When you see her, she just sits there.
She doesn’t move, and she doesn’t speak. She wears a black uniform, with her legs together and her hands folded on her knees. Her expression is not sharp, and can even be said to be “nothing”. But you will soon notice something indescribable and uncomfortable – a perfect silence, a posture of completely retracting “self”.
Her name is Zanni, a character in “Mingchao”. She has the attribute of fire, but she is not passionate at all. She is not like fire, but like water, the kind of water that runs deep and still. She speaks very softly and not much, but every sentence is like a file, dully rubbing the calmest and most rational part of your heart.
She is a self that has been perfectly cleaned up.
Bi Feiyu once wrote about such women in “Moses on the Plain”. They are neither passive nor active. They never cry or laugh on their own initiative, but you can feel that there is a tiny, hot vortex in their hearts. When you get close to it, it doesn’t speak, it just burns. Burns you, and burns itself.
Zanni’s “fire” is such a fire.
It is not an explosion, not a burning, not the heroic power of flames rising to the sky, but quietly, like a little reddish charcoal deep in the furnace, invisible from the outside, but painfully hot inside.
She is a member of the system, a screw in the system, and an enforcer of order. She is more rational, accurate, and disciplined than anyone else. She goes to get off work on time every day, handles affairs meticulously, and even speaks concisely to the extreme. She has no nonsense. She even deleted her emotions.
But you can’t say she is cold.
She is not cold, she is just too careful. So careful that she dares not even express “heat”. So careful that she has to polish herself into a smooth stone before she can be smoothly embedded in this huge and irresistible machine.
When Bi Feiyu wrote about Xiao Yanqiu in “Qing Yi”, he wrote about this state: “She has learned to swallow her pain without making a sound.” Zanni is such a person. It’s not that she doesn’t feel pain, but that she can’t speak. It’s not that she has no desire, but that she can’t show it.
She lives by using the overly heavy way of “forbearance”.
Her skills are called “judgment”, “watching”, and “silent negotiation”. These words themselves are a kind of declaration: she does not seek communication, does not ask for understanding, and does not have the luxury of “emotional catharsis”. She is just working, just executing, and just constantly confirming that she has no deviation.
But who can always be “without deviation”?
She occasionally makes mistakes, even if the mistakes are very small. For example, a wrong judgment, an unfinished report, a word that is not said enough. She will not be scolded for too long, at most a light reminder from her boss. But she will think about it again and again, and examine herself again and again.
This is her “fire”. Her anger is not directed at the outside, but at herself, a kind of self-torture that burns continuously. She regards herself as a project, a “system indicator” that must be achieved and cannot fail.
So she doesn’t laugh. It’s not that she can’t laugh, but that she knows the price of laughing.
Her laughter will make others misunderstand that she is relaxed, make others think that she is fine, and make the system think that she can be pressed a little more.
She is a smart person. She understands too much.
Bi Feiyu said: “The world is not guilty, but too heavy.” Zani’s heaviness is not weight, not emotion, but a kind of self-restraint brought by “knowing too much”. She understands the rules of the game and the rules of people. She doesn’t challenge because she knows the consequences of the challenge; she doesn’t run away because she knows there is no escape.
She chooses to “live”, chooses to “stay”, and chooses to “be a person who is useful to the system”.
In the system, she turned herself into a knife. But this knife is not used to stab others, but to cut open herself to see how much of “me” can be preserved.
She was not like this before. Maybe, before entering this system, she also laughed, expected, and had some unrealistic and passionate dreams. But later, she let it go. Not because she was weak, but because she wanted to “live longer”.
You can say she is cowardly, but you can’t deny that she lives hard, even a little bit awe-inspiring.
She never says a word more, never gets angry easily, and never expresses herself too much. She seems to have practiced “how to be a useful person” in advance and got full marks in this course.
And the fire is buried under this full mark.
Her fire does not burn fast, and it will not even be noticed by most people. But it really exists, and it slowly, bit by bit, burns herself.
She knows the pain. She knows.
But she doesn’t shout. She just draws the curtains and turns off the lights on a night when no one is paying attention, and then says to herself in a weak voice in the dark:
“Hold on.”
This is Zanni.
A small fire, burning continuously, not amazing, but warm enough and painful enough.
She does not save the world, nor does she destroy the world. She just tries not to be destroyed by the world.