“You have now reached the next stage, you can only move forward”
Over the past few years, transnational activities have been restricted due to the control of the spread of the new crown virus, but the life shaped by “globalization” since the last century is still growing new branches. Yiwu – the famous international small commodity market – weaves A complex network covering the whole world has emerged. A group of Arabs live here and continue to manage their lives of hope and depression in a foreign land.
In the hot summer this summer, Xiaoyu went to Yiwu with two Lebanese friends. There are many foreign restaurants in the area, and shisha is a standard item in coffee shops. The two friends talked about politics endlessly during the trip, and even more Lebanese gathered around them to discuss the marriage system in Lebanon. Their eyes are shining with passionate political ideals and vigorous optimism, but they are desolate because they are far away from the real political scene.
This article is part of Xiaoyu’s “Sailor Project” project. He plans to go to Syria, the hometown of two friends, to continue his writing.
Lenin in Yiwu
Written by: Lu Xiaoyu
Traveling with Lebanese fulfilled my romantic imagination. Adventurers, travelers and astute businessmen, the Lebanese live outside their own country of four million people, with a diaspora of more than ten million people spread across the globe. When in Ghana, go to a Lebanese store to exchange currency and listen to them talk about Nkrumah’s Arab wife; when in Mexico, go to a Lebanese barbecue restaurant and watch them turn Shawarma into a meat taco (Al Pastor). These days, two Lebanese take me to Yiwu on Eid al-Adha, promising me to meet “real Syrian food and people”. Adhan and Muhammad spent several days and nights discussing politics non-stop in Hangzhou. I thought they would stop when they arrived in Yiwu. Yet our conversations have barely left politics, even in record-breaking heat. The moment we got off the high-speed rail, we couldn’t help but let out a long sigh of “Oops”. Adhan opened his umbrella, the first Arab man I’ve ever seen with a parasol. Muhammad said that it was like being in Saudi Arabia, and immediately corrected that, no, Saudi Arabia is not such a hot and humid place. Getting in and out of stations with them is slow. When entering the station, they had to squeeze through the manual passage with passengers holding household registration books or temporary ID cards, and endured constant queue jumping. In the end, I lost my patience and pushed Muhammad to the front.
When leaving the station, instructions in Arabic lead them to a station serving foreigners and “brethren of ethnic minorities”. I saw the date of last entry written by Adham: 2019-08. I said, almost three years. He said, yes, relatives and friends have died and left one after another during the past three years. Muhammad scribbled and corrected, trying to recall the exact date. He was too nervous, his whole body was tense, and he was about to break the pen. Beads of sweat appeared on his smooth forehead, and his eyes behind the lenses several thicknesses were fully focused. Compared with Adhan, his experience was more tortuous. At the beginning of the epidemic, he was trapped in St. Petersburg, Russia, and later returned to China via Lebanon, and completed his doctoral research on artificial intelligence in Changchun. He and Adhan were born on the same date. They went to the same elementary and middle school, joined the Lebanese Communist Party at the same time, and went abroad together. They even studied for a master’s degree in Wuhan and stayed in China to teach after graduation. When he walked out of the service station, sweating all over his body, I asked him, did he feel the power of the form? He smiled shyly and said, that’s why Lenin said, we need a thorough anti-bureaucratic struggle.
We went straight to Yiwu International Building. The intersection of Binwang Road is still the center of Arab activities. Adhan found the Syrian restaurant in the back street, greeted everyone, ordered a big plate of food, akkawi, Baladi, Jibeh, which I never expected Cheese that will appear in China. After that, for three consecutive days, life happened according to this pattern: we went out near noon, Adhan walked into a restaurant, greeted and greeted all the people kindly, and then there was endless food, until he fell into the body paralyzed by overeating , picked up the mobile phone to share the news. The plunge of the euro made Adham very excited. He said that Europe is going to end and the West is going to end. He had just returned from an officially organized trip to Xinjiang, where he gave local officials his book on Wuhan’s fight against the epidemic. We subscribed to similar news agencies, had diametrically opposed sentiments, and while I lamented hopelessness and what the hell this was, Adhan and Muhammad firmly believed that a new era was unfolding.
The movie “Looking Homeward”
They also believe in the saying “dessert stomach”: No matter how rich the meat and carbohydrates of the main meal, there is another stomach that can hold dessert after the meal. The Turkish Mato ice cream shop has stores in Yiwu and Guangzhou. This time I came to Yiwu and found that it has another branch. Adhan and I played the game of guessing the hometown. When a person came in, he asked me where that person was from. After hearing my answer, Muhammad shook his head one after another and said, that is a typical Egyptian, or, that is a typical Iraqi, look at the back of his head, how can you misidentify him, you don’t even need to listen to him say. As Kunefe was at the table, Adhan suddenly spoke about his wedding and his ex-wife in Syria. That was the one thing we all had in common: a failed international marriage. He traveled to Syria alone in the war-torn 2016 and 2017, when the two were still dating, and Adham bypassed areas controlled by opposition and terrorist groups, taking mountain trails in and out of the outskirts of Damascus. Their wedding in Lebanon lasted three days, and there were more than a thousand guests on the check-in list—that’s just the number of signatures from men representing the family, including the leadership team of the Lebanese Communist Party. In the photo, his uncle carried the newcomer on his shoulders into the lobby. He said not a single one remained sober, and the whiskey alone consumed three hundred bottles, three hundred bottles. Then he pointed out in the photo that so and so had died, or died of war, or the new crown, or some other random reason. His older brother used to have a lucrative job in the Lebanese port, and his salary after the big bang was forty dollars a month. Adhan’s ex-wife’s sisters have all left Syria. They originally planned to go to China together, but she couldn’t bear to leave her mother alone and chose to stay in China, so the two separated. Adhan said, you know what it’s like, you’ve been to Syria and Lebanon, you know that.
Every time Adhan tried to convince me, he said, you have been to Lebanon, and you know what the so-called system is like in the third world. Muhammad would add a quote from Lenin at this time, so frequently that it seemed to say “Lu Xun said it”. Adhan didn’t understand my complaint about reality, even though it was exactly the same as his approach to Lebanese politics. As the Lebanese began to gather in Adhan’s direction, his emotions intensified. We escaped the most difficult period of daylight in the hotel, and went to the “Lei Feng Juice Shop” opened by the Egyptians to wake up our stomachs. The Lebanese who came across on the road and heard that Adhan was coming came here one after another. Their businesses run the gamut from clothes to electrical appliances to shipping containers, and their street-learned Chinese speaks fluently with a variety of accents.
Once again my knowledge of Lebanese geography was expanded. For example, in Tripoli, the stronghold of the Sunnis, there used to be an Alawite community (Jabal Mohsen). The conflict between communities lasted from the Lebanese civil war to the Syrian civil war. The owner of the Spinneys supermarket in Yiwu also appeared, and I immediately said that I had been to Spinneys when I was in Beirut. It was a time-honored supermarket chain established by British military officers in the 1920s. It opened a desert bus between Baghdad and Damascus during World War I. It opened a branch in Beirut in 1948. It was only closed during the civil war. It is a shopping favorite for foreigners. where to go. The boss just smiled when he heard these kind words. I soon learned from Adhan that Yiwu’s Spinney was a registered trademark when he came to China, and he fought a lawsuit with the original company for five years because of this, and finally won.
The movie “Why Home”
The meeting place shifted from a fruit shop to a Syrian restaurant. I ordered aubergines and everyone laughed when Muhammad said something. Adhan said, are you a Shia? The Shia hadith says that “Eggplant cures all diseases” (Note: Quoted from “Ocean of Light”, Bihar al-Anwar). According to Muhammad, eggplant is said to be the first vegetable to worship Ali. I’ve mouthed this hard-to-pronounce Arabic word several times: الاباذنجان (Albadhinjan). The Lebanese, who at first claimed to be single, revealed the status of their wives and children in greeting each other. The arrangement of being alone in China with the wife and children in the home country is the most common, but the practice of claiming to be single is also common. My female researcher friend almost never met a married Arab when he was doing field work in Yiwu. And at the coffee shop on Binwang Road, an even bigger party awaits us. Only in Yiwu, shisha is standard in coffee shops, even if the owner is Chinese. I saw that the scale of the party continued to expand. People who joined successively moved tables and chairs, and the seats around the long table became a circle. The size of nearly 20 people was close to the total number of Lebanese in Yiwu.
Adhan is the center of the circle, and he seems to be delivering a political campaign speech. A topic that sparked heated discussions was Lebanon’s marriage laws. Lebanon has not yet fully recognized civil marriages, and marriages must go through religious courts and ceremonies. This is a legacy of religious partition, which restricts interfaith or secular marriages in ways that do not recognize them. There are very few cases of completing civil marriages in Lebanon’s history, and married couples almost always face heavy pressure from the family and society. Going to Cyprus or Turkey to get married is a way to get around the restrictions, but as the economy deteriorates and overseas travel becomes difficult, online registration of marriages, which became popular this year, has once again sparked national discussions. Discussions like this reproduced a sense of dislocation I felt during my travels in Beirut: bright openness and deep conservatism. Lebanon talks about everything, and people can dress up in any way. The appearance of a secular country, but every little bit of pierce the surface, there are entangled sects, traditions and memories inside. There was still jokes about non-marital relations at dinner, but now there was a quarrel over the registration of civil marriages.
The movie “The Kite Runner”
Mohammed turned his head and said to me, this is the epitome of Lebanese politics, you see, there is no way to agree on one thing, this is the status quo of division. He raised his head, put down the e-cigarette, and took out the loose tobacco to make cigarettes. He said, you see, we talk a lot now, so we feel like we have become social animals. When we were in Lebanon, we discussed politics every day and lived like this. In the past six months, it was like an animal; it was like a fish that used to be in the sea, but now it is in the fish tank, and I felt like I was about to suffocate. Adhan has not been back for so long, he must be more painful than me, he used to come to Yiwu every month, this is the first time in five months. At the same time, Adhan continued his speech, mentioning Mao and Lenin. I held back my curiosity and did not pursue until the end of the meeting. On the way to the riverside for a drink, Adhan began to translate:
“Did you ask me how to distinguish between a conservative and an open Lebanese? If you want to find a Lebanese who can talk about everything, you can only be me and us atheists. You see who you want to ask? When he went to have a drink, what did he say? He said he was too old to drink. How can a person not drink because of his age? In fact, it is telling you his attitude towards faith in a tactful way. Muhammad In Mudd and my hometown, we often say ‘fuck god’ when we talk, it doesn’t represent our religious position, it’s just that we often use these words in our dialect to express everyday emotions. Of course, not every Lebanese or Arab Humans can accept this so let’s pay attention too. You see these discussions about civil and religious marriages, I discussed it as a teenager, what else is there to say, but that’s the kind of stuff that stalls in Lebanon A few days ago, we talked about it because of the news about the marriage on these two antennas. Don’t look at them. They have been in China for so long. They have never left Lebanon for a moment. What they eat, watch, care about, and even their life time It is the Beirut time zone. Even in China, we are still talking about the future of Lebanon. It can no longer go on the road in the West. It has done everything Europe and the United States let it do, and then? This is a systemic problem, in this way In the problem of the system, we need a leader, a cause, a way, a leader like Mao or Lenin. (I asked him what the alternative way is.) You live in an alternative way Know yourself? We definitely need a new narrative, the political narrative is so important, but Lebanon’s line is not clear, it can’t copy China or Asia, and it must not be the same as the West. But it will appear, because Its appearance does not depend on the will of people, nor does it depend on the will of a collective.”
Feelings of dislocation swept over me. Lebanese spit out passages recited from political textbooks as teenagers. It may have been ten years since I last heard “no will.” When it takes the form of belief, my understanding of its meaning blurs. China, which was at a certain historical stage in the past, and Lebanon in its current state, both need this sentence to inspire the vision of national transformation. Now in the eyes of others, China is no longer the subject of transformation, but instead serves as a symbol and symbol to represent another possibility. Being in a representative place of global capitalism circulation, what Adham discovered in it was the power to subvert capitalism. Muhammad’s eyes brightened. He agreed with the change of the system and the existence beyond the will, which gave him full optimism. Only when it came to this did the tension that had been hanging over him disappear. He was relieved, and he seemed completely unafraid that the development of society would go in another unforeseen direction. In the unexpected sense of relaxation, Adhan played the Lebanese singer Fairuz by the Yiwu River. Music is an element that cuts through the divisions in Lebanese society, and Firouz songs are played in restaurants and homes regardless of the denomination. Firuz’s son, Ziad Rahbani, was also a musician and a communist who was fiercely critical of the regime. In one of his interviews, he vaguely revealed his mother’s political stance. Unexpectedly, figures in the Lebanese political circle issued statements to quell the storm, saying that Firuz’s greatness should have nothing to do with his political stance, and he did not think which camp she belonged to. .
Firuz in Beiterdine, Lebanon, 2001
Alignment issues plague Adhan’s perception of me. Because I don’t have the doctrine that can be clearly expressed like him, but I’m not as great as Feluz yet. He had to assess my political stance through various issues. In their mouth, there is hardly a respectable sitting Arab politician. Once they criticized the “weak policy” of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at an Arab gathering in Wuhan. The Palestinian students present turned green. He scolded harder. When I was talking about this, Adhan suddenly turned around and said to me, you are on our side. I said, you can say that I have no doctrine, but I still have a conscience, and China’s attitude towards Palestine has always been very clear. Muhammad said that the official attitude is that among the people I met, there are still many fans of Israel, especially some scientific practitioners, who elevate Israel’s status to a high level. I use this to point out the parallel spaces between official and non-governmental, the gap between the ideology in words and the essence of operation in reality. Adhan said frankly that he has not met many people who truly understand Marxism in his daily life in China, but this does not affect his definition of China as a country of Marxism. Muhammad continued to speak of their fascination with Marx. When he found a hanging portrait of Marx and Lenin in a bar in Yiwu, he raised his eyebrows and took a photo with his spiritual mentor. Marxism is not only their political views, but also comprehensively guides their work and life. This is not the case with the Champagne Left, which tries to separate politics from life. Adhan works on economic inequality, Mohammad works on Marxist psychology and artificial intelligence. He popularized to me Alexander Luria, Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev and other Soviet cultural-historical psychologists, saying The birth of the socialist “superman” under the new economic structure is explained as a response to social problems from the academic level.
The movie “Lion of the Earth”
They were not interested in the mosque in Yiwu, and Adhan’s next stop was a restaurant opened by a Lebanese-Venezuelan. “His burgers are the best in the world.” The restaurant is not in the Arab gathering area. The fireplace, bar counter, lighting, marble plate, Chinese and English menu with exquisite fonts, and the birthday party of the Venezuelan family at the next table create a completely different cultural space. There are no burgers on the menu, and the owner wants customers to try something new. Adhan looked disappointed, so disappointed that it seemed that a revolution had failed. He said, you choose the next place to go, it is my fault to come here. I chose to take them to a temple-turned-bar and Livehouse. Muhammad asked nervously, was the temple changed? I said, what’s the matter, Marxists still taboo on this. He said that Lenin said that irony (irony) is crucial. I said, I don’t believe Lenin said this even if I killed him. For an ordinary working day, the bar is unusually crowded, the adjacent tables are local people playing cards, the air conditioner in the glass room built outside the temple building doesn’t seem to work, we are slumped on chairs, the weight on our stomachs and The constant discussion hollowed out my social appetite. The political enthusiasm and optimism that has been around has been washed away by personal emotions. No matter how much the vision stuff is said, we are somehow removed from the public scene, for them, it is undoubtedly the land of Lebanon, and now they fall on the border of the Arab community formed by the global small commodity market Drink beer next to a dilapidated temple. For the first time, Adhan showed a tired expression. He said, the past three years seem to be three hundred years. I am too far away from politics. People cannot live without politics and cannot escape, because you are in it. Muhammad joked to himself that now it is a cycle of “disappointment-depression-alcohol”. As Marx said, capitalism has destroyed nature and human beings. In the process of falling, you can see the increasingly diffuse mental illness.
At this time, a familiar figure walked to the bar from the aisle outside. Members of the band Joyside. Bian Yuan wore tight green trousers and a flowered shirt, and was even thinner than he had imagined. In just a few sentences, I learned that their performance in the south was cancelled, so I temporarily stayed here for the night. I tried to introduce Joyside to the Lebanese: a well-known punk band with status in the Jianghu. Some people think it is one of the most important independent bands in China. So, what is their political attitude, Adham said. I said, the political attitude of punk bands can be imagined. Adhan said, what about their actions, are they anarchist? I shrugged. I don’t like anarchists, he said. Once again, I tried to explain the inverted context, the position of rebellion will shift with the mainstream official value orientation. The manager of the bar also joined the discussion. I said to Adham, if you grew up in China, you might be closer to them.
Adham: (shaking his head) You’re just wrong, my brother. Lebanon also has such people, anarchists, petty bourgeois, liberals. I can smell them as soon as I get close to them. Their problems are all the same, they have little practical experience, they don’t provide ideas, and they always want to break and overthrow. You asked me if there is a new order. Didn’t the BRIC countries start a new order? You couldn’t say no in the past, but now you can. The current corrupt order will eventually collapse. If these countries are not completed, the countries behind will be completed. This is like bumping into a pillar. Even if one person does not fall, the person behind may fall if he touches it. The same is true for Chinese society. After a long revolutionary road, this pillar has already fallen. The stormy revolutionary process has been completed, so why break it. Some people are just obsessed with smashing, without asking the purpose afterward. Now what are you doing to lift up the pillar and break it into pieces? Do you understand, you have now reached the next stage, you can only move forward. You have been to the Arab world, you can better understand what China has achieved in the past three decades, no matter what, there are almost no homeless people on the road. Now the entire Middle East, the entire Arab world, how many homeless people are there. You have to understand…
The movie “Why Home”
Adhan stopped. He looked up, and suddenly three men in police uniforms entered through the front door. I, Adhan, Muhammad, and the principal looked at each other, wondering who the police were looking for. I joked that it was time to decide which was more dangerous, the punk band or the Arab left. The manager got up to meet him, and learned that the police came to monitor the bar and extended the storage period of the surveillance video from two weeks to one month. Mohammad rolled up his cigarette and said it was all part of the acceleration. He doesn’t seem worried at all, as if the technologies are ultimately for him, or as he puts it, for the people. Historical breaks do not exist for them. What we think of as “farewell to the revolution” is integrated from one stage to another chapter, and they all belong to the continuation and length of history. Therefore, they have a huge ability to digest all kinds of contradictions, and they don’t feel any surprise that we are at the pinnacle of global commodity circulation, temple-turned-bars, shared rooms on Joyside, and unexpected police visits , These are the driving forces for the advancement of society. The only thing that can cause emotional waves is Lebanon, which is thousands of miles away, because it seems to be abandoned outside the process of history.
Their next stop is to find a seaside, which can catch up with the summer Mediterranean seaside. I searched with them along the coastline on the map, either too hot or rainy. Our political discussions are over, and even Lenin needed a beach vacation. At the station leaving Yiwu, Mohammed was still sweating profusely, enduring the adults and children thrusting in front of him, holding a Lebanese passport with a cedar pattern, and his army green T-shirt was soaked. He waved helplessly at me on the other end. I said, insist on being a good-tempered Marxist! He replied, I will find out for you Lenin’s sarcasm, I will. As he spoke, he took out a tissue and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
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