Mingcheng Song

“For all that, I recognized Akira with no difficulty...I would appear to him no more than an intimidating silhouette.”

I felt stuffy putting down When We Were Orphans. Great leaps in time without landing on a general sense of resolution really induced the horror that's instilled in me ever since I was a child. "Don't waste time"--I can hear mother yapping in my ear. In truth, a great motto to live by, but most of the time it just bashes you for the time already "wasted". To think that for all his life, Christopher has been holding on to this tremendous purpose, and for it to turn out to be somewhat of a Sisyphean boulder, really crushes the idea of a competent, respectable detective that he so insistently constructed for himself. I see many parallels in the story, like the old detective, and Sarah's Sir husband, both accomplished, but somehow short of a legacy that could withstand the test of time. The Sir husband senses something fleeting, and tries to capture it with one last push, but falls short. In a similar fashion, after a farcical reveal to Christopher's magnum opus, all that I know about him seems to fizzle out. Despite him uncovering the truth and eventually reuniting with his mother, Christopher loses momentum and drops out of the projected trajectory. Maybe he was doomed from the start, because whenever the idea of rescuing his parents in a blaze of glory comes up in the story, it is never meant to be taken seriously. The maybe-Akira has cautioned us to brace for impact, but Christopher's journey up to that point has been a complete fever dream, a world where the unlikely becomes the inevitable.

So was it all a waste? Christopher probably won't agree. It just seems like it because I was too focused on his personal narrative to notice how each of the characters are trampled by the historical current. Strong-willed like Ms Hemmings couldn't foresee herself being held captive at a prisoner's camp. Their collective joys and sorrows gather like specks of sand to give shape to the hurricane that is war, which in the end will also die down to a whisper of wind, telling the story of a distant past.