For this reason, prejudice and misleading fake news are countless on the Chinese internet.

I usually read only Singapore's *Lianhe Zaobao*, because among Chinese-language media it is perhaps the most objective and rational, carrying less emotion. I can also see reports from Voice of America, the BBC, and domestic media, but I am not interested in those outlets flooded with extremist views, because their credibility is too low. Media at war are always biased; only bystanders can be rational. I have basically cut off all social media, where incendiary, emotional rhetoric is even more rampant, because it lacks the layer of restraint traditional media have.

From a marketing standpoint, a calm audience will not buy advertised goods or accept an author's views; only by putting audiences into various excited states (fear and panic, for instance) can you make them buy products or services. My writing is good, but my article click-through rates have never been impressive; the reason is simply that I do not join the various emotional hype cycles. Such emotional hype harms not only the audience but the author too; many just do not realize it, or realize it but are, under the grip of desire, no longer their own masters.

In my previous article I mentioned that twenty years ago, on a national platform, I studied an important topic: unsustainable development will trigger a survival crisis for humanity. Twenty years ago many scholars already foresaw that human society would face all kinds of social and environmental crises, but at the time many optimistically believed humanity could improve things by restraining its behavior.

Yet after twenty years of observation, I find these crises far more serious than before. The root cause is that over the past two decades the population kept growing; surplus populations scramble for insufficient resources, and mutual slaughter becomes inevitable. Perhaps these social pressures will only ease once the population enters a declining channel.

We live in an age flooded with negative emotion and are easily influenced by our environment. Someone like me, who deals with life and death, encounters negative events constantly; those without inner strength easily break. I avoid the harmful effects of these negative emotions by understanding more deeply the laws behind how the world works.

If we understand the laws behind these events and their deep causes, it becomes easy to forgive and tolerate everything and to be willing to accept the world. Though we still wish to improve the world, we are no longer so anxious; after all, natural laws cannot be reversed by human effort.