For people controlled in the workplace, where they maybe don’t have an
outstanding achievement or an honorable reputation, they might join a club in their spare
time based on their hobbies, in which they could both seek for freedom and pursue their
personal interest. In clubs, people don’t care who they are and what their job is; instead,
they just admire the talent. My father is obsessed with playing chess and attends a chess
club. He might forget to go home and have dinner, but he will never forget his chess club
every day at 5 o’clock. Believe it or not, in this small and inconspicuous chess club, it
accommodates not only the security guards and cleaning personnel at Haidian Hospital
but CEOs and mathematic professors at Peking Universities as well. To some extent,
clubs gather people with varied social status and from distinct social classes together and
enable members to fraternize with each other.
However, even though in clubs, people do not have complete freedom either.
Sometimes they are controlled by the intensive common wishes and goals in which some
of them finally get lost. Maybe the original purpose and reasons for people to participate
in a club come from the shared personal interest and goal pursuit. Overwhelmed by the
common goals, some club members might find themselves having no relaxation and
freedom but busy catering other’s expectations, because of which hobbies might turn
into burdens. I like playing Zheng in my spare time and joined a national music club,
where students who play Chinese instruments gather together. To my disappointment, I
was one of the worst Zheng players and the slowest learner for the new song in my club.
Criticized and blamed, I had to spend all my free time on practice over and over again,
through which I did not have joy but pain. Sometimes, people struggle too much with
themselves to figure out what happens and what they do. In Fight Club, people get tired
of the unappealing and oppressive daily work. As a result, they take part in Fight Club,
where they could vent suppression, indignation, and other negative emotions bottled up
in their hearts through fighting and try to figure out the meaning of their lives by contin-
uously “hitting the bottom” (Palahniuk 109). Gradually, they go to an extreme and cause
numerous anti-society actions at the expense of others’ lives. Even the narrator doesn’t
realize what they are actually doing and try to resist until the death of Bob, his best
friend whom he met at one of the support groups. In clubs, while having a degree of
freedom, people are still controlled by external factors, even though they might not
realize it yet.