River of the human world

Author: Ni Zhanhe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: In this story, Simon is heart-wrenching, Locke is pitiable, and even Zili, who has little screen time, has a distinct personality. At the end of the film, Zili mentions his two older brothers to his youngest brother, saying, "Locke yearns for the pastoral hometown he once had, and we can never return to it. He treats Simon like a saint, yet it only destroyed him." Zili is perhaps the smartest among these children. Simon and Locke, despite their different fates, live in confusion, unlike Zili, who follows his older brothers, watching them with a detached gaze, and gradually, he sees everything clearly. As I watched this movie, watching it, I felt a bit like Zili. However, Zili is still too worldly-wise in his intelligence. When Locke won his first match, he unexpectedly sat on the steps outside the arena and cried, and Zili followed him, utterly bewildered. Locke explained while crying, "I've been accumulating so much hatred that I can't vent it anywhere, so I resort to hitting the punching bag—how ugly! How ugly!" Upon hearing this, I burst into tears along with him. I too had been accumulating many things in my heart, because I wanted to uphold certain principles, so I had to endure as much as possible and make allowances; in truth, perhaps it was just because this world is so ugly, and I didn’t want to get entangled in its ugliness, so I could only turn away, like Locke hitting the punching bag, and find something to do with all my might. Like Locke hitting the punching bag, I studied and wrote with all my might. But suppose one day, I finally win like Locke—then the only thing I can do would probably be to sit on the steps outside the arena and cry bitterly: How ugly! How ugly! To escape the ugliness of this world, I can only seek a so-called career to "close my eyes in broad daylight." When Locke finally becomes a champion, Simon kills the woman he abandoned and destroys himself—this is the other side of the "broad daylight" victory! This is the fate reflected in the tears of a boxer, a fate that cannot be escaped!
As a child, I was a kid who rarely cried, and people described me as someone who "eats pain." That was truly vivid—pain was forced down, of course, leaving no room for tears. The trait of "eating pain" might not change in this lifetime. But as a child, there wasn’t much pain to eat; now, however, I slowly began to eat pain, ate so much pain, that holding back tears became no longer easy. When burden, endurance, and tolerance became my nature, the only thing I couldn’t bear was crying for myself in front of others. So, like Locke hitting the punching bag, I found books—I cried bitterly for the pain of others in them. This might be sympathy, or perhaps self-pity, or maybe, self-pity is the very essence of sympathy. However, Aristotle, when discussing tragedy, said that when we experience the suffering of others, sympathy can lift us beyond our own selfishness—this is the difference between critics and boxers. A boxer must knock others down, while a critic cries for those who have fallen. Yet who can say that such crying isn’t another form of "knocking down," if the so-called "crying" is merely a battle of knowledge and intellect, an ugly attempt to escape ugliness?