We live in a huge gap.
In my opinion, no one is completely mentally healthy, at least not all his life, and psychologists are no exception. In fact, all of us have different degrees of anxiety, worry and fear about things that have not happened yet, which affects our attitude towards life and way of thinking more or less. 1997 lost his passport once in Hong Kong, and went through a lot of hardships to return to Beijing. The loss of passport means the loss of identity. In the next three or four years, every time I was abroad, I dreamed that I lost my passport again, and then I woke up in a cold sweat, only to know that it was a false alarm. Moreover, whether speaking at a meeting or traveling, I will nervously check whether my passport is still in my pocket every four or five hours. Today, when I pack my things before going abroad, the first thing I consider is what kind of clothes to wear to ensure the safety of my passport, and then I consider other things. It can be said that losing my passport in Hong Kong will make me feel anxious and afraid of losing my passport again as long as I am in a foreign country in the next ten years. This is the fear that I may lose myself again.
Of course, the anxiety in my life is nothing compared with the depression in Cui Yongyuan. I have the courage to stand here today because I have a strong partner, my friend Mr. Cui Yongyuan for many years.
My job is telling stories. According to the standards of gypsies in Notre Dame, I am the kind of person who tells other people's stories and then asks others for money. I still want to tell stories today, and it's free today.
Professor Zhao told me that the theme of this conference is to discuss the psychological changes of China people in the past 40 years.
More than 30 years ago, in the late Cultural Revolution, I was a middle school student. At that time, neither boys nor girls spoke. Although they really want to talk, they dare not say it. They just appreciate each other and can only secretly look at them with their eyes. There are also bold boys who quietly write notes to girls, but dare not write clear love stories. They all refer to sentences where a deer is a horse, such as giving erasers and pencils to each other to convey the message of love. The girl who received the note immediately understood what the boy wanted to do. The girl's general reaction is nervousness and fear. If the note is exposed, the girl will feel deeply ashamed, as if she had done something wrong.
Today, more than 30 years later, middle school students' love has long been legalized psychologically and made public in public opinion. Now female middle school students actually wear school uniforms to the hospital for abortion surgery. There is a news in the media that when a female middle school student went to the hospital to have an abortion operation in her school uniform, four male middle school students surrounded them. When the doctor said that family members needed to sign before the operation, four male and middle school students scrambled to sign.
What causes us to go from one extreme to the other? I don't know. I only know that China has created an economic miracle that attracts worldwide attention in the past 30 years, with an average annual economic growth of 9%. By 2006, it has become the third largest economy in the world, but behind this brilliant data, it is a disturbing data, and the per capita annual income is still outside the world's 100. These two economic indicators should be balanced, but they are so unbalanced in today's China.
When skyscrapers in economically developed areas such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou are one after another, and shops, supermarkets and restaurants are buzzing, the poor and backward areas in the west are still in depression. With an annual income of just over 600 yuan, there are 30 million poor people in China. If this indicator is raised to 200 yuan, that is, the annual income is above 800 yuan, then the poverty-stricken population in China will reach 1 100 million.
China is a country with a vast territory, a large population and unbalanced economic development. In the mid-1980s, people in coastal cities generally drank Coca-Cola. However, in the mid-1990s, people who went out to work in the mountainous areas of Hunan would bring Coca-Cola as a gift to their villagers when they came home for the New Year, because their villagers had not seen Coca-Cola.
The imbalance of social life will inevitably lead to the imbalance of psychological demands. In the late 1990s, during Children's Day on June 1st, CCTV interviewed children from all over China and asked them what gifts they wanted most on June 1st. A little boy lion in Beijing wants a real Boeing plane, not a toy plane; A little girl in the northwest said shyly that she wanted a pair of white sneakers.
It is shocking that there is such a huge gap between two China children of the same age, even in their dreams. For this northwest girl, what she wants is a pair of ordinary white sneakers, perhaps far as the Boeing plane that the Beijing guy wants.
This is our life today, an unbalanced life. The imbalance between regions, economic development, personal life and so on. And then the psychological imbalance, and finally even the dream is not balanced. Dreams are everyone's innate wealth and everyone's last hope. Even if you have nothing, you can make a comeback as long as you have a dream. But our dreams today are out of balance.
The dream gap between Beijing and Northwest China presents two extremes, which can be said to be as great as the first example I gave. Female middle school students more than 30 years ago and female middle school students today are the other two extremes. The former shows the gap between reality and the latter shows the gap between history.
Professor Xiao Zeping, the Chinese chairman of this Sino-German psychotherapy conference, told me that I was invited here because I wrote a novel called Brothers. Professor Xiao quoted a passage from my postscript to Brothers: "Westerners need 400 years to experience these two completely different worlds, while China people only need 40 years to experience them." That's why tonight's theme-psychological changes of China people in the past 40 years: an author's perspective.
I know that I wrote a huge gap in Brothers, the gap between the upper cultural revolution era and the lower today's era, which is a historical gap, the gap between Li Guangtou and Song Gang, and this is a realistic gap. The historical gap has made a China person experience 400 years of turmoil in Europe in just 40 years, while the realistic gap has split contemporary China people into different eras, just like the aforementioned Beijing boy and northwest girl. The gap between their dreams gives people a sense of trance that one lives in Europe today and one lives in Europe 400 years ago.
This is our life. We live in a huge gap between reality and history. We can say that we are all patients and we are all healthy, because we have been living at two extremes. Today is like this compared with the past, and today is still like this compared with today.
More than 20 years ago, when I was just engaged in storytelling, I read a passage by Ibsen in Norway. He said, "everyone has a responsibility to the society to which he belongs, and he also has a share of the ills of that society." I totally agree with Ibsen. Why did I come here? Why did Professor Zhao Xudong invite me here? Now I have the answer, because I am a patient. I'm not so much here to give a speech as to seek treatment.