Late October in Boston turns cold quickly. After a week of drizzling rain, the blue sky and white clouds felt especially precious.
As soon as Friday’s class ended, Wang and I decided to have a good meal — a quiet, unspoken ritual we’d built week after week.
“One meal a day, and make it count,” Wang said with a grin, wiping his hands. That was his food philosophy.
Before long, two bowls of noodles and a few side dishes became the centerpiece of our dinner. I rubbed my bamboo chopsticks together, carefully mixed the noodles, and began to eat heartily.
Just as I was savoring the aroma of garlic and noodles, Wang suddenly asked, “You don’t seem to post about your girlfriend much — but I’ve seen you taking photos and sharing with her.”
I paused, swallowed the garlic. “Yeah, I’ve never posted,” I said. The garlic was spicy.
After a moment, I added, “I feel like that’s all about appearances. Love is about how you feel. We don’t really care for those formalities. I share photos with her because I want her to feel part of my life.”
Wang nodded. “What do you think about marriage? And that idea of being a ‘good match’?”
There was a touch of academic curiosity in his gossip. “I actually read a bit about that recently,” I said. “Marriage is the basic unit of society — it keeps the social structure stable. As for being ‘well matched,’ Foucault once said that every person is shaped by society. Maybe people from similar family backgrounds just find it easier to connect — shared upbringing, education, or worldview makes mutual understanding simpler. But social shaping isn’t just about wealth. After all, there are those who, as the saying goes, ‘cannot be seduced by riches, swayed by poverty, or bent by power.’ They keep their dignity and grace in their own way.”
After saying that, I fell silent for a moment and sped up eating my noodles.
Wang sighed. “Feels like people today are so materialistic.” He picked up his steaming roujiamo(Chinese burger).
I nodded. “Yeah. Marx wrote Das Kapital to explain how capital dissolves the genuine bonds between people, leaving only relations of exchange. Maybe that’s the side effect of modern civilization.”
Then I added, “But Marx never gave a timeline for when communism would arrive — he left that hope to later generations.”
“True. The world’s changed,” I said. We fell silent.
Outside, the sunlight gleamed. The wind swept in a hint of chill, and I shivered.
I looked down at the bowl of noodles. Some think it’s overpriced, some find it delicious, and some taste a bit of home in it.
So what is love, really?
Perhaps that, too, is something for later generations to answer.
