Yama Reborn

Chapter 49: Hitchhiking

Dinner was a basket of bread, fresh from the oven. The hotel retained its Colonial Era style, and the service of baking bread in the back kitchen was still available. Mineral water with bread was how Chen Nuo made do with dinner—he wouldn’t dare touch the local curries and bean soups.

Around seven o’clock in the evening, Chen Nuo ambled out of the hotel and onto the streets of Kathmandu. In this era, there weren’t many domestic tourists in Kathmandu; Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, was what was in vogue. It wouldn’t be until the new media era, a decade or so later, that this place would be hyped up by a bunch of internet celebrities and second-tier tourism dealers, who would concoct the "highest happiness index" gimmick. Nobody knew which dubious organization had come up with this so-called "highest happiness index." In any case, the Nepalese people themselves definitely didn’t buy it.

The term "literati youth" was a compliment in the seventies and eighties because it carried substance. Back then, the bar was high; one had to be well-read in Tagore and Shelley Yeats, and domestically, able to casually mention Hai Zi, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, and Bei Dao. By the nineties, it weakened a bit, but aspirants still had to have read Wang Xiaobo and San Mao, and be able to discuss the new wave in cinema convincingly. Reciting lines from Wang Jiawei’s films was also essential.

After 2000, everything went south. The explosion of the internet led to a massive influx of poseurs into the "literati youth" group. There’s nothing inherently wrong with posing, as the older generation also enjoyed it. The problem was, most newcomers lacked substance and merely pretended, often blindly. A major reason for this shift was that before 2000, "literati youth" genuinely possessed a certain cultural edge. After 2000, however, higher education became widespread, and college graduates were everywhere. Consequently, when an uncultured, pretentious person started spouting off, bystanders would get annoyed, thinking, Who the hell hasn’t been to university? Who hasn’t received a higher education? Who are you to try and one-up me?

These individuals lacked true literary cultivation, having only skimmed a few catchy phrases from pseudo-literary "spiritual chicken soup," yet they dared to play the part. Later, it became even more ridiculous. In the new media era, they collectively morphed: on their Weibo and in their friend circles, they projected an image of "peaceful years" and "graceful subtleties," yet elsewhere, their conversations were often crude, revolving around genitalia. They hardly read any books—they just scrolled through Little Red Book.

Why the decline? Because the cost of posing had plummeted. One no longer needed to laboriously chew through great novels or poetry; understanding them, or even reading them, became irrelevant. Internet celebrities, with their self-serving advertorials, would condense catchy quotes and hand them over, essentially saying, Take these. You don’t need to read the whole work; these few lines are enough to show off.

Speaking of which, those naïve "literati youth" who firmly believed Nepal had the world’s highest happiness index were, in fact, part of the same crowd as those dimwits who hitchhiked to Tibet and then proclaimed their souls had been purified and elevated. Some of them overlapped, belonging to the same group.

Yes, just some of them—the type who would dress up like gypsy women and hitchhike along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway instead of flying. They’d hitch rides during the daytime, and at night, well, the fireworks were nonstop. They paid for their car rides, food, and accommodation with physical offerings, eventually arriving at the gates of Potala Palace. (If you’re interested, look up some articles from a few years ago that describe this; I won’t go into detail here.)

Then, gazing at the clear sky, breathing the oxygen-depleted air, they would cry out: "My soul has been purified!"

Next would come all the affected prose on Weibo and in their friend circles, accompanied by photos of their dirt-streaked faces, flushed from the high altitude.

All this pretense of having transcended the worldly and attained limitless spiritual elevation and purification...