2024 viewing roundup: a few ways of living with fate

Xiangzi went to his death convinced that he simply had not tried hard enough. Of course, Xiangzi kept his eyes fixed on the outside world. He thought he saw society clearly, yet missed one thing: when you only look outward, you can take in every corner of the world outside you, but you still cannot see yourself. And if you cannot see yourself, you cannot begin to talk about yourself in relation to your time. As protagonists, we are always looking outward. Only as readers can we watch “the world and me,” and then turn back to examine ourselves. That is why Lu Zhishen could say, “Only today do I finally know who I am.” I think that is exactly the point.

Good television often has this kind of turn, like a beautiful painting: bright surface color alone can move the viewer, but if the hidden structure and ideas underneath move you further, then it becomes art.

For me, the 2023 conversation around fate falls into two camps: the chroniclers and the absurdists.

Blossoms Shanghai and The Long Season

Blossoms Shanghai and The Long Season belong to the chronicler camp. People always seem at a loss when history starts moving under their feet. The Long Season asks why Wang Xiang, a model worker, could still be laid off; why his son became a murderer; why nobody around him ever quite figured out how to live. One snowfall lasts twenty years. He never gets over that ridge, and keeps trying to dig old ghosts out of the world. Shen Mo asks Wang Yang, “Do you believe in fate?” Wang Xiang and Biaozi can no longer make sense of life either, so they too begin to call it “fate.”

In Blossoms Shanghai, Wong Kar-wai stages a whole chain of missed connections¹. A Bao and four women—Xuezhi, Lingzi, Miss Wang, and Li Li—keep missing one another. Wealth, place, status, and experience never quite line up, so feelings have to twist and double back. The show says, “From Zhenyuan Garden on, every ending had already been decided,” and “Everything is inevitable fate.”

The novel ends with a line like this: walking through the whirlpool of fate, people eventually drift apart, until only you are left.

Only the River Flows and Journey to the West

Only the River Flows and Journey to the West belong to the absurdist camp. When too many low-probability events pile up together, they leave people bewildered.

In Only the River Flows, Ma Zhe refuses to accept that a madman could be the killer, and drifts farther and farther from the truth. The film quotes Camus: “Human beings cannot understand fate, so I disguised myself as fate. I put on God’s stupid and incomprehensible face.”

In Journey to the West, Tang Zhijun believes fate is guiding him toward extraterrestrials. Every coincidence is inevitable.

When we stay only inside the protagonist’s point of view, we always look outward, free to mock Kong Yiji. But as readers, we can feel that each of them is taking a different stance toward fate.

The Long Season is reconciliation

One snowfall lasts twenty years. That is long enough, just as a truth can wait twenty years before finally coming to light.

Wang Xiang answers to that finger snap: one case keeps him from getting over it for twenty years. At first, he believes that as long as he works hard and earns merit, he can avoid being laid off. Then the reversal arrives, at the workers’ assembly, when the truth comes out: the factory owner can fire whoever he wants and keep whoever he wants. It was the plant director who organized the stripping of assets. Wang Xiang’s lifelong pride in Northeast industry finally shatters. Beneath the murder mystery, what is really rotting is the Northeast itself.

An individual cannot withstand the upheavals of an era. At best, he can do what One Sentence Is Worth Ten Thousand Sentences suggests: hold on to the answer he needs and keep looking ahead. Fate cannot be resisted. People eventually have to learn to move forward. So the train begins to sound again, rolling slowly along the tracks through the cornfields.

Blossoms Shanghai is also reconciliation

A Bao can walk in and become Bao Zong, then walk out willing to be A Bao again, calm and unhurried², still holding on to The Count of Monte Cristo’s motto:

In the face of fate, there are only two words: wait and hope.

Only the River Flows is just plain madness

The absurdist camp only raises the predicament; it never answers it. People cannot fight the era. That is where it stops.

Once you understand that, you understand Cthulhu: there is no solution, and because people still want one, they go mad.

Absurd events naturally have no answer, because we cannot understand them. Reality simply keeps flowing without pity—Only The River Flows…

Journey to the West is waking up

Like the party in Journey to the West, the main group maps onto Tang, Sun, Sha, and Zhu as they head west. Tang Zhijun wants to find his own true scripture—an alien.

On the surface, they are looking for extraterrestrials. In truth, they are looking for an answer. An unhappy marriage, a bruising working life, the meaning of human existence—if human beings cannot solve these things, then could aliens? It looks like an obsession with science fiction, but underneath it is still a life cast adrift. The ending wants to turn back inward: searching for aliens is an outward move, and maybe it is unnecessary. Human beings are already a miracle, so at last one lets go. But the film does not unfold that process very smoothly.

Living with fate

When human smallness runs into an era the people inside it cannot understand, we use “fate” as a convenient blur. Those who come later, and those watching from outside, usually see more clearly. But when it lands on your own head, you still get dizzy. That is the scale of fate. Most people question fate, and the answers are always some version of this: “There is only relative fairness, never absolute fairness”; “Heroism is seeing the world clearly and still loving it”; “The world has kissed me with pain, and I answer with song.”

At that point, truth is not the important thing. What matters is holding on to a philosophy of survival. Right or wrong, anything that helps us keep the will to go on living has some value. But when someone really wants to understand the relationship between a person and the tide of history, these answers are not enough³.

Either you fall into madness, or you learn to compromise—accept everything, live for tomorrow, keep looking ahead.

That is survival philosophy. Some things have already been proven impossible, and still your hands itch to go after them. That is fate and human beings. Giving up on thinking is one answer. Thinking until you collapse is another. Thinking until you compromise is another. Those, I suppose, are a few ways of getting along with fate.