The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

QDaily's editor-in-chief picks the best of the week.

"How should a person live?"

When the philosopher Zhou Lian asked this, he was reaching back into the deepest tradition of his discipline. Facing death at the hands of the Athenians, Socrates told everyone: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Examination matters because it gives us a path and a method for thinking. It asks us to put questions to ourselves, to find out whether some disturbing evil or folly sits behind the things in our lives we long ago stopped noticing.

Everyday life is in fact full of propositions that need examining. Does obscenity really corrupt the young, and must it therefore vanish from cultural life altogether? Facial recognition helps the police watch over society, but where is the line between fighting crime and invading privacy? Rap culture is thriving — is it right for the authorities to suppress it simply because it does not suit the Kremlin's taste?

Look around. In a world that seems settled and ordinary, there is plenty worth picking apart, everywhere you turn. Those thoughts are what finally become the standards by which you live your own life well.

This week, the first piece we recommend is QDaily's interview with Zhou Lian. He talks about many of the currents of thought and the problems of contemporary society. Asked how one person, specifically, ought to live, he said: "My advice carries no compulsion — people have their own aspirations, after all. What I would hope is that young people stay as honest and true to themselves as they can."

Our running series are still adding installments.

The third installment of our memoir series on the Stars Art Exhibition is about Wang Keping, who turns 70 this year. Forty years ago he carried his wood carving Silence onto the front page of The New York Times of October 19, 1979. It was a head 43 centimeters tall, cut from birch, the face twisted and the features coarse. A round object stopped up the mouth and stretched it enormously wide; the left eye was sealed too. At the time people said the meaning of such work was clear "at a glance."

Among the Stars artists, Wang Keping was the brash one. "Back then I wasn't thinking much about myself — I was thinking about the future of China as a whole. And you felt brave: you said the things other people didn't dare say." But he also admits, "Our generation went through the Cultural Revolution. We had some experience, some strategy; we knew where to stop, and being too extreme was no use. I was still a little extreme; the others were steadier, more strategic."

In the end, society had no room for Wang Keping. He recalls: "In 1979 there happened to be a certain political climate, so the Stars exhibition had a big impact. Later things went back to normal. The whole situation had changed — 'Anti-Liberalization,' 'Anti-Spiritual Pollution.' Ideology started to tighten. And once it tightens, the people who watch which way the wind blows do whatever comes down from above." In 1984 Wang Keping's passport finally came through, and he has lived in France for the 35 years since.

Having looked at how America's sexual liberation helped raise a sense of gay community, our "Stonewall at 50" series turns again to the social conditions that produced the 1969 riots. This time the subject is a gay magazine called ONE. The magazine was a serious one; its founders wanted to teach the public more about the community. But the postal authorities in charge of its distribution ruled it obscene.

With help from lawyers, the magazine sued the postal authorities, and in 1957 the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices did not treat it as much of a case, but the ruling they handed down changed history: they found ONE was not obscene. "[The case] set the gay community on the road to freedom."

QDaily columnist Yoshii Shinobu continues her series on the Chinese owners of restaurants in Japan. In a place called Nishikawaguchi, in the south of Saitama Prefecture, they have built a district where you can eat grilled lamb skewers, malatang, milk tea, knife-shaved noodles, Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles — and the people it draws are not only the Chinese who live and work in Japan.

Zhu Guoxin runs a shengjian shop — pan-fried buns — named the Bund. A Shanghai native, he finished high school in 1976 and then worked at a bus company for ten years. In January 1988 he left to study in Japan; he waited three hours at the airport for someone who never came to collect him, and finally found his way to the language school on English and hand gestures.

After two years at a business vocational school he joined a local Japanese timber trading firm. Fifteen years on, the slump in the Japanese economy cost him his job. That was when Zhu went back to Shanghai to learn how to make shengjian, and then opened this shop in Japan. By the time it opened it was already 2010.

These days Zhu doesn't get up until 11 a.m. He smokes, drinks coffee, picks up a few things on the way and reaches the shop around noon, opening as soon as he's ready. It stays open until one in the morning. That is this Shanghainese man's life in Japan.

Han Kui, who has also worked as a contributing correspondent for Phoenix TV, interviewed five Czechs in Prague about the changes of the past 30 years. It was in 1989 that the Soviet Union pulled out of what was then Czechoslovakia and the Czech Communist Party lost power.

The Czechs' reactions are mixed. The historian Michal Kopeček thinks that "much of it has been good for Czech society, the economy and culture; the negative side, such as the gap between rich and poor, rests on having a democratic system as its base" — but on the whole the good outweighs the bad. Stanislav Grospič, vice-chairman of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, argues the opposite: "Before 1989 there was more democracy, and the democratic system was better," because other parties still had the power to speak and take part, and decisions were not made any slower by having several of them.

Everyone understands the history they have lived through from their own position, and putting these accounts side by side helps us see more clearly what actually happened.

Finally, a few more things worth watching:

The central bank is cutting the reserve requirement ratio again to stimulate the economy. On May 21 the People's Bank of China announced on its website a cut in three steps to the reserve requirement ratio for county-level rural commercial banks, bringing it down to 8% (from 11.5%) by July 15. But the effect of looser credit is fading. The money has gone mainly into infrastructure and property. Small and mid-sized firms, which need cheap loans most, have not seen their lending rates keep falling, which has left them less willing to borrow from banks and has in turn slowed how much they invest.

How can the brightness of lights at night be used to estimate how developed a region's economy is? There is new research on the question. A recent study from the International Monetary Fund gathered light and economic data for 182 countries and 3,870 regions, and found that fast-growing middle-income countries are the best fit for checking growth rates against light data. In these places the spread of lights is more accurate, easier to tell apart, and the margin of error is moderate.

Why does food delivery keep getting more expensive? Meituan's latest first-quarter results may hold part of the answer. The company's food delivery gross margin was 14.4% in the first quarter of 2019, against just 7.6% a year earlier. The reason: as Meituan has become a super gateway for traffic and the scale effects of its delivery business have taken hold, it has gained the upper hand in bargaining with small and mid-sized restaurants, and has begun raising the commission it takes on each order.

Apple holds its annual developer conference in the early hours of June 4. Going by what is known so far, here is what Apple may announce: iOS 13 may add a dark (night) mode; macOS 10.15 and watchOS 6, the first moving toward closer integration with iOS and the second toward independence; the tvOS 13 update may be tied to Apple's own content service, Apple TV+. New hardware is unlikely.

On May 20, the 20th World Metrology Day, new definitions took effect for the kilogram, the unit of mass; the ampere, of electric current; the kelvin, of temperature; and the mole, the amount of a substance. This means that the base units are no longer defined by any physical object, but by the basic properties of things and the limits of human measurement.

The Booker Prize, one of the most important novel prizes in contemporary English-language fiction, has been awarded. The Omani writer Jokha Alharthi won for Celestial Bodies, the first time Arabic literature has taken the International Booker Prize. In Celestial Bodies, which tells the story of three sisters in rural Oman, the country on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula lives through colonization and turns from a traditional slave-owning society into an oil producer. The sisters' lives are upended again and again, and the shape of those lives reflects Oman's own changes.

Street vendors of every kind are surely familiar to you. More than a decade ago, the fights between street vendors and city administrators keen to keep cities orderly and clean were often front-page news in the Chinese media. Now the Netflix documentary Street Food has brought the question back into view. It asks: what can banned street vendors give a city?

In many countries, paternity leave is part of a push for gender equality and also a way to encourage people to have children. But a study in the Journal of Public Economics reached an unexpected conclusion: the paid paternity leave Spain introduced more than a decade ago did not raise the birth rate at all. It made many families drop the idea of a second child, or more.

Cheng Ran, born in Inner Mongolia in 1981, has won the art prize with the largest purse in the world. The Nomura Emerging Artist Award is judged by a panel of directors from well-known museums around the world. Since 2005 Cheng Ran has made films and video works that draw on Chinese and Western literature, poetry, cinema and visual culture, and that take up complicated, delicate states of mind along with cultural difference, social status and existentialism. In 2017 he had a solo show at the New Museum in New York, where he presented his multi-channel video installation Diary of a Madman.

Hong Kong director Ann Hui has begun shooting Love After Love, her adaptation of Eileen Chang's novella Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier. The casting — Ma Sichun as Ge Weilong and Eddie Peng as Qiao Qiqiao — has set off a huge argument. Chang's original is a sensuous story of ruin, after all: aren't Ma Sichun and Eddie Peng a little too upright and healthy for it?

Woody Allen's A Rainy Day in New York has a trailer. Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning play a couple. Fanning's character lands a rare interview and goes to Manhattan with her boyfriend, but one thing after another opens cracks in the relationship, and New York's rain does nothing for their mood. Earlier, when old allegations that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter resurfaced during the #MeToo movement, Woody Allen's career took a blow, and Amazon abandoned its plan to release A Rainy Day in New York in North America. Word later came that the film would open in Europe.

May 21 was the most excited day of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite both had their world premieres to very high praise, and both got a standing ovation. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, set in the summer of 1969, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading film and television star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double. Critics called it Tarantino's style at full stretch, and a tribute to the film noir of 1960s Hollywood.

Parasite carries on Bong Joon-ho's long line of social criticism. It tells the story of two families far apart in status. Song Kang-ho plays an unemployed father who sends his eldest son — the one the family is counting on to make a living — to apply as a private tutor at the home of Mr. Park, the head of an IT company, which sets off a chain of accidents. Both directors, incidentally, asked reporters and everyone else who had seen the films not to give away the plot.

How did The Big Bang Theory bring nerd culture into everyday life? By pointing its camera at a group of high-IQ PhDs, the show pulled the figures of the "nerd" and the "geek" into the mainstream and into ordinary settings, and helped different sorts of people understand and tolerate one another. "As for 'nerd culture' — however people choose to define it — one day they may look back and find that this much-criticized cartoonish little sitcom was a more positive force than they imagined."

Cover image / A statue of Socrates