Words are vanishing.

On several nights, I sat in my room, opened my blog, tried to write things truly from my heart, but failed. The things I want to write always evade from my pen, the words I want to use have no courage to show up. No, it’s me. I don’t have the courage to write what I want to write. Currently, for me, writing in Chinese is like writing a love letter under the nose of my headteacher, or worse. 

Most Chinese Apps and sites have set up “sensitive words” to censor content, including “climb the Wall”, “VPN”, “Winnie the Pooh”, “ascend the throne”, “me too”, “constitution amendment”, “PewDiePie”, “Liu Xiaobo” (this word list can be extremely long). If you try to write sensitive words on a site or app, your post/article will be deleted, and sometimes your account will be blocked. The more sensitive content you write, the more attention you draw. Once you pass a threshold, national security officials may find you, and ask (or force?) you to sign a guarantee like “I promise I won’t write this nonsense again.”

No, I’m not complaining about these dystopian things that many Chinese, and Western journalists, have talked before. I just notice something new: even if there are no sensitive words censorship, no national security officer, I still can’t write from my heart. Political words and topics have become a mental taboo, they scare me. Words like “习近平” （Xi Jinping), “修宪” （constitution amendment), “六四” （Tiananmen Square protests）are firing, I can’t get them from my head to my blog, even it is a personal, anonymous blog backed by a foreign company.

It looks like a word deprivation. We (in my blog, “we” usually refers to most Chinese, including me) have gotten used to these words bans so well, that we can’t live with them again. Every day, we take the metros, wait in lines, chat about celebrities, work in offices, and browse the news. We know many things happened, bad things, but we pretend we don’t know, at least we never talk about them. The world is divided into two: one is real, one is within the superficial discourses.

Still, there are many brave bloggers who dare to write political things on the internet. Sometimes they use alternative words (“Winnie the Pooh” is an alternative word for Xi, later on, it became a sensitive word itself, so some people use “bun” or “emperor Qinfeng” or “200 jin”), sometimes they transfer an article into a picture and upload it upside down. But on most occasions, they write above the sensitive threshold, AKA the “Red Line”. These articles, in my view, are ambiguous. Writers know where the gold is, but they stop digging with 100 meters ahead. I know it’s a way to protect their social accounts, one of the most important internet assets they have, but the compromises of the articles, like using soft tones and euphemisms, technically hide, and even defense, the cruel things done by the Government. So many times, after stupid regulations come out, the end of these articles reads like this: “Although things have become so bad, we still need to hold hopes…blah blah blah…we need to read Government’s documents carefully, get what they really mean, follow their steps to success.” These sentences guarantee the safety of these articles and accounts, but they are disgustingly fake.

So what should I do? I don’t want to chat with national security officials, and I don’t dare to use sensitive Chinese words, I also dislike compromising articles, the only choice I have is… writing in English. Yes, that’s all I want to say in this blog post:)

Oh, something more. If this blog is found by Chinese patriots (yes, Little Pink) and you hate what I write and you want to call me “traitor”, let me be clear: I refuse to be restricted by any countries, any organizations, any communities, any races, any occupations. I’m not, mentally, a member of your big country family, and I have no identification with any groups, except for “human” and “woman”.