When I was young, I often heard neighbors casually uttering, “Men read works of Louis Cha Leung Yung and women Chiung Yao.” In the minds of boys, the works of Louis Cha Leung Yung represent a martial arts world, while Chiung Yao’s works tell romantic tales.
Chiung Yao was one of the famous contemporary Chinese female writers. In the era of black-and-white televisions (in the 1980s in China), her works were already widely acknowledged. The beautiful childhood memory of “Princess of Pearl” we watched on TV is adapted from one of her works.
Like her works, Chiung Yao leaves us with an unforgettable memory. Her real name was Chen Zhe, and her nickname was Fenghuang ("phoenix" in English). Born in a scholarly family in Chengdu in the 1940s, Chiung Yao had been fascinated by novels since childhood and had a deep passion for reading. Throughout her life, she authored and published over 70 novels. In the field of art, Chiung Yao was not only a novelist but also a screenwriter and director. Due to her unique literary insights and ability to capture the times, her works always reflect human nature and touch people’s hearts. Therefore, throughout her life, both her personality and works had a significant impact on the life values of a generation.
However, what is incredible is that she at the age of 86 chose to suicide in her twilight years. According to official reports, the cause of her death was carbon monoxide poisoning. Her suicide note reveals that she had been suffering from illness for many years and, in her old age, she felt unable to overcome the shadow of disease and chose death to overcome it and bid farewell to her loved ones in this way.
Chiung Yao’s suicide note is heartbreaking and helpless. Through this note, she wanted to express that her life had already blossomed like a flower, and now, in her old age, she did not want to be tortured by illness anymore. So she chose this way to end her pain.
Some people believe that Chiung Yao’s choice is wise as human dignity lies in not being bound by any illness or death, but in living a free and unrestrained life. However, others believe that her choice is wrong and selfish because she did not consider the feelings of her family and only wanted to control her life.
In fact, since the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden, people have wanted to control themselves and be their own masters, but the result of such an attempt is death. In fact, people cannot control their own lives. Committing suicide is just a manifestation of an inability to face painful realities and to escape them.
Chiung Yao’s story serves as a great warning to all of us, especially to today’s young people. Many young people work hard to earn money, pursue fame and fortune, and strive for promotions and salary increases, hoping to provide a comfortable and respectable life for themselves and their families. However, we see that even though Chiung Yao had everything, she was still gripped by pain and helplessness because her fame and wealth could not save her from the shadow of death.
Many people feel sorry for her, not only for her literary achievements but also because they believe she was a wise and insightful person. Her story helps us see a fact: even the wisest person’s end is the same as everyone else’s, being unable to escape the emptiness of life and the oppression of death.
As Solomon lamented in the Book of Ecclesiastes, "Then I said to myself, 'The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?' I said to myself, 'This too is meaningless.' For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die!” Both the wise and the foolish will encounter death. In the face of death, Solomon believed that wisdom is empty."
No matter how wise a person is, they cannot overcome death, as wisdom cannot save people from it. Human wisdom is powerless in the face of death. The reasons for the suicides of intellectuals like Plato, Hai Zi (the late famous contemporary Chinese poet), and Ernest Hemingway are not that they lacked knowledge but that the more knowledge they acquired and the more they saw through life, and the more they found life to be empty.
I remember a news report about a famous poetry critic who was a doctoral supervisor at a university in Hebei. One morning, he jumped from the 16th floor of a building in his university. The reason was that his dream had always been to become a doctoral supervisor and contribute to literary causes. However, when he finally achieved this goal, he felt overwhelming despair about his life. It seemed that after acquiring knowledge that ordinary people could not attain, he was left with despair after seeing through many realities. So that morning, he dressed neatly and jumped from the teaching building, ending not only his life but also his dreams of literary causes.
This is also Solomon’s sorrow, feeling despair about life when he realizes that both the wise and the foolish cannot escape the power of death. What does it mean to live in the sun? In Solomon’s writing, being in the sun has a specific meaning, which refers to a life without a focus on God, a life without eternal concern. For instance, living without a sacred eternal focus by just eating, working, and studying excessively. They no longer live in response to God’s grace or eternity and fall into vanity. The so-called vanity and chasing wind refer to not obtaining substantial eternal meaning, which is void and empty. The phrase ‘in vain’ often appears in the New Testament to mean the same.
What does in vain mean? In Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Sisyphus is punished for defying the gods and thrown into hell, where he is forced to push a boulder up a hill. However, due to the boulder’s weight, each time Sisyphus is close to pushing it to the top, it will roll back down after he is exhausted. Thus, Sisyphus is stuck in a cycle of failure and retry, with no substantial meaning to his life in the process of failing.
As this year is ending, there have been several suicide reports, from Sha Bai to Chiung Yao, and the cases were due to despair in life. For many people, it seems that living is harder than dying. When such phenomena continuously appear in our sight, they reflect not that we do not have enough but that we live in the emptiness in the sun, and are unable to find the meaning and value of life.
Where does the meaning of life lie? This is a question that everyone should stop to ponder. This is a question that Chiung Yao pondered and struggled with but did not find the answer. My hope is that everyone who loves Chiung Yao will continue to think and search for the answer to this question through her suicide. Because deep in our hearts, what we truly long for is not sweet love but unending happiness; what we truly desire is not money and fame but eternity.
(Originally published by the Christian Times, the article has been edited under permission and the author is a Christian contributor. )
- Translated by Charlie Li
