3 things this week | on radical acceptance

reaction to the military parade & two new book recommendations

From Polish illustrator Rafael Olbinski

Hello, readers old and new !

Welcome. This is a space dedicated to the ordinary life of a Chinese millennial: real-time reactions and murmurs from the ground. It’s deliberately biased, the opposite of the “objective” news you scroll through on your feed. Sometimes I respond to hot viral topics, sometimes I sink into literature-nerdy content. If there are things you’re curious about, what people here really think, I’ll dig in. After all, this is a reader-supported space.

This week, from the spectacle of a military parade, to Perel’s labyrinth of love, to Li Yiyun’s devastating memoir, I kept circling back to the same lesson: radical acceptance. To accept the contradictions of a country, the complexity of an affair, the unbearable truth of grief, without fleeing them. Maybe that’s what this newsletter is for: a place to practice holding complexity, and to keep going anyway.

News: The 2025 China Victory Day Parade

In Beijing, rehearsals for the military parade began early, with traffic restrictions and soldiers already visible in uniform. At subway stops, guards stood on platforms, while neighborhood ayi’s in red vests waved small red flags to direct cars and pedestrians. It felt as if the whole city had accessorized in red. On Monday night, when I went to return a power bank at the subway station, the machine was unplugged. I couldn’t see how that affected the parade, but fine.

The parade began at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Students and workers were encouraged to stay home to watch. The show lasted 70 minutes, followed by an evening program featuring Xi’s appearance. By the time I woke up, friends were already sharing photos of their giant TV screens. We watched on Bilibili, the Gen-Z streaming site that had launched a playful campaign a few days earlier: see which military team to cheer for. In a lucky draw, the three of us ended up on “Team Tibet.” The whole thing had the vibe of watching the Spring Festival Gala, family members of all ages gathered in front of screens, a national ritual.

I’m not pro- or anti-military, nor do I follow international wars closely. They’ve always felt far away. But when close friends are excited, it’s hard not to get swept along. Social media overflowed with clips: soldiers swearing to leap into war at a moment’s notice, young women in uniform hyping each other up, recruits drinking Chinese herbal medicine to prevent fainting in the heat. They were young, mostly attractive, their energy spilling through the screen. Mainstream media amplified it with wartime films like Dead to Rights and TV dramas such as The Long Way Back, dramatizing WWII battles against the Japanese.

On first impression, the uniformity struck me: the choreography of lifted legs, arms, and gazes. It was so precise it almost looked AI-generated, aesthetically mesmerizing. Camera angles enhanced the spectacle: shots from rearview mirrors of marching vehicles, pilot POVs over the city, close-ups of soldiers’ wide, spirited eyes, some breaking into proud smiles.

Foreign dignitaries sat among the audience, fanning themselves in the heat. One even carried a black umbrella. Most moving were the appearances of elderly veterans in their 80s, rising to salute alone, silent gestures of commemoration. There was also a clip of Xi seemingly explaining to Kim Jong Un aspects of the parade; Kim nodded enthusiastically. Every moment was captured and broadcast live.

The 70-minute event was tightly choreographed, layered, efficient, and visually rich. When jets streaked across the Summer Palace in multi-colored trails, it almost read as art, communication through spectacle. To my surprise, it was aesthetically coherent.

A friend educated primarily in the U.S., now permanently back in China, commented:“The parade is a display of power. The most important part is showing the nuclear weapon, Dongfeng-61… that display itself deters war, bringing peace by preventing it.” Others, on WeChat, saw something darker: a compliance test for citizens, a page from the playbook of fascist governance.

For me, the whole experience was surreal. To see instruments of war so close to home, jets overhead, engines rattling the city, while friends cheered with almost devotional awe. I’ve always felt ambivalent about the homeland. I’ve heard too many city tales: journalists losing visas, friends arrested for ambiguous reasons, editors ordered to delete posts, artists expecting police visits as part of their creative process. The fear feels real. I still remember drinking tea with police officers in a teahouse, asked why I worked where I worked, why I wrote what I wrote. They looked puzzled, even sincere: “If you are Chinese, why not patriotic? Why disclose the unpleasant sides?”

Secrecy works like a blindfold. A friend here temporarily for work put it bluntly: “In my country, mistakes are acknowledged. In China, they’re hidden. It’s strange.” I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to defend, but couldn’t.

I don’t know how to feel in the midst of all these: pride? dread? admiration? fear? and maybe the point is that all of those feelings can sit together. I was reminded that radical acceptance means not choosing one, but admitting the contradictions are real.

More readings from the week:

Book: The State of Affairs by Esther Perel

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading this book and aggressively highlighting passages. Perel draws out a striking paradox of our time: we live in an age that celebrates sexual and emotional freedom more than ever before, and yet we expect our partners to be responsible for our personal happiness. Compared to our parents’ generation, where marriage was more often an economic alliance, our unions are imagined as love-matches, and yet infidelity is punished more harshly than ever, sometimes with the weight of a “death sentence.”

Talking with friends, I’ve noticed how common affairs are at different stages of relationships. But how do couples repair after betrayal? How do some become closer than ever? Perel approaches these questions with care, illuminating the shadow side of human longing. She also reminds us that cultural expectations shape what counts as “betrayal”: in some societies, women have low expectations of their husband’s fidelity, and affairs are not punished as severely as in the West. In Tanzania, for example, so long as a man can afford to provide for his children, he may take as many wives as he can support.

So radical acceptance here is about acknowledging complexity, love and hurt, freedom and confinement, rather than flattening infidelity into only “good” or “bad.” Here are some sentences that stood out to me:

• “Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.”

• “Infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures: our memory of the past.”

• “He made her doubt not just him but her own sanity.”

• “If fear, sadness, and vulnerability can be introduced into their sanctuary, they might encounter new selves in places they never expected.”

• “An affair throws a couple into a new reality… trust no longer solely hinges on the predictable, but becomes an active engagement with the unpredictable.”

Book: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Li Yiyun

After both of her sons died by suicide, writer Li Yiyun turned to literature as a way to endure. She uses the phrase “radical acceptance”, and warns that if you cannot meet the book on those terms, you may not be ready to read it.

This is perhaps the most bitter book on grief I’ve read, more devastating than Joan Didion’s memoirs of loss. What unsettles is not only the tragedy itself but the language: composed, like a surgeon’s scalpel dissecting her own grief for the reader. Her emotions are not released in action but in words that displayed in such precision.

Li recalls how therapists had already warned her of the risks her sons faced. She admits she would have considered herself a lucky mother if both had simply survived high school. She also insists on respecting her sons’ choices, even their choice of death. Her strength lies not in following them, but in refusing to. She showed the most difficult face of radical acceptance: not erasing pain, not rationalizing it, but holding grief and love in the same hand, without flinching. Here are some sentences that stood out:

• “My husband, referring to the picture recently, made a comment that as a family, what the four of us shared was our belief in, and our respect for, free will.”

• “The ability to believe and disbelieve simultaneously seems a prerequisite for any parent. Is that rash a minor skin irritation or the first symptom of a deadly illness? Is a child’s preference for playing alone a developmental stage or a sign of more serious trouble? There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end.”

• “Think of those parents who refuse to understand their children’s sexual orientation, their existential questions, or simply their feelings. Where do those children go?”

• “Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, and alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are fiction, until, once confirmed by life, they become facts.”

• “‘You love your children more than you love me’ was a complaint she(Li’s mother) made when my children were young. Two years after Vincent died, she informed me there was some karma in my losing a child: I had failed to return her love.”

*Special thanks to ChatGPT for editing.

Until next time!