A little while ago, I went to see Aespa in Oakland. Before going, I thought it would be a diversion, just another experience. But afterward, it stayed with me much more intensely than I had expected. My feelings were tangled and complicated, and I wanted to write to release and record everything I felt and thought. I will keep putting down what goes through my mind honestly, holding nothing back. I am writing now, and out of respect for the act of writing itself, I owe it that same unreserved honesty. You may find my thoughts filthy or vulgar. I call them the healthy thoughts of a healthy human being. I simply haven’t hidden them.
Onstage, they were as close to perfect as anyone could be. Even after more than two hours of nonstop singing and dancing, they showed no sign of fatigue or of letting up. They remembered every lyric, every dance move. Every line was sung just right; every movement was carried through to its fullest. Their skin was flawless. However closely the cameras zoomed in, there was nothing to fault. How many beauty-conscious women must have envied that skin, and how many men drawn to the beauty of women must have stared wide-eyed? Their hair flew freely in the artificial wind, its abandon strikingly set against the deliberate expressions on their faces. Their eyes, appearing and disappearing behind their hair, caught and reflected all the dazzling light directed at them. Already standing on that magnificent stage, they seemed more divine still.
I love them: their voices, their figures, their faces, their stories, the passion and energy that pour out of them. That passion and energy can clear the gloom from my mind. They make the cells in my body move with the music, make those cells healthier, and in turn make me healthier in both mind and body. They also remind me that life needs storms as well as calm. The same goes for music: there must be songs that stir the blood as well as songs that soothe it. For the past six months, I’ve felt as though I were living an old man’s life. I once described it this way: an old man’s hours, an athlete’s diet, a sage’s reading. But that was only talk. I am neither a composed old man nor a disciplined athlete, much less a wise sage. Yet this concert suddenly lit the long-dormant spark of youth inside me. Young blood took charge of me again, of my body and my mind, of everything psychological and physical.
I love every aspect of them, so to me they are perfection itself. The rational part of my mind knows perfectly well that they aren’t perfect, and that perfection doesn’t exist. But the irrational part is willing to imagine that they are, because only then can I experience that concert night to the fullest. We all live in reality, and reality contains no perfection. That is precisely why we turn to art. We write poetry to celebrate life, songs to praise love, literature to embrace suffering. We read poetry, listen to songs, and read literature. Making art and appreciating it can ultimately bring us to the same place: closer to perfection. In art’s perfect world, we encounter ideas in their purest form, and those ideas deepen our wisdom and give us the strength we need to live in an imperfect reality. We cannot draw a perfect circle, yet each of us can hold the idea of one in our mind. What matters is not giving up on perfection because it doesn’t exist, but knowing that it doesn’t exist and still believing we can reach it. They are so perfect. They have shown me what perfect singing is, what a perfect performance is, what a perfect body is. If, when I am tired and drowsy, I can dispel my gloom by watching them dance and listening to their songs, if I can make them one of the ideals I aspire to in life, then my own life will gradually become more perfect too. I will take more care with how I dress and how I look, bringing myself a little closer to their perfection. Perhaps that is what being a fan means. We choose an image of a perfect life and hope we can move toward it. The things the person we admire enjoys doing gradually become things we enjoy doing; the books they like become books we like; their values gradually become our own. As long as the person we admire is a positive influence, being a fan deserves encouragement. But we must remember moderation. Extreme emotions often bring destruction, not just financial ruin but the destruction of character and family. That is how life works: whatever we do, we need to find a balance. Really, we spend our whole lives searching for a point of balance in everything.
Since reality lacks perfection, we should try to create it. Everyone tells us to keep our feet on the ground and give up unrealistic fantasies. But isn’t living that way exhausting? Don’t people without ideals or dreams find everyday life dull, tedious, and boring? To me, they have no sense of romance. Dare to fantasize. Dare to invent perfection. Lose yourself in it. Forget life’s imperfections for a while. Escape this purgatory of an earth, briefly, and enter a fiction of your own. Sometimes you can take someone by the hand and enter a shared fiction, so that you, or both of you, can find peace and stillness within. So to me, they are perfect. Their voices are the most perfect voices, their figures the most perfect figures, their faces the most perfect faces. Among them are the very sexiest and the very cutest. Of course, this is perfection I have created. This is the perfection I have invented. No perfect person exists. Reason tells me that they are products packaged to perfection by capital. But if I see them that way, my reason wins and my feelings suffer a crushing defeat. And I am human; I am irrational. If I must live in naked reality, I am utterly defeated. So I choose to think of them as perfect. They are what I long for. I love everything about them. I already loved their songs, but seeing them shine onstage as they sang has changed how I hear that music. Their singing and dancing have drawn a veil of romance over it that will be hard to lift.
Everything we have lived through becomes a memory. There is a place in our minds where memories are stored, and I can return to mine again and again. By consciously reshaping them, I can make the good ones lovelier and let the bad ones fade. We all live for ourselves. As long as we believe in those more beautiful memories and forget the ugly ones, no one has the right to accuse us of deceiving ourselves. It is enough that we believe, because we are living for ourselves.
Why do I think this way? I believe there are two reasons: my natural attraction to women, and my own idealism.
The first is easy to understand. As a man, being attracted to women is the most ordinary thing in the world. Their faces, their makeup and styling, their clothes, their figures—all of these appeal to me. But that is certainly not the deepest layer. Beneath it is, fundamentally, a pursuit of perfection. As I said earlier, we all live in an imperfect world, and being a fan can bring an element of perfection into our lives. We don’t have intimate access to their lives, so there is little opportunity for our perfect fantasies to be shattered. Even if I had that opportunity, I don’t think I would choose to break the spell. And if that perfection were bound to fall apart, I still wouldn’t regret it.
I used to be someone who lost his head over love. Rather than a pathological way of thinking, I see that as a form of idealism. People like that romanticize love. They believe it is pure, belongs to two people alone, and has nothing to do with anyone else. They believe it means being inseparably bound to each other and replying to messages right away. Reality, of course, tells us otherwise. What is real love? It is staying by each other’s side even when the physical attraction between you is gone. Love truly begins after passion fades. It is mutual respect, not mutual confinement. It means letting the other person have a life of their own, not insisting that their life consist only of being with you. So do you think I don’t know what real love is? I do. But I will never throw away the part of me that loses its head over love—and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Whether we are made that way is also determined by our genes and our childhood experiences. I have always believed that the ways of seeing the world and dealing with people that we develop as children cannot be erased. They can only be hidden, covered over by our mature personalities. I think of that hidden, inborn self as our child self. Each of us has a child inside, living in our heart for the rest of our life. Maturity can only keep that child from taking charge of our behavior and feelings too often. Since we cannot get rid of him, we must learn to accept that childish side of ourselves. Perhaps true maturity means seeing both sides of something and allowing both to exist. I know what mature love looks like, and I know what love driven by feeling looks like. I will strive for mature love, but I will also allow emotional love to lead my life from time to time. There is no absolute right or wrong here, because wrongness itself was not invented by the Creator. It is a foolish human definition.
Life is in tatters. I know that. But I will keep looking at the world through a filter, screening out the impurities and adding a little beauty. I believe that as long as I actively invent perfection and embrace the perfection I invent, the world will be perfect for me, and my life will surely be perfect too. It may be a deception, but I would rather be deceived than live among ruin and ugliness.
要政阳
October 8, 2026, Santa Clara
