I grew up and read a great deal about state violence, about ideological interpellation, and I came to see clearly enough how the concept of “everyone” can be used, within structures of power, to swallow the individual.

There is, every month, a night like this. I set aside whatever work is at hand, pour a glass of  wine, and open a playlist so familiar I no longer need to search for it.  

Москва майская (Moscow in May), Подмосковные вечера (Moscow Nights),  Уральская рябинушка (The Ural Rowen), Калина красная (The viburnum Is  Blooming), Песня о тревожной молодости (The song of Restless Youth),  Прекрасное далёко» (The Beautiful Afar)-and one that was added almost as an  afterthought, Очень Хочется В Советский Союз (I Wish I Could Go Back to the Soviet  Union).  

There is no strict order to this list, and yet over the years it has settled into one of its own,  the way a person walking the same road home at night, again and again, comes  unconsciously to know at which streetlamp to turn. I allow myself, on this night, to re-enter  that sadness. Not to work it through, not to resolve it, and not to turn it, the next morning,  into some kind of fuel for labour. When it comes, I let it come; however long it stays, I stay  with it. Like a person who must go, once a month, to a certain graveyard — bringing no  flowers, saying nothing, simply exists there. Until, at some sudden moment, I close the  playlist, turn off the light, and go on with tomorrow’s life. 

I also remember that before I ever started primary school, I already knew how to draw the hammer and sickle.

Perhaps a Russian word explains it: тоска. It resists translation almost entirely. The English  words we reach for — longing, yearning, melancholy — are never quite right; they are too  light, they lack weight. Nabokov, annotating Pushkin, once paused to give the word its own  few lines-he called it a profound spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause, for  something, or even for a something one cannot name. It is not depression. It is something  older, a pain known only to souls that history has repeatedly ground beneath its wheel.  

The Chinese word xiangchou (乡愁, nostalghia) comes closer, but nostalghia at least has a vague object; тоска has none. It knows only that it is absent from something it cannot  itself name. I am willing to admit that the sadness I sink into once a month is precisely this  concept. 

But my curse is the work of philosophy. I cannot simply let it come and let it go, the way an  ordinary person might. I must analyze it. This is, perhaps, a deeper stubbornness still — I do  not believe any truly deep emotion is without origin. That it keeps resurfacing means it has a source; and a source can, slowly, be excavated. 

Only my analysis has never been the Western form of reflection. Hidden inside that mode of  reflection is an arrogant premise — that a person, through correct enough thinking, can  calibrate themselves into a painless state. Whatever hurts is thereby a deviation awaiting  repair, a disorder not yet properly managed. This posture has never worked on me. I believe, instead, that certain pains are themselves true testimony — the residual warmth of some  conviction not yet extinguished. To force such pain to dissolve is not to dissolve the pain but  to dissolve the self that once believed. 

My unconscious analysis, therefore, never tries to expel this sadness. It begins instead from  an older, clumsier question: what, exactly, am I missing. 

This is not an easy question to answer, because the songs themselves are strange.

Marc Riboud. Reception room of a factory, a portrait of Mao faces the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, Beijing, 1965

Even the songs from the Soviet Union’s high tide — works that should have been wholly  bright, wholly buoyant, wholly belonging to a new world under construction — carry, at their  core, an inexplicable sorrow. Take The Ural Rowen(1953), a song about a girl at a factory gate at dusk who cannot choose between two men; the melody ought to be sweet, and yet it  isn’t.  

The song ripples gently on the water at dusk, the factory’s lights already glinting through the  gathering dark. 

The factory’s lights are meant to be the emblem of the new world, the very flame optimism should kindle, and yet in that melody, once caught by the water’s surface, they seem instead  like something already receding. 

Moscow Nights needs no further argument.  

In the deep-night garden all is hushed and still, only the wind sings softly. 

Socialism was never simply a political system.

A song built almost entirely out of tenderness, and yet inside that tenderness is a dull ache  that makes you want to turn away, like a hand placed on your shoulder through the fabric of  your coat, making you suddenly afraid to walk any further forward. 

There are all kinds of explanations available. Some would say this is simply the melancholy bred into the Russian temperament, tears mixed into even its songs of praise. Others say it  is because the Soviet Union eventually collapsed — that what we hear now is not the  sound as it was then, but an echo carrying hindsight, the last glow of a world already  destined to become ruins. These explanations are all correct, and none of them touches the  essence. 

The longer I listen, the more I am convinced that the sorrow does not come from outside. It  is not an ornament of national character, nor merely history’s dust refracted. It belongs to the  people inside these songs — who, even as they sang of that way of life, already half-knew,  dimly, that the way of life was fragile. They knew that the gesture of handing oneself over  entirely to something larger was beautiful, but that it would not last forever. What they sang  was love for a world being built, one that already sensed, in its bones, that it would  eventually be lost. 

And it is precisely this love that I hear. So, I ask myself — what is it that you love. 

The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall sits quietly at the center; a weight carefully set in place.

It took me many years to answer this question honestly. Because honesty here means  admitting to something that, in today’s climate, is no longer quite respectable. 

Socialism was never simply a political system. 

I know the wrongs it committed as a system — the bloodshed, the campaigns, the lives  ground between its gears, the dead who to this day cannot publicly be mourned. I do not  turn away from these. I do not even defend them. If socialism were only that apparatus, only  a particular decision made by a particular leadership in a particular year, I would have  excised it from my body long ago. 

But it is not only that. 

To me it is a temperature. An atmosphere. A way in which people were still presumed to  belong to one another. It is the entire daily, ethical, aesthetic texture that my childhood body  lived inside, before it was fully replaced by capitalism’s logic of isolated islands. Every  vocabulary I later learned — collective, solidarity, recognition, mutual bearing — grew out of  that texture, not the other way around. I did not first read those words and then come to  endorse the life they described; I was raised inside that life first, and only later, in a library in  a foreign country, did I turn a page and suddenly find myself in tears — and by the time I  noticed, my face was already wet — because I had recognized the very air I had been  breathing since childhood. 

That air was made of some very specific moments. 

тоска. It resists translation almost entirely. The English words we reach for — longing, yearning, melancholy — are never quite right; they are too light, they lack weight

I remember a National Day. I could not yet have started primary school. Our building had a  flag hanging below it — not large, not especially official, but one the neighbourhood  committee dutifully hung out for every holiday. That afternoon I stood in front of the building,  watched it turn once in the wind, and suddenly made a very clumsy request: I wanted my  father to take it down so I could wave it myself. 

My father laughed for a long time. It was not mockery; it was closer to the laugh an adult gives when a child runs headlong into something the adult cannot fully explain either. He  crouched down to my level and told me the flag could not be taken down. He did not use the  term public property. He used something clumsier, closer to what I could understand: he said  the flag belonged to everyone, that every household upstairs and downstairs had hung it  together, and that it could not come down just because I wanted it. “Everyone’s.” 

I could not,  at the time, really grasp those words. I only knew I wanted that flag, the way I wanted any  toy of my own. I was a little disappointed, but I did not cry, because there was something in  my father’s expression that made me feel, dimly, a kind of shame. He was not refusing me.  He was bringing me into a larger order, telling me there was something more important than  my own individual desire. Being brought into it did not feel like being suppressed. It felt like  being lifted. As if I had begun as merely a child wanting to wave a flag, and through that one  moment, I too became one of “everyone.” 

Only my analysis has never been the Western form of reflection. Hidden inside that mode of reflection is an arrogant premise — that a person, through correct enough thinking, can calibrate themselves into a painless state.

I grew up and read a great deal about state violence, about ideological interpellation, and I  came to see clearly enough how the concept of “everyone” can be used, within structures of  power, to swallow the individual. I do not deny that side of it. But I have never been able to  fold my father’s expression that day into that critique. He was not disciplining me. He was not  even educating me. He was simply setting me back down inside a daily order he himself still  stood within — one not yet fully corroded by the logic of the commodity. In that order, some  things were still everyone’s: the building was everyone’s, the flag was everyone’s, and the  children — in a certain sense — were everyone’s too. 

That National Day night we went down for a walk. A neighbour sat on a low folding stool  fanning himself; a radio somewhere played an evening program; a bicycle passed slowly  now and then, its bell ringing once. The flag still hung there. I did not ask to take it down  again. I only glanced at it a little longer as I passed.

I also remember that before I ever started primary school, I already knew how to draw the  hammer and sickle. 

I did not first learn to draw flowers, or cats, or houses, and only later learn to draw a flag. I  learned this symbol at almost the same time I learned to write my own name. In my  understanding at the time, it carried no label of “ideology” — that was a word I would not  need for many more years. It was simply a pattern, a shape so familiar it required no  explanation, like the pattern of horse-drawn carriages on the tiles in our bathroom. 

I remember drawing it on a sheet of white paper, then carefully filling it in with a red crayon. The red was never even — press hard and it would gleam, press lightly and the paper’s  white would show through. As I colored it in, I felt I was doing something important. I did not  know why it was important, but my body knew. Later I held the paper up to show my mother.  She only smiled, said nothing, but took the paper and put it away in a drawer. Many years  later I no longer remember where that paper ended up, but I have never forgotten the  gesture of her putting it away — a gesture with no ideological solemnity in it at all, only a  kind of tenderness between family members, almost a complicity. 

This is the temperature I tried to explain after many years. It is not the temperature of the  state apparatus. The state apparatus is cold — always cold, any state apparatus is always  cold, even one wrapped in a red coat, even one singing the most moving of songs. The  temperature I felt as a child did not descend from the state apparatus. It rose out of the way  people treated one another — my father’s tone as he crouched down to tell me the flag  belonged to everyone, the way my mother slipped a sheet of paper covered in red into a  drawer, the way a street vendor, seeing me walking home from school in winter, would call  out through her window, “Come inside and warm up, child.” 

And these people were able to treat one another this way because they lived — at least in a  certain atmosphere — inside a world that still believed people ought to be this way toward  one another. That world of course had its severity, its repressions, its lack of consideration  for the individual; I am not romanticizing it. But it also had something that has since,  gradually, disappeared — people were not, by default, presumed to be one another’s  competitors. 

At Beijing’s intersections there used to always be a few elderly people wearing red  armbands. 

Mostly retired, in their sixties, faces carrying the weathering of their generation and yet  strangely preserving a plain dignity. They wore large sunglasses that never quite matched  their age — a style unchanged since the nineties, thick-framed, exaggeratedly black,  covering half the face. They stood at the intersection, blew whistles, waved small flags,  shouted at cyclists running the red light. They did this for very little pay, expecting no  recognition. They did it because — in their view of the world — a person, once old, ought to  still have something to do, ought to stand on the street being of some use to everyone. He  was handing himself back over to something. 

The factory’s lights are meant to be the emblem of the new world, the very flame optimism should kindle, and yet in that melody, once caught by the water’s surface, they seem instead  like something already receding. 

I have never once seen this posture in Paris. Not that Paris lacks good people — Paris of  course has good people. But that gesture of handing oneself over, unpaid, even a little  clumsily, to a collective — it no longer grows here. 

Or the bus conductors. Many routes in Beijing no longer have them now, but they were still  there when I was small. Mostly middle-aged women, in dark blue uniforms, seated at a small  platform in the middle of the bus. The moment the bus started, they would begin calling out  the stops — a voice that belonged only to that era, a mixture of official brusqueness and  something almost neighborly, almost warm. They did not treat you as a customer, because in  their world the concept of “customer” had not yet swallowed every relation. They treated you  as a person on this bus — an older, clumsier, and warmer identity. On rainy days they would  remind the girl in the front row to lift her bag off the floor; seeing a woman with a child board,  they would half rise to call out for someone in the back to give up a seat. None of these  gestures was dictated by any procedure. They happened as naturally as breathing. 

And the Young Pioneers polishing the railings in the square. Their red scarves tied tight,  their small faces earnest to the point of excess. They would crouch by the railing with a not particularly-clean rag, wiping, centimetre by centimetre, metal that had already been wiped  countless times. They knew, in practical terms, this task had no meaning — the railing was  not actually dirty — and yet they did not find it boring. They did it solemnly. Because for them  the meaning of the act was never in the railing itself, but in the fact that they were taking part  in something larger than themselves. That sense of participation shone on their faces. It was  only much later, as an adult, that I understood how precious that light was —because it  never again appeared on my own face. 

These images, and the Moscow inside my head, are connected on a certain level. 

When Moscow Nights plays, I am not imagining an unfamiliar city. I can almost see, eyes  closed, that garden — a summer night, tree-shadows, a river giving off the faintest sound in  the distance. A small river flowing quietly, rippling gently, a girl in a white dress standing on  the bank, her braid resting on her shoulder. She is in no hurry to speak, and neither is he.  Behind them stands a factory, its workday already over, the smokestack no longer smoking,  its iron gate slowly stirred by the evening wind. Further off, the sound of an accordion —  another group, down by the river bend, playing The Red Snowball Tree Is Blooming 

(1974). By the little river in the field, the viburnum tree blooms; there is a young man who  truly wins my heart. 

Others say it is because the Soviet Union eventually collapsed — that what we hear now is not the sound as it was then, but an echo carrying hindsight, the last glow of a world already destined to become ruins.

That singing drifts all the way over to them, drifts into the silence between them, and turns  that silence into something neither of them needs to break. 

I know this scene is one I have idealized. Soviet youths on a date may not have had an  accordion, may not have worn white dresses, may not have had Oh, the Viburnum Blossoms drift by just so. But this scene lives truly inside me because it is a form, I used to house a  certain conviction — that people can have moments like this, that silence need not be filled  with words, that two people can stand by a river doing nothing at all, and that this, in itself, is  already enough. 

Or Red Square. On a winter morning, a thin layer of snow over the paving stones. Lenin’s  mausoleum to one side, that low building of dark red granite, like a seal stamped onto the  ground. Many find it gloomy, but as I have grown older, I have come to understand its  aesthetic — it does not try to sublimate death; it simply lets one who has died lie there, for  those who come after to see. It is not a Christian monument, not upward-reaching, not  turned toward the light; it is flat, resting on the earth, an attempt to let the dead continue  existing as part of the collective.

On the other side of the square, a group of Young Pioneers  assembling, white shirts, red scarves, lined up straight in the snow. They breathe out white  clouds, murmur to one another. The teacher leading them raises a hand, and they fall still at  once. Someone begins to sing The Song of Restless Youth (1958) — Hear the wind and  snow roar, watch the shooting star fly; my heart calls out to me, rushing toward a restless  distance. The singing is not loud; the snow absorbs most of it. But what remains is harder to  bear than any loudness would be. 

Tiananmen Square is the same. Its scale is likewise too large to feel entirely real. The  Chairman Mao Memorial Hall sits quietly at the center; a weight carefully set in place.  Outsiders often find the building cold, but for a child raised in Beijing like me, that building is  as familiar as anything can be — it is the gathering point for elementary school spring  outings, the place you line up to await the flag-raising ceremony, the backdrop glimpsed in  passing on countless afternoons walking down Chang’an Avenue. It entered my body not  politically but geographically — like the river at the end of my street, simply there, existing. 

Beijing’s rivers — Beijing, in truth, has no great river of its own; what we have are those not so-wide waterways: the Tonghui River, the moat, and a few smaller, nameless channels.  They are not grand, but they carry a light that belongs only to this city. On summer evenings,  sunlight leaks down through willow leaves, falls on the water, is broken up by the surface’s  small ripples into fragments of gold. I have seen a similar gold in other cities, but never quite  the same one. It carries a clarity that belongs only to the dry air of the north — not the moist,  soft, almost dissolving gold of the water towns south of the Yangtze; it is a harder gold, one  that already carries a hint of the north wind to come. Even now, with my eyes closed, I can  still see it. Willow leaves turning in the wind, the flecks of gold turning with them, two young  people passing over a bridge on bicycles, a bell ringing once, a girl with braided hair turning  back to smile. Far off, the factories have let out for the day; the television has begun its  evening broadcast — an even, steady voice, brooking no argument yet holding no malice  either, gently closing the day’s end, the way a book closes with the faintest stir of air. 

These images have no borders between them. That girl passing under the willow trees on  her bicycle, the girl standing on the riverbank in Moscow Nights, and the girl standing on the  steep bank in Katyusha (1938) — just as the pear blossoms had bloomed across the land,  a gauze of soft mist drifted over the river — are, in my heart, one and the same person. Not  because they resemble one another in appearance, but because they belong to the same  picture of the world. A world that still believed a person could remain connected to the land,  to the river, to the collective, to the small task at hand. They are not consumers, nor the  consumed. They simply grew there, the way the trees along the river grew there. 

I do not expect this conviction to still be shared by most people today. I know clearly enough  where the times have arrived. The Soviet Union dissolved long ago; that world which once  sincerely believed in some notion of we has shattered into fragments now repainted,  repriced, and set back out on shelves.

But the world I live in now is not like that. In the kind of society I now inhabit, people are  trained to become islands, each one alone. Everyone must manage themselves, market  themselves, optimize themselves, and bear full responsibility for their own happiness.  Relationships are optional, replaceable, in need of constant renegotiation and redefinition.  Love is consumption, friendship is consumption, even the family has become a configuration  one can opt out of. People, in this environment, live in a way that appears free — free to  choose, to move, to sever any relationship that no longer feels comfortable — but this  freedom is a lonely freedom, the freedom to face, alone, the final accounting of one’s own  life. 

I know the wrongs it committed as a system — the bloodshed, the campaigns, the lives  ground between its gears, the dead who to this day cannot publicly be mourned. I do not  turn away from these. I do not even defend them.

That Young Pioneer polishing the railing cannot exist in such a world. Because the premise  of his crouching there to do that is his belief that something larger than himself is worth half  an hour spent on a railing that isn’t even dirty. Such a conviction, in an island-society, would  be mocked. People would ask him: How much are you getting paid for this? Will this help your résumé? Did your parents force you to do it? He would go silent in the face of such  questions. That light of his would, little by little, go out. 

And the reason I must return, once a month, to that playlist is precisely this — only in those  songs is that light still burning. Only there can I still see a father crouching down to tell his  child, the flag belongs to everyone; a vendor calling out from her window, “come inside and  warm up, child”; an old man in oversized sunglasses earnestly waving his small flag at an  intersection; a girl with a braid standing on the riverbank, saying nothing, needing to say  nothing. 

The character for person, ⼈, is built from mutual support.

Moscow in May is, of all these songs, the most radiant in melody, the most buoyant, the  closest to a declaration of optimism — a song offered up to a new world under construction,  to a morning, to a future beyond question. It ends like this: 

One stroke leaning left, one leaning right, each depending on the other; neither can stand  alone. Whoever pretends they can stand as a single, independent stroke is no longer the  character ⼈ at all —only an abstract diagonal line. 

I do not expect this conviction to still be shared by most people today. I know clearly enough  where the times have arrived. The Soviet Union dissolved long ago; that world which once  sincerely believed in some notion of we has shattered into fragments now repainted,  repriced, and set back out on shelves. My homeland, too, is undergoing its own  transformation, in ways more complicated and harder to describe. The temperature I knew in  childhood is retreating, bit by bit, from the streets, the stairwells, the buses, the squares. The old man in the oversized sunglasses will retire one day, and the new traffic warden who  replaces him will wear a jacket with reflective strips and carry a small handheld scanner,  standing watch in a world that is cleaner, more efficient, and colder. 

Moscow in May is, of all these songs, the most radiant in melody, the most buoyant, the  closest to a declaration of optimism — a song offered up to a new world under construction,  to a morning, to a future beyond question. It ends like this: 

До свиданья, день вчерашний, Здравствуй, новый, светлый день!  We bid farewell to yesterday and welcome the new light of dawn!  

孙锡瑞