Life, by Lu Yao, is a Chinese novel written – and situated – in the early 1980s. A lot has happened since in China (and globally), though much of the story revolves around timeless issues.
What does it mean to love someone of a different social status? How does one balance between responsibility and personal desire? Should one submit to their fate – here defined not as some ghostly force but as what society prescribed – or not?
Life, by Lu Yao, poses such questions. The problem is that not only does it actually attempt to answer them – there are no real answers to such questions – but that it does so in a narratively naive, uninspiring manner.
No other word must be more misunderstood, misused, and abused than “love”. To an extent it might be a matter of linguistic shortcomings, to another extent it might be an issue of manipulation – perhaps precisely exploiting the linguistic ambiguity of the word. But the fact remains that the word “love” is used too lightly, without any real thought behind its choice. Often it’s used in contexts that appear self-evident, such as “the love of a mother for her child is the greatest love of all”. But can love really be unconditional – and should it? Or would conditional love be in fact the only form of true love?
Few things can make one more miserable than being stuck in a bad marriage or in an unhappy relationship. Hours, days, weeks, months, years of emptiness, lack of empathy, lack of intimacy, animosity, hatred. Why on earth would anyone want to stay in such a situation? After all, our time in this world is finite. The scent of cardamom and cinnamon while decorating the Christmas tree, the feeling of waves gently lapping on your feet as you enter the sea, the full moons you admire in the hot August night – endless, don’t they seem? Hard to believe you have 10, 20, maybe 30 of those left before you die. Why would you waste them being with someone that doesn’t love you and, most probably, despises you? Maybe the Bard has the answer:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
Perhaps it’s all a matter of habit, of fearing the change.
