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The Purpose of Life

Last week while I was in Shanghai, a friend told me one day that she received news at her office that someone had committed suicide by jumping from the highest floor of a shopping center near my flat. She said that there were pictures of the terrible event all over the internet, and that she had unfortunately stumbled across several of them, putting in her mind an image she would much rather get rid of.

Part of what made this suicide a little different than your “run of the mill” jumper was that the woman had jumped not onto the pavement outside the shopping mall, but down to the courtyard inside. She had jumped into a very crowded area, and it was this that had made it more newsworthy than most suicides in big cities.

A couple of weeks earlier, my teacher had been telling me about another suicide — this one more commonplace, except for the fact that her friend had been right there when it happened and witnessed it. This one was in a subway station, and the person jumped down to the tracks in front of an oncoming train. That seems to be the most common method of committing suicide in Shanghai. (Here in Singapore, I am under the impression that jumping from a high building is the preferred method.)

These two things got my friends and I to talking about suicide in general. One of my friends said she could never understand why one would want to take one’s own life. It isn’t quite so hard for me to sympathize — I can certainly get why one might find this life to be not worth living. There are plenty of things in life to make one think, “What’s it all for? What could possibly make me want to go on living?”

My friend responded in a way that seems to me to be an attitude I’ve encountered often amongst the Chinese. She quoted the film To Live (based on the novel by Yu Hua). In this movie, when things all fall apart due to the harsh realities of life, the protagonist ends with a note of optimism that might seem somewhat unreasonable. He chooses, ultimately, to laugh in the face of the absurdities of life rather than to give in to them. In response to the question, “Why go on living? What’s the point?”, he answers, “The point of life is to live.”

Yesterday I read an article in 《读者》 (Duzhe, a magazine like Reader’s Digest) by Chinese novelist Mo Yan. He makes a comment very similar to that made by the film To Live. The point of life is to live it, he says, and this is the theme of his most of own books. In the article, he reflects on motherhood and the difficulties mothers endure for the sake of their families. His own mother, he says, was always willing to undergo any difficulty without complaint, as long as it be for the benefit of the family. For her, he writes, the important thing was that the family all have the freedom just to live. It seems that she was not an overly ambitious person, but simply hoped to give her children space to carry on, and that life would be play itself out in whatever fashion it might choose.

The underlying assumptions of the film To Live, the article by Mo Yan, and the response of my friend to the suicide case might all seem rather fatalistic — very foreign to the more romanticized views of life that we often see in the West. It seems to me, though, that there is a fundamental good sense lying beneath it all. It is the sort of mentality that might be very useful on those days when life seems ready to squeeze all hope out of us.

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

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