Chapter 2: Who Am I

On any form, the first box is always the name. Then sex, date of birth, place of origin, employer, position, married or not. Fill them in one after another, and when it is full you hand it in, and the person on the form is me.

But if someone asks in the night: who are you, really? Not one box on that form is any use.

“Who am I” is not usually asked. What is usually asked is someone else’s “who are you,” and the answer is one’s own “I am”: I’m Zhang, I’m in Class Three, I’m his mother, I’m an accountant, I’m from the north. Every one is right, every one works. At the hospital you give your name, at the parents’ meeting you say whose parent you are, in business you hand over a card. It is by these “I am”s that a person has a place among people.

When a person says “I am,” what is going on inside?

A group of strangers sits together for the first time and takes turns introducing themselves. Each, having said a name, almost always adds at once what they do and where. Some say it fast, some say it slowly, pronouncing the name of the employer very clearly. When they finish, they glance at the others’ faces. That glance is checking: did they take it in? Do they know who I am now?

A class reunion after more than ten years. Before long the talk circles round to the same few things: where are you working now, how old are the kids, where did you buy a flat. Those who have done well talk more; those who haven’t eat. Afterward, one who hasn’t done well walks home alone and feels bad for a long time: who am I? What have these years amounted to?

Someone who has been slighted says: do you know who I am? The moment it is out, everyone nearby is embarrassed for him. But what he is anxious about is something serious to him: he is afraid of being taken here for nobody, for just anyone, someone who can be treated any way at all.

A woman who has been a mother all her life: the children are grown, gone to a city far away, home once a year. The house is suddenly big and quiet. She cooks every day, sits down, and does not know what to do next. She doesn’t say it, but there is a sentence inside her: am I still anyone’s anything?

A man retires. On the last day at work he clears his desk, and his colleagues give him a bunch of flowers. The next morning the alarm doesn’t go off, and he wakes after five as usual, lies in bed, and suddenly does not know what sort of person he is supposed to be when he gets up. People used to call him “Section Chief Li”; now they call him “Old Li.” It takes him days to get used to that one word’s difference.

And smaller ones. Choosing a name online, choosing an avatar, taking a long time to find one that is “like me.” Saying, in conversation: that’s just the kind of person I am. I’m straightforward. I’m not that kind of person. When saying these things the tone is hard, like driving a stake into the ground: this is me, don’t move it.

Under all these “I am”s there often lies the same fear: the fear of being nothing.

No title, no use, no one who needs you, no look by which you can be picked out at once in a crowd; if all this were gone, what would be left? It seems only an emptiness would be left, to scatter at a puff of wind. So people spend their lives hanging things on themselves: name, post, identity, temperament, catchphrases, hung up one after another, the more the steadier, like a tree driving its roots down, the deeper the less afraid of being blown away.

But these things will be taken away one by one. Titles end, children leave, strength goes, even a name can be changed; “that’s just the kind of person I am,” looked at ten years later, is often no longer that kind of person. Each thing taken away makes something inside sway.

So a deeper thought arises: all these are outside, given by others, given by the days, clothes worn one layer at a time. Under the clothes there must still be a bare, true me that nothing can take away. Find it, and there will be nothing more to fear.

What “who am I” is really looking for is this: a me that cannot be taken away. A last piece of ground no one can touch.

Then go and look.

You can try now: put down what you are doing, look inward, find the “true me.” Not a name, not a job, not someone’s someone; the one behind all this, always there, holding all this.

You will probably find something. Perhaps behind the brow, a feeling of “I look out from here”; perhaps in the chest, an indescribable “I know I am”; perhaps something very quiet and empty, as if everything passes before it while it does not move.

Look once more at what you found. That feeling of “looking out from here” has a location, a little behind the brow, not at the soles of the feet; it has a thickness, thicker the moment you attend to it, thinner when distracted; a moment ago it wasn’t there, now it is, and in a while, going to pour a glass of water, it will have gone who knows where. That quiet, empty thing is the same: it has come only just now, it has its look, it will come and it will go.

Everything you find is a thing that is happening, there like the birdsong outside, like the cup in your hand. None of them is “holding everything”; they are among the things being held.

Not finding it is not for lack of looking carefully. Keep searching behind, and every “one behind” you find becomes, the moment it is found, the one in front. Like someone trying to turn round and see the back of his own head: however fast he turns, the back of his head turns with him.

That ground no one can touch is not there.

When it is not found, a person easily falls the other way: then there is no me. I am false, an illusion pieced together from thoughts; see through it, and there is no me.

This fall is wrong too.

Someone who says “there is no me” still gets hungry at noon, and when hungry still says “I’m hungry,” not “this bundle of thoughts is hungry.” When someone steps on his foot, it is his foot that hurts. When he does something wrong and people come looking, it is him they look for; if he says “what me? No one did this,” that is not seeing through, it is welshing on a debt.

And there is something finer. Someone who says “I no longer have a me” often has more of a me than anyone: a me that has seen through, a me a little higher than others. That “no-self” has become a new title, hung on the same person. He is still hanging things on himself; this one just looks least like clothing.

Both ends are wrong. “I” is not an owner hidden behind, nor an illusion waiting to be punctured.

Then what is it?

Back to the form. What is the name on the form to a person?

The name is not the person. But without a name you cannot call a person, letters cannot reach them, accounts cannot be kept, nothing can be carved on a grave. A name is an address: follow it, and you find this place.

“I” is an address too, only closer. A name is what others use to find this place; “I” is this place’s own answer. Someone calls “Zhang,” this place turns its head and says: yes, here I am. From then on this place can be found, can answer, can promise, can apologize, can sign an IOU, can say at a sickbed “I’ll stay with you.” An address is not the owner of the house; but without it, no one can find the house.

And this house is always moving.

A person opens a childhood album; on the first page is a baby, chubby, knowing nothing. His skin, his bones, his thoughts, what he feared, what he liked: almost none of it is left today. Yet pointing at the photo, a person still says: that’s me.

What makes this sentence hold? If it depended on something kept unchanged from then till now, nothing would be found. The sentence holds all the same, because there has been no break in between: day after day, mouthful after mouthful, night after night, from that page to this one, not one day empty. The baby was not swapped out; day by day he grew into the person of today.

So “I am still me” and “I have changed” are both right at once.

I have changed: temper changed, tastes changed, what I feared I no longer fear, people I looked down on I now understand. I am still me: the road of changing is one road, not broken in two. “I” is not a thing worn down bit by bit by time; “I” is this one occurrence, going on changing all the way. It is not that there is first an unchanging me who then goes through many changes; it is that these changes, joined all the way along, are joined into a person who can say “I.”

Along this road, things change in different ways. Some change fast: a mood can shift several times a day, thoughts dozens of times a minute. Some change slowly: bones, skin, a person’s accent, showing a little only over decades. Some seem never to change: a certain look around the eyes since childhood, by which an old classmate recognizes you at a glance in the street decades later. Some change until they are gone: the child who used to cry a lot, the young man who used to speak so sharply, can no longer be found. What changes fast is; what changes slowly is; what seems unchanged is; what has changed away, has been.

“I” is how all these, fast and slow, changing and unchanging, are growing together in this place.

Looking back on their lives, people often pick and choose too. The years in their twenties, full of spirit: “that was really me.” Later, the down-and-out years: “those years weren’t like me; that was no life for a human being.” Old, the memory failing: “I’m not myself anymore.” As if only one stretch of a life were the original, and the rest copies gone out of shape.

But which stretch is the original? The years full of spirit were you; the down-and-out years, the one squatting in a rented room eating instant noodles, lying awake at midnight, was also wholly you; the old one who forgets things is also you. When each stretch came, it was not standing in for another. If the “true me” were only in the best few years, then who was it that ate and slept here the other decades, hurting and laughing? No one else lived those decades for you.

What does not change is not any one stretch either. Look for a me unchanged from beginning to end: it cannot be found, and need not be. It is not that an unchanging me passes through stretch after stretch; it is that each stretch is wholly you, joined on, unbroken. Whatever you become, that is you; wherever you change to, nowhere is out of shape. The original is not the look before the changes; each time is its own original time.

Rivers and trees never ask “who am I.” But they too are always changing, and always themselves.

A river. Down from the mountains, round the city, out to sea. Watching from a bridge: today’s water is not yesterday’s; the water that flowed past here yesterday is long gone downstream, some into the fields, some into the sea, some evaporated into cloud. The riverbed changes too: one flood washes away a sandbank and piles up another downstream; over decades the bends bend more, and the straight parts silt into shoals. Yet people still call it this river, by the same name for hundreds of years.

Is this river a thing? Look for its “true river,” and it cannot be found. Take away the water, and there is no river; take away the flowing, and there is no river either. The river is this one occurrence, always flowing. It has never had an unflowing “river itself” hidden under the water, waiting to be found. While it flows, it is itself.

A tree too. It buds in spring, drops its leaves in autumn, every year’s leaves are new, last year’s long rotted into soil; the trunk adds a ring each year, and the innermost rings have long stopped living, only holding it up. It is the same tree, not because some piece of wood was never replaced, but because all these years, year after year, it has kept growing, without a break.

People and rivers and trees are no different in this. “I am still me” rests, too, on always becoming, without a break. Only people can open their mouths and ask “who am I”; rivers and trees don’t. The moment of asking is one occurrence on this road too, like a flood or a fall of leaves: it is.

Seen this way, the place of human beings becomes clear too.

There are often two ideas, one high and one low. The high one: humans are the most remarkable of all things, they think, make, ask; the world revolves around humans, who sit on the throne. The low one, more and more common in recent years: machines are getting cleverer, they write and calculate and draw, faster and more precisely than people; people seem about to be outdone, to become a heap of useless waste, sooner or later to be replaced.

The two ideas, one high and one low, assume the same thing: humans have a position, either above or below, and must be somewhere on a ranking.

In this matter there is no such ranking. Humans do not sit on a throne, nor stand where the waste goes. A human being is one occurrence of being, in this place, growing into something that speaks and asks “who am I”; a river is one occurrence of being, flowing; a tree is one occurrence of being, growing; the machine that writes is also one occurrence of being, running in its own way. No one is more by a bit for being cleverer, and no one is less by a bit for being outdone. What people can do has its weight, which no one can take away; but that weight does not come from being ranked ahead of someone.

The fear was falling on nothing all along.

People fear being nothing because they think of “I” as a thing: a thing can be taken away, lost, outdone. So they hang up titles, drive stakes, look for a last piece of ground.

But “I” has never been a thing. It is one occurrence of being, going on. Something going on cannot be taken away, because it is not kept anywhere; it is just this moment, this moment, this moment. The title ended, and the day it ended was; the children left, and the moment at the station was, and the moment standing back in the empty house was too; “that’s just the kind of person I am” stopped being true after ten years, and every day of those ten years of changing was.

So the question “who am I” can be asked another way.

The old way was looking for a thing: peel off layer after layer of clothes and find the unmoving me underneath. Looked for that way, it will never be found. Ask it another way: right now, in this place, what is happening?

This body is breathing, these eyes are reading this line, a thought has just come up in the mind and sunk again, next door someone is chopping vegetables, the light from the window is moving across the table. Many things meet in this place and happen together; what their meeting makes can speak, can answer, and calls itself “I.”

The answer to “who am I” is not behind, not underneath; it is in this cluster of things happening. It is not a noun; it is one occurrence of being, going on.

This is not to say “I’m Zhang” and “I’m his mother” don’t count. They all count; they are how this occurrence of being is called out between people. “I’m his mother” was made, between this place and that child, over decades of one feed, one cry, one late-night dash to the hospital after another; it is as real as can be. Only it is not an outer garment with a bare body underneath; it is part of this place’s being, and it will change, fade, and one day complete its stretch. Completed, that stretch has been, and no one can take it away.

Old Li, the morning after retiring, sits on the balcony with a cup of tea. Downstairs someone is quarrelling; the sun on the back of his hand is a little hot. At this moment, who is he?

He does not need to find an answer first before he can sit here. The tea is cooling, the back of his hand is hot, the quarrel downstairs comes and goes; being is not a bit less. He is no longer a section chief, nor is he “nobody”; he is this occurrence, sitting on this balcony, the back of his hand a little hot from the sun.

After a while he gets up to go to the market, and on the way he meets an old neighbor, who calls to him from a distance: Old Li!

He turns his head and answers.