Love, and Happy New Year

Love, and Happy New Year

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Zhang Shanjian is back　February 16, 2026,  11:03

Got carried away, let me return to the series.

The male lead is a gifted interpreter fluent in multiple languages. Intelligent and cautious, he navigates professional settings with remarkable precision, skillfully rendering not only goodwill but also irony and veiled hostility according to context. The female lead, propelled to stardom by a hit horror drama, dazzles with her radiant beauty; yet beneath it lies a second personality born of childhood trauma.

In the first episode, they meet by chance in a noodle shop. The heroine is trying to win back her ex-boyfriend, only to run into his current partner. She asks the hero to translate some provocative words meant to assert her pride in front of the foreign girlfriend. Unexpectedly, it is the foreign woman who was betrayed and who chose silent endurance. Calmly—yet cuttingly—she exposes the truth and punctures the heroine’s self-esteem. The hero understands every word. Yet instead of faithfully relaying them as a professional interpreter would, he chooses to shield her from humiliation. He tells the foreign woman that he is the heroine’s current boyfriend, that they have come especially to offer their congratulations and a small gift—thus preserving everyone’s dignity.

When he uses his professional skill to solve problems concretely and act with reliability, his charm becomes undeniable; the character’s arc rises to its brightest point. Whether in love or in life, one must cultivate the ability to resolve problems. Even if one cannot become a lover, one can at least become a decent human being.

Yet how do you create dramatic tension for such a capable and magnetic character? The series cleverly reverses his professional advantage: he can translate every language—except his own feelings.

Their relationship is built upon constant testing, guessing, stalemates, and words that fail to mean what they say. He tells her, “You are capricious and impulsive. At first you mean one thing; later it becomes another; in the end it turns into a third. It’s very hard for me to understand.”

She initially takes the initiative and expresses her affection. He, claiming it is “hard to understand,” cools his response. She wants to step forward and ask for clarity, yet fears rejection and retreats. Seeing her retreat, he assumes she wishes to avoid trouble and withdraws his own outstretched hand.

Perhaps in love—or in the love we idealize—understanding feels instinctive, communication barrier-free. We imagine that repeated listening and even quarrels erode love. Yet precisely because we take understanding for granted, we overlook how luxurious the unspoken truly is.

So perhaps misunderstanding, conflict, and grievance are not matters of the heart, but of misused language. Recently, while reading *Sapiens*, I was reminded that from the evolution of Homo sapiens onward, we have been trained anthropologically, learning the linguistics of diverse language groups. “If one wishes to communicate effectively across cultures, one must learn the other’s language.” The same may apply in love. Each person’s language of love may differ from their partner’s as greatly as Chinese differs from English.

On the frozen surface, the couple’s love appears tangled and bittersweet; beneath the sea, however, lies their ongoing effort to learn one another’s language. Incompatible languages resemble lovers living in different time zones. Love with a time difference becomes a wager—who will speak first, who will retreat first. We anticipate the other’s next move, parsing each word as if translating it line by line. The words that cannot be translated freeze in the throat, like a trapped horse in a game of Go—unable to break through, unable to place a stone.

And perhaps this extends beyond the language of love. In my earlier reflections on *Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out*, I wrote: “Humans may fail to understand animals, yet animals exist in their own right.” Animals share languages among themselves; plants grow along veins of their own silent speech; humans communicate through bodily gestures. Every person, every species, every living organism speaks through movement, gaze, and inner life. What we articulate about closeness or distance, affection or aversion, right or wrong, is but a fleeting surface. What we truly mean is often encrypted.

That is why the heroine’s characterization is so compelling. Beyond her glamorous identity as a luminous movie star, she harbors a repressed and fragile secondary personality named “Dolame.” Dolame understands the subtleties of human communication. She is adept at pretending not to notice hostility from those who dislike her, and she voices the anger, fear, cowardice, and desire that the primary personality cannot utter.

I think of this secondary self as a mask. Why do people wear masks? To belong to society. Sometimes it is also so that others can understand what we are trying to say—we disguise ourselves in order to be heard. And by the end, it becomes difficult to tell: is the movie star the mask for Dolame, or is Dolame the mask for the movie star?

There is a striking exchange in the series between a writer and the interpreter:

“Do you know how many languages there are in the world?”
“More than 7,100, I think.”
“You’re wrong.”
“How many are there?”
“As many as there are people.”
“Each person speaks their own language. That’s why we misunderstand one another, distort each other’s meaning, even speak recklessly.”

As many individuals as there are in the world, so too are there that many languages. The different forms of language give shape to different kinds of love: some entangled with grievances and longing, profound enough to last a lifetime; some quiet and steadfast, sustaining each other through ordinariness; some torn by conflict, where love and hate intertwine; some not entirely honorable. Love may take countless forms, but understanding perhaps has only one. And perhaps encountering someone who truly understands you is even rarer than encountering love itself.

After all, in a lifetime, to meet love or passion is nothing extraordinary. What matters most is to meet understanding.

And perhaps this is why I can now grasp the heroine’s choice in the second film, *Eternal Station*. The story tells of a transit hub one reaches after leaving the mortal world—a junction connecting countless eternal realms. There, one is given a week to decide where, and with whom, to spend eternity.

When people arrive at the transit station, they appear as they did at the happiest moment of their lives. Most take the form of their youthful prime; few are gray-haired and elderly. “You will absolutely never see a high school student there.”

From this station, one may choose among countless eternal realms: a World of Smokers, a Cowboy World, a World Without Men, a Gourmet World, a Marxist World, a Clown World, a Museum World. Once a realm is chosen, there is no turning back. Those who attempt to reverse their decision are hunted down and cast into the Void—a space of everlasting darkness.

The film opens with absurdity: the male protagonist, A, chokes to death on a biscuit. Upon entering the transit station, he regains his youth. He leaves a letter for his wife and, as the seven-day deadline approaches, prepares to depart for the Beach World.

But when his wife eventually arrives, she unexpectedly encounters her first husband—protagonist B—who died in the war. He has waited for her in the transit station for sixty-seven years.

What begins as a metaphysical choice about the eternity of the soul transforms into a quiet competition between two loves. On one side stands a marriage steeped in the ordinary textures of daily life—shared years of groceries and bills, trivial quarrels and accumulated tenderness. On the other side burns a love forged in passion, tempered by life and death, sealed by irreversible separation—a devotion so intense it becomes unforgettable.

It calls to mind a lyric I once admired: there is always one person who remains a cinnabar mark upon the heart.

As the story unfolded, guided by its dialogue, I found myself stepping into the heroine’s place, almost making the choice alongside her.

The reunion between her and B is profoundly moving. She tells him, “I’ve never seen you so clearly before.” He answers, “You look exactly the way you did in my dreams.”

A chooses to withdraw of his own accord. He tells her, “If you’re happy, then I’m happy—but only if you truly are.”

Faced with the decision, she is in unbearable anguish: “I choose neither of you, because whichever one I choose, I’ll be covered in wounds.”

And yet, after choosing to be with B, she says with quiet honesty, “I can’t pretend you never existed. Without you, my life cannot go on.”

As for the ending, you can probably guess it from everything that came before, so I won’t spell it out. What gives me pause, however, is this: A longs for the “Beach World,” B has always dreamed of the “Mountain World,” and the heroine’s best friend boards the train to the “Paris World” without hesitation. Yet the heroine herself never voices a clear desire of her own, nor is she truly granted the agency to choose. Instead, she is continually persuaded—urged to follow one man or the other. The pendulum swings among these three destinations, but no one asks her whether she has ever considered which world she wants.

If “How Do You Translate Love?” examines the idea that each person speaks a private language, leading to misunderstanding, then in *Eternal Station* the heroine’s language is never truly heard. In her personal world, she is therefore unfortunate. And yet in love, she is extraordinarily fortunate—she has known the most incandescent passion in her youth, and she has shared a lifetime of quiet companionship. Outside such an extraordinary setting, who would ever be forced to choose between a moonlit ideal and a cinnabar mark upon the heart—between midnight and dusk, between one shore and another—between two versions of a “perfect” love? The premise itself is enough to inspire both envy and awe.

Real-world choices are rarely so ideal. So perhaps the wish is simpler: may you first learn to listen to yourself, to understand yourself—and may you find the one who understands you in return.

And finally, Happy New Year. May your journey of understanding begin—even with reading the tiles at a mahjong table.