For Everything, There’s No Fucking Reason

Jealousy by Munch @ Munch Museum, Oslo



Undoubtedly a dramatic title, designed to provoke curses and swearing from my readers (Hello! I am back and half-kicking). Midway through my fifth travelogue reflecting on my visit to Bergen, Norway with its picture-postcard beauty, and Moomin Valley in Finland with its modest, idyllic charm, my thought wandered off to a more impending, urgent issue which I have been pondering for the past two months: The consequences of natural events.
By some odd coincidences the books I have chosen for my bedtime reading recently have in one way or another dealt with the questions of choice, fate and their opposites. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is an interwoven dialogues of four people who, plagued by their share of problems, and who, by fate, or by chance, or by their own device, meet on the top of a popular suicide spot in London on Christmas Eve, contemplating to sky dive and end it all. Of course they didn’t. Someone else, an extra, a nobody, some Joe took that spot. Four voices, quadrupling the scrutiny of one single question: to be or not to be.
And ultimately an optimist, Hornby prescribes the latter. I saw the author in the screwed-up life of the TV presenter who went to jail for fucking an under-aged girl who claimed she was sixteen, only she was a few dozen days short, the weary-ridden mother who got pregnant and gave birth to a vegetable son, conceived in the first and only intercourse (what were the odds of that!?), the troubled MP’s daughter who was dumped by her boyfriend and whose family had been engrossed in grief over the mysterious disappearance of the other suicidal daughter, and the aspiring (more like failing) musician from the States who had no education or street-smartness to fall back on. More alarming and warily, I see myself personified in the foursome, except I wasn’t in London as I would have wished.
I have always been fascinated by the notion of a full circle, that the beginning is actually the end in the scenario of a perfectly interwoven wheel—a Ferris Wheel, the London Eye more specifically—that Hornby used metaphorically but to another effect. I was awed by films like Before the Rain and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (title of my blog and an embedded message I have invited everyone to ponder), or for the average movie-goer, The Terminator, or even Somewhere in Time (!), questioning time and time again how one thing leads to another and eventually returns to square one as if the life you have been leading has yielded nothing but futility.





installtion @ Statens Museum for Kunst;
Haunting image of a hopeless relationship. Does make you wonder: is it before or after the you-know-what?
Check out the museum's Café Nørgaard with its chic décor by the Danish artist Lars Nørgård!

Then I finally got hold of Amy Tan’s book of musings published over a year ago. For some odd reason, except Joy Luck Club, I have read all Tan’s books throughout the years, and even had a brush with the author at a book signing in Leeds. She is the only Chinese American writer I read without bias or prejudice, which is extraordinary when so many sought-after writers, movie stars and personalities of all sorts of ethnic minorities in the States and the Western world have raised my eyebrows with their publicity stunts and their pathetic ‘Otherness’. And the book, The Opposite of Fate, proved to be another winner of my adoration for the writer, who published her first book at age 37! There’s still hope for an aspiring writer like my humble self (now I only need to search for a pastry chef who rose to stardom at age 38 to boost my ego!) Paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, she took me from the child whose biggest joy was visiting the library accompanied by her father, a MIT scholarship holder, a devoted missionary, and ultimately the redeemer of her mother, to a teenager who was taken to Switzerland by a traumatised mother after losing both her father and elder brother to a brain tumour within half a year, to the homicide of her best friend the night, her birthday night, she would have been in the same crime scene if not by a twist of fate, to her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease in her twilights, the same moaning, psychopathic woman whose life’s happenings have inspired the story of The Kitchen God’s Wife. I wept reading the book. No need to be shy about it. Her mother terrified her as a child, tormented and embarrassed her as a teenager, haunted her as a young adult, but never once she did walk away from her, like most people would have ages ago. She saw in her the same tormented, terrified little girl whose mother committed suicide in front of her very eyes.
Compassion, a scarce commodity these days.
Tan dares to question the notion of Fate. Too many a time we accept the so-called destiny unquestionably without pondering its opposites, and pathetically and desperately trying to comfort ourselves by rationalising nonsensical events. And too many a time people tell it to my face or write to offer solace by offering their all-time favourite doctrine: Oh, agnes, everything happens for a reason. No, it fucking doesn’t! It makes no sense that innocent people are being bombed up, children are dying of curable illnesses and preventable calamity, that tens and thousands of lives are wiped out by a single quark, hurricane and tsunami, and that we lost our dear ones to illnesses at our most ill-equipped moments, except to lead non-believers and believers—shaken to the roots of their faith—to believe that the Almighty God somehow does kill randomly. And spare me from theories like the 52 casualities in London and the 2,986 deaths in the 9/11 attacks serve as a wake-up call to the shitheads Tony Blair and George W. Bush, because morons like them often sleep well at night and bring carnage to the world as zombies in daytime.
Which leaves me one single challenge: to complete the circle, I must take one step forward at a time, however arduously, to return to where I begin it all.
Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust.