It is fairly cold on New Year’s Day. People exchange greetings and wish one another happiness, good health, good luck and success. Everything in the streets looks green through my green-coloured glasses. Many parents, dressed in warm clothes, are riding bicycles or motorcycles with their cute children behind their backs. How nice it is to see the little ones wearing transparent silk scarves!

Happy New Year!

But what is the New Year?

I overheard two men talking below my berth on a train yesterday. "The new year is another countdown. Can people find any joy in a year of bad omens while paying their last penny?". I really wanted to get down from my berth to tell them: "Hey, you are both pessimistic. As you know, life is limited, isn’t it? Why are you still reluctant to give it up and lift yourself out of the doldrums?". No doubt, they are like children who often feel sad on Thursday when they know there are only two days left before they will have to return to the town, concluding a week-long holiday in the countryside.

This morning I prefer walking and looking through my green-coloured glasses and my heart is filled with joy to realise that I have lived long on this earth. But what have I experienced in those long years? Not much. I have been tied down to big cities, either working at the office or going out with good friends most of the time. Sometimes I also feel sad but not for long. "What do you want?" you may ask me. "Do you want misfortune or starvation?" And then, to be sure, you’ll curse me "You bloody petit bourgeois!

No one wants any suffering. But knowing nothing about suffering until death is much like a tourist coming back from a mountain area, who admits of no involvement in any adventurous activities like climbing the mountains or crossing the rapids. No thrills or shivers of horror at all! Just feeling a little joy, then smiling and closing the eyes.

Frankly speaking, I never want to live such a quiet, flat life. I was born to live once and so I always like to test my life through different experiences and feelings. But I also don’t like to end my life in poverty and sick fear. I just like to be the main character in a cheap, thrilling film who will finally find a way to escape with his life. I wish to go to the other side (if there is one) as a talkative spirit with a good stock of stories to tell.

If I am allowed, I shall divide the world into two parts, one half for those who expect the arrival of the New Year (like growing children and youths waiting to get driving licenses) and the other half with no New Year coming for those who worry about running short of time in their lives (as in the case of the two men on the train).

In the second part of the world, if viewed from above, people seem to be moving non-stop on a long carpet, without being interrupted by month and year as each day is followed by night every 24 hours. Both sides of the central line of the carpet have many branching roads that spread out like roots. In daylight, people take their chosen roads to go to work or eat. When night falls, they find some places to enjoy themselves and then go to bed. Such activities are like woven lines. (Be careful: the carpet of life you are making will look quite boring if you continue working for the same office, living in the same place and eating at the same restaurant.) Sometimes, certain incidents occur on the carpet like disease, loss of money, strange footprints on the carpet… all of which create special patterns, only by accident of course. Without getting deeply involved in the weaving process, you’ll never succeed in designing what you like, even if the patterns may look out of place with dark colours or glorious with bright colours whatsoever…At the end of one’s life, his or her human carpet will be rolled up. Only nice carpets, rich in colour, will be rolled out to be viewed again at some stage. Ugly carpets will be left intact forever while other carpets will be put aside for no reason to fade into oblivion.

"No one wants to bathe twice in the same river," but in this 700-word story I have twice repeated my wish for a more "exciting" life than today. Keeping myself bobbing up and down on the waves of life like this is so boring.

However, no one really wants to wish for "a new year of strange and thrilling events". Pre-historic people are believed to have taken shelter in caves to avoid being hit by thunderbolts. Now, modern people often go out to watch the sky and even brave the rain. Is it because they like to get hurt? Well, as you see, the revolution has changed two-thirds of my life but now it turns out to be just a burnt-out case.

Too much thinking, hesitance and shyness has made the carpet of my life look like a semi-finished product with patterns still in off-white colours. It’s really worth nothing more than being cut to pieces and put under the teapot.

Next year, as the same things will happen, you’ll find me again in the newspapers. Sure, I will complain again, like many other people, about a year passing unremarkably, a year without impressive colours…and then I will simply shift the heavy burden of hope on to the coming New Year.

Translated by Nguyen Duc Phu