The Ones Who Couldn't Sit Down (Hito)

LOL newsletter membership 53

Welcome to the 53rd issue of the membership newsletter. You can also join the membership plan to receive weekly long-form articles. Recent content includes:

From Neurons to Neural Networks: How Psychologists Ignited the AI Revolution

How to Use Your Imagination to Achieve Anything

When a Man Starts Going Bald

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For many students, June means the Gaokao, the national college entrance exam. All these years later, I no longer have the confidence to tackle the science and math sections; the only part I can still manage is the essay. During the exam, the essay is bound by all sorts of restrictions: word count, genre, theme, title, and so on. It doesn't encourage imagination, nor does it truly train logical thinking. After the Gaokao, we all embarked on different paths, and our writing has long since moved beyond the confines of those exam essays. So, I thought I would write a little Gaokao essay of my own, taking only the title and theme from a past prompt and writing wherever my thoughts lead me. This is the first piece.

2025 National Paper 1

Read the materials below and write as required. (60 points)

He wanted to sing a passage for the children, but his heart was churning, and he couldn't open his mouth.

—Lao She, The Drum Singers (from National Paper 1, Reading Section II)

If I were a bird,

I too should sing with a hoarse throat

—Ai Qing, "I Love This Land"

I will embrace you one by one with bloody hands,

For a nation has risen

—Mu Dan, "Praise"

What associations and thoughts do the materials above inspire in you? Please write an essay.

Requirements: Choose a clear angle, establish your theme, define your genre, and create your own title. Do not use templates or plagiarise. Do not reveal personal information. No less than 800 characters.

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The Ones Who Couldn't Sit Down (Hito)

The beginning of things is always insignificant, like a grain of sand blown into the eye, at first just a slight itch, then the swelling and tears begin, until finally, you realise that perhaps the entire world is just one colossal sandstorm. Hana, a multimedia artist whose job it was to fix the formless, floating concepts and emotions of the air into light, shadow, and sound, thought that perhaps she was just too tired lately, or perhaps it was her old back injury protesting in silence, but in any case, when she sat down, a burning pain emanated from her buttocks, not a sharp pain with a definite location, but a diffuse sensation, as if a small piece of charcoal were slowly smoldering beneath her skin. She changed her position, moving from the sofa to a dining chair, from a hard wooden stool to an ergonomic office chair, but the hot, irrefutable pain followed her like a shadow, as if the problem were not with the chairs, but with her body's refusal of any form of "sitting."

A few days later, her husband, Hito, a cybersecurity policeman accustomed to hunting phantoms in the virtual world, felt the same torment. He rubbed his backside, his face wearing the same bewildered expression a programmer has upon discovering an inexplicable bug in his code. He said, My love, I think our chairs may need to see a priest, they seem to harbour some kind of religious animosity toward me. Hana didn't laugh, she just looked at Hito, a man who normally wielded logic and reason as his weapons, now using almost metaphysical language to describe his physical sensations, and she knew something was wrong.

They decided to see a doctor, a logical and socially normative decision. The hospital, at first glance, seemed no different than usual; the smell of disinfectant was just as overpowering, and people's faces still wore that standardised patient expression, a mixture of anxiety and hope. But strangely, everyone was standing. In the waiting room, by the nurses' station, even in front of the long benches meant for patients and their families to rest, people stood as straight as silent trees, as if the verb "to sit" had been deleted from the human lexicon. A woman also in line, seeing the grimace on Hana's face as she tried to bend her knees, kindly whispered to them, Don't bother, it's no use, all the chairs and sofas in the world have a fever now, they're sick, a haughty, incurable illness that only affects human buttocks.