This is a different generation of young people.
They have just come out of the depression of the Cultural Revolution, and the outstanding students who have been backlogged for ten years have just had the opportunity to enter the university. It was an era of believing in the elite and an era of beautiful ideals. As long as you work hard, a primary school graduate can directly enter the research institute of Peking University. Every liberal arts student wants to be a poet, and every science student wants to be a scientist.
When the bubble of communist grand ideals bursts, people always look for alternatives. After the days of burning passion, young people still full of ideals began to believe in Sartre, Freud, and the "Declaration of Independence" on the other side of the ocean.
In the reform under the dual-track system, the evil of human nature gradually appears, but you still believe in beauty, the young people on the side of the democratic wall are filled with righteous indignation, and the self-cultivation of the Chinese scholar class for thousands of years has begun to flow in the veins.
They took the GRE and TOEFL exams, all for the sake of going to the American universities that only appeared in the papers. The once anti-American and anti-imperialist suspicions have dissipated, but the story of the Mayflower and the American Dream have taken root in the Chinese mind.
Lu Gang is one of them. So is Zhang Chaoyang.
They all came to the United States through the Li Zhengdao Scholarship. Thousands of students come to the United States. Of course, your family has high hopes for you, and after ten years of catastrophe, you may be the first in your village to go to college.
2.
Almost every international student in the United States has such an experience. Passionate and kind Christians will give you free furniture and invite you to their parties, where there is a free lunch and occasional ice cream. Of course, they will preach unreliable things, such as how the theory of evolution is wrong. As a science student, Lu Gang, you must be dismissive, but as long as you have food, it is worth listening to their occasional nonsense.
You have also seen such Chinese people, they have foreign names, the man is called Peter, the woman is called angel, because they think that foreigners are really not allowed to pronounce Chinese names, although foreigners can accurately pronounce Indians, Brazilians and Turkish name.
They always greet you in English and write you emails. They often go to church, and when they pray, you often look at their pious faces and think, because you think this may really become their belief, and belief cannot be attacked casually in this politically correct country. At gatherings with Americans they also like to sing opera, especially "Mrs. Butterfly", in which a docile oriental girl commits suicide for a cheating American man. They have both sides in the United States.
Gradually you get used to the eyes of the people around you, you are a Chinese, you are a science student from China, you are a male science student from China, you should be introverted, you should not like parties, you should sit in the laboratory for 15 hours , should have strong mathematical ability and weak verbal expression, should be obedient and quiet.
Gradually, you find that many people in academia are also messing around. There are a lot of journals here. Every teacher who has just become an assistant professor is desperately applying for NSF, using funds to produce results, and all you have to do is predecessors. On the basis of the small changes made, I will publish a few articles in my life that no one may have read, and I will be a tenured professor, and then I will find a way to return to China to make money.
And you once said, you want to be a scientist. You persistently tell your friends about your ideals, although their eyes seem to be full of jokes.
Life without dating is disgusting and hopeless, and the brightly dressed American undergraduate chicks on campus will not look at the lewdly dressed oriental doctoral students. And some female students from China would rather sleep with an old man in his 50s for a green card. They know how to use their own resources too well, and Wendi Deng will always be the idol in the hearts of many girls. Prostitution can bring pleasure, but it cannot bring inner warmth and tranquility.
3.
When your boss introduces you, he often says that you are from communist china or red china, and you keep smiling even though you are unhappy. The most important thing is that the teaching of the dignity of the teacher is engraved in your heart, and you always call him Professor rather than by his first name.
You are from the ancient East, and you hate the interpersonal relationships explained in the thick black school. When you were a university student in China, you were often shocked by the words of Jefferson and Hamilton hundreds of years ago, but in the United States, people are always emphasizing Networking, even in the school's career handbook, has clear guidelines on how to build relationships.
Gradually, you and your boss have a disagreement, which is purely academic, so the boss assigns a lot of tasks to you, and you extend your long working hours. The first time you defended, you were harassed by your boss for a small detail, and he asked you to redo 1000 fits, which later proved you right. Your academic thirst and ambition seem to be making your boss uncomfortable, all he cares about is getting more money done on time for the project at hand.
Here's the thing, a shattering of the American dream.
Zhang Chaoyang chose to be a hippie first, and then a realist, starting with the first money from Negroponte: there is no permanent ideal, only permanent interests.
He got it, ideals are often dressed up as bitches to fool the masses.
And you, Lu Gang, chose to fight, you are a complete idealist.
4.
We all know what happened later, and what followed was a surprisingly unanimous condemnation, and this condemnation all pointed to Lu Gang alone.
This condemnation comes from mainland China, they say, you have embarrassed the Chinese, and these people are afraid to apologize to Uncle Yang.
This condemnation comes from the school and the American media, who think you are selfish, mean, and narrow-minded.
This condemnation also comes from Chinese Americans, who are afraid that their status will be affected by you.
I just know that when you shoot yourself in the head, the police still hold your hands.
More than 10 years later, when the Korean Cho Seung-hee started a massacre in Virginia, the American media again attributed the reason to Cho's mental illness.
5.
In the movie Pulp Fiction, Jules quoted a passage from the Bible before killing:
"On the path of justice, surrounded by selfish and cruel wicked men. Bless him with mercy and goodwill, leading the weak through the dark valley, he guards his brother and seeks lost children. To those who try to kill my brother people, I will kill them with great hatred and unparalleled anger. When I take revenge, they will know that I am the Lord."
When Lu Gang shot his mentor, he did not think that he would become Jehovah. If he were Jehovah, he would not have to go to the principal, write letters to the local press, and contact department chairs. In the case of system failure, you usually have two choices: obey silently, just like most people, save the country by curve, then today, you may be a Changjiang scholar, a successful businessman, or a teacher in a school in the United States, or To choose disobedience is like Henry Thoreau's objection to military service, expressing an attitude through behavior.
But you chose the third way. You know you can't go the second way, which means you go back to China and for years you've written letters to your family boasting about America's prosperity. And the pride and ideals in your bones make it impossible for you to compromise.
So you raised your gun.
Violent Malcolm X and nonviolent Martin Luther King were both shot by angry whites.
Years later people only knew about Martin Luther King Jr.'s fame and his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Malcolm became a bad symbol. Academia has grown to study nonviolence and civic noncooperation.
But everyone has forgotten that Locke said in his Treatise on Government a hundred years ago, that under the basis of natural law, people have two rights: the first is to protect themselves and others, and they can do whatever they see fit. matter. The second is the power to punish crimes against natural law. And when people join together to form a government and renounce the state of nature, the only purpose of legislation is to protect people's rights to life and property, and without regular and effective regulations on rights and property to guarantee their peace and tranquility, people will not Abandoning the freedom of the state of nature to join society and be bound by it.
Yang-=Jia and Lu Gang and Malcolm X are similar in a sense, they both abuse lynching (Lynch) because normal laws and institutions cannot protect them.
6.
In the movie, Liu Xing did not kill Ke Lai Rui, the school director who was drunk on Chinese culture, but in the real world, Lu Gang shot her through the chest with a bullet.
What finally calmed my turmoil was a letter from Claire's younger brother to Lu Gang's family:
"As we gather in grief and memories, we also think of your family and pray for you, because this You must have been so sad and shocked this weekend. Ann believes in love and forgiveness. We are writing this letter when you are grieving to share your grief and hope that you will join us in praying and loving each other. In such a painful time Ann must want our hearts to be filled with compassion, forgiveness, and love. We know very well that if there is one family that is suffering greater grief than ours right now, it is yours. We want you to know that we are willing to share this with you. so that together we can find comfort and support from it. Ann hopes the same."
What we never give up is love.
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