Translated by Hinh
This title is borrowed. I only wanted to do a shallow kind of remembering. I’ve said before that my memory has declined to a certain point—but it isn’t that I’ve truly forgotten. It’s that some things have sunk deep into the brain; if you don’t dig, you can’t retrieve them.
When we talk about the New Year, what are we talking about?
Let me start with this year’s New Year’s Eve. What was I doing? I was playing a game. A game called The Alters (Chinese title: 《多重人生》). It’s almost funny: it’s a cyberpunk work that probes existence and the meaning of life, with hardly any New Year atmosphere at all. It’s mostly about economic crisis, financial collapse, corporate dominance, survival on a lonely planet—radiation and magnetic storms. The gameplay is interesting: build infrastructure, plan resources, and cooperate with other versions of yourself. Those other selves are what you get when one life choice branches, and a new self grows from it.
The protagonist has six “splits” in total. Besides the builder-self, there are a scientist, a refiner, a botanist… The game gives each one a vivid personality. There’s a rude, hot-blooded technician who loves hard and hates hard; a scientist who stays neutral and cool; a botanist floating inside an imagined soft life… anyway. It’s a fairly hardcore game: you start from scratch, build a base, mine resources, keep the whole thing running so you can survive. That’s what I did on New Year’s Eve. When we talk about the New Year, I’m telling you about a time-consuming sci‑fi game. I might uninstall it, because I don’t have the mental energy to carry it to the end.
Its theme is basically an exploration of the self, with a little self-mockery about human nature. The game says: the self is only one organ in the upper chamber of the unconscious. If you can become part of existence, as a whole, you should feel happy. Yes—some key choices, like whether the protagonist stayed at the university after a PhD, whether he left home and emigrated to start over, ultimately write different career chapters… He creates his splits, and they help each other survive the end of the world.
In that situation, can a person still keep a moral balance? I don’t think I can. In the mid-to-late game there’s a fairly major moral choice, so I decided to stop playing. If a game is made well enough to pull me in, I’ll want to live at any cost. And in those moments, the choices you make usually lead to a bad ending, because game companies have preferences. I think they often prefer sacrifice and grand narrative. But I’m an ordinary person who wants to live. I always have been. That might mean I can’t be a hero, but maybe I can survive in a chaotic era.
I opened my photo album. The earliest photo is dated June 25, 2025. So I don’t have any deep memories from before that. What did I do in the New Year of 2025? Honestly, I don’t remember. From a few scattered sentences from my family, I heard that in 2025 my grandpa fell seriously ill, in and out of the hospital again and again on New Year’s Eve. I should have been at home then, but I don’t remember.
So I want to remember what I did this year—play a game. I played The Alters all the way until the Spring Festival Gala started singing “Unforgettable Tonight.” Many things changed. When I got home this year, I found there was no lock on my bedroom door. The lock had been broken for a long time, but removing it entirely is still unusual. My room has basically become a public space, leaving no privacy for my existence. On the way home, I wrote down a few lines about what I’m actually afraid of—why I’m afraid to go home, why I’m afraid of the New Year. Here’s what I wrote then:
Fear, a physiological reaction. Heartbeat accelerates, blood pressure rises, breathing becomes short.
About going home—what am I afraid of?
I’m afraid of verbal violence.
I’m afraid of aging, because it sits so close to death.
I want to be connected to the world, yet I deeply loathe the few proofs of my existence—home. As if existing is a sin.
Countermeasures:
I feel braver than before.
I can read the novels I want. (Why is this here?)
I will be protected; I must believe that the One with me is with me. (PS: I’m not religious, please don’t misunderstand…)
On the night of February 16, 2026, fireworks bloomed, and I burned paper offerings by the roadside. Smoke and ash danced over the asphalt; sparks kept leaping toward people. I lowered my head and bowed three times, knees on the familiar white line of the road. My life is a piece of Chinese folk horror, spanning ancient and modern alike. And yet I found a thread of peace inside it, because everything was not as terrifying as I imagined. It was all—static. People weren’t that hard to deal with. There wasn’t that much criticism or arguing.
But maybe that’s only because I go home too rarely. A whole year passed; I returned only for a brief stay. Maybe distance really does create beauty. My feelings about all this are complicated. But I seem to have become stronger, braver—standing up, believing myself to be a complete person. So I built walls of bronze and iron, and a lot of filthy language couldn’t pierce my defenses. “Defense” isn’t a nice word. Too many sensations dilute the spring of thoughts; the more I can say, the more I cannot say. My edges seem to have flattened. There’s so much evidence that I suddenly became more “mature”: love and hate both fading, more perspective-taking, more switching positions with others.
When we talk about the New Year, what are we talking about?
This New Year wasn’t as bad as I imagined.