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1. Dust Among Dust

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Time: Some Day in January 1931.
Location: 58 Little West Door Chinese: 小西门外58号, pinyin: xiǎo xī mén wài 58 hào. , Hengyang, Hunan Province.
Event: A crying Chinese: 呱呱, pinyin: guā guā, literally “croaking”. newborn (that’s me) being dropped into the human world.

This was a happy event, and it was an insignificant and ubiquitous yet completely unpredictable event.

I say this was a happy event because at the time, my family was well-off — they had enough to cover the basic needs — and my great-grandparents, parents, and older brother were all around. Add on the newly-born me, thereby increasing our household’s population by 20%, and more than just that, I was male; considering the culture at the time, this was obviously a good thing.

I say this was an insignificant and ubiquitous event because it was all too common at that time. During that era, the Chinese population was about 450 million people, and the nation had over 100 million families. Another newborn being born was like another speck of space dust floating down to Earth.

A Ming dynasty scholar named Hong Yingming Chinese: 洪应明. He was also known as 洪自诚, or Hong Zicheng. wrote in 《菜根谭》 Sometimes translated as Caigentan, its title is difficult to provide a direct translation for. , “山河大地已属微尘,而况尘中之尘! Pinyin: shān hé dà dì yí shǔ weī chén, ér kuàng chén zhōng zhī chén! Rough translation: Earth’s great mountains and rivers are but dust, and we are dust among dust. The words 尘中之尘 means “dust among dust”, and it is the title of this chapter in Chinese as well. ”. This conveys a Zen-like perspective: as far as the universe is concerned, Earth’s tallest mountains and longest rivers are as miniscule as a speck of dust; are we not smaller than dust compared to dust?

Hong Yingming’s analogy can be extended with modern scientific knowledge.

Earth is massive: it has a volume of 1.083 trillion cubic kilometres. However, Earth is miniscule on the Sun’s scale. The Sun is 1.3 million times larges than the Earth, with a diameter of 30 billion kilometres or 0.003 lightyears. Compared to the Sun, Earth is literally like a speck of dust.

The milky way’s diameter is on the order of 100,000 lightyears. The lightyear is a unit of distance used by astronomers, and it’s the distance traversed by light over the course of a year. Light travels 300 thousand kilometers every second; a light year is thus about 9.46 trillion kilometers.

At the scale of the Milky Way, which is comprised of 4 trillion stars, so too does the Sun seem like dust.

And within our vast and endless universe, we have already discovered trillions of galaxies. Our Milky Way is just one of them, and it too resembles dust.

Our observable universe is about 14 billion years old. Modern humans Presumably, he means the Homo genus have only existed for about 2 or 3 million years, and our written history spans only a few thousand years. Currently, reaching passing 100 years old is the limit of human longevity, but compared to the age of the universe, even the longest human life is reduced to a fleeting moment in time.

Thus, at the cosmic scale, all of our human and earthly relationships, lives, and experiences are unremarkable and infinitesimal.

The following two images gave me a deep impression of what “dust among dust” really means.

On the left is a diagram depicting the relative sizes of the Sun, the Earth, and the other planets. Since the Sun is itself just a speck of dust within the Milky Way galaxy, even the Earth amounts to dust among dust.

On the right is a diagram illustrating the “galactic year”, and the arrow indicates the solar system’s position within the Milky Way galaxy. A galactic year is the time elapsed during a single revolution of the solar system around the centre of the galaxy, and it is equivalent to about 225 million Earth years. Compared to the galactic year, an Earth year is miniscule and fleeting.

I say this event was completely unpredictable because of the trillions of specks of dust, each are distinct and unique, each with a one-way path towards their inevitable destinies, and hence each is unpredictable.

During that time period, over 4.5 million Chinese infants were born every year (calculated as 1% of the birth rate). Those people of the same generation not only looked different and had different genes, but their environments and challenges were different too. Their life trajectories are necessarily different as well. If you compiled each and every one of their personal histories, you’d find that they are more vivid than the colours of the Earth, that they have more emotions than flavours we can taste, and that they’re full of human characters that are more interesting than even the most legendary figures.

However, the event of my birth is hazy and unbeknownst to most, and it did not leave much impression of any kind. But if you were to ask me about my own feelings towards it, I would say I feel gratitude and I feel fortunate.

For my parents, “哀哀父母,生我劬劳。 Pinyin: āi āi fù mǔ, shēng wǒ qú láo. This is a couplet from the 《小雅》 section of 《诗经》, a collection of ancient Chinese poetry. It expresses mourn or sorrow for the parents’ pain and effort in birthing and raising a child. ” I owe my parents gratitude for bringing me into this world, and I owe gratitude to the ancestors that raised them too.

For myself, I am very fortunate to have a healthy birth, especially amidst China’s era of declining medical care It’s difficult to find resources on this, but one can imagine that the medical practises of 1930s and 1940s China were far from spectacular. Western medicine had barely been introduced, and conflict with Japan likely drained most available resources. . To not have congenital heart disease or cerebral palsy, and thus to avoid bringing hardship to my parents and family, having a healthy start to my life truly was a piece of good fortune.

I suppose these feelings of gratitude and fortune, together with some other lamentations, will comprise this speck of dust’s introductory journal entry in commemoration of its birth.

Translator's Note 1.

Something to keep in mind is that much of the above scientific knowledge (particularly relating to the cosmic scales of size and time) weren't discovered until the 20th century. The scale of the solar system, the scale of our galaxy, and the scale of our universe were known to me as a child, but these were genuinely novel discoveries that occurred later in my grandfather's life; he did not have the luxury of a comprehensive primary school scientific education. Thus, I think this knowledge was far more impactful to him compared to people of my generation, especially in developed countries. I, for one, considered the cosmic scale and age to be common knowledge.