"...to dance with you till we're both dead."

zhou zishu's unheard biographic monologue

Retracing his steps, you could call him many things. You could call him an idealist. You could call him a realist. You could say that they were futile, his calls to shine a light in the faces of the macabre masses' tumultuous fates, or you could say that he was our saviour, our honourable burning martyr standing alone under this precariously crumbling behemoth we call a cliff, a fate he brought on himself. What a god, so staunchly righteous. He laughs bitterly. You could say he fought his whole life not knowing who he was fighting and what he was fighting for. You could say that he teetered in and out of stories and emotions, to see in person every name, every number on those unfurled bamboo-bound reports his master left on the table untouched. He is more agitated now. You could say that when he, that when he rebelled in a transcendent moment of clarity, that when he stepped under that sun for the first time, that he was only bitter for the fate of his younger brother, in name and in actuality. And that might be true. He, himself, still does not know. His voice strains.

Time will, no doubt, keep altering its verdict even decades later, and by then he'll be relegated into a minor name lost in the waves of years past. His gaze suddenly turns earnest. But there is a fact we cannot deny, that there once existed someone named Zhou Zishu, who tried his best, however mislead, to make us better off. It is a bit idealistic to say that those long hours spent toiling by the dirt and the mud, rifting through an endless downpour of documents for the Emperor, belittled by those men who call him stupid and childish, seeing his knifepoint gleam in the brutal winter wind and finally, breaking free, were all for something. His eyes soften again, almost engaging in self-mockery but with a long sigh, deciding against it. At the close of his life, though, he did believe it, even if only for a brief second; but we'll leave him with his Maker.