To Create Something Beautiful…
For those who want to make beautiful things, it is beautiful even to suffer. In Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (2019), there is an implicit interest in beauty, though not in a superficial form. Instead, the beauty that captures the eyes of all our principal characters is that of life and its fragility. There is a preoccupation with the sanctity of life, with the complexities involved in rearing children in an autocratic state, and how one must fervently protect the precious things that exist around them, in all of its multifarious forms.
Our story follows two families over three decades. Wang Liyun (Yong Mei) and Liu Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) are good friends with Shen Yingming (Xu Cheng) and Li Haiyan (Ai Liya). Fate blesses them when Liyun and Haiyan birth sons on the same day, Xingxing and Haohao. However, fate works in mysterious ways, stealing Xingxing away from Liyun and Yaojun: he drowns in a reservoir as he plays with Haohao. The story tracks how this one traumatic event shapes the lives of all connected to it.
The film appears to ask the question: to create something beautiful, to nurture it, feed it, and bring it to life – is that not what makes life worth living? To foster a labour of love and protect it from harm; it provides meaning to an otherwise empty world, a ray of light in a dark vacuum. But when that beautiful, precious thing is taken away from you – what kind of corrosive impact does that have on your soul? As such, the characters in So Long, My Son process the grief and guilt that are involved in the dismantling of a life.
Our non-linear narrative transports us to years after the event, where we see Liyun and Yaojun fighting with their adopted child. Naming him Xingxing, they have raised the boy on the grave of their dead son. He renounces them, fights against them, and declares himself independent of their care. There is an agony in Yaojun’s heart that transmogrifies into seething rage; something he has nurtured and loved is spurning him, rejecting him like an unsuccessful organ transplant. Liyun and Yaojun have become foreign objects to their surrogate child.
Their mistake stems from attempting to recreate something beautiful from their past instead of recognising the unique identity of the child before them. However, doing so would have meant they could move on, something they simply find to be incapable. Blinded by the pain of their trauma, anything with the potential for a new start is infected with the memory of their loss. A human life was taken from them – but not for the first time.
China’s one child policy, which was introduced in 1979, provides perspective on the theme of beauty and life. When Liyun becomes pregnant with a second child, she is forced to have an abortion. She almost dies in the operation, haemorrhaging severely. Her bleeding from the inside out is emblematic of her indescribable loss – a living organism, one that was a part of her body, has been coldly detached, ruthlessly separated.
In this respect, Liyun and Yaojun are robbed both by tragic luck and a calculating government at different times in their lives. The natural impulse to foster life is curbed by agents of fate or an inhumane program. In a moment of economic downturn, people’s humanity is weighed by the price of fines, judged on the status of population reports. The beauty of a child is reduced down to a single statistic.
Liyun and Yaojun attempt to escape the agony of their loss in a multitude of ways. They move constantly, hoping to find a place where the memory will not follow them. They refuse to acknowledge their mortality or talk about the future, though they cannot help but think it; without a child in their life, they only wait to become old. After Yaojun impregnates a woman from his past life, he refuses her suggestion that he and Liyun should raise the child as their own – he is afraid he will ruin something precious, just like he did with their adopted son.
As Liyun and Yaojun return to their hometown to see their dying friend, the streets have changed so much they can no longer recognise them. Their past life has been physically expunged; any proof of their years spent as a family in this place exists only in memory. This is evident in how, despite the fact the rest of the city has drastically altered, their apartment has remained exactly the same. That moment in their lives is untouchable, inviolable. They would not – could not – move on, their hearts and minds stuck in the period when their son was alive, a blissful time when Xingxing would still come home for lunch.
It is human to find meaning in such pain. Life goes on, but will we go along with it? As the world keeps turning, do we resolutely stand still, trapping ourselves in stasis so as to remember our loss as closely as possible? Does feeling the trauma as intensely as we can make it more real? By employing a non-linear narrative, Xiaoshuai seems to suggest that the past, the present, and the future are inextricably linked by one momentous tragedy. By shaping his story around a singular event, he suggests that the suffering induced by loss can shape entire lives.
But he also suggests that it is never too late to find forgiveness, to earn one’s solace. One must accept the blow before they can recover from it. Redemption can be found in confessing the truth, in committing to life, or in appreciating beauty in whatever form it takes, without trying to shape and mould it into something else.
Xiaoshuai’s film becomes an epic treatise in how to accept the detached betrayal of humanity and the dispassionate workings of fate. There’s a touch of Nietzsche’s amor fati, but it’s more than that. It’s an insight into what it means to be human, from how we connect to how we experience loss. It conveys what it feels like to hold beauty in your hands and to have it wrenched from your grasp.
Love and sorrow become powerful conditions of the soul. So Long, My Son instils in the viewer the fear of loss and change, but also the knowledge that these parts of life are rarely suffered alone – a death ripples through a group. As a result, we tend to grieve as one. This can be as simple as a husband and wife sitting by their child’s grave, enjoying the sunset with some food and drink. In a sublime moment, they are connected together again. Perhaps, across two different planes of existence, time and space bend, allowing love to cross seamlessly.
