Celebrating New Sinology

西湖屎蘤

 

These famous lines by the Song-dynasty poet Lin Sheng 林升 have adorned the feature wall of Lou Wai Lou, a restaurant on Solitary Island in West Lake, Hangzhou, for over a century. My initial encounter with the restaurant, and Lin Sheng’s poem, was during my first Spring Festival in China in February 1975. Our class of foreign students at Fudan University in Shanghai visited West Lake during the holiday and, among other things, we had a meal at Lou Wai Lou, which included signature dishes like West Lake Vinegar Fish 西湖醋魚, Chun-leaf Soup 蒓菜羹, Beggar’s Chicken 叫花童雞 and Dongpo Pork 東坡肉.

Half a century later, in July 2025 during a plumbing crisis in China’s preeminent tourist destination, local Hangzhou wags changed one word in the last line of Lin Sheng’s ancient poem turning its hackneyed lyricism into social satire:

Idle travellers intoxicated by the warm breeze
catch wind in Hangzhou of a rising tide of shit.

暖風熏得遊人醉，直把杭州作便州。

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‘Turd Blossoms in West Lake’ is one of six sections in a chapter on West Lake in the series Celebrating New Sinology. The chapter consists of the following parts:

• 別才 別眼 A Certain Talent and a Certain Vision
• 西湖潮 Tides of West Lake
• 西湖屎蘤 Turd Blossoms on West Lake
• 西湖憶尋 West Lake Revisited
• 與潮共舞 Tides & Time — Hangzhou and Xi’an in China’s Mytho-poetic Historical Complex
• 冥寥子游 The Travels of Mingliaozi

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‘Turd Blossoms on West Lake’ takes as its leitmotif 屎上雕花, ‘etching flowers on turds’, an expression that gained currency during 2023. It referred to the prodigious efforts made by Beijing to sugarcoat, whitewash or otherwise conceal a state of affairs that was in fact a pile of shit. It is claimed that the expression ‘etching flowers on turds’ originated with the following online observation:

Working for a State-owned Enterprise really fucked me over. I was desperate to get out after only three months. It was bleeding my soul dry. I was faced with meaningless tasks that were like etching flowers on piles of turd. It nearly destroyed me.

We had originally believed that people working in an SOE were geniuses, individuals with grand ambitions who could use such a platform to give full scope to their abilities. What they really need is a stage, not piles of shite.

我也是被國企忽悠瘸了，才三個月就極度想跑，已經在看崗位了，無盡的精神內耗讓人受不了了。一堆屎上雕花的無意義的工作，人都快廢了。我們相信國企工作的每一個人都是天才，都有偉大的抱負，他們希望借助這個平台發揮自己的聰明才智，他們需要的是舞台，而不是一坨坨的屎。

Others claimed that ‘etching flowers on turds’ was inspired by a remark that Barack Obama had made during his 2008 presidential campaign. He said that when his rivals John McCain and Sarah Palin talked about ‘change’ it was nothing more than cosmetic change. ‘You can put lipstick on a pig,’ Obama told a cheering crowd. ‘It’s still a pig.’ He added:

You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.

— from Caged Birds and Turd Blossoms in Xi Jinping’s China

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‘Turd Blossoms in West Lake’ consists of an introduction from RealTime Mandarin, Andrew Methven’s essential newsletter on contemporary China and Chinese and an essay on the scabrous literary art of Li Chengpeng by Ren Jingjing 任晶晶, who writes for China Literature & Arts, which describes itself as being ‘a pioneering platform curated by three distinguished writers from China and the United States’. It aims at ‘bridging the contemporary Chinese literary scene with a previously underserved English audience’.

As Ren Jingjing observes of Li Chengpeng’s ‘leave-no-turn-unstoned’ prose style in the following way:

If Lu Xun envisioned China as a “sealed iron house,” then Li sketches its contemporary version as a septic system of endless circulation. The former knocked on the door. The latter breaks the window. Between the two lies a century of satirical progression—from Enlightenment-era needling to livestreamed defiance. With his unflinching candor, nimble comic timing, and steadfast empathy for the marginal, Li has carved out a sharp, dirty, unforgettable corner of today’s literary topography. Not always elegant. Rarely perfect. But impossible to ignore.

We are grateful to Andrew Methven for his support. We include the original text of Li Chengpeng’s essay for the delectation of students of (as well as adepts in) New Sinology.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
6 August 2025

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Also by Li Chengpeng:

• Chinese Time — the struggle of memory against forgetting, China Heritage, 2 January 2022
• When It All Comes down to It, China Has No Real ‘New Year’, annotated translation by Geremie R. Barmé, ChinaFile, 21 February 2024

See also:

• 夸克，中國大便史，油管，2025年8月26日
• Chinese Doom Scroll, A History of Poop in China, 31 August 2025

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Between Shit and Song

The Grotesque Realism of Li Chengpeng’s Satirical Prose

Ren Jingjing 任晶晶

6 August 2025

The moment Li Chengpeng’s latest piece, “The Sewage of Hangzhou and Picking Up Shit Through Time” (“杭州的粪水和《时间捡屎》”), hit social media, it functioned less as an essay and more as litmus: a chemical strip dipped into the slop of public sentiment. Rage, hilarity, disbelief, despair—his readers, as always, were yanked through the emotional gamut. The text reads like a relentless torrent of filth—both literal and linguistic—yet carries a narrative tension too precisely honed to be accidental. To read it is to feel first repulsed, then involuntarily gripped. Shit, for Li, is no crude flourish. It is metaphor, mnemonic, indictment. It is, grotesquely, the residue of history and the sediment of compliance. As in China’s famine records, so in today’s bureaucratic debacles—excrement emerges as both the mark of suffering and the mechanism of its erasure. The laugh-choke rhythm that defines Li’s prose acts like a syncopated metronome of moral outrage. He pounds it again and again, making readers gasp, then laugh, then wince—until the farce at the heart of reality beats through like a war drum.

To understand how Li’s metronome became so finely calibrated, one must trace his evolution as a writer. Once a beloved soccer journalist known for his barbed wit, Li morphed over the past two decades into a novelist, commentator, and public intellectual. His polyphonic persona—reporter, critic, storyteller—emerged not from academic salons but from the raw immediacy of mass culture. Around 2010, he translated the clickbait virality of his blog posts into print credibility. His first essay collection, Everyone in the World Knows (“全世界人民都知道”), is still shared online, often cited as a totem of 21st-century grassroots writing. In that volume, and in his satirical novel The Ballad of Li Kele’s Demolition (“李可乐抗拆记”), Li outlined the template for his enduring method: biting social allegory, couched in wit and wound. His trajectory zigzags between nonfiction, fiction, and op-ed, but always in service of a coherent satirical agenda.

Stylistically, Li belongs to a distinctly Chinese tradition: what might be called “allegorical prose satire.” This form, as delineated by Yang Jiang (杨绛), operates on a dual-structure of metaphor and critique, cloaking deep censure beneath mundane narrative. Yet Li’s contribution lies in his deft remixing of classical satire with digital-age modalities: memes, online slang, and the punchline mechanics of internet humor. In “The Sewage of Hangzhou and Picking Up Shit Through Time”, the titular parody pivots on a punning reference to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (“时间简史”), twisted into Picking Up Shit Through Time (“时间捡屎”). One syllable swaps cosmology for catastrophe, metaphysics for municipal failure. Elsewhere, aphorisms like “Don’t advise a prostitute to go straight, don’t advise my people to resist” reverberate with double entendre—gendered, political, ethnic—all at once. The result is satire at once breakneck and barbed: rich in allusion, precise in diction, and jagged with restraint.

Such velocity invites comparisons to Lu Xun (鲁迅), the godfather of Chinese satire. Like Lu Xun, Li uses sarcasm as scalpel, swaps sentiment for sneer, and grounds his polemic in historical excavation. But the terrain has shifted. Where Lu Xun’s battlefield was the Republican-era newspaper page, Li’s is the algorithmic churn of X (formerly Twitter), Weibo, and guerilla self-publishing. Where Lu Xun spliced classical idioms into vernacular rebellion, Li mashes up film dialogue, WeChat jokes, and viral lingo. The two share tonal ancestry—rage braided with irony—but operate in radically different epistemes. If Lu Xun’s essays were sermons in the courthouse of public reason, Li’s posts are bombs lobbed into the digital coliseum of public spectacle.

In global terms, Li’s satirical register bears strange kinship with Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which babies are proposed as economic fodder. Li swaps cannibalism for scatology, but the rhetorical thrust is the same: to weaponize abjection against power. There are also echoes of George Orwell’s Animal Farm—though where Orwell deploys animal allegory to depict political hierarchy, Li opts for sewage to depict political decay. And if Orwell’s satire is scaffolded by British restraint, Li’s bears the fingerprints of Beijinger black humor: a brutal, offbeat, often heartbreaking collision of absurdity and truth. His tonal architecture—where punchline precedes punch-in-the-gut—recalls the dark wit of Beckett. Yet Li never abandons the gritty viscosity of reportage. His prose is too grounded, too tactile, to drift into fable.

Language, for Li, is both cudgel and balm. He builds momentum through sharp-edged parallelism, then interrupts it with street slang, dialect, and emoji logic. His sentences reek—literally—of the body, of hunger, of human waste. The vulgarity is deliberate. Words like shit (“屎”) or sewage (“粪”) pierce the veil of moralism, while pop-culture cameos—Erin Brockovich, Dong Yuhui—form an incongruous collage that produces jarring beauty. A line from The Ballad of Li Kele’s Demolition, in which “the house stands sobbing in the dark,” finds eerie continuity in the recent metaphor of “sewage reincarnation.” Both figures animate objects and dehumanize people, asking the reader to confront not merely the world outside, but the grotesque within. Satire, here, is not pure denunciation but dual-action rhetoric: it pierces lies and preserves dignity.

Narratively, Li constructs essays like jump-cut montages. News clippings, oral history, movie plots, social media fragments—all whirl together in high-speed prism. One paragraph begins with famine archives from Tombstone (“墓碑”), veers into Hangzhou’s water crisis, detours through Erin Brockovich, and lands with a thud in a family WeChat thread debating bottled water. This kaleidoscopic form—hyperlinked, associative, and jolting—disorients while reinforcing a core thesis: history repeats, but in uglier, smaller loops.

And yet, for all the mockery, a moral seriousness persists. Li’s allegiance lies with the vulnerable, and his satire is tempered by grief. Trolls call him a “keyboard warrior.” The state has shuttered his social media accounts seven times. Each deplatforming reveals not weakness but the dangerous power of language when wielded precisely. In an era where public discourse contracts, Li uses satire as a pressure valve—releasing, however briefly, the built-up gas of collective unease.

Thus, Li Chengpeng’s satire occupies a singular axis in modern Chinese literature. It inherits Lu Xun’s zeal, accelerates through digital conduits, and evolves satire from “paper shiv” to “online detonation.” It bears the torch of May Fourth enlightenment but drags it through the sewer pipes of contemporary absurdity. In the friction between condemnation and self-mockery, he transmutes daily nonsense into cultural critique, turning essay into engine.

If Lu Xun envisioned China as a “sealed iron house,” then Li sketches its contemporary version as a septic system of endless circulation. The former knocked on the door. The latter breaks the window. Between the two lies a century of satirical progression—from Enlightenment-era needling to livestreamed defiance. With his unflinching candor, nimble comic timing, and steadfast empathy for the marginal, Li has carved out a sharp, dirty, unforgettable corner of today’s literary topography. Not always elegant. Rarely perfect. But impossible to ignore.

In the viscous interplay between shit and song, he reminds us: literature remains both blade and mirror. Satire, in particular, is the mirror’s most luminous—and most obscure—glint. It allows us to laugh, yes, but also to pause and wonder: When the stench hits, will we crack a window—or just keep picking through the filth of history, one turd at a time?

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The Sewage of Hangzhou and Picking Up Shit Through Time

Li Chengpeng

李承鹏：杭州的粪水和《时间捡屎》

When I read the harrowing accounts in Tombstone (“墓碑”), I sometimes find myself laughing through tears. During the Great Famine, when even tree bark had been gnawed bare, a man named Zhang Dafa in Tongwei village, Gansu, was so desperate with hunger that he had the sudden idea to collect frozen excrement from the outskirts of the village, roast it, and eat it. Another woman in Tongwei, more knowledgeable about nutrition, disdained such crude methods. She would wait until the cadres relieved themselves before rushing over to pick up their excrement, reasoning simply: the food in a cadre’s feces was not fully digested, its nutritional value was higher, and it was more “effective.”

But the supply of cadres’ feces was limited. In Jingning, an old man praised the ingenuity of Sanniang in his family:

“She waits by the captain’s door for the children’s feces. Children in the captain’s household are certainly well-fed. She collects it, dries it in the sun, and eats it.”

Reading these accounts, I laugh while crying, then cry while laughing. The spirit of “scientifically eating shit.”

I read Tombstone both as a history of catastrophe and as a chronicle of endurance. Tens of millions starved to death without organized resistance, yet people devised ever more “scientific” ways to eat feces. Of course, the era left them no choice, but what’s more unnerving is how many elderly survivors, crippled by famine’s aftermath, still tell young people, “You should endure some hardship, only then will you cherish the good times.” This lingering flavor of feces—passed down as moral instruction—has seeped into the bones and souls of generations, like a smear of “spiritual Laoganma” [老干妈, a chili sauce brand] rubbed onto the food of the next.

A few days ago, 1.42 million residents of Yuhang, Hangzhou, were forced to “collectively eat shit.” The water company, reportedly, connected sewage pipes to drinking water pipelines, so that tap water poured out in the color of excrement, filling homes with a stench of feces. People rushed into the streets to hoard bottled water, joking bitterly: “Hangzhou is now Kaifeng,” “Don’t kiss a Hangzhou person for the next six months,” “Even eating shit now requires checking the time.”

A friend from Shanghai berated the Hangzhou people for not protesting, so I sent him the jokes that Shanghainese once made about themselves: “This is not hunger, it’s intermittent fasting,” “If you can’t get groceries, eat the greenery from the park to boost your fiber intake,” “Even when lining up for nucleic acid tests, we mind our makeup—others are testing, we’re walking a runway,” “As long as there’s sand in the heart, everywhere is the Maldives.” I asked him why they didn’t resist. He blocked me. These days, people fight misfortune with jokes, nothing more. Don’t persuade them, or they’ll snap back, “Why don’t you go resist, if you’re so brave?”

[Note: See also ‘Ugh, here we are’ — Q&A with Geremie Barmé, The China Project, 8 April 2022. — China Heritage.]

Don’t urge a prostitute to go straight; don’t urge my people to resist. Better to keep eating shit than to rebel. This is the truth.

I won’t blame Hangzhou citizens for not resisting, because eating shit has a long lineage. Zizhi Tongjian(“资治通鉴”) records that from the Eastern Jin through the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang, when natural disasters and wars hit, people ate tree bark and then competed for “fecal residue.” The Veritable Records of the Shunzhi Emperor (“清世祖实录”) officially noted that in the Sanhe region and four provinces, people scraped the ground for feces to eat, earning the name “people who eat filth.” Records of the Taiping Rebellion (“太平天国纪实”) tells us that in Anhui and Jiangsu, “the hungry scavenged grain husks from cow dung, and if they found chaff in human feces, they considered it a delicacy.” Eating cow dung was routine. Finding human fecal chaff was like winning a Michelin star.

Sadly, I think, to have survived, most likely, our ancestors ate shit. We are the descendants of shit-eaters.

Let us turn to critical realism. Hangzhou authorities claim, “This was caused by sulfur compounds from anaerobic degradation of algae at the water source.” Some “government enthusiasts” explain, with curious zeal, that sewage and drinking water pipelines differ in pressure and diameter, so contamination is impossible! But as early as 2013, Hangzhou residents complained of foul-smelling tap water caused by large pesticide and chemical factories dumping tens of thousands of tons of waste into the Qiantang River. In 2020, residents again found the tap water revoltingly stinky; the culprit was a state-owned company discharging kitchen waste into a stream. After protests, the company quietly merged its sewage into the municipal water pipes. These bizarre events were reported by Guangming Daily and other official outlets. Too many questions remain. Why are mushroom stems and corn kernels found on water filters? Why, as early as May, did coliform counts at the intake exceed April’s by 730 times, rising in June to 16,000 per liter—Class IV, unfit even for ornamental fountains? Scientifically, anaerobic algae can produce sulfur compounds, but not coliform bacteria. Those are decomposed by gut microbes, which do produce sulfur compounds. And in 2020, Hangzhou completed an “integrated pipeline” project, in which sewage pipes are also pressurized. A single management error could cause backflow contamination…

I know your brain just jolted.

Don’t jolt. Be clever. Know that if you question anything unfair in our motherland, you’re immediately branded a “walking 1540” [a slang term implying being paid by the U.S.]. Criticism that was once normal is now seen by patriotic trolls as treason. It’s true: to a streetwalker, everyone looks like a customer. It’s humiliating—you want to see your compatriots live with dignity, but some compatriots make sure you lose yours. Gradually you stop speaking of “resistance.” The police would summon you for “tea,” and meanwhile you naively think that pointing out social sores is helpful. But to some, it’s like exposing Ah Q’s scabs—instantly they shout, “Stop eating human blood buns! If you’re so great, you do it!” Over the years, we’ve arrived at an optimal equilibrium: we endure together. As mother-in-laws say, “If others can endure, so can we.” Otherwise, how could we have birthed the king of chicken-soup inspiration, beloved of the cosmic mother-in-law: Dong Yuhui [董宇辉]?

Remember that train that stopped running recently? A thousand people were locked in a metal can at 39°C, hotter than the standard 23°C for shipping pigs. People were fainting, yet no one dared protest. Faces blank, they recited the Heart Sutra: “Others endure, so will I. Thus have I heard…” Until one young man in black smashed a window. When the police hauled him away, no one intervened. Those who breathed fresh air just sighed in relief: “Thank God it wasn’t me.”

The war-wolves who scream online about bombing America or Japan, or taking Taiwan, never show up. The 99.9% who won’t smash a window in real life criticize the 99.9% on the train who didn’t. Our only courage lies in not being there.

Just a drop of sewage in the long river of Picking Up Shit Through Time. Hangzhou’s people can look to their compatriot Goujian, who famously tasted bile and said, “Pure! My illness will heal, great king.” It’s all about attitude. Eating shit isn’t scary. What’s scary is failing to find the “right mindset.” And here lies another truth: a poor mindset—that’s eating shit; a good mindset—that’s enduring hardship for future glory.

[Note: On Goujian, see Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China. — China Heritage.]

Think of it this way: even the purest water, once drunk, turns into excrement. It seeps into the earth, rises as vapor, falls into rivers, returns as clean water, and you drink again… In Hangzhou’s city promo video Hangzhou Is More than a Poem (“杭州不仅是一首诗”), there’s a line that proves prophetic: “The cycle of a drop of water is the vitality of a city.” So don’t think you’ve drunk sewage—it’s just water completing its cycle.

This may sound pessimistic, but optimism requires reciprocity. In Hangzhou parents’ groups, not one voice speaks for the children in Tianshui poisoned by lead. The parents in Tianshui, likewise, don’t mention Hangzhou’s water. Online, lone voices cry, “No man is an island,” which is admirable. But the main contradiction in today’s China is this: everyone wants support when they suffer injustice, but most pretend blindness when others do. Lanzhou drinks benzene, Longnan drinks antimony, Yueyang drinks arsenic, Guangxi drinks cadmium, Shaanxi drinks zinc, Shanxi drinks ammonia, Beijing drinks lithium, Hunan drinks cadmium… not just islands, but sealed capsules. Optimistically, lone cries aren’t useless: at least now, parents read food labels carefully. Though they dare not post on social media under official scrutiny, they notice that during the worst days of contaminated water, Yuhang food factories never stopped production.

And please, don’t trot out the “Tacitus trap,” as if the government’s good deeds are merely misunderstood by a habitually cynical populace.

I recall the American film Erin Brockovich [“永不妥协”], based on a true story. Julia Roberts plays a single mother of three who, while working as a file clerk in a law firm, stumbles on suspicious medical records during a real estate case. She uncovers that PG&E, a giant power company, had poisoned the town’s water with carcinogenic hexavalent chromium (sound familiar? Yes, Tianshui), falsifying records to hide the danger, paying only paltry medical costs to victims.

She got angry. Without any background or law degree, she dragged her kids house to house under the blazing sun, gathering evidence and trust. She rallied hundreds of residents to sue PG&E. When the company’s high-priced lawyers sneered, “Who do you think you are?” she replied, “I’ve spent 18 months with these people. I know this case better than you. I haven’t forgotten a single name among the 324 victims.” She began reading them: “Donna Jensen, Pamela Duncan, Ronald and Annabelle Plummer…” Name after name, until the courtroom fell silent. Justice, she reminded us, isn’t abstract. It’s about every individual being heard.

She won them $333 million. As people cried and hugged her, she said, “Your names have been heard.” Julia Roberts won an Oscar, and critics praised the film’s belief that “one person can speak for the many.”

But here, she wouldn’t get the chance. A divorced, scantily clad single mother would be condemned for her morals, called a mistress. Without a degree, she wouldn’t be allowed in court. Her determination would be blamed on “foreign forces.” And the deepest wounds would come from those she fought for. Don’t believe me? Remember Wu Huayan, who, due to poverty, survived on steamed buns and pickles, her body wasting to 21 kilograms. When a teacher sought international aid for her, Wu said: “You’re shaming China. Chinese problems should be solved by Chinese people, not foreigners.”

Recently, I saw a blogger write: “Society is broadly debased, and the young are collectively timid.” On one side, officials commit unspeakable acts; on the other, citizens, trapped in a train, won’t smash a window. People obsessively measure Japanese nuclear radiation but not Hangzhou’s or Tianshui’s. They swallow excrement but don’t throw it at the water company; instead, they hurl it at a girl who sleeps with a foreigner—claiming it’s about national dignity. It’s absurd. Princess Diana dated an Egyptian tycoon, and Britain’s dignity remained intact. Wang Zhaojun married three generations of Xiongnu chieftains, and Han China’s dignity stood. But a modern female student’s casual fling? A national disgrace? Stranger still, these same people denounce the Cultural Revolution for killing girls over their love lives, yet today they play the same games—wanting to sack and drown girls in burlap sacks at Dalian’s Tiger Beach. The Cultural Revolution never left. Inequality now extends to sex itself, echoing Ah Q’s fury during the late Qing revolution: “Damn it, the monk gets to touch them, why can’t I?”

In such a fragmented era, grand narratives feel obscene. The elderly join the Party, the middle-aged recite sutras, the young lie flat, the “little pinks” hunt “sluts” and “traitors,” tycoons keep mistresses, children fight over inheritances. The poor, meanwhile, cheer infrastructure. Check the trending topics: countless factory workers comment with pride, “After the Yajiang hydroelectric station is completed, it will generate 300 billion kWh, equivalent to three Three Gorges Dams. A weapon of the nation, suppressing India. Born Chinese, I have no regrets.” Then they go to the mall for free air-conditioning, because running it at home costs too much. Electricity prices have risen again.

People leave comments on my articles: “Stop pouring cold water on us. Chinese people are not cowards. Look at Huanghuagang, May Fourth, and countless peasant uprisings.” True, my people have never lacked rebels. But Chinese history follows a grim rule: the failed rebels become the excrement, and the successful ones make others eat it. Check the dynastic histories if you doubt me.

This isn’t about cowardice. For China to improve, we must break the cycle of eating shit and making others eat it.

There was courage, not long ago. In 2008, the people of Weng’an, outraged by the suspicious death of middle-schooler Li Shufen, stormed the county offices, forcing officials to step down. In Wukan, villagers nearly built a fortress of defiance. In Xiamen, Lian Yue rallied crowds to protest a chemical plant. Such scenes of bravery are barely a decade old. A decade on, men have consumed too many “Black-Bone Chicken Tonics.” Lian Yue has become Lian “Non-Group.”

Latest news: Hangzhou residents are still running their taps, water growing yellower and more pungent. The water bureau’s official statement reads like bad scriptwriting, with no concern for plot holes or believability. Hangzhou recently won the group gold medal for public health water supervision. The legal owner of Hangzhou Environmental Monitoring Co. is also the 100% shareholder of the Water Group—self-monitoring at its finest. Are you convinced?

Today’s other main social contradiction: the people ask, “Do you believe this?” The authorities reply, “Do you obey?”

Now the final report is out. Its gist: abnormal weather, naughty algae, hardworking water departments. The only fault: failing to execute emergency plans. The punishment: warning, admonishment, warning, and quietly dismissing the general manager of the environmental company.

For such ritualized “self-punishment,” the people remain unconvinced. They cite a Zhihu user’s suggestion: We once demanded Japanese officials drink Fukushima water to prove it was safe. Shouldn’t Hangzhou officials now drink their tap water? Surely they’re not less honorable than Japanese officials.

They won’t. Our next generation will still eat shit.

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• Source: Author’s X account

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Chinese text:

杭州的粪水和《时间捡屎》

李承鹏

我看那么惨烈的《墓碑》，有时也会被一些情节给整笑。大饥荒那会儿，树皮都被啃光，甘肃通渭村的张大发饿得不行，灵光一闪跑到村外捡了冻硬的粪，回家烤着吃。通渭村另一位妇女对此很不屑，她是懂营养学的，要在边上等干部解完手，才冲过去拾粪吃。原因很简单：干部拉的屎粮食没消化完，营养高，更顶事。

但干部的屎是有限的，静宁县一位老人就夸还是他家三娘脑子好使：“三娘在门口等着队长倒小孩拉的屎，队长家小孩吃得肯定营养咧，她捡拾了屎回家，晒干再吃。”

看着看着就哭了，哭着哭着就笑了。论科学吃屎的精神。

我把《墓碑》当成灾难史，也当成忍耐史，饿死千万人没见什么反抗，倒琢磨出怎么科学吃屎。当然这是时代所逼，但好玩的是，不少饿得落下病根的老人至今还教育年轻人“你们就该过过苦日子，才能珍惜眼下的好”。吃屎教育的那抹余蕴入骨入魂，忍不住给下一代的食粮抹上精神老干妈。

前几天杭州余杭142万人集体吃屎，说是水务公司把排污管道接到饮用水管道，自来水滚滚流出都是屎黄色，做的饭菜满屋子屎味。人们上街疯抢矿泉水，还编些“直把杭州当汴州”“谈恋爱，这半年千万别跟杭州人亲嘴”“吃屎都走表了”的段子。

有上海朋友骂杭州人为什么不上街抗议，我传去当初上海宁编的段子：“这不叫挨饿，叫轻断食”“抢不到菜，就吃绿化带，增强肠道纤维”“排队核酸也讲究妆容，别人是做核酸，阿拉是走T台”“只要心里有沙，哪里都是马尔代夫”……我问他为什么不反抗。他就把我拉黑了。这些年，大家几乎只是用段子对抗生活不幸，君莫劝，劝急了，劈头盖脸招来一拨“有种你他妈去反抗啊”。

别劝小姐从良，别劝我族反抗，与其反抗，不如继续吃屎。这是真理。

我不会批评杭州人不反抗，因为吃屎源远流长。《资治通鉴》记载：从东晋、南北朝到隋唐，天灾战争不断，人民吃完草根树皮，就开始争食“粪渣”。很官方的《清世祖实录》记载：三河四省一带的人们常刮地皮找粪吃，被称作“食秽民”。《太平天国纪实》记载：安徽、江苏一带，“饥者拾牛粪中粟壳，若获人粪中糠滓，视为珍味”。吃牛粪是日常，捡到人粪的糠滓，简直是米其林。

我悲哀地想，能活下来的，大概率都吃过屎，我们是屎者的后代。

还是来点批判现实主义吧，杭州官方辟谣说“这是水源地藻类厌氧降解产生的硫醚类物质”，也有“政府爱好者”热心论证排污和饮用水管道压力和口径不一样，不可能是屎！但2013年杭州市民就发现自来水有异味，原因是大型农药厂和化工厂向钱塘江排放数万吨废液。2020年，杭州市民又发现自来水奇臭，原因是一家国企将厨余垃圾排入溪水，经抗议，该企业悄悄将污水并入市政自来水管道。上述奇葩事均由光明网多家官媒报道。疑点太多了，为什么水龙头滤芯上会有金针茹、玉米粒。为什么早在5月，取水口粪大肠菌群数值远超4月730倍，六月更升至16000个/L达到IV类水平，不能饮用甚至不能当作景观用水。从科学角度，藻类厌氧降解会产生硫醚类物质，但不能产生大肠杆菌，反倒是肠道内微生物会分解出硫醚类物质。而杭州在2020年就对污水与自来水管道进行一体化工程，污水管道其实也加压，若管理失误，就可能形成合龙倒灌……

你脑子此时肯定激凌了一下。

别激凌，你得机灵，机灵地知道只要你质疑祖国发生的一些不公平事，就是行走的1540，收了美国钱。十几年前看来很正常的批评，现在都被爱国粉红视作卖国，也对，出来卖的，见谁都像收了钱。这就尴尬了，你本想让同胞过得体面些，但有的同胞必会让你不体面，慢慢的你就不想再提“反抗”，一方面帽子叔叔会找你喝茶，另一方面，你单相思认为人民缺什么就该补什么，但这等于在阿Q面前提癞疤，有的同胞立马不干了，“别他妈吃人血馒头，你行你上”……这么多年，终于凝练出一个最优选：大家一起忍。毕竟丈母娘们常说“别人能忍，我们也能忍”，否则怎么可能诞生宇宙丈母娘之最爱的鸡汤王，董宇辉。

想想前段时间那列停运的火车，上千人闷在39度高温的铁皮罐里，还不如运猪猡的23度室温标准，大家几乎休克却没一个站出来反抗，面无表情默念《心经》：别人能忍，我也能忍，如是我闻……直到一个黑衣青年哐地把窗砸碎。当帽子叔叔把带走青年，也没一个敢阻止。呼吸了新鲜空气的人们只是暗自庆幸，好险，幸好不是我。

那些天天喊打美国炸日本武统台湾的战狼一个也没站出来，99.9%在生活中不敢砸窗的人却在网上批评车上99.9%的人不敢砸窗。我们唯一的勇气来自于：我们当时并不在火车上。

不过是《时间捡屎》历史长河中的一滴粪水罢了，杭州人民可以对标老乡勾践，他吧叽嘴说“这味儿，纯，大王病马上好”，主打的就是一个懂事。吃屎不可怕，可怕的是没吃出心态，这又是一个真理：心态不好，那才是吃屎，心态好，那叫卧薪尝胆。

你这样想就对了，再干净的水，喝下去也会化为粪水，浸入大地升腾为水汽，再降落江河湖海，又变成干净的水，然后你再喝……杭州城市宣传片《杭州不仅是一首诗》里有句台词一语成谶：“一滴水的轮回，也是一座城的蓬勃”——所以，你不要认为自己喝了粪水，这只是一滴水的轮回。

这样说显得有些消极，可是积极应该是双方面的。在杭州家长群，没有一个人为天水孩子血铅说话。天水血铅孩子的家长，也闭口不提自来水管。网上总有孤勇者呐喊“没有人是一座孤岛”，这令人敬佩，但当前中国社会的主要矛盾是：每个人希望自己遭遇不公时有人声援，但大多数人在别人遭遇不公时都假装看不见。兰州吃苯，陇南吃锑，岳阳吃砷，广西吃镉，陕西吃锌，山西吃氨氮，北京吃锂，湖南吃镉……不仅是一座座孤岛，简直是一个个互相隔绝的胶囊。当然乐观地看，孤勇者呐喊也不是完全没用，至少今后你会发现，家长们在超市里会认真凝视小食品包装上的产地，他们在领导要求下已不敢发朋友圈了，但他们会从朋友圈机敏发现，粪水最浓那几天，余杭食品加工厂没有停工。

也别说什么塔西佗效应了，弄得就跟政府做了好事只是被刁民习惯性冤枉似的。

想起有部根据真实案件改编的美国电影，《永不妥协》。朱莉娅·罗伯茨主演一名离婚后独自抚养三个孩子的单亲妈妈。生活潦倒的她是律所档案员，有一天处理地产案件文件时发现了可疑的医疗费用记录，经调查，小镇居民的饮用水被大型电力公司PG&E的致癌物“六价铬”（这名字熟悉吧，对，天水）污染，该公司隐瞒真相将其篡改为安全的“三价铬”，只为受害者支付极低廉的医疗费。

她愤怒了，她没有背景也没有法律学位，拖着三个孩子、顶着烈日，一户户走访小镇居民，收集六价铬导致癌症的线索。期间她也遭受白眼，仍靠坚韧不拔和精神力获得信任，收集证据，成功号召几百名居民发起对PG&E历史性的诉讼。

PG&E派出强大的律师团，高傲地质问她：“你凭什么自认为了解这些人？”

她说：“我花了18个月深入资料和居民的生活。我对这个案子的了解远超过你，这324个人的名字，我一个也没忘。”

她开始朗读：“Donna Jensen，Pamela Duncan，Ronald and Annabelle，Plummer……”，她一个一个说出全部受害者的全名，整个法庭寂静无声，这段背出所有人名字的情节，是她的高光时刻。正义不是抽象的制度，而是对每一个人的尊重。

她最终帮居民赢得高达3.33亿美元的赔偿金。胜诉的瞬间，人们哭泣着冲上来与她拥抱，她说：“你们的名字被听到了”。

奥斯卡给朱莉娅·罗伯茨送上金奖，影评人说：它表达了“一人能为万众发声”的强烈信念。

但在我们这里，她没机会念出那324个受害者名字，穿着暴露且离异的她会被质疑作风有问题，是小三，她没有学历，根本没资格上庭，她这么执着，一定有境外势力操纵，而伤她最深的很可能是她为之拼搏的居民。别不信，因家境贫穷每天只吃馒头和少量咸菜的吴花燕，瘦得只有21公斤，为了帮助她，一名老师向国际组织求援，吴花燕就说：“你让中国人在国际上丢脸了，中国人的事情自己能解决，不要让外国人抹黑中国”。

前两天刷到一个博主（名字忘了）写的一句令人触动的话：“社会普遍性下作，年青人整体性懦弱”。一方面衙门干了许多不堪的事，另一方面，民众困在列车里不敢砸窗，天天测日本核辐射但没一个敢去测杭州、天水，吃了屎却不敢往水务公司门口泼粪，却集体往一个跟外国人上床的女生身上泼粪，还上升到国格。奇怪，黛安娜与埃及富豪搞破鞋，没伤到英国国格，王昭君嫁了三代匈奴单于，没伤到大汉朝格，当代女大学生约个炮，就伤到国格？更奇怪是，他们刷到文革时女孩多谈几个男友就被枪毙，也大骂时代荒诞，可现实生活中他们仍玩沉塘那一套，恨不得连夜把女孩裹上麻袋扔大连老虎滩海里。文革一直没走，贫富差距体现在性资源差距，就是晚清大革命时期的阿Q，“妈妈的，和尚摸得，老子摸不得吗。”

这么鸡零狗碎的时代，宏大叙事是可耻的，老年人在入党，中年人在念心经，年轻人在躺平，粉红在抓破鞋和汉奸，富豪在养小三，子女在争产财……而穷人在为基建欢欣鼓舞，看看热搜，多少拧锣丝的人在下面跟帖点赞，“雅江水电站建成后，能发3000亿度电，相当于三个三峡水电站，国之重器，硬控阿三，生于华夏，无怨无悔”，然后他们就去商场乘凉了，家里开空调太不划算，电，又他妈涨价了。

总有人在我文章下面留言，说你不要泼冷水啊，中国人并不怂，举出黄花岗、五四运动、还有一些敏感词例子。还有文盲杠精来杠，你他妈瞎吗，看不到那么多次农民起义。是啊，我族从不缺反抗者，但中国史的规律是：反抗失败的成了粪渣，反抗成功的，就让别人吃屎。不信，你去查查历朝历代的帝王史。

不是怂不怂的事，中国要变得更好，得打破吃屎和让别人吃屎的周期性问题。

想想前些年也挺勇武的：08年那会儿，瓮安人因不满初二女学生李树芬死因的鉴定结果，十万人冲上街头，砸了县衙，最终逼着县令和捕快下课；还有乌坎人，几乎建立了一座勇武对抗的城堡；还有厦门，连岳召集众人上街抗议建化工厂，这么勇武剧集的镜头，至今也不过十来年。这十来年，男人吃了太多乌鸡白凤丸，连岳，变成了连岳不群。

最新的消息是，杭州人此时还在打开水龙头放水，水越来越发黄，味还很大……杭州水务部门那份辟谣通告，剧本根本说不通，情节与情节之间连个钩子都懒得设计，也不在乎你信不信。杭州市勇夺公共卫生饮用水监督技能竞赛团体冠军，杭州环境监测有限公司的法人同时身兼水务集团大股东，持股100%，发挥着自我监督的精神。就问，你服不服。

所以当前社会另一个主要矛盾就是：普通民众质问“信不信”与官方反问“服不服”的矛盾。

此时杭州的终极调查出来了，大意仍是气候异常，藻类不听话，水务部门很辛苦，只是未执行专项应急预案的要求，处理是：警告，诫勉，警告，只是轻轻地把环保公司总经理撤职了事。

对于这种自罚三杯的老套路，民众显然不服，只好用知乎网友提出的办法：当初我们天天要求日本官员喝一口福岛的水，证明水质未遭污染，现在我们就该要求杭州官员喝一口自来水，中国官员不可能连日本官员都不如吧。

这也做不到，我们的下一代还得吃屎。

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