Listening to Other People's Stories, Shedding My Own Tears

Thirty years of wind and rain: I've climbed mountains and crossed rivers, shed tears and endured pain, and even now I keep going. They say there is something called a magnetic field that can pass through mountains and leap across rivers, make time irrelevant, bring hearts together for warmth, and make emotions resonate. These days, the genuine feelings, true nature, and heartfelt sincerity born of other people's “pasts,” which have settled into my memories and even my life and continue to linger in my mind, have found kindred spirits in the magnetic field of my life and resonate at the same frequency as my temperament and emotions.

Rather than warmth and resonance, I think it's more a matter of truly sharing another's feelings. They say that genuine emotion can make even a stone weep. I'm no stone, and I can hardly defend myself against heartfelt sincerity that moves me to the depths of my soul. I listen to other people's stories and shed my own tears. I've seen and heard too many deeply moving stories from other people's pasts, and it's impossible not to feel battered inside, hurting for their wounds and grieving for their pain. There have been times when I felt those stories had happened to me, only in another time and place, because my feelings after hearing and reading them were so real, as if I had experienced them myself. To borrow a line from the fictional Jia Baoyu: “This person before me, I feel I've seen before; this thing, I feel I've experienced before.”

People and the relationships between them are profound subjects, and I'm not qualified to discuss them. Here, I'll share the stories that have touched my heart. Call them moving or sentimental, either way, I feel it's my duty to tell them. In some ways, we are far too short on moments of being moved, comfort, and release.