What Is Home? Where Is My Home?

In the evening, I went alone to the park and sat cross-legged on a bench beneath the mottled old pagoda. In meditation, a voice rang in my ears and said to me: "Zhiyuan, come home with me!"

Home—how warm those two words are—but where is my home?

I once thought I knew where my home was; then, suddenly looking back, I found I really could not find where my home was. Home should be a place that lets me settle down completely and rest my body and mind. Have I had such a place all these years?

I walk through this world ill at ease, living in trepidation, afraid that being too willful on my part will hurt others and draw everyone's displeasure. For a long time no one recognized my holding to my own personality and dreams; I always had to find ways to please my relatives in exchange for a relative peace in my heart. It was less that I was striving happily than that I was stubbornly resisting in loneliness. So, is the family my relatives built my home?

Life always uses failure to confirm others' denial of us, defeating our confidence, and also uses failure to wear down our edges. The failures I have experienced are far more than ordinary people's, because I have never been afraid to try. If ordinary people stop after one or two tries, I will try a hundred or two hundred times before giving up.

So my family has ample evidence, in my failures, to deny me. The problem is that a person always has some edges that no amount of grinding can smooth away. And family keep staring at those edges that cannot be smoothed, expressing their dissatisfaction with you—openly, or through displeased looks. What is one to do then?

The criticism I have received in my life, I think, is more than anyone I have met. Because I have always been different, reckless,—to put it nicely, daring to act and growing braver with every setback, to put it badly, foolishly stubborn. So most of the time I have to walk alone, or, temporarily and painfully, change the real me for the outside world, falsely living in another state.

But this change does not last, for before long I revert to my old ways and return to my true self; so I always seem so fickle and wavering. How I long not to be fickle, to always be the real me, and long for the family around me to accept rather than condemn that real me.

When I was small, I was beaten more times than I can count. My parents always told me that in this world the Heavenly King is only second and I am first. No matter how dangerous a thing, I dared do it. No matter how they beat me, I would not yield.

After being beaten so often, I did not even cry when beaten; I just stood there proudly and let my father beat me, sometimes saying to him as I was hit: "Go on, hit me, hit harder; it would be better if you beat me to death. Anyway I was born of you; if you want to beat me to death, just do it! If you beat me to death I'll have no more worries." I said this while the beating had drawn streaks of blood on my legs. This tempering let me regard physical pain as nothing. I can disdain every force that strikes me; when I truly decide to do something, I can achieve the resolve of "though ten thousand stand against it, I go on."

My sense and ability of self-reliance are very strong. At ten years old, once my parents could not find five yuan at home. That day was the day before Children's Day; my mother had given me a few cents in advance to celebrate, and I eagerly spent it buying cigarettes to share with my uncles and neighbors. As a result, my parents judged from my behavior that I had probably stolen the five yuan.

They rushed to the village school I attended, called me out of the classroom, and made me hand over the five yuan. I had not taken it, so I did not admit it and could not hand it over. My father found a thin bamboo stick and beat me hard; after that stick broke, I still denied taking the five yuan, and he found another and broke that too. At recess, the whole school watched me being beaten; that day my father must have broken several sticks.

My mother, puzzled, went back and searched again, finally found the five yuan where they had hidden it, and rushed to the school to tell my father; only then did my ordeal end. My father did not apologize to me; he was simply silent. That was his way of expressing apology. My father, all his life, whatever he did wrong, never apologized. From then on I was labeled a thief. Later, when my childhood friends lost things, they suspected me and even beat me up together, thinking I had stolen them. When my uncle, who was also my teacher, lost something, he asked me directly in class whether I had gone to their house and stolen it.

This humiliation made me, from primary school on, use every means to make money; whatever I wanted, I found a way to get it myself. When small, I caught a one- or two-meter-long snake with my bare hands and sold it to a snake buyer, just because I wanted a fountain pen and would not reach out and ask my father for money. In primary school I stood at the village gate selling melons and fruit, just because I would not eat my family's food for free. By middle school I longed all the more to escape my family's economic control, be independent, and never suffer this humiliation again.

My childhood made me, in my youth, hate evil as an enemy; seeing someone wronged and bullied, I would bristle with anger, slam the table, and, regardless of everything, root out the strong and support the weak. This trait made me again and again a leader among people. Many people then thought I did it to show off; no one knew that the wounds in my heart drove me, from my true nature, to sympathize with and help the weak.

I cannot find another person like me. My behavior, my thoughts, are all seen by my family as strange, dangerous, and unrealistic. I often have to face the whole family's reproach like a lone figure. Every one of them points out my faults, jointly condemning my foolishness and willfulness. I have lived thirty-seven years; from when I can remember, I have had to live in this state. But whenever the family faces a major crisis, the one who steps forward and never gives up is always me. The economic and spiritual pillar on which everyone relies is also me.

Condemned so often, I once wondered: am I really wrong? I spent ten years deeply reflecting on myself, repenting morning and evening, admitting fault and apologizing to everyone. But when I took one more step forward, my family still told me: "Zhiyuan, you are wrong again." In fact, my greatest error was being born different from others, born exceptional, born fearless, born passionate; these innate traits made me unacceptable to the crowd and even to my own family, and caused pain not only to myself but to my family.

For a time I asked my wife: "Is it my too-strong personality and pursuit of life that make you live in such pain?" I truly felt regret; when I fell in love with her and married her, I hoped and promised to bring her happiness, but in fact I brought her far more pain than happiness. What pained me most was that my happiness was built on her suffering.

Perhaps many families are in just such a state, long maintained in mutual blame and fault-finding; each person hopes to change everyone else into someone who thinks like himself, and each feels he is giving, enduring and giving up things for the other. In our family, whatever does not match our own thinking we regard as wrong and needing correction. We make all sorts of demands on our spouses, our children, and our parents that do not fit their natures, believing our demands are for their own good and taking for granted that we are wiser than they.

But who truly has the qualification to be the judge of life? Is it we ourselves? Is what we give our family really love, rather than spiritual enslavement? Have we considered the feelings deep in their hearts? Do we really know what they truly need? Have we stood in their place and thought? What is the ultimate meaning of life? Is it to live a "correct" life, or to live a "happy" life?

I read a book written by Westerners called The Family in Its Life Cycle. In this book the author holds that the great majority of a person's spiritual wounds come from his own family. Every stage of family life brings its own wounds. In a failed family, the family members suffer the most spiritual wounds.

In adolescence I suffered from severe psychological illness and did a series of things that stained my character and brought lifelong shame. For this I read, hungrily, works of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, religion, and medicine—not to show off, but because I wanted to escape the vague pain deep in my heart; I wanted, under the guidance of the wise, to figure out: Who am I? How should I be myself? What is right, what is wrong? I wanted to understand why I am such a complex person, such a burden to myself.

Readers often ask me: why are your articles so profound, why do my eyes fill with tears when I read them? Because I am a patient; I need, in the process of studying medicine, reading, thinking, and writing, to find my root cause and find the prescription to cure myself. My experiences drive me to reflect on Chinese society and culture, to reflect on the logic behind all the unreasonable phenomena that happen in this land where we were born and raised, and to seek a path to liberate myself and the multitude.

Thirty-seven years now, I have spent ninety percent of my time reading, thinking, and writing, and this life will continue lifelong. Not to be modest: in China it is hard to find another with a knowledge system as vast and complete as mine, another with a temperament as true and earnest as mine, another as free and bold in flowing prose as mine.

Now I live only in my own spiritual world. Material poverty, the strange looks of outsiders, the incomprehension of relatives and friends, the curses of those who walk a different way—to me all are like floating clouds. Who am I? I am myself! In others' eyes, whether I am a pile of stinking dog shit or an outstanding talent, it has nothing to do with me.

Where is my home? I need not deliberately define what my home is; where the heart is at peace, that is my home. The world is vast; where can I not make my home? Deep in my soul there is my home. Love and hate, right and wrong, good and evil, greed, anger, delusion, and arrogance in the mortal world are like a tangled mass of thread, like a floor of scattered chicken feathers; with one fire of wisdom, set all ablaze, and every affliction vanishes in an instant. How simple and free!

For a person brave at heart, life is always heroic; even in loneliness it can be a heroic loneliness. If there is still fear in the heart, it must be because we are not yet brave enough.