About the Engagement (1): About Writing the Engagement

SSS_8118.jpg
Originally uploaded by Wanchen Tai

It has been more than 2 months by now since the engagement between I and K in the end of March in 2009. I have been thinking about writing about it but have been either kept busy with other tasks or indecisive about how the event can be represented.

It felt like a dilemma of writing, which I never could avoid ever since the moment when I learned to write. The writing school that I attended in my childhood taught us to be always committed to a good opening, an opening that would surprise readers and that would tantalize their anticipation. This principle, however, has made every writing difficult. Of course, it is also true that I am yet far from good at 'writing' after all. Hurdles are always there not to be overcome.

So an entry about the engagement has been postponed.

Yet I found the 'non-writing' of the engagement quite a serious problem for me since my settlement in Tokyo about 2 weeks ago. When life moved on and the space and time changed, the flow of time that my blog followed lagged behind. I felt rather unorderly if any post about my life in Japan would appear before 'that' piece of writing about that moment.

Then, miraculously, I happened to be able to overcome (or ignore?) this dilemma a couple of days ago when I was reading a novel （月色撩人）by Wang Anyi (王安憶).

She writes about a male character's feelings about love, marriage, and romance:

"另潘索感到沮喪的是，每一次的開頭都很特別，但是結局都是一樣，總是落入窠臼。" (p. 47)
(what disappointed Pan is that every romance begins in a unique way, but nothing ever escapes the set pattern in the end.)

Of course, it is not how I feel about marriage at all. Instead, I am intrigued by the literary contrast between the anticipation for being unique and the disappointment at the inevitable falls into cliches. Any attempt to be different is after all another failed attempt to make difference, that is. What an amusing observation about the destiny of struggles of human beings in life!

I understood that this passage presented a rather hopeless or even pessimistic situation, but I couldn't help laughing at myself when I read this. It set me free from my serious (but useless) attempts to impress readers (or myself, more accurately) by writing a unique article to mark a good moment of my life. If it was only another attempt, I felt less anxious about making this other endeavor now.

The dilemma was then solved.