ThereIsATurret

Fulfillment Precedes Fitness

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

All of my friends know that I'm an absolute homebody. I am allergic to all forms of exercise. But recently, I started to do some exercises. The story begins one day when I was bemoaning my mediocre state of health to my friends. I expressed my worries about if I can't live longer than pathetic dictators dreaming of living to a hundred and fifty; Considering that all seniors and relatives from my father's family have diabetes, I feel like I'm at a high risk of getting diabetes from a genetic standpoint. I should accumulate some "fitness karma" for my healthy retirement life from today.

At the same moment, Bilibili pushed a few fat loss cooking videos to me. Thanks to the algorithm, I systematically learned everything about this fitness theory and found that I am genetically blessed for weight loss: chicken thighs, broccoli, shrimps, and tofu … all of these "healthy foods" are my favorites. As for the carbohydrates, I don't crave white rice over whole grains. Daily cardio is not a problem to me as well – I am quite good at jumping rope and swimming. I tried replacing rice and noodles with oatmeal and milk for a few days. And I found this diet alleviates my food coma a lot, which make me more energetic. What a fantastic rejuvenation thanks to the low-GI food regimen!

In the ancient era, people loving fat-gaining food survived; while nowadays, only people loving low-GI food can survive. Facing such a preposterously indifferent natural selection, what else can we do other than brainwashing ourselves and thoroughly reversing our natural diet preferences?

People say that being resourceful is the prerequisite of starting your fitness plan, which means purely austere physical hardwork doesn't really work on body shaping without a comprehensive understanding of nutrition science. I'd like to add an additional principle: being mentally fulfilled preconditions being resourceful.

Your mood determines your brain's ability to control yourself. Countless failed weight losing stories attest that the essence of body shaping is emotion management: Nowadays, people can enjoy high-fat, high-sugar, high-sodium foods to nip any upsets in the bud; Doomscrolling with emptiness until 3 am, newly produced cortisol breeds visceral fat under your abdomen. You can't really rely on your noble fortitude to adhere to the principles of healthy lifestyle under constant pummeling of everyday life. The emotional damage has to be somehow repaired – whining, gluttony, hysteria – people step on the path of self-destruction while craving the feeling of being loved.

As I said, I am the ultimate weight-loss prodigy – I have never had any silly emotion repairing feasts. But even like this, I am still not good at persuading myself to touch some grass. "Exercise half an hour every day" drains my heart badly. "You should stand for ten minutes for an hour of sitting" is an annoying alarm disturbing me. Only the ephemeral timeless moments pervading the immersion of virtual imagination guide me to my own mindflow and bring peacefulness to me.

The definition of "Healthy" has always been a lie for my generation during our childhood. Chinese parents desperately cram everything edible into your mouth and scold you why can't you absorb more nutrition to grow up faster and be taller than your peers. Motionless quiet kids always become the role model of discipline in school and teachers only care about the stats on paper. Congee and chicken soup are a great legacy from our ancestors while steak and all fat milk are poison imported by evil foreigners. People with all brawn must have no brains. Higher education level means more decent. Women should marry rich men even if the stenchy fatty can't get it up.

Nobody cares what a kid thinks. Nobody cares if all these dictums and operations pushes an ape to its brink of burnout from the perspective of biological limits. All these ingrained dogmas turn out to be disadvantages of survival after graduation. This lifestyle incredibly increases the probability of sudden death. Facing such an upbringing full of lies and violence, what else can we do other than forcing ourselves to change our toxic mindset?

It's weird to be not that stubborn and unchangeable when growing older. I thought that I would always be a sedentary person for my entire life. But these years, I can feel some changes happened on myself. More and more often, sitting for over an hour makes me feel uncomfortable. It seems like I have reached the bottleneck of all my old indoor hobbies. And the guilt of wasting time strolling has been decreased by listening to podcasts. I even bought two dumbbells – I moved or helped people move out for many times in recent years and I realized the soreness from your muscles releases joy to your brain. Since I don't like gym, the best practice for me is to have gym time at home with dumbbells.

I wonder why I am only just now able to be aware of these little things of happiness. Maybe it's just because my prefrontal cortex has fully developed. But I prefer to say that lower pressure level helps. Some angst haunting me for a long time doesn't exist anymore.

To be more detailed, I joined the biggest company in the world. I have a 10 am to 5 pm daily work routine now, which provides me at least two more hours spare time compared to my life in Beijing. I can cook for myself before the dinner time arrives – yes, just repeat between chicken thighs with broccoli and shrimp with tofu, and I can even take half to my tomorrow's lunchbox. I can play video games or read books for a few hours so that I don't need to scroll on my phone endlessly to make up for my lost delusions of grandeur during the daytime. The balance of life quality sneakily turned to another side, enabling one to get rid of the vicious cycle.

Hey folks, I'm not bragging anything about my life in the States but I mean – yea that's true – the two hours leisure helps.

Observation on Chinese in NA: Language and Subjectivity

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 13:08:04 +0000

点此阅读中文版

After coming to the United States, a lot of concepts that I had known from the Internet became tangible to me. I could not understand either why Americans are sensitive to what they call "Cultural Appropriation" and why leftists always reflect on their dominate position and privileges on culture. And I could not even get a clear picture of the racial problems in America. I have been thinking all these shouldn't be problems if we can see people in an equal way.

After all, I am always confident that I can keep a constant peaceful feeling every day no matter where I live. But I've never realized the reason I think like that before: I have my own support system built by the Chinese language world; I know where I came from and where I am going. In an objective way, we can say that everyone can make a new choice to step into a new role and start a new journey. However, it is never easy for a person to grow up smoothly and get that kind of magic.

In China, I am the ABSOLUTE SUBJECT in my cultural context. I am not only a male, but also a Han Chinese, a Beijinger. I even get this privilege of language: my native language is Mandarin, which literally means the standard official language in China. So I could weave my subjectivity in my mother tongue. I have always lived in such a natural way. Of course, there are so many injustices and unfair events to the various others in China. These tragedies have often prompted my sense of crisis which urges me to think differently by putting myself in their place. But anyway, all of these only happened in China. I never think like this for foreign topics: all foreign languages, including English, are just a kind of tool, another treasure waiting for me to find out.

Ultimately, the reason that I can see English in a quite equal and common way is that I cannot really relate to it. Therefore, the identity of the minority is not a big deal for first-generation immigrants who just want to earn big money in a foreign country. But things are totally different for minority-race people born here: They are THE OTHER in the English world. They must put themselves in the position of others if they start to learn English—which means the textbooks made by locals. They will define themselves by white people's rule. I guess this is the reason why the white girl who wore a cheongsam(or "qipao") got accused of "Cultural Appropriation". A Chinese would likely say "thank you for loving my culture!", but a local Chinese American may think "if even you can wear my own cultural garments, how can I speak for my culture?". Wherever they live, the minority are always stereotyped and thus othered by the dominant ethnic group in various insidious ways—think of the strange costumes that the minority delegates at Two Sessions every year.

Many of my friends who are disaffected from the Chinese government might find it hard to understand such an alienation feeling for minority people and get confused by the truth: why in the United States, such a free and progressive country, do people still suffer from this? Indeed, America has done a good job of popularizing modern common values. But every family has its own problems—or we can say that, once a common language is established in a certain area, such problems always happen. In China, children's language gets polluted by the Leninist Party. They would repeat the party's propaganda such as "capitalism is bad and all foreigners are hostile to us" when they grow up. In America, American children learn reflection of privileges, racial conflicts, and LGBTQ issues when they are even relatively young. They construct their view of the world in this way. They learn too much unnecessary reflection before they learn how to be proud of themselves. I don't mean that Chinese-American kids must learn ancient Chinese poems to be proud of their ethnic identity. What I want to say is that the construction of one's subjectivity is essential to everyone when we are under endless invasions from a vicious language environment.

This feeling of mine was proven. Last month, I joined a thanksgiving party hosted by a local Chinese Christian church. I fortunately met a decent Chinese-American lady who just finished her British literature Ph.D. and worked as a professor in a college. I wanted to learn more about English world culture so I asked her to give me a reading list of American literature. I chatted with her. She told me that she was born in New Jersey. Her parents are Taiwanese, but she can speak Mandarin in a perfectly standard northern China style: No Beijing accent r-colorization like me, but all retroflex is pronounced pretty precisely. "My pronunciation just got influenced by classmates from northern-east China." She said.

We talked about American literature and ethnic topics. She used Chinese enumeration comma to enumerate all ethnicities in America in her text. Oh my gosh, it's even hard for Chinese young people to use that punctuation correctly. Most people just use a space instead of an enumeration comma in their writing. I guess only less than 10% of the whole Chinese people can do it well. But she could use it smoothly in a perfect right way. "You must have worked hard on learning Chinese when you were young," I said. "Huh, my experience is quite special for an ABC. I just loved the Chinese language and Chinese culture when I was young. I can't say the exact reason for that. I just love it so I put much effort into it. It is a very natural process for me." She replied. I think that for someone like her, who grew up in a bilingual background, both Chinese and English are either subject and other to her. I really envy her.

I could clearly feel the difference in temperament between her and other local ABCs I met, which we call "banana Chinese". The latter seems like a normal white person in America: always has a big confident smile on his or her face, which makes people feel easy but might be a little superficial and frivolous. However, many of them cannot have good communication with their parents, and they are perplexed by the given identity of minority. But She is more like me: she doesn't like the fusty meta narration given by Chinese government propaganda and ancient Chinese culture, but still gets her own motivation from the Chinese language world. During the days people expressing their anger about Urumqi fire, she texted me the famous two lines of poetry:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That is the power of language: You can be an American in China, and be a Chinese in America. Wherever you live in, there are always some people understanding you support you. You can always imbibe courage and motivation from it, and keep a constant peaceful feeling in your daily life, and be no longer lonely. "I've never seen an ABC like me." That's what she said.

This is how understanding a language and the culture behind it can shape people with a sense of mission. Like the host of the podcast "the Weirdo" Wang Qing, a journalist who works in Europe for many years said: Although Chinese young people are deeply traumatized, they at least know what problems they want to solve and have the motivation to move forward; European young people have lived too comfortably since childhood, and probably the biggest imaginary enemy in their life is climate change, and the lack of mission also leads to the lack of a sense of vitality in their lives.

We can also discuss this topic in a bigger picture. I find it is a pervasive topic in almost every culture that second-generation children cannot relate to their successful parents' culture. Many of my friends are second-generation Beijingers, their parents worked hard and got a place to live in Beijing, the most privileged city in China. As for me, a third-generation Beijinger, things are quite the same: My grandfather was from a small town in Shandong province. He got a huge amount of pension provided by the party and enjoyed his life for twenty years after his retirement in his sixty. Even now, he often forwards some news of that small town in Shandong—although he has never been there again since 2008.

He identifies himself as a Shandonger in Shandong and a Beijinger in Beijing. He feels naturally for the double identities. He thinks he is a successful Shandonger who got the seat of subjectivity(i.e. got the citizenship of Beijing and the pension) and feels complacency in his life. He also thinks that our offspring are too fragile and useless. Not like most of my family, he was quite happy when I told him I wanted to make a big money in America. He is eighty-five now, he replied to me with a big smile: "Your grandma and I are very healthy. No worries for us. I guess we can live to at least ninety. We will visit you after you succeed in settling down in America."(Fine, they did get recovered from COVID-19 three days after the infection.) Although I am a third-generation "Banana Shandonger" who has been assimilated partly by the culture of Beijing as well, but anyway, the Shandong dialect is just a branch of Mandarin, and My grandfather, my father, and I share almost the same philosophy of struggle in studying hard. We couldn't possibly disagree with each other more than a fraction of the conflict between the ABCs who don't speak each other's language and their fathers.

Of course, what I talked about before doesn't mean that I agree with the vlogger who said "decided never to learn English again". In contrast, I feel how absurd her opinions are from the point of view of fighting against the hegemony of language. It might be a source of tolerance and solace for minorities within the United States to not mandate speaking English well. However, for a wider group of foreigners, it will make it impossible for those, who live in late-developing countries, to catch up with Americans, which will only solidify the global technological and cultural hegemony of the United States and increase the impact of the English language hegemony on the world. Back to the personal experience of the vlogger herself, things get even weirder: As a Manchu with her own unique language, she was converted first to the Chinese world and now to the English world. The deeper root for her has disappeared since long time ago. What does she really need to oppose? I don't mean that everyone should succeed in the culture and mission of their ancestral history, and fight for their own subjectivity. But there are too many people go gentle into that good night without any hesitation, which is quietly ignorant and unfortunate.

The Origin of Broken Grammar

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 06:18:00 +0000

I've always been sensitive to the precision of language. As I said before, I hate it since I was pretty young when people put gender words in front of a person's title like "a female programmer" or "a male nurse", or when they assume everyone in some general terms that don't refer to anybody are males. That doesn't mean that I'm a radical feminist so I believe that women can compete with men as 50-50 in all aspects(although I hope so), but I simply think that such descriptions are intellectually confusing. First, if there are no gender prefixes before a word, it describes a collection of all genders in default. For example, the term "person" includes both men and women. Therefore, I feel disturbed whenever I heard something like "people should marry wives, have sons and protect them" — that doesn't mean that I support women to get liberation from marriages (although I do). I dislike this description just because it may ignore some possible cases and cause some logical fallacies. Then, if you append a gender word before a generic term(like "a female programmer"), it could falsely assume the existence of some relevance between the gender and the context where the word appears. In this case, the gender words are redundant which wastes the reader's attention. Since we are talking about industries but not parenthood, we should focus on one's skill level but not his or her fertility. Nevertheless, most people seem to have little interest in grammar and scientific testing, they just let the broken grammar goes viral for centuries.

I would like to explain the controversial Natsumatsuri topics in the same way. Japanese animation was getting more and more popular when I graduated from elementary school. I did a lot of research on the moe culture at that time. I finally decided that the etymology of "moe" is just some otaku men their feelings. "Loli" is also not a decent word. In my opinion, it is just a euphemism for some Japanese pedophiles to talk about the sexual fantasies of little girls legally. However, several years later, "moe" got viral in China. It almost replaced the word "cute" in my peer group. And cute girls proudly claim that they are "little loli", which makes them feel exotic and fashionable.

Chinese people extremely lack art in their daily life. That's why they are obsessed to imbibe aesthetic feelings from every exotic word. People call "story" "monogatari", call "Wednesday" "suiyoubi", and call "too ashamed to face people" "ningenshikkaku". Even a boba tea shop could use the word "の" but not the regular "of" to put some exotic feeling on its brand. As sexually hungry male programmers always add a gender word before their female peers' title when they meet them and fall into an erotic fantasy, Japanese culture fans in China also never translate the Japanese words into proper Chinese words but just use the vocabulary as they are. They build their identity in this way. We never enjoyed the beauty when we were young, we just wore our blue-grey sportswear and wasted our youth. That's why they commenced wearing Japanese high school girls' sailor suits and Lolita suits after graduation. We can only fulfill our destiny when we wear such corsets.

Learn some foreign languages, please: Although "祭" only means "ritual" in modern Chinese, the word "matsuri"(祭り) just means "festival" nowadays. I remembered that there was a club called "nijigen"(二次元, "two dimension") in my high school. At that time, the word "nijigen" had not yet been known and the concept of it had not gotten distorted. This was a super visionary name. A friend who loves Japanese animation once complained to me: "Japanese high school students have their ‘gakuensai‘ , and what do we do?" I just had to tell him, "gakuensai" means "campus fete". We, the privileged high school students in Beijing, also have this every year. There are a lot of Japanese-based terms which are much more sensitive than "Natsumatsuri": Bilibili calls their paid subscribers "kanchou" and "teitoku", which are derived from Kantai Collection, a Japanese strategy game inspired by Imperial Japanese Navy. I believe this one is much more terrible than "the Summer Festival". A lot of Japanese cultural products in China have changed their name or terms in it. I guess the rest won't last long.

Of course, I understand that doesn't matter at all. As men — actually, not only men but rather people who approve of the order — love to assume "a person" is a man by default. They distinguish the Subject and the Other in this way and get on the right track in life. We must create some confrontation intentionally to start the great struggle. The story begins so: Since my rigorous parents and professors never give me a chance to express myself, the kind and gentle Japanese people must be the most lovely ones. Animation saikouda! Since Japanese people like to worship war criminals, so every festival in Japan is the legacy of militarism. We must defeat them! Misunderstanding is just a pretext to create conflicts, which is their real purpose. All phenomena in which desire and anger overwhelm intellect and logic are much the same. Within the most profound longing and repression, I am too cruel for telling them this truth, aren't I?