Apple's Reflection
作为Gen Z，虽然我在中国出生并成长了十七年，传统文化在我儿时的记忆里一直都是模糊的、无足轻重的存在。可能是因为觉得文化的物质传承与我们的时代无关，在电子设备逐渐盛行的时代，我们只需要思考今天可以玩多长时间的平板、社交媒体今天又流行什么游戏。日复一日沉浸在电子屏幕里的我，第一次接触到传统文化，只觉得那是属于、流行于老一辈子的产物。所以文化存在的意义是什么？是历史的遗孀，还是被现代科技社会逐步遗弃、忽视的old fashion。从初中开始的历史课上，老师告诉我们不要忘记历史，要记住现在脚踏的土地和平静湛蓝的天空，是怎么来的。这不仅仅跟战争与和平有关，也是古人重蹈覆辙研究出适应气候、驯服地形、为了谋生四处奔波而产出的工具。传统文化作为历史的重要媒介，何不是这样的道理呢？它从来不是死板的教条，而是先民们在这片土地上活过、奋斗过、思考过所留下的温度与痕迹。中国清代学者龚自珍说 “欲要亡其国，必先亡其史；欲灭其族，必先灭其文化。” 一个国家或民族的灭亡，往往是从其历史被抹杀、文化被遗忘开始的。如果我们被教导不应该忘记历史，那么我们也不应该忘记文化。
As a Gen Z who was born and raised in China for seventeen years, traditional culture has always been a vague and insignificant presence in my childhood memories. Perhaps it was because I never saw how the material preservation of culture related to the world we lived in. In an age increasingly dominated by electronic devices, all we seemed to care about was how long we could spend on our tablets today, or what game was trending on social media. Having spent day after day immersed in screens, my first encounters with traditional culture left me with the impression that it was something belonging to the older generations, something that had long been in fashion but no longer had a place in our time.
So, what is the purpose of culture? Is it the widow of history, or merely something old-fashioned, gradually abandoned and overlooked by a society consumed by modern technology?
In my history classes since middle school, my teachers have reminded us not to forget history. We must remember how the land we stand on today, and the peaceful blue skies above us, came to be. This is not merely a story of war and peace, but also of the tools our ancestors developed through generations of trial and error: learning to adapt to the climate, navigate the terrain, and travel far and wide in search of a livelihood. Is traditional culture, as an important vessel of history, not much the same?
Culture has never been a set of rigid doctrines. Rather, it carries the warmth and traces of those who came before us—of how they lived, struggled, and thought on this very land. As Gong Zizhen, a scholar of the Qing dynasty, once wrote, “To destroy a nation, one must first destroy its history; to extinguish a people, one must first erase its culture.” The downfall of a nation or a people often begins with the erasure of its history and the gradual forgetting of its culture. If we are taught never to forget history, then surely, we should not forget culture, either.