Named after the post „I am a ruin aborigine“, the tag classifies my anti-travel notes, for I do not travel.
My problem is essentially the definition of the implicit systems in which we find ourselves prisoners; what I would like to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice without realizing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent. Therefore, the more I travel, the more I remove myself from my natural and habitual centers of gravity, the greater my chance of grasping the foundations I am obviously standing on. To that extent any trip — not, of course, in the sense of a sightseeing trip nor even a survey — any movement away from my original frame of reference, is fruitful. It is always good for me to change language and country. A simple example: in New York I was struck, as any foreigner would be, by the immediate contrast between the “good sections” and the poverty, even the misery, that surround them on the right and the left, North and South. I well know that one finds that same contrast in Europe, and that you too, when in Europe, are certainly shocked by the great misery in the poor sections of Paris, Hamburg or London, it doesn’t matter where. Having lived in Europe for years, I had lost a sense of this contrast and had ended up believing that there had been a general rise in the standard of living of the whole population; I wasn’t far from imagining that the proletariat was becoming middle class, that there were really no more poor people, that the social struggle, the struggle between classes, consequently, was coming to an end. Well, seeing New York, perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast that exists everywhere but which was blotted out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that was for me a kind of second revelation; the class struggle still exists, it exists more intensely.
— Foucault, Rituals of Exclusion (quoted from Foucault Live), translated by J. K. Simon
Back in old Ruyqiuan
Earlier this year, I stopped by Ruyqiuan Tutoring Centre. It was the place I frequented as a kid, though for not the lessons but hanging out with classmates. We had chat perpetually, pretending to live in a fictional world (which is our co-creation), even on our way there.
One teacher taught math but also handled odd jobs. WeChat official account, for example (the teacher had at least some writing talent, publishing poems and stories back then, though the enthusiasm had waned). The teacher also organised public lectures on the Four Great Novels to attract would-be customers, while we only wanted to play Rubik’s Cubes. In the office the teacher usually led us in, a note reads ‘We must become elite professionals who strike fear into the hearts of others’. The character for wind was replaced with a simple sketch resembling an ‘@’ symbol. We showed no respect by calling him by name, since another teacher shares his surname.