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Each Generation Worse Than the Last

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2024.3.21–22

—A response to Huzi, twenty-five years later

Study hard!

And you can be like them

a group of colourless

adults point at

another group of colourless

adults

and say to a group of many-coloured

minors

Last night

cries and vows

bought you colour

today you must still

with laughter and lies

deepen those colours

but what sort of colour

can colourlessness bestow

so disperse on the spot

fluorescent green bright blue blazing red

vivid yellow luminous purple dazzling orange

the sum equals zero

Colours in motion

have caused

colours to congeal

adding to Gongzi Hall

and Qing-Qing-Niu-La's

lack of colour

one more brushstroke

of no colour

So adult or not

everyone points one hand at you

and the other at me

surprised and delighted

a great discovery—

we're the same!

or are bound to be

But when you grow up do you become him?

Two groups of colourless adults

think the others have colour

point at each other

give each other a taste of colour

declare to each other

we are different

each generation worse than the last!

The adults who turned colourless first

say this to those who follow

The many-coloured minors

have not realised

they are the next generation

because they are wondering

whom are we meant to be like?

Written in haste at the Law Library at 10:30 p.m., 21 March 2024, just before closing and being turned out

Revised back in my dormitory shortly after 2 a.m. on 22 March

Appendix: Hu Xudong, "On Sunday, the Flowers Visit Peking University"

On Sunday, the flowers visit Peking University.

Oh! Wrinkled Weiming Lake,

what a fine place for a spring outing, like

the old face of Uncle Zhang or Granny Li next door,

smiling with such meaning and saying

"Children, come and have some sweets!"

But the flowers long ago stole sweets from their textbooks, Wo Wo,

Jiajia, White Rabbit and chocolate peanut brittle stuffing

a childhood chilly with early spring till it bulges.

Peel off a sweet wrapper, eat a Boya Pagoda;

peel off another, and find your own sexy future

blooming on a peach-tree branch, seized

by an old professor, widowed for years!

The angry flowers scream

and rush into Teaching Building No. 1 beside the lake,

searching blindly for toilets, urgently unblocking

bladders stopped up by a heavenly library.

Their footsteps burst the pimples of youth sprouted

from a line of miserable English roots in the next classroom;

their urine, like correction fluid, wipes my revision notes

on Li Zhi's "childlike heart" down to this:

The Sunday morning is thick with mist,

children collecting scraps stand in a line.

February 1999

Note by Wang Ao, a friend of Hu Xudong:

Thank you to Azi for sending this poem. Huzi and I talked a great deal in those days; I have many memories. I remember the 1998 university anniversary: to create a festive atmosphere, the university bought great quantities of flowers and plants to line the paths and put carp into the campus pools. But they stocked too many; the fish crowded together, jumping and thrashing. Huzi and I both thought this was a waste of people's labour and resources. He suggested catching some fish, and that night we went out. At a pool near the west gate I kept watch while Huzi crouched by the water. There were so many fish that he scooped one up with his bare hands, rather like the videos of cats catching fish that are everywhere now. We later decided to keep it, and raised the fish Huzi had caught in a bucket in my dormitory. Thinking of it now, it seems like yesterday.

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