Chapter 14: We

“We” is the plural of “I.” But when people say “we,” they often mean one layer more than “I.”

Our family. Our class. Our company. Our generation. We Chinese. Let’s be together. When people say “we,” the heart is warm, has somewhere to settle: I am not alone, I am among a group of people, there is a place, there are some people, and I am one of them.

There are also “we”s that taste different when spoken. Everyone’s like that. Everyone else has one. Other people’s children all got in. When people say these things, “we” is not beside them, but outside, with an “everyone”; they stand outside looking in, afraid of being left behind.

People inside “we” look very different from one another.

Someone has just joined a new workplace. At lunchtime he sees his colleagues going to the canteen in twos and threes, chatting and laughing. He walks behind alone, unsure whether to catch up or pretend he has something to do. A few months later he is finally asked along, and sits among that table, smiling, agreeing, though in fact there is a lot he doesn’t agree with. But he dares not say so, for fear that if he does he will be left outside again.

Someone is in the family group chat; at New Year the red envelopes are grabbed with great excitement; the rest of the time no one says anything. A distant relative posts something he disagrees with; he wants to reply, and holds back: no one else has said anything; if I do, I’ll seem not to fit in.

Someone sees that the people around him are all married, all have children, all have bought flats. He has none of it, and going home for New Year he is questioned on every side. He says it doesn’t matter, but inside there is always a voice: everyone has it, only I don’t; is something wrong with me?

A couple just together want to do everything together: eat together, watch together, go together. One wants an afternoon alone, and the other panics: don’t you want to be with me any more?

A couple married many years: every morning he brushes his teeth in the bathroom while she boils water in the kitchen; in the evening each looks at their own phone, and now and then one says, “it’ll be colder tomorrow.” He gets a haircut, and she notices three days later. He has been quiet lately; she thinks he is just tired.

And there is a kind of “we” that can’t be avoided. A woman and her mother-in-law under one roof, neither able to stand the other, and neither able to leave. Someone and a colleague, five years together, awkward at every turn, still having to sit in one room every day. A man and his father, unable to see eye to eye for decades, still sitting at one table every New Year. People speak of this kind of “we” through gritted teeth.

These shapes often assume two things, opposite in direction, with one root.

One is: “we” is a ready-made big house; go in, and you are no longer lonely; be shut out, and you are lonely. So people struggle to squeeze in, and once in, dare not make a sound for fear of being squeezed out; those together had best be the same in everything, do everything together, and any difference is a crack.

The other is: “we” is chosen by oneself; choose well, and you are happy; choose badly, and you are unlucky. Those one can’t avoid are wrong choices, bad fate; the best life is being only with people you like, and keeping the ones you don’t at a distance.

Both assumptions guard that fear: the fear of being alone outside, of being left behind, of loneliness.

“Everyone” brings out something else too: comparing.

Under “everyone has it, only I don’t” lies not only the fear of being left behind but a deeper thought: the life others lead is the real life. Their child got in, they moved into a new flat, their family went traveling, and in the photos they smile so well; looking and looking, one comes to feel one’s own share is a making-do, not lived well, not yet begun. The ones truly being are them; oneself is only standing aside, watching.

But the people in the photos are looking at others too. The one who moved into the new flat envies another family’s well-behaved child; the one whose child got in envies another couple’s harmony; the family who went traveling comes back, scrolls through others’ photos, and feels they had a better time. Look all the way round, and every one of them feels the real life is with others; not one feels it is with himself. If there really were such a thing as “the real life,” it ought to be in someone’s hands; yet go all the way round, and it is in no one’s.

It is in no one’s hands because it is not a life at all; it is a thought: this one now doesn’t count. While this thought hangs there, whoever’s life you swapped in to live would still not count; move into their flat, and you would go and look at a bigger one.

Push further down. Envy needs two: a me, and a him I want to become. But where is that “me living his life”? If you really became him—with his flat, his children, his temper, his childhood—then that is him, not you; you haven’t lived his life, you have simply ceased to be, and he is being instead. If it is still you, with your years, your body, these things in your heart, going to live in his flat, then it isn’t his life either; it is your life moved to another place. The envious “if only I were him” leads nowhere at either end.

So this one now is you, one-to-one. The you without a flat is you; the New Year of being questioned on every side is you; the sinking feeling looking at others’ photos is you too. It is not a you who ought to be living better, left behind here. The other’s share is fully being in his place; your share, in your place, is not a bit less. In being, no share is the original and no share the copy.

What does the word “together” say, to begin with?

The Chinese for “together” is yiqi, literally “rising at once.” There is no ready-made “together,” like a room, waiting for two people to walk in; it is two times of being, rising at the same time, meeting in the same place, and so there is together.

Many people remember where they first met a certain person. Perhaps a rainy day, at a party they hadn’t meant to go to. She arrived late, there were no empty chairs left, someone shifted along and made room for her on half the sofa. She sat down and said thank you. He said: no problem.

Just those few words.

Before that day, the two had their own two lives, living in the same city, perhaps passing each other many times on the same street, neither knowing the other. After that day, things were different. Later perhaps they became friends, became family, or perhaps only met a few more times and then lost touch; but however it went later, after that half a sofa there was a path in their days that had not been there before: some things one would say only to him; some places one went because of him; a book he mentioned in passing, and after reading it, one’s way of seeing something changed.

None of this existed before that rainy day. It was not in her, nor in him; it grew between the “thank you” and the “no problem.” Nor were the two swallowed by this path: he was still he, she still she; when the party broke up, each went home, each went to sleep. What grew between them was real; it was not bigger than the two of them, holding them inside it; without her, without him, there would be no path.

Here one thing must be made clear: a relationship and its two ends rise together.

It is not that there are first two sealed-up people, then a thread to connect them; nor that there is first a net, and people are knots tied in it later. Without her thank you, without his shifting along, there would be no path; yet it was that very path that made her, later, a her who would go to certain places, read a certain book, see things in a certain way. The two ends and the middle are several faces of one time of being: from this face, two people; from that face, a meeting. Neither is dissolved by the other.

A meeting has one more feature: there is no going back. If later they fell out and stopped speaking, they still couldn’t go back to before that rainy day. They can stop seeing each other, but they have seen each other; that sentence has been heard, that book read, the way of seeing already changed. What has been cannot become what never was.

Meeting doesn’t pick either. Those gritted-teeth “we”s are meetings too.

Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law bump against each other in one kitchen every day: too much salt, a bowl not washed clean, the child not dressed warmly enough. Every bump is a real bump, and what it strikes out is cold, hard, prickly; and there is no going back from it either. That colleague, awkward at every turn: five years, and something was struck out in him too: he learned to think before speaking, learned not to show everything on his face, and once, meeting someone even harder to deal with elsewhere, he found he wasn’t very afraid.

The person one can’t avoid is not a mistake from outside, stuffed into one’s life by someone. He too is one time of being, meeting oneself in the same place; what is struck out includes pain, and other things as well. A person can leave, can keep his distance, can draw a line; these are real too, and sometimes there is nothing else to do. Only, those years of bumping under one roof have been lived too, have grown something; they were not being for nothing.

Perhaps a family like this once moved in upstairs: a three-year-old who ran about every evening, from one end of the flat to the other, thud thud thud. The person below went up and knocked once; the young mother who opened the door had an even smaller one in her arms and kept apologizing. The next evening, thud thud thud, again. Later the two households agreed that after nine the child wouldn’t run in the living room, and upstairs put down a rug; there were also times they couldn’t agree, and in the lift neither looked at the other. At New Year that mother knocked on the door downstairs and brought a plate of dumplings, wrapped all lopsided; she said the child had made them himself.

Then what holds together these things that grow between two sides? The two sides being alike? Their understanding each other?

At a crossing you sometimes see a blind man and his guide dog. He knows where he is going; the route is perfectly clear in his head; what is on the way, he can’t see: where an electric scooter is parked, which paving stone sticks up. The dog can see, but the dog doesn’t know where he is going. Each holds only half of this road. He says: left. The dog goes left. At a step, the dog stops, and he knows to lift his foot. At the crossing, he hears the traffic stop and says: forward.

The dog doesn’t move.

He says it again: forward. The dog still stands, its body pressing back, pulling him back a little. A turning car brushes past in front of them. He hadn’t heard it. The dog had seen it.

In that moment, neither got inside the other. He doesn’t know what the crossing looks like in the dog’s eyes, and the dog doesn’t know the map in his head. They didn’t become one: he is still a man who can’t see, it is still a dog. Two beings, each with what it can’t see, did not merge into one that sees everything; they only joined up along a harness. He gives it where he is going; it gives him the road it can see. Together they crossed that crossing.

People and those around them are together like this too. Neither goes in, nor need they be alike; each side is its own, and along an invisible harness they rise together.

The man in the canteen, agreeing, not daring to voice a different view, thought “we” was held up by sameness; the moment it wasn’t the same, it would crack. But the guide dog and that man are not alike at all; what keeps them together is exactly their not being alike. If both could see, or neither could, the harness would be useless.

But there are many days, too, when no meeting happens at all.

Some people have had a stretch of days like this. Living in a city for several years, every morning squeezing onto the same subway train, hundreds of people in the carriage, shoulder against shoulder. At noon a fast-food lunch downstairs, every table around full, chatting and laughing. Home in the evening, the door opens, and the flat is dark. He turns on the light and puts his keys on the shoe cabinet, and that little click is the only thing the flat says to him all day.

He scrolls through the contacts on his phone from top to bottom and bottom to top. Over four hundred names, he knows every one, and not one is someone he could send a “you there?” to at this hour.

He doesn’t lack people; he is surrounded by people. Nor is he cut off from anything: in his lungs is this city’s air, that lunch was made by dozens of hands, upstairs someone is walking about, downstairs someone is stir-frying. All things being together: this is not a bit false; yet not one of them could come and sit across from him that evening.

Being together did not keep him from loneliness.

If someone had said to him then: you have never been alone, all things are together with you, you just haven’t seen it clearly—the reasoning in it would not be wrong, but hearing it would only make him lonelier; even his loneliness would be called the error of not seeing clearly. His loneliness was not a miscalculation. He really was touching everything; only nothing was leaning toward him.

Being together does not by itself become “being known.” To be known, a being has to lean over.

Perhaps one day the cobbler downstairs looks up and asks him: haven’t seen you for a while? He is taken aback, and says: I was away on business. Just that one exchange. That evening, when he turns on the light, the flat doesn’t feel so dark.

So the words “you there?” have their weight. Asked, it is this time of being leaning toward another; it often comes to nothing, sent out with no reply for ages. But sometimes the other end soon replies with one word: here. Just one word, and a whole evening’s words have somewhere to go.

Among the hundreds of names in your phone, perhaps there is one standing right now under a lamp just switched on.

Together with someone for a long time, things take another shape.

Two people have been together ten years. One day at dinner he mentions in passing something from his childhood she has never heard. Ten years, and still this? Later she knows such things will keep coming: just when she thinks she knows him best he will say something unexpected, make a decision she couldn’t have guessed; he will grow old, and what he grows old into she can’t choose for him; he will fall ill, and the pain of the illness she can’t take any of. The closer they are, the more he shows himself as another person.

But the commonest shape of being together is many years afterward in which nothing alarming happens. Not that the love is gone, but that they are too close, close enough not to look any more. She knew long ago what he was like, she thought. The him she thought she knew slowly came to stand in front of him, sitting across the dinner table in his place; the living man, behind that image, changed day by day, and she didn’t see.

One day he says: for the past six months I’ve been thinking about changing jobs.

Six months. She has been sitting across from him for six months.

When people fear losing, they grab; when they no longer fear, they stop looking. Grabbing is wanting to press the other into one’s hand; not looking is thinking he has long been in one’s hand. Both swap a living person for an image in one’s heart. That evening she switched off her phone and asked him: what kind of job do you want? He talked for a long time. Some of it she was hearing for the first time.

Trees don’t say “we,” nor do birds, but they are always together.

In a wood, above ground the trees stand clearly one by one; below ground, roots tangle with roots, and some roots are joined with fine fungal threads in the soil. The threads reach through the soil and help the roots get water and nourishment; the trees in turn give the fungi sugar they have made. No one organizes it, and no one says “we are a wood.”

A flock of birds flies overhead, hundreds of them, now left, now right, now gathering into a mass, now scattering, like one whole thing flowing across the sky. Yet each is only watching the few beside it and turning with them. No bird is leading; that great flock just rises together like that.

These togethers have no ready-made big house waiting for them to walk in. They are beings one by one, each with its own edge, each moving by itself, touching, following, joining, and so there is together. Together is rising at once, not being packed in together.

People are like this too; no one stands outside “we.” Someone damages nature, cuts down a wood, fouls a river, thinking he stands outside, laying hands on a thing; yet he drinks that river’s water and breathes what that wood breathes out. People set against people, a fight to the death, think the other side belongs to another world; yet both sides eat grain grown from the same earth and are rained on by the same rain. These clashes are real, and the wounds are real wounds; some will step in, some will take responsibility, and that is all being too; only no one stands outside. “We” has never had an outside.

Many years later, a mother grows old and begins to forget. First where she has put her keys, then that she has just eaten; later still, one day her son pushes open the door, and she looks at him and asks politely: who are you looking for?

At that moment she is sitting in front of him, close enough to touch. Yet she has gone somewhere farther than a distant city. Her inside he could never get into; now even the little of her that knew him is gone.

He still goes every week. Cuts her nails, peels an apple, sits with her for an afternoon. Sometimes she calls him by a stranger’s name, sometimes asks whether he is the new carer. He says: yes, I’ve come to keep you company.

She doesn’t know who he is. He knows who she is.

In a “we” like this, one side can no longer say “we.” That afternoon the apple peel hangs down in a long spiral, and downstairs someone is hanging out a quilt to air. She doesn’t recognize him, and this afternoon is lived all the same.

Between people, in the end, there is often just this one thing left: being beside. Not going in, not taking over, not necessarily even being recognized; just being, at the edge, peeling an apple.