To Your Infatuation, I Travel To And Fro In This Boundless Night Sky, Your Dreams A Light Muslin Cloth

我对你的迷恋穿梭在这广袤的夜空， 你的梦如轻纱，缓缓掠过我满布皱纹的额头。体温隔着房间相互交融，你在均匀地呼吸， 我在寂静中劳作。爱人，这就是幸福。To your infatuation, I travel to and fro in this boundless night sky, your dreams a light muslin cloth that slowly sweeps past my wrinkled forehead. Separated by a room, our body temperatures melt together, you rhythmically breathing, I quietly working. My love, this is happiness.

Yu Dafu (郁达夫), “Loved One, My Insomnia Gives You Tears”  (爱人，我的失眠让你落泪)

Short story writer and poet Yu Dafu was one of the key figures in modern Chinese literature. Initially beginning higher education at Hangchow University, Yu was expelled after participating in a student strike. In 1913, he moved to Japan to study economics at Tokyo Imperial University, where he, along with several other Chinese intellectuals, founded the Creation Society (创造社) aimed towards promoting vernacular literature that emphasized freedom of form, artistic expression, and individuality. The society’s literary magazine, 创造, was one of the first publications to adopt left-right horizontal printing, breaking away from the right-left vertical printing of traditional texts. 

(via sinethetamagazine)

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souvlaki space station

there is nothing tethering us to this weightless existence, bodies drifting into an astral lightness that lasts just short of six minutes. dream song that we slow dive to, with our heads tilted towards the sky; and in this temporary eternity all i taste is air unfenced and alive. our hands reach out to catch the night-coloured echoes, only for them to slip through our fingers, diffusing into hazy memories of a time not forgotten, nor remembered.

(a little poem i wrote based on the song souvlaki space station as a homage to my favourite band in the world)

Husband One looks to me for confirmation, no doubt skeptical of the party line. These days, only fools speak freely among strangers. I nod yes, but do not elaborate. What do I care about the dilution of our blood and the increasing complexity of our society when my most basic need for a wife and child is not met?

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King. Harper Voyager. 2017. 

A dystopian novel depicting the consequences of China’s infamous One Child Policy and traditional preference for male heirs, An Excess Male is the poignant, deceptively matter-of-fact debut novel of Taiwan-born author and current San Francisco Bay Area resident Maggie Shen King. 

Over 40 million eligible bachelors find themselves without wives and abilities to pass down family names to children, one of the most crucial parts of patriarchal marriage customs, leading to the creation of Advanced Families with a hierarchy of multiple husbands for one woman. Wei-guo meets May-ling, aspiring to be her Husband Three after establishing a mutual rapport and comfort he had never felt with anyone else. The complex intersections between politics and love, state and family, and patriotism and belief climax as Wei-guo faces challenges, rebellion, and the quaking boldness of personal resolve. 

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(via sinethetamagazine)

a character: *is written realistically and has more than one aspect to their personality because that’s the whole point of having multifaceted characters, so it can create depth*

people who have obviously never written a three dimensional character in their life: “lmao the fuck?? is this inconsistent characterization??? this character was sad 7 episodes ago and now they’re smiling because they’re feeling ”“”“happy”“”“”?? in MY house??? bad writing, 0/10"

Wang Qingsong (王庆松), Follow Me. 2003. Photography.

Contemporary photographer Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) began his art career as a painter, he transitioned into photography during the 1990s as a means of better documenting the rapid changes taking place across China’s social and political atmosphere of the post-liberalisation period. Wang’s overscaled photographs call for hundreds of models who play roles of teachers, military officers, literati members, and other whimsical caricatures. Follow Me takes its name from the first and most popular English-teaching TV program introduced by the CCTV in 1982, that for many Chinese citizens was a preliminary glimpse into so-called Western society. 

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