Zhang 3 Feng’s World | Professor Lao Dongyan Returns to China: The Real Distance is at Your Feet

When Professor Lao started public speaking a few years ago, she said: Go to the distance.

I can understand that feeling. The constraints and boredom of reality make people feel a kind of confinement.

Before I went to Columbia University last year, I saw that Professor Lao had gone to Canada. Some people on the internet said that she had “run away”, and she replied once: it was just a visiting scholar.

But many people have no memory, or want to deliberately create some topics, so they spread the rumor that “Professor Lao has run away”. Some people are just spreading rumors, some people are “logical reasoning”, and some people think that since she dares to speak out, she will definitely not come back.

I think this atmosphere itself is strange and also sad.

But this atmosphere is also real. At my first meal in New York, my good friend told me: If you want to stay, you should prepare early.

I was completely unprepared, I only brought a suitcase and a thousand dollars, because I had no idea.

And I think it’s a bit shameful to stay there using the opportunity of a visiting scholar. A friend advised me: If you really want to stay, it doesn’t matter, the person who invited you to be a visiting scholar will understand.

I thought of Professor Li, who is already eighty years old, and he has helped many Chinese people “stay”, his eyes are always full of compassion, he understands everything and forgives everything.

But I want to be a clear and transparent person. At the beginning, I always responded “I’ll think about it”, and later I completely confessed: “I want to go back.”

Before I came back, I ate Lanzhou noodles with Professor Li. He said: Many people are very pessimistic, you are the only optimistic person I have ever met.

——Maybe I am the truly pessimistic one.

I understand that it is not difficult for Professor Lao to stay in Canada, and I completely understand if she really stays, and I should bless her. But when she said “I have returned to China”, I was also happy for her from the bottom of my heart.

I want to tell her: The real distance may be at your feet.

This is my recent feeling. After returning, I carefully manage my small bookstore and found that it is an incredibly rich world. It is right in front of me, but it has so many moving, absurd, and even dangerous things.

Yesterday, Lin Yao came to the bookstore. In the hot evening, sixty or seventy people came to the dam outside the bookstore and listened quietly to Lin Yao telling “stories from afar”.

I said that “the real distance” is at your feet, not what Xiang Biao said about “nearby”, but to “create” on the real land.

So when I learned that she did not “escape”, my admiration for her increased, and everything she said became more credible.

If “freedom” is good, creating freedom is better than enjoying freedom. For a law professor, what is more important than helping others achieve justice.

To achieve it, and to achieve it with your own hands.