A Better Life

Before entering university, personal statement interviews always asked: why do you want to go to school? I remember my answer back then was: a better life. But what exactly is a better life? At the time I couldn't answer at all.

For something to be "better," there has to be a standard for judging good and bad — but who gets to set that standard? Some external rule? Or the verdict from your own heart?

Actually, thinking back on the novels I've read, you realize you could almost say this is the question all literature is trying to answer. Because literature is always telling human stories, and narration inevitably carries the author's perspective, which means it also carries an answer to this question. But that doesn't mean the question is easy to answer; on the contrary, it's precisely because it's hard to get a satisfying answer that there are so many attempts.

First of all, how to live better and what kind of person you should become are really two sides of the same coin. You can understand someone's inner world as the places they've lived, the games they played as a child, the schools they attended, the poems they read; at the same time, a person can also be all their interactions with the world — the words they jot down casually, what they say to the person they run into on the way out in the morning, the color of the clothes they're wearing today.

Of course, how someone wants to do things is entirely their own business, but if that's the case, does it mean there's simply no standard of good or bad at all? That doesn't seem right either.

Even if we hand the power of setting standards completely to the individual, at the very least that standard is trying to be self-consistent. For example, if someone believes friendship should be built on sincerity, and at the same time insists on being self-serving in everything, the result is bound to be ridiculous.

Or, someone gives up the right to choose entirely and just goes with the flow. But even going with the flow, you can't really escape a standard; in an East Asian environment, that standard is often the pressure from other people's eyes, brought by the lingering shadow of what used to be communal life.

Another example: with what I understand about investing so far, I think in this cruel arena, a person's most important weapon is actually a set of standards beyond money — otherwise you end up like everyone else, thrilled when you make money and scared to death when you lose it, while ignoring that in the long run, doing things right matters far more than receiving the "right" feedback.

But literature has never been able to write a state that's already completed; otherwise it either turns into a static anthropological survey or becomes a manifesto for action — either way, it can't become a story.

What we see is that self-consistency might be impossible at the root, because a complete, unified person running like a logical system is itself an illusion; a person may be the sum of behavior patterns in different situations. But that doesn't mean being fickle is correct.

It's only in pursuit, in shouting, in the exhaustion of being constantly slammed back by raging currents, that literature comes into being. The role of literature is precisely to let us see that reality's existence doesn't necessarily make it reasonable; that growing up doesn't necessarily mean losing innocence; that becoming mature doesn't necessarily mean losing sincerity. We discover we aren't alone — there have been many people like us who once lived seriously, who, even in pain and even in despair, kept holding on to what they believed in, so that today we still have the good fortune to read them.