I no longer dream
of borrowing the wind to carry me forward,
but instead
of becoming the wind
and dancing with the waves.
I met Li Feng in P4’s previous production, Theatre of Love. She had excelled at school, was sweet-looking, gentle and considerate, but had never been in a romantic relationship. Although she was paired with a man in the later performance, regrettably they did not ultimately enter a relationship.
Before going home for the New Year, she arranged to talk with me. Only then did I learn of her anger and her difficult struggles with reality. Born in 1995, she is now 28, crushed breathless by the mountains of career, love, education, marriage, ideals and the future. She once ranked sixth in the city in an examination, a child singled out for success. As the eldest child and eldest granddaughter, she was the apple of her family’s eye, the exemplary child other adults held up to their own children. How had she reached the point of lacking even the courage to go home for the New Year?
In her, as though in a mirror, I saw myself and our shared refusal to give in: our refusal to be swept into dust by reality’s enormous waves, to lose our bearings in the flood of information, or to bury dreams we had struggled to sustain. Creation—only creation allows life to keep flowing.
Today, Li Feng has become the initiator of Becoming the Wind, Breaking the Waves. She wants to tell her story, summon resonance, speak metaphorically of our times and turn grief into strength. The only hands that can write an answer are our own, through practice. Come and join the collective creation of this new play. We can write, direct, rehearse, adapt, design, produce, perform, document and more together. By the end of this month, we will present the results of our labour to the public through a beautiful event. The documentation team and I will record its emergence from nothing throughout the process. We will also turn our work at each stage and our individual emotional journeys into videos in various forms, distributing them across content platforms so that our voices can be seen.
An open call for participants in Becoming the Wind, Breaking the Waves
If the writing below resonates with you, join us in February to make this unusual event. Together we will decide, discuss and create its ultimate direction. Do not worry about your skills or profession; those are no longer what matters. We hope you feel an impulse and are willing to let go and share. Of course, if you have extraordinary leadership abilities, we would welcome you leading us towards a larger stage and a more far-reaching sea.
Creators might be playwrights, directors, full-time homemakers, exam-trained young people from small towns, zookeepers, investment-bank executives, CEOs of little-known companies, vocational-school dropouts, conservatives, overseas returnees—“sea turtles”—unemployed young people, insurance salespeople, and others. Non-professionals are the greatest actors; naturally, if you are a professional, you can be all the more professional.
If you are extremely shy and afraid to express yourself in front of a camera, yet still cannot suppress your curiosity, you are also welcome to join our documentation team. Observation and creation behind the camera are just as important.
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This February, let us
leave something behind together.
In a Tangle
Li Feng
Today is 22 January 2023, the first day of the first lunar month. Just now, after our first reunion meal of the New Year, my mother watched me washing dishes and remarked in passing, “How lovely—you know to help your mother with the housework now.” I was born in the first lunar month of 1995. I am now 28 in completed years—well into my thirties, as people like to call it—so being praised like that for washing dishes is a little embarrassing. On reflection, I realised that behind this rare initiative was excitement I could hardly contain: for the first time in my life, I was spending the New Year in our own home with only the three of us. That knowledge changed my plan to stay in Beijing. It made me rebook my ticket at the last minute to arrive a day earlier; pushed me through Daoxiangcun’s door, where I had been hesitating outside, to emerge carrying its signature treats; and guided me to set down my own bowl, gather the bowls on the table and head to the kitchen. A very subtle thing.
Being a good child
If you searched the first eighteen years of my life, the keyword occupying centre stage in the largest, boldest type would surely be “good child”.
That took different forms at different stages. Before high school, I was a good student so self-disciplined that on holidays I did some homework under the duvet before getting up; the good daughter other families envied, proud of being an all-rounder in morality, intellect, aesthetics and labour, with only physical education a little weaker; the good girl so protective of herself that, after falling for a boy and slipping in the midterm exams, she returned to first place at the end of term. During three years of high school, limitations in my abilities and other things I could not name began to show. I did not understand physics, slept through chemistry and once scored fifteen in mathematics. After choosing humanities, my geography teacher said I thought differently from others, my politics teacher told me not to get stuck in dead ends, and my Chinese teacher repeatedly explained exactly how my essays had gone off topic. Yet I did not give up or go astray. I did not disguise admission only to a second-tier university as an uncharacteristically poor exam performance. I did not move from not-good to bad. Then I repeated the final school year. I set out without expectations or asking where I would arrive, but unexpectedly found guides and companions. In the end, I recovered everything that had been mine. That was probably my best time. Wearing the big red flower of the “good child”, I entered the adult world, expecting naturally to receive the title of “good adult” and all its accessories. Then, suddenly, one day I discovered that I was not good at all.
Not good-looking. Not good fun. Not good to use. Not easy to love.
Talking to Mum and Dad
As I realised that the goodness which had belonged to me was being stripped from my body piece by piece, I fell into the panic of no longer knowing who I was.
Instinctively, I turned to my parents for help. I was their child, after all; surely they would know who I was. Instead, faced with me like this, they were first appalled, then furious, then deeply disappointed. They could not understand why I rejected Chinese Language and Literature—which could make me a teacher, qualify me for civil-service examinations or let me do written work in any organisation—for Dramatic and Film Literature, which sounded disreputable, offered so few employment prospects and even led to an arts degree. They opposed my abandoning the competition for a recommended postgraduate place to start work, especially when I kept choosing independent organisations that were, to them, embarrassing to name, informal and insecure, able to dismiss me whenever they liked and unlikely to provide a pension. They were dissatisfied that, after I finally secured a job at a centrally administered state-owned enterprise everyone approved of, and even obtained the coveted Beijing household registration, I did not settle down to plan a career. Instead, I kept saying I wanted to resign—utter nonsense, madness. Through repeated confrontations of tears and exhausted voices, they could not understand how the good child who had caused them so little worry had grown up this way. And I came to understand that the goodness I had failed to keep had never really belonged to me.
But where is the goodness that is mine? Can I still grow up well?
She wants to be a good actor
In the small city where my family lives, singing, dancing and painting are all the art forms people can think of. Only the first two are considered worth putting onstage. Before I was eighteen, I thought so too.
Then I went to university and acted for the first time. Onstage, under the lights, wearing a shell that was not my own, I opened my inner life with extraordinary naturalness. The unprecedented experience felt overwhelming, earth-shattering. For the first time, I intensely wanted to hold on to something, whether good or bad. So, beginning with a mother-and-daughter scene with my beautiful, well-proportioned roommate—me as the mother, her as the daughter—I ran headlong down the path of middle-aged and elderly women’s roles. I played the first wife, married by arrangement, whose birth and death dates are unknown, behind a great man of the Republican era; an elderly grandmother who painstakingly held a family together for decades beneath the surface of everyday life in wartime; a hideous monster from Eastern mythology; and an ambitious, wicked witch from a Western fairy tale. Convincing old-age make-up, greying wigs, stiff and clumsy movements, background music deliberately underscoring comedy or sorrow: these were often my companions. They showed me a little of the scenery awarded to good children, taught me far more of the blows good children are not supposed to endure, and led me decisively towards the narrow gate away from becoming a good adult. So today I must admit that what I want to hold on to is not good for me. Yet I still want to hold on.
I want that good child who does not know who she is to grow into a good actor whom everyone recognises.
It is already the evening of the second day of the New Year as I type this ending. Reading it through, I find it feels too disjointed; I need to force an echo between beginning and end, or it will be another off-topic essay. As for the subject: I began writing because, after hearing my supposedly widely relatable but actually rather unremarkable story, Brother Fa suggested that I be the initiator and female lead, write a confession, assemble a cast and make a play together. At the time we were still thinking of a love story—ha! Brother Fa said, write what is truest; truth moves people most. But as I wrote, I discovered that the truest thing was that I, always confined by being good, had never been able to be true. Later, the project reminded me of the “One-Day Dream Tour” in the film The Dream Factory, in which the protagonists help people fulfil their wishes. If it is a dream, then I want the utmost goodness.
Li Feng is not my birth name. My name is Zhang Lei (张蕾).
When I was little, introducing myself often prompted a puzzled question: which lěi—the 磊 made from three stone characters, or 雷, thunder? As I grew older, people tended first to assume and then ask: “Zhang léi—wait, is that character pronounced léi or lěi?” Later still, people stopped asking which character my name used and began asking which Zhang Lei I was. Not wanting to be a tiny flower bud crowded among others, I named myself Da Sa (大飒), only to be called Da Biao (大飚). Eventually, I realised that some dispositions written into my DNA also kept me from truly becoming the wind. So I thought: let me be a tree, then, standing in the wind.
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This February, let us
leave something behind together.
We will meet in Wangjing, Beijing.