I don’t play the game “Mingchao” very often, but my kid is obsessed with it, holding his phone and muttering “Resonator” all day long. I didn’t care at first, but one time, he spread a character picture on the dining table, drinking soy milk and reading: “This woman is called Zanni, she is in finance, an office worker.”
I took a look and didn’t look away.
This character named Zanni is not the kind of enchanting woman who loves to wear golden armor and long hair in the game, nor is she as delicate and fragrant as someone’s eldest daughter. She wears a decent suit, her hair is tied up meticulously, and her expression is stern, like a big accountant who manages accounts, and also like Sister Ma from the town finance office I knew before—cold on the outside but warm on the inside, knows how to work, can keep calm, and can hold back anger.
The game says she has the fire attribute. I laughed when I heard it: “Angry, it’s what he deserves.” Here, anger doesn’t just mean a bad temper, it means that a person has been holding it in for too long, and has anger that can’t come out, and it becomes a disease when it is pent up in the heart. And this Zanni is the kind of woman who walks in the corridor of the unit without showing her face, but her heart is burning with a ball of fire.
Her skill is called “silent negotiation”. You taste it, you taste it carefully. That is not the silence of ordinary people who can’t speak, that is the silence of learning not to speak. Like my third aunt who was transferred to the warehouse as a counter in the county tobacco factory that year. She originally hoped to get a stable job, but she had to record hundreds of in and out data a day, and was often suppressed by the little leader with a look. In the end, she didn’t say a word, but just piled up the account books neatly in the drawer. Until something happened later, those account books were flipped through and it was clear, and even the court said that she “had professional ethics”.
I asked my son about Zanni’s “flaming form”: “What does this mean?” He said that she exploded at the critical moment and her attack power became stronger. I nodded. Isn’t this the old saying “even rabbits bite when they are anxious”? You think she is soft, you think she is patient, but if you really push her to the limit, her fire will burn you to ashes.
This kind of woman is a real woman. She doesn’t rely on coquetry to gain sympathy, nor does she engage in tender dramas to seek protection. She accepts her fate, but she refuses to obey it. Accepting it means knowing that you have to hold the pot of life, no matter how hot or heavy it is; not accepting it means that once you try to take the pot from her, she will hit you back.
In Jia Pingwa’s novels, there are such calm, calm but stubborn women. Who doesn’t say that the sister-in-law in “Carrying a Lamp” lives a cowardly life with a dead man and children? But when she turned around at the last moment, she walked away with a strong spirit. Country people talk about roots, bones, and endurance. City dwellers like Zanni hide their “bones” behind their professional licenses in another way among the tall buildings.
Her other skill, “Tomorrow’s Beacon”, makes me feel sour when I hear it. In the game, this is a skill to improve the defense of teammates, but I think it is more like the “I’ll take it all” spirit in her. How many women are like this? They get up early to cook, go to work during the day, and take care of the family at night. They don’t rely on anyone, and no one asks them to rely on anyone. They are the “defense towers” of the family. Others are fighting, and she can only keep the family from collapsing.
She said something, and my son amplified it for me when he was playing games: “The most urgent thing? Get off work.” Don’t underestimate this sentence, it is a rebellion that jumps out of the soul. In this world of efficiency and performance, “getting off work” is not relaxation, but a declaration of “I want to return to my own world.” Who can understand the weight of this sentence? Only those who pretend to smile in the office and have to pretend to be calm when they go home can understand the pain of “getting off work”.
I used to work in the logistics department of an office and have seen too many female employees. The young ones are ambitious, and the older ones are more honest. There was a little Li, who was less than 30 years old. When she entered the unit, she was pressed to the reception position and smiled every day. Once a county leader scolded her, saying that she was “not enthusiastic”. She went back to the office without saying a word, slammed the cup on the table, and her eyes were red. That night, she worked overtime to make the weekly report for the whole group and said, “I don’t rely on my mouth, I rely on my hands.”
When I look at Zanni, I think of her. Silent, neat, logical, and looks like a rigid office procedure, but she has a lot of stubbornness in her bones, and she has the toughness of gritting her teeth and not crying thousands of times.
When Jia Pingwa writes about people, he always likes to write about those who live on the edge but refuse to admit defeat. He writes about a beggar in the village who can turn the world upside down, and a woman in the city who can support the family. Those who live below the ground, who can’t lift their heads but are unwilling to bend down even if they die, are the most real “resonators”.
You say that the game is fictional, I say it is more real than reality.
Because it gives women like Zanni a chance to fight back.
In reality, they just purse their lips and swallow their anger.