I’m not really afraid of heights, but I am a little afraid of objects that sway in heights, like suspension bridges. The first and only time I went skiing was just out of curiosity. I took the cable car to the intermediate trails, but I was so afraid of jumping off that the foreigner sitting next to me turned a circle with me in vain.
A few years ago, I went bungee jumping in Shidu with two friends. We had to take the cable car up first, and it was a bit shaky. I bought a Superman T-shirt just for that. When the staff saw Superman coming, they pushed me straight down.
The free fall seemed slower than expected, and the weightlessness is not as strong as on a roller coaster.
This summer, we went to Shidu again to see other people bungee jumping. There were so few people that it took a long time for anyone to go down. There was also no DJ like before.
I bought two boxes of bang snaps from a small store down the street, and the old store owner was thrilled.
Then we went to Sandu. When we got there, there was a suspension bridge and there was no other way to go. The bridge swayed too much and it was hard to reach the middle of the bridge, so I shouted to the man in front of me. “Don’t shake it.” He was not shaking, it was his child who was afraid to go and stopped there.
About fear, I always think of the claustrophobic Chen Jianbin’s monologue in Chicken Poets.
“Tight spaces, closed planes, swaying fuselages, I’ve never been afraid. What I was afraid of was something else. Not being taken seriously, being abandoned by the crowd, having no talent, being a loser. Who wouldn’t be afraid of that?”