LINK: they don’t know ’bout us (rojie’s version)
Currently listening to: they don’t know ’bout us – BTS
They don’t know about us
How your voice
Can calm the sea-ea-ea
They know
Write about a book, movie, or show that changed how you see the world.
Prompt created by yours truly.
Feel free to use any prompts for April 2026 that I post and/or tag me.
I’d love to read your responses.
*SPOILER ALERT*
These three (book, movie, and show) have somehow given me validation, that the world is not fair, and that people aren’t single narratives. The systems aren’t broken, they were built this way for a reason.
Oof. I felt that. A bit too hard at times…
Book: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors. This book made me really think about how I perceive my own reality, consciousness, identity, and understanding the boundary of the “real world” versus the world in my mind.
This book has two narratives running simultaneously. One is chaotic and the other is eerily still. In the first narrative, a “Calcutec” works as a human data encrypter in Tokyo’s underground, getting pulled into a wild conspiracy involving mysterious organizations and scientist till something strange happens inside his mind.
In the second narrative, a man enters a dreamlike town at the end of the world. The place is sealed off from everything outside of it. The people in the community don’t have shadows, memories, or sense of who they are. His job is to read the dreams embedded inside unicorn skulls at the town’s library.
I know I’m probably doing an injustice with this synopsis but you just have to read the book to fully grasp what I’m trying to convey.
Movie: Xiu Xiu The Sent Down Girl
During China’s Cultural Revolution, a young teenage girl named Xiu Xiu is forcibly sent to the remote area in Tibet for “re-education through manual labor”, which was common during that era. This idea was a part of Mao’s, Down to the Countryside Movement, to strip away the boujie tendencies and reconnect the younger generation with the working class.
She was supposed to learn horseback riding skills, serve her country, and return to the city in six months, but those months stretched into years, and no one comes for her. Lao Jin, a Tibetan herdsman assigned to train her, waits alongside her. He has made peace with the world’s indifference, but Xiu Xiu has not. She believes someone is coming and that the system will correct itself. But nobody comes…
She is left stranded and desperate—she begins to trade her body to government officials, soldiers, and even strangers in exchange for promises of papers that will let her go home, but those promises are never kept.
The movie was based on a short story of a former sent-down girl, Yan Geling. The film was shot guerilla-style in China without government approval because the director, Joan Chen, knew that it wouldn’t ever pass censors. It was subsequently banned in China.
I made one of my exes, Beau Mec, watch it with me since we both love foreign films. I could tell that he was bothered by this film because I was never allowed to pick another movie afterward. It’s an extremely difficult movie to watch but I felt that it was masterfully made.
Show: When They See Us on (Netflix)
This is based on a true story of the Central Park Five—five Black and Latino teens from Harlem who were wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1989 rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. There are four episodes that follows each of their stories from the night they were arrested through coerced confessions, racially charged trial, years of imprisonment, and the long journey towards being exonerated. It depicts how the system failed these boys at every turn, from the interrogation rooms where they were manipulated without their parents or lawyers being present, the media convicting them in the court of public opinion before any verdict was made. It was one of the most poignant and gut-wrenching shows I’ve watched since it dropped on Netflix on 2019.
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