"There is nothing like the moon when it was full in my village," said Zhu, who grew up in a farming family in Henan. "It was so bright in the sky that when you looked down the road you could see all the grass by the wayside. I just don't get that feeling anymore."
We were trying to catch a glimpse of the moon in the sky on that smoggy Beijing night, a difficult thing since it was constantly obscured by the tall buildings surrounding us, and dimmed by the myriad lights of the city. "When we ate soybeans by the light of the moon after cooking them over the fire, they were the sweetest things in the world," Zhu continued. "I don't know how to find such soybeans anymore."
Here he was, in the capital of a rising China, behind the wheel of a Roewe and capable of earning 20,000 yuan a month on a good month driving it. He has his own house and car, a wife and kid, but somehow something has been lost in the move from hometown to capital, from poverty to the middle class.
Being from Singapore, which was growing at the rate China does now in the 80s, I was not too surprised by this strain of nostalgia, because it is one I have seen in my own culture in the face of development.
Whether it was poets bemoaning the clean up of the Singapore River (which had a legendary stink from the pollution) as "losing its soul", or painters resolutely depicting the attap huts of villages which have all but vanished from the island, our art reflected a need to memorialize and honor the things being swallowed up by modernity.
We are simply seeing the same phenomenon in China, which changes at such a break-neck pace that sometimes, it exceeds the human capacity to fully comprehend. Just because we are intellectually able to adapt to modernity and technology does not necessarily mean we are emotionally able to process it.
But perhaps the drivers' sentiments are also part of the age-old human predilection for viewing the past through rose-colored lenses - a normal part of an aging person's nostalgia for their youth, no matter what the circumstances.
"My life now is just about earning more money," says Zhu with a sigh. "We were so carefree then - the moon of our youth is the best moon."
(By Judith Huang)
