BETTER DAYS
Why do we always want a happy ending?
I grew up on fairy tales. They always begin, “Once upon a time …” and always end, “… they lived happily ever after.” My romance novels are like that. They’re set in the Texas Panhandle of the 1950s, but actually they could be set anywhere, anytime. The town and the county where they take place are fictional. The characters—usually two young people—face a series of impossible obstacles to their love, but in the end they overcome the odds, kiss, marry, and live happily ever after—à la Hallmark, Disney, and traditional Hollywood. So when my Chinese international student friend, Doris, sent me to see the current Chinese blockbuster movie, Better Days, of course I interpreted it in the same way I would an American movie.
A young high school student, Chen Nian, is the mild-mannered, only child of a single mom who is heavily in debt. Chen Nian’s only hope to live a better life is to score high enough on the national university entrance exam to attend a top-tier university. Her biggest obstacle is that she’s the bullying target of a clique of extremely mean and well-to-do girls. She meets a dropout and street thug, Xiao Bei, who becomes her protector against these bullies. Initially, Chen Nian sees only the criminal side of Xiao Bei, but by the end of the movie, she sees through his criminal side and discovers that despite where he comes from and what he does to survive, he’s a noble person, who is willing to sacrifice his life for her. But can this discovery of nobility lead to romance? Based on the ending of the movie, my American interpretation was that they were now a couple, would marry, and live happily ever after. However, my Chinese friend emphatically said, “No!” They are just “friends,”—“friendship” apparently has a different connotation in the Chinese language. Perhaps friends for life. But their differences remain and are far too great. They could never fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after. … Impossible—at least in Chinese culture.
I don’t pretend to be able to analyze Chinese culture and explain why my friend Doris cannot accept my happy ending for Better Days. I’ll only try to explain why—as an American—I want to believe that everybody can be like the couple I recently read about in the Obituary Notices of the L.A. Times. When they died within days of each other, they had been married 72 years. He was born in 1921, she in 1923. He was a Marine Corps pilot in World War II, flying Corsairs off aircraft carriers—and came home despite the odds against it. And it sounds like they married and lived happily ever after—for 72 years! And there was also a human interest story the same day about a widow who is 95 and whose husband was also in World War II, but in the submarine corps. It sounds like she and her husband also lived happily ever after for six decades, after he came home. The story says that he was the only one of a crew of 100 who came home. He was on land sick in the hospital when his sub was lost sea with all hands. … Which leads me to ask again, Why do Americans focus on the one who lived happily ever after and don’t want to think about the 99 who are somewhere at the bottom of the sea—and didn’t come home to their wives and girlfriends?
I don’t know. Maybe it comes from our country being a land of immigrants who left the Old Country and didn’t look back. When they got on the boat, crossed the ocean, and saw the Statue of Liberty, they just knew they would live happily ever after—despite all the hardships they knew would come. … Culturally, Americans are optimistic, whereas Chinese seem to be fatalistic.