When will I be good enough to have earned the privilege to be a “good person”?
No Pollution No Public Harm is a book written by priest, a popular Chinese web author. Her stories are extremely easy to read — they are all romcoms with happy endings and laughter-inducing humor and never fail to cheer me up after a long stressful day. Yet, every single one of her stories lives and breathes the zeitgeist of the China I grew up in, and pushes me to think harder about how things are and why they are the way they are.
On surface level, No Pollution No Public Harm is a modern day martial arts fantasy love story. Beneath the shiny keywords, this book is actually about being a “good person” in modern day China, and how hard that apparently is.
The blurb of the story begins with this quote:
When I was young, I often wrote class essays that ended in the phrase “I vow to be somebody useful to society”. I’d make this vow twenty to thirty times per semester, without too much thought.
“When I grew up, I realized that being harmless to society was already my biggest achievement in life.”
Original:
“我小时候写作文，最后一句常常是‘我立志，要做一个对社会有用的人’，一个学期平均立二三十次志吧，很不走心。”
“长大以后才发现，做一个对社会无害的人，已经是我这辈子最大的成就了。”
This resonated with something in my memory. When I was younger, I mostly thought about how I could make myself useful to society. And then on separate occasions, people older and wiser than I was at the time, educated me that such naiveté was actually a mark of extraordinary privilege. It was the privilege of not needing to worry about survival — food, shelter, healthcare, supporting a family — and and the pressures of life that gave one the leisure to ask such a question.
It’s been ten years since. I’ve seen people who once lectured me this way enter fields of prestige and profit, and accumulate much more wealth than necessary for basic food and shelter, but I’ve not seen the “pressures of life” for anyone ever truly end. There’s always the next fancy hobby to pursue, luxury bag or Tesla to buy, the Bay Area or New York house and mortgage, the kids who need to go to private school, and all the trappings necessary to send them to Harvard because God forbid that they attend school anywhere else. Being a “good person” is a privilege, they said, but I don’t know when that privilege is finally earned, if it ever is.
LIGHT SPOILERS WARNING: main character backgrounds.
The story No Pollution, No Public Harm follows two leads. The male lead, Yu Lanchuan, is the classic example of a white-collar elite. He graduated from a top college, received his graduate education from another elite university overseas, and works in an investment firm as an executive. The female lead, Gan Qing, is a high school dropout with a prison record for manslaughter, working in a retail store for the Chinese equivalent of healing crystals and good luck charms. This is mirrored in their martial arts world standings as well — the male lead inherits his title of the president of the Wulin or martial arts league; the female lead is the disinherited disciple of a legendary but lone assassin with a shady reputation.
On the surface, the big city white collar executive, Yu Lanchuan seems like he’s got it all set, but in reality, his works inhumanely long hours and is constantly under a huge amount of stress. Despite his high paying executive finance job, after paying rent on his CBD apartment and a mortgage on a house that hasn’t finished building yet, he can barely manage his credit card debt. In essence, the house purchase is what humbles the modern day youth. Pre-house purchase, they are full of confidence and optimism, post house-purchase, they are thirty-year slaves to the bank.
But why does he need that house? Because he wants the freedom and standing to tell his parents to stop trying to set him up on arranged dates. Not having a house or living at home would mean that he would be constantly subject to parental pestering about when is he getting a girlfriend, getting married, and having children. Getting a house, would shut his parents up in the “you won’t ever find yourself a suitable mate” style of nagging. Moving out into his own apartment, would save his ears from the “when are you bringing a girl home” style pestering. It may sound melodramatic and kind of stupid to an English audience, but Yu Lanchuan’s reasoning here is literally “give me freedom, or give me death”. Thus, he takes out a million-dollar mortgage AND rents a pricy apartment, that literally depletes his savings to zero each month and leaves him at the mercy of his demanding job. This is viewed not as luxury, but as a basic necessity, a prerequisite to maintaining his human dignity. Thus, as a struggling young man, he resents all the weddings and funerals in his social circle as unplanned expenditures (it’s customary to present red packets of money at such events in China), and minds only his own business.
In contrast, the female lead Gan Qing, starts off the story living in an illegal underground dormitory with sixteen girls squished into bunk beds in a single room for 600 RMB per month, until a crackdown on illegal dwellings and “low-end population” renders everyone in that illegal dwelling instantly homeless (as an aside, a crackdown on illegal dwellings and “low end population” actually happened in Beijing in 2017). As an orphaned high school dropout with a criminal record and mediocre looks, she has very little prospects for anything better than her dead end retail job. Yet, when she detects a kidnapping on her way home, she is the sole active bystander who calls the police when everybody else is busy “minding their own business”. The victim of this kidnapping turns out to be the male lead’s brother. When the male lead is forced to extract himself from a torrent of financial statements and business calls to bust out his martial arts skills and help his police friend find his poor kidnapped brother, Yu Lanchuan and Gan Qing’s paths collide.
The story isn’t your standard Cinderella romance. It’s also a story of generational conflict and evolution within the Wulin (martial arts world). In this story, there used to be a Wulin (martial arts world) — a world of fist-fighting skill and villain butt-kicking in which our Gan Qing is the highest DPS carry — that has now turned underground since 1949. The aging leadership of the Wulin, namely the venerable leader of the Beggar’s Clan, Old Yang, desperately wishes to find a way to pass on the torch. But his sole granddaughter — a successful lifestyle blogger, and fashion/media entrepreneur — not only rejects learning martial arts, but also scoffs at their antiquated values of frugality and community support and calls the Beggar’s Clan an illegal gang (which is technically correct according to PRC Law both inside and outside of the story). Despite building-scaling and fist-fighting martial arts skills, senior citizens like Old Yang and his friends are still bewildered by modern technologies like ride-sharing and e-commerce, and feel somewhat left behind by the world of their grandchildren. In the old world, street peddlers negotiated territorial boundaries by duking it out in a battle of fistfights in front of the Wulin President. In the new world, white collar finance executive Wulin President Yu Lanchuan, does not take kindly to being woken up to judge a fistfight between two Jianbing (egg pancake) peddlers at 5 am in the morning — he promptly breaks up the fight by threatening to call the authorities on both of them.
So when the younger generation, moves into the Wulin’s traditional headquarters at 101 Hutong, what happens next? The rest of the story is an interesting cast of characters across a variety of socio-economic backgrounds in a series of events that pretty much covers every single one of China’s trending social issues in the year the novel was written. When the trophy housewife of a finance executive goes crazy and attempts to murder her husband, what happens next? When an ailing and isolated grandfather falls prey to a cult that offers him the sense of community and belonging that his family does not, what happens next? When an impressionable young woman falls into the snares of luxury lifestyle bloggers and the trap of high interest loans, what happens next? At its essence, every mini-story is basically the exploration of a choice between good and evil, between minding one’s own interests and doing the right thing, between succumbing to temptation and taking the road less traveled.
I’ll leave a few choice quotes:
Yu Lanchuan’s teenage angst came and went like the wind. When he recovered, he resumed the mainstream lifestyle of Gaokao, studying abroad, and getting promoted. When he had finally realized it, he had already been galloping in the opposite direction to his ambitions for many years. Ambitions, when they are too far away, will automatically crumble into whimsical daydreams.
喻兰川的中二病来去如风，病好了，就过上了高考、留学、升职加薪的主流人生，回过神来的时候，已经在与理想背道而驰的路上快马加鞭了好多年。理想这玩意儿，离得太远，就会自动崩塌成异想天开的白日梦。 — 《无污染，无公害》
The new age is like an active volcano, ready to melt the roads ahead at any instant. Nobody has access to the game walkthrough, so they can only tell everyone and themselves, “You need to become a better version of yourself, so that you may be equipped to face the upcoming changes” — but this is a useless platitude, because the definition of “good” is so vague that God knows what “a better version of yourself means”. So we can only create more illusions, beautiful appearances are “good”, exquisite and luxury items are obviously “good”, if you fail to read a hundred books a year, that isn’t “good”, poetic travels are higher levels of “good”… and then all these large and small versions of “good” are thrown into the air for people to chase after. When everybody else is sprinting, who dares to stop, who dares to “settle”?
而时代如同蠢蠢欲动的火山，随时准备把前路烧成断崖，没有人拿到安全通关的攻略，只能反复告诫周遭，“你要变成更好的自己，才能以不变应万变” — — 这相当于是废话，因为“好”的定义如此宽泛无着，鬼知道什么叫“更好的自己”。所以只能一再炮制幻影，光鲜的皮囊是“好”，精致而奢侈的东西当然也“好”，每年读书不破百不配叫“好”，诗和远方才是高级的“好”……然后大大小小的“好”被抛向四面八方，供人们追逐得尘嚣四起。
人人都在跑，谁敢停下来，谁敢“差不多”？
