无污染、无公害
NO POLLUTION, NO PUBLIC HARM
WU WURAN, WU GONGHAI
by Priest
"On what do you build your life?"
❝ 问一生以何来立足，是你我心间火身中骨。❞
❝The moon of Fuliang was covered by clouds, the snow on the cold river flowed east with the water, the sparrow in front of the fall hid in its nest of mud, the wind piercing through the forest scattered and dissipated.
This lively and exciting midwinter where the beating of the war drums reached the sky came to an end. Spring had barely started when the weather seemed unable to wait any longer to turn warm.❞
❝When I was young, whenever I wrote essays, my last line was frequently 'I am determined to become someone useful to society.' On average, I made this resolve twenty to thirty times per school term. I was very thoughtless.
Only when I grew up did I realize that to become someone who brought no harm to society was already the biggest accomplishment I would have in my life.❞
Main Characters
Gan Qing, Yu Lanchuan
Genre
Modern Wuxia | BG
116 Chapters + Extras
Year of Serialization: 2018
Translation Status: Complete
DETAILED CHARACTER LIST & GLOSSARY
Due to working through the night and putting in overtime until his liver was going bust, the leader of the Martial Arts Alliance was in a bad mood. He refused to organise the yearly Martial Arts General Assembly.
The descendant of the previous Sect Leader of the Beggars' Sect was someone addicted to swiping the phone and online shopping; Tang Qian Yan who left no marks when stepping on snow produced a wretched shut-in with severe social anxiety disorder…
Like the water in the rivers flowing away, the state of the world became worse day by day. Only the followers of the demonic cults preserved their original aspirations. As ever, they shouted their slogans every day and worked hard to sell health supplements made by black market suppliers, carefully and seriously disturbing the public peace.
And, among the jianghu people mentioned above, whether they belonged to the righteous or the evil, not a single one of them could fight.
Kindness repaid with kindness, evil repaid with evil? "White Horse Neighs in the Western Wind"? Such things did not exist.
Everyone still had to pay their credit card bills and house loans.
This is going to sound weird & fake deep, but at the end of the day, shuangwu was really asking one daunting question: "You can leave the neighborhood, but does the neighborhood ever leave you?"
And perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer it leaves in your care at its conclusion is equal amounts of hopeful and devastating.
the problem i find myself running into while reading modern/slice of life stuff is either me thinking that there's no plot or that it's become too real to be considered a form of escapism anymore. shuangwu somehow got the balance right. plus, its wuxia meta moments are peak hilarity.
shuangwu has a lot of things going for it that you can't help but be charmed by: it asks that you fall in love with a place because it yearns to love something back, so why not you? whatever dead thing that you carry around with yourself never quite remains dead in the way you would prefer for it to—it has slowburn romance starring two clowns (these heterosexuals DO have rights), generational stories that leave you gutted like a fish, and all the members of the supporting cast have complementary arcs that run parallel to our main characters'. it's about coming to terms with never being able to regain what you've lost, but building something amidst the wreckage brick by boring brick all the same. the snort-out-loud humor is clickbait and a coping mechanism, for the most part.
if you've liked priest's themes in her writing in the past then i can more or less assure you that you'll like shuangwu, as well. its endless《journey to the west》allusions, wuxia trope dissections under the microscope of a no longer feudal but rapidly changing capitalistic society, and its take on the materialistic grind and (unsurprisingly) chaotic side of the wulin, are definitely bound to enthrall. its events are modeled after mainland china's real time social issues around its serialization period in loads of places, and it unfailingly retains the ephemeral entanglements between humans struggling with their divided loyalties—loyalties that all of us have grown up loving wuxia for. only now you're being asked to see them in a different light, and quite often, you find yourself standing in the all too personal shadow that it casts.
to draw this (frankly sappy as hell) recommendation section to a close, the best summary of shuangwu can perhaps only be found in mary oliver's, "The Summer Day." no i will not elaborate.