Seeing Today as Right and Yesterday as Wrong — Tao Yuanming, “Return Home”#

In A World Without Thieves, Wang Li is the first to want to stop.

She and Wang Bo have grown accustomed to being thieves. Their way of life depends on skill and an understanding between them, and brings the pleasure of earning a living without following ordinary people’s rules. Stopping takes more than acknowledging a principle or changing a single act. The person she loves still lives by theft; through their travels together, both have grown accustomed to living this way. To ask Wang Bo to change is to reopen a question between them: how will they make a living, and how will they live together?

Pregnancy gives this question an approaching deadline. Plans once put off until another time, another journey, now concern a life on the way. Wang Li draws on ideas of retribution, accumulating merit, and seeking blessings to understand her fear: she worries that their wrongdoing will fall upon the child and hopes good deeds from now on might hold it off. This does involve an imagined economy of moral recompense, but it also contains a person’s fear for the future. If we see her only as bargaining with gods and buddhas, a clever explanation lets us dispense with the mingling of fear and love.

People do not always begin with a pure desire and then find the right words for it. Often they borrow familiar expressions to say something they can barely explain even to themselves. Fear that a child will suffer can contain an unwillingness to go on hurting others; a prayer for safety can contain a longing to settle into a life. Fear and love within one person may not be separable. If we insist on removing every trace of fear before acknowledging love, we will miss many of the places where change actually begins.

Wang Li’s prayers also lead into action in the present. She takes an interest in Sha Gen’s money, wants it to remain his, and wants Wang Bo to help her protect him. A desire still taking shape begins to acquire substance in action. Where the couple once needed only to calculate what they could take this time, she now wants to consider whether someone else can leave with what he brought. The shift is small enough to spoil the thieves’ fun, yet large enough to change whom they consider when they act.

Sha Gen’s money is not simply a bag of temptation standing for human nature. It is what he has earned through work, bound up with plans to go home, build a house, and start a family. Before the money has even left his hands, the thieves have given it a different purpose: whoever takes it proves his skill; whoever makes good on his claims preserves his standing. The years Sha Gen spent working become the terms of a contest between experts. The film makes thieving look beautiful, and that beauty can briefly make us forget that someone else’s life is being used for the performance.¹

Wang Bo knows what Sha Gen’s money means, but has another, worldly explanation. Someone so unguarded is bound to come to grief sooner or later; showing him what people are like may not be doing him a disservice. The convenience of this argument is that it casts the person doing harm as a teacher of good sense. The victim loses his money, yet seems merely to have paid tuition he would have owed eventually. The harsher the lesson, the more knowledgeable about reality its teacher can appear.

That knowledge has a basis. The world Wang Bo knows is hardly peaceful, and he has not invented thieves out of nothing. But does knowing that the world has thieves oblige him to become one himself, stealing another person’s money to prove his trust mistaken? Acknowledging that theft exists and committing theft are two different things. His worldly argument insists on joining them: refusing to steal looks like failing to understand, while agreeing to do it proves that one sees clearly.

Wang Li’s insistence prevents Wang Bo from remaining comfortably in that position. He has his love for her, his concern for the child, and his pride, which will not let him concede to a rival. We need not erase these motives and leave a saint who acts only for others before acknowledging that his later protection is real. Hands accustomed to taking begin to prevent others from taking. The same sharp eye and deft movements now serve another person’s journey home. People do not have to settle everything in their minds before starting to move elsewhere.

This is also what matters most about Wang Li’s place in Wang Bo’s life. She is not a light waiting patiently for him to choose goodness, still less someone whose task is to provide him with an opportunity for atonement. She first states what she wants from life, then intervenes in what they do, refusing to let him carry on as before. Love here does more than give a hero a reason to sacrifice himself. It asks a question of the living that takes much longer to answer: will you find another way to live with me?

The film ultimately gives them little time to answer. But the question was asked, and had already begun to change things. Someone’s later death does not reduce it to the fuse of a tragedy.

The Gentleman Helps Others Bring Good Things to Fruition — Analects, “Yan Yuan”#

Sha Gen believes in a world without thieves. The thieves on the train know better than anyone that thieves exist. Strangely, this does not end in an easy exposure of his mistake. Several people who know the truth instead busy themselves on behalf of his belief, trying to make what he encounters on this journey accord, as far as possible, with what he believes.

If a belief is simply a sentence inside someone’s head, all this effort looks absurd: so high a price to maintain an error. Yet they are protecting both Sha Gen’s belief and his plan to take his money home. The belief now involves how several people act; its truth or falsity cannot settle everything. In his discussion of ideology, Žižek shifts attention from what people profess to believe to how they act: knowing that an account is flawed need not prevent someone from maintaining its force in practice. Taking this distinction in the other direction, people in A World Without Thieves who know the world is dangerous can also act for a wish they themselves scarcely dare believe possible.²

The wish here is that relations between people need not always begin with guardedness.

Wang Bo already knows how to be on guard. He understands watching and countering, what lies beneath a commotion, what may hide behind kind words. Sha Gen amuses and irritates him because this man can apparently live without those skills, as though the world had not yet taken away the possibility of a simpler relationship. Wang Bo may not actually want to become Sha Gen. But he can be tired of having no choice except to be Wang Bo. Protecting another person’s trust is also, in some measure, protecting a wish of his own that he has not entirely abandoned.

Sha Gen, however, is more than someone who keeps that wish alive for Wang Bo. He believes for himself, speaks for himself, and makes his own plans to go home. His trust first opens toward others, making their responses possible. Without his earnestness, everyone else’s cleverness could go on working undisturbed, with no need to ask anything. The man who does not understand the hidden struggles makes those who do change their habitual methods. He does not know what he has set in motion, yet he has affected what happens.

And things really do change. The money is protected; his plans to return home are not stolen away by the outcome of the thieves’ contest. Goodwill does not simply flicker inside the characters and remain irrelevant to reality. Someone takes trouble, someone takes risks, someone changes what they do, and a fragile wish acquires a factual shape on this journey. Dismissing that as consolation is too easy. These efforts do not lose their weight because they have protected only one person.

Yet the form of protection leaves a question. Sha Gen’s safe arrival depends on special care from others amid dangers he knows nothing about. The film does not make that care an arrangement every passenger can expect. For the moment, its moving vision of a world without thieves is open to just one person, while others bear its costs in secret. Goodwill has gathered, but has not become a shared way of life that can reliably continue.

Dissatisfaction with the film need not therefore mean wanting Sha Gen to suffer a loss as soon as possible. Teaching him to be more canny might look more realistic, but would still leave this unanswered: why must people become skilled at guarding against one another to keep what they have earned? The film entrusts a general wish to one protected exception. We can cherish that exception and remain dissatisfied that it is only an exception. The dissatisfaction is no more callous than the feeling it accompanies.

Wang Bo’s final actions take place amid this mingling of protection and rivalry. Discussing the film’s creation, Feng Xiaogang explained that Wang Bo was not someone ready from the outset to give his life for Sha Gen. The script had to keep increasing the resistance he faced until he had to fight; honor played a part too.³ This account takes some of the halo of predestined martyrdom away from the ending, but gives greater weight to a person in the midst of changing. He has not surveyed a perfect path of sacrifice and calmly followed it to its end. With his old temper, his old skills, and a desire only recently turned in another direction, he is driven to the last confrontation.

Death closes the story. Had Wang Bo survived, the couple might still have quarreled over making a living, or discovered only after giving up theft how hard life was. There could have been another temptation, and an ordinary, inconspicuous act of perseverance. None of those days has had time to happen. The audience can finally place him on the side of those who saved someone. A change that was hesitant, mixed, and unfinished is fixed by an ending that cannot be altered.

But affirming his final action need not mean affirming that finality. It is precisely because he had begun to change that the days he never lived deserve our regret. If death merely buys him the name of a good man, we no longer have to consider what staying alive might have held. That is an undemanding kind of sympathy for someone who was learning to stop.

The name does not settle Wang Li’s future. She will live on with her loss, facing days they had imagined together and she must now bear alone. The film does not develop her future livelihood, caregiving, or intimate relationships, and we cannot supply a fulfillment it leaves unwritten. She had asked for two people to keep living; what she ultimately receives is one person’s death. The success of protecting Sha Gen and her loss remain in the same film. Neither can be allowed to hide the other.

There Is Still a Future — A New Account of Tales of the World, “Self-Renewal”#

Stories of self-renewal in old books sometimes allow people more time than modern films do.

In the “Self-Renewal” chapter of A New Account of Tales of the World, Zhou Chu is counted by his neighbors among three scourges, alongside a dragon and a tiger. Someone urges him to get rid of the two beasts. He enters the water to fight the dragon and does not emerge for a long time. The villagers assume he is dead and celebrate; he returns alive and hears their rejoicing. This is not the moment when an evildoer is finally caught by authority. What makes his old life impossible to continue unchanged is discovering that his very existence is such a calamity to others. His former prowess remains; his former way of seeing himself no longer holds.⁴

Yet knowing that one is detested is not the same as knowing what can come next. Zhou Chu worries that he has wasted his years: even if he changes, he fears he will achieve nothing. Lu Yun’s answer contains four plain but consequential Chinese characters: “There is still a future.” They begin by distinguishing the time that remains from the life already lived. Having once been this way does not mean that you deserve only to remain this way. Nor must you wait until you can guarantee a lifetime’s achievement before resolving what to do now.

For someone used to being told “This is just the kind of person you are,” those words can have a practical weight. They do not rush to praise present remorse or make self-reproach the final achievement. They direct attention toward what can still be done. Regret is no longer only a repeated backward count of one’s wrongs. It begins to include a refusal to surrender the rest of one’s life to them.

The next account, about Dai Yuan, makes the future more concrete. Dai Yuan sends young men to rob Lu Ji’s baggage, showing ability in the way he directs them. Seeing this, Lu Ji asks why such talent should be used for robbery. Dai Yuan throws down his sword and joins Lu Ji; they form a friendship, and a recommendation follows. Change does not remain confined to a formidable man’s inner life. Someone sees that his abilities could serve another purpose, and brings him into relationships in which that purpose can be realized.

This road, too, has a threshold. The man who receives recognition is talented; the man who helps him is a celebrated figure. The future of ordinary robbers and the victims’ property are not its central concerns. A distinguished person’s discernment cannot be a remedy for everything. Still, one thing the story understands deserves to be kept: asking someone to stop living by his old methods requires more than making him ashamed of them. A new life needs things to do, people to associate with, and an everyday existence that does not repeatedly send him back to the old path.

Seen this way, Wang Bo’s last act of protection is more than a good deed suddenly added to a moral ledger. He has shown that his abilities need not only encroach upon others; they can also protect them. The difficulty is that this new use of his skills remains wrapped in the competition and honor of thieves. If he could leave that contest, how might his dexterity, alertness, and courage find a place in another life? This is a genuinely unanswered question, not an afterword already completed by calling him a prodigal who has returned.

When we discuss reform, we are often eager to discuss resolve and less eager to discuss this. Resolve belongs to the individual: one need only demand it of him. But ways to earn a living, other people’s willingness to associate with him, and an organization’s permission to leave are no longer his alone to command. Judgments about the person grow harsher while discussion of the conditions of living grows thinner. If he does wrong again, people can look back and prove that he never meant to change, as though there had never been a need to ask whether sincerity was followed by a road he could take.

Bringing living conditions into the picture does not mean that the slightest unfavorable circumstance removes all responsibility for one’s actions. What matters is that self-renewal was never entirely an inward task to be completed alone. New conduct begins with an individual, but also needs to find its footing through others’ responses. A society can seriously restrain harmful behavior without defining everyone who has done wrong as permanently harmful. It can also praise new beginnings in words while welcoming, in practice, only those who have never left an ugly record.

A society serious about restraining harm differs from one willing to accept only the innocent in more than generosity or severity. They leave different futures for people who have already done wrong.

In Infernal Affairs, entering a new life involves another future held in suspension. Chan Wing-yan is not kept out of ordinary police life because he has done wrong; he has always wanted to be good. That desire makes him willing to take on undercover work, and allows the organization repeatedly to ask him to continue. The question of self-renewal thus leads into the limits of loyalty: someone who is not awaiting forgiveness may still wait years to regain his life.

The Ruler Employs His Ministers with Propriety; Ministers Serve with Loyalty — Analects, “Ba Yi”#

By the first film, Chan Wing-yan has had enough of a deadline that keeps being extended. Undercover work is no longer a clearly bounded assignment he can finish before going back. It gradually consumes his chance to live as an ordinary police officer. Only when the second film turns to the past do we see how this began.

His family background becomes both the police force’s reason for rejecting him and its condition for selecting him. Being from this family makes him publicly unsuitable to be an officer, yet highly useful in secret work. The family ties he wants to escape are precisely those the organization wants him to reenter. His identity thus acquires two accounts: one visible to outsiders, another known to a handful of superiors. His loyalty to the police cannot be made public, while the work assigned to him on the strength of that loyalty can keep growing.⁵

This makes Chan’s situation different from that of someone carrying hidden proof who merely needs a misunderstanding cleared up. Superiors who know the truth are certainly important, but as long as the work must continue, their knowing it need not restore his life. An organization can sincerely regard him as one of its own and sincerely believe that he should hold on a little longer. Together, those two sincere beliefs can still leave someone’s days suspended for years.

Chan does not thereby lose his own judgment. Late in the second film, he is willing to keep helping both out of duty as a police officer and because of his promise to Luk Kai-cheung. Chan can choose to undertake something and still demand an end to undercover work, a return to a life in which he can have a desk.

There is nothing heroic about that desk. It is even a little mundane, as though someone who has been through too much danger finally wants a little order in everyday life, too unremarkable to make a dramatic climax. But this is precisely what shows that he is not asking the world for an exceptionally generous reward. He wants a place he can occupy openly, where someone coming to see him need not first check for a tail, where what he does can be credited to his own name. Loyalty here does more than obey the organization. It also makes a demand: if you acknowledge that this is who I am, you should allow me a life consistent with it.

The second film also removes Wong Chi-shing from a position he could too easily occupy without question. He is not only the dependable superior entrusted with Chan’s true identity; he is also a participant in a murder conspiracy. The force’s subsequent handling of him involves an unfinished struggle, dead colleagues, and the need to keep investigating. His acceptance by the organization does not wait until every past act has been publicly clarified. The organization knows how to leave room for people it needs to keep working, and how to invoke shared sacrifice to explain why they must continue.⁵

Once we have seen this part of Wong’s past, we as viewers must distinguish Chan’s relationships with these men. His promise to Luk has its own weight; it does not depend on Wong’s innocence. His duties as a police officer, his promise to Luk, and obedience to Wong personally cannot be collapsed into the same commitment.

Returning to the rooftop with this in mind, we cannot casually expand Chan’s instruction that Lau tell a judge into an immaculate world already waiting beyond the film. It is Chan’s demand of Lau: a refusal to determine Lau’s future alone at gunpoint, and an attempt to take the matter beyond a private bargain between two men. That demand has legitimacy. But the history of the police force in these films does not guarantee that handing the matter over will make everything just. We cannot borrow Chan’s words to erase what Chan himself has endured for so long.

The leniency Wong receives gives particular weight to the question of who gets to begin again. One man’s past can be treated as the complicated background to continued cooperation; another man’s origins are enough to require him to prove himself for years. Breaking the law is not always measured by the same standard. When it is judged useful to organizational aims, it may enter a narrative of loyalty, necessity, and sacrifice. When it comes from someone who cannot be accepted, the law becomes a clear dividing line again.

This treatment connects an individual’s wrongdoing to the organization’s need to keep working. In The Parallax View, Žižek discusses the entanglement of an organization’s public norms and its concealed transgressions: certain acts which cannot be publicly acknowledged are taken as proof of really belonging, of being willing to act for the organization.⁶ This comes closer to the second film than a general observation that everyone has a dark side. What matters is how Wong’s transgression enters actual cooperation, how the organization subsequently handles him, and how it continues to present itself as the representative of legitimate order while accepting him.

There are still real differences between what Chan does and what Hon Sam does. Nor can Luk’s sacrifice be erased by saying that police and gangsters are all connected. But those differences must be discerned in actions and relationships; labels alone cannot preserve them in advance. An organization can indeed do work worth doing and invoke the value of that work to demand endless sacrifice from particular people. The more necessary it believes its work to be, the harder it becomes to hear how long the person doing it has been waiting.

Hon Sam, too, gives Lau Kin-ming more than a secret assignment. He plants his people in the force, maintains contact, and supplies intelligence that helps them advance, allowing legitimate posts and a criminal network to support one another. Lau acquires more than a uniform to disguise himself in. He acquires a gradually forming life: professional skills, colleagues’ trust, the conveniences of power, and a self he can introduce to others. The police and the underworld do not simply occupy separate territories that two men happen to cross. They have already helped make some of the positions within each other’s worlds.

The two undercover men’s predicaments are therefore not neat mirror images. Chan loses his public identity as an officer so that he can work for the police; Lau gains a public identity as an officer so that he can work for Hon Sam. Chan’s serious commitment to the work makes the organization still less willing to let him go. Lau’s involvement in police life may make him increasingly unwilling to belong to the man who sent him. The identities both men were assigned to perform gradually produce consequences their assigners cannot necessarily control.

By this point, saying that Lau is only acting the part of a good police officer is no longer enough. After so many years of playing it, a role does not dutifully remain outside the skin, ready to be taken off on command.

Do Not Deceive Yourself — The Great Learning#

If Lau Kin-ming wanted only the advantages of being a police officer, he would seem close to his goal after Hon Sam’s death. The man who kept ordering him about and held his origins over him is gone. Lau can still remain in the force and enjoy everything he already has.

But Hon Sam’s death cannot make Lau someone who was never under Hon Sam’s control. The difference is slight and extremely hard to bear. Severing a relationship outside himself does not sever the relationship it has left within him. Lau still knows how he came to stand where he does. As long as anyone else knows, his life as a police officer can be reinterpreted at any moment. What he wants to preserve gradually becomes more than his position and safety. It includes a self that need not be continually disturbed by its origins.

Lau wants to escape both Hon Sam’s actual control and the way of seeing himself from Hon Sam’s position. The question of identification in the Lacanian tradition helps distinguish these two relations. Žižek distinguishes the lovable image someone wishes to become from the position from which that person observes himself and judges himself worthy of love.⁷ The image might be a competent, well-presented, trusted police officer; the position concerns whose standards allow him to decide that he has become such a person. The police force’s judgments, Hon Sam’s control, a lover’s gaze, and ideals Lau has already internalized all participate in that judgment.

The two do not fit seamlessly. Lau can look more and more like the ideal officer and still feel that he has not truly become him. He can gain his colleagues’ recognition while knowing that what they recognize does not encompass all of him. A secret is more than a piece of hidden information. It also adds unease to every expression of approval: do they like me, or do they like the person they can like only because they do not know what I am? If the truth comes out, can these relationships remain?

It is easy to say that he should therefore tell everyone the truth. But for someone who has staked his whole life on this identity, confession is not like opening a drawer and moving one object from inside to outside. It may change the meaning of his work, marriage, experience of being loved, and self-respect all at once. He fears more than punishment. He also fears a moment in which he no longer knows how to name himself: unable to retain his former police identity, and not having learned how to continue living with this past.

That fear deserves understanding; Lau’s way of dealing with it needs separate attention. Wanting security and wanting to be regarded as good still leave other paths open. Yet he increasingly ties a new life to one condition: no one must make him confront what he has done. People who know his history cease to be people who can respond, leave, or make demands, and become, in his eyes, dangers to be removed. To preserve a life of being trusted and loved, he keeps damaging the relationships needed to build trust and love with others.

The records and the CD in the first film make this entanglement more complicated than a straightforward deception. Lau first deletes Chan’s file. The CD Chan sends, with the music used to test the audio equipment, then enters Lau’s home. Mary has already listened to it; Lau plays it, and Chan calls. Before leaving home, Lau tells Mary that he will restore Chan’s identity. Only afterward comes the meeting on the rooftop.⁸

This sequence keeps Lau’s unfulfilled promise within events that are still unfolding. Chan is alive; the men can still meet; harm already done can still potentially be repaired. The statement alone certainly cannot establish that Lau is ready to give up all self-protection. But neither can it be flattened into acting that never falters from beginning to end. Someone can fear what he may lose and still sincerely want to stop what he is doing. The difficulty lies precisely in the next step: when the two desires call for different actions, which will he allow to change his life?

On the rooftop, he says he wants to be good, and Chan demands that the matter go before a judge. Chan cannot be made into an obstacle who fails to understand forgiveness. Restoring Chan’s identity and surrendering control over the decision about himself would both mean that Lau cannot choose, alone, to retain only the parts of a new beginning that benefit him. Nor is Chan obliged to entrust his safety and his life again to someone who has just deleted his file. The life Lau wants to begin and the life Chan wants back have now come into direct conflict.

After the confrontation, Chan is killed by another mole, Lam Kwok-ping. Lau’s earlier control of the records and efforts to protect himself have already helped create Chan’s peril. A character need not be the sole author of every consequence to be more than an uninvolved spectator. The film gives several people calculations of their own, then joins those calculations together. Disaster emerges from relationships none of them controls in common.

Lau survives, but the third film does not simply have him continue an increasingly accomplished performance. He investigates, suspects, hunts for moles, and gradually mistakes himself for Chan Wing-yan. An image he once aspired to becomes the position from which he lives, sees, and investigates. He wants more than to make others believe he is good. He wants to begin from the identity of a truly good man and find the bad man who ruined that good man’s life. The person he is pursuing is himself.⁹

By now, the question of whether he is sincere or pretending no longer adequately explains the contradiction the film presents. Sincerity need not lie beneath every disguise like an original object waiting to be found. It can also grow within a disguise, then be so damaged by the actions that maintain the disguise that it has nowhere to exist. What makes Lau tragic is that he wants to change, yet gradually permits himself to change only in the likeness of someone who never committed these crimes. He wants not only a different future but a past that was never this way.

Chan becomes the place in which this impossible wish takes refuge. Chan has suffered injustice, has a legitimate mission, and is finally confirmed after death as a police officer. If Lau looks at the world from Chan’s position, it seems to offer a place outside his own crimes. But borrowing an innocent person’s position cannot make him that person. The more stubbornly he wants to inhabit Chan’s identity, the harder it becomes to acknowledge his own experience and continue living beyond it.

Writing about the end of psychoanalysis, Bruce Fink particularly cautions that the analyst cannot serve as an all-knowing judge of values, or simply have the analysand imitate another ideal personality.¹⁰ Set beside Lau, this warning is suggestive. He does not lack a sufficiently admirable person to emulate. He lacks the possibility of ceasing to live as before without replacing his whole self. His past belongs to him, but his future cannot belong only to the Chan Wing-yan he imagines as having never done wrong.

If we decide that Lau’s repeated harm to others makes this possibility no longer worth discussing, we can still firmly oppose his actions, but will have closed off a deeper part of the film too soon. If someone only pretends to seek goodness, exposure is nearly enough. If someone truly longs for goodness yet uses evil to defend that longing, we must keep asking what he has mistaken the life he wants to enter for. The question cannot bring the dead back. It does bear on how we regard those still alive.

Having Seen the Gentleman, How Can I Not Rejoice? — Book of Odes, “Wind and Rain”#

But Chan Wing-yan has a life of his own; he cannot appear only as a good man within Lau’s desire. The third film returns to his lifetime and gives him time to joke, seek treatment, fall for someone, and sleep.

Sleep is no small thing here. Undercover life requires him always to know whom he is facing, which words he can say, and what response might arouse suspicion. Someone talking to him may be testing him; he may talk to someone to obtain something. After living this way for so long, rest means more than stopping work. It also means being able, for a while, to put down the apparatus of explanation, vigilance, and performance. Dr Lee Sum-yee’s consulting room gives him somewhere to do so.⁹

He can sleep there and display an ease that serves no investigation. He need not bring a new lead every time he appears, or prove his loyalty through more danger. What we see in his time with Dr Lee is more than a supplementary character trait—proof that a good officer also has a tender side. His life has already begun to take another shape, and that shape is worth sustaining in itself.

The film entwines treatment with love, but Dr Lee’s judgments do not revolve only around that love. When treating Chan, she first explains that she must submit a report about Chan to the court after treatment. Later she tells Chan that as a doctor, what matters more to her is curing him. After Chan’s death, Lau asks about Chan’s file; she continues to regard Chan as her patient and safeguards his privacy. Knowledge of a patient does not automatically become a power any visitor can call upon.

This differs markedly from using knowledge to control others in the police and criminal worlds. There, knowing more often means having a hold on someone: being able to dispatch, blackmail, or eliminate him. With Dr Lee, knowing more instead brings a responsibility to safeguard what she knows for the other person; even when he can no longer answer, some of his life must still be kept from public access. Privacy is not merely a black box in which criminals conceal wrongdoing. It can also be the space that keeps an ordinary person from being wholly put to use.

Chan and Dr Lee’s encounter, then, does not need his later death to become precious. Affection has already happened, ease has already happened, restful sleep has already happened. If we turn them all into evidence of how great his sacrifice is, we hand the evaluation of life back to death. The fact that Chan could have been happy does not make him more deserving of a heroic death. He has already been living some happy days, and death takes away the possibility of continuing them.

Lau’s wife Mary, too, has made an everyday life with him. She has her own writing, using imagination and words to explore contradictions in people. When the secret enters the marriage, it affects how she has understood this man, how she decided to live with him, and whether she now wishes to continue. Her departure is a person’s judgment, not the film using a woman’s voice to pronounce a final verdict.

There is another Mary in the second film: Hon Sam’s wife. The young Lau’s desire for her is entangled with his early crimes and his relationship to Hon Sam. She makes active plans of her own and gives a clear refusal. The shared name creates an echo between two periods of his life, but it does not make Lau’s later wife a substitute for the earlier woman, as though two women’s faces took turns filling a fixed vacancy in a man’s mind. Both Marys are more than their functions in Lau’s story.⁸

This distinction also requires us to reconsider the question of whether love can save him. Love can open a previously unavailable life and make someone want to stop doing harm. But the person who loves does not thereby lose her own desires, limits, or right to leave. If love’s only task is to prove that a man still has a good side, a woman’s refusal begins to look like a failure to fulfill her responsibility to save him. That is not an acknowledgment of love’s power. It is the conscription of one person to keep another alive.

Listening to music in the audio shop offers a different kind of encounter, one that need not begin with a lifelong promise. Chan and Lau do not yet know each other’s positions in the police and criminal networks, but can already discuss equipment and sound, sharing an enjoyment. Tsai Chin’s “The Forgotten Time” does not authenticate two hidden souls. Appreciating the same song does not prove they are essentially alike. Yet learning who they later turn out to be cannot make their moment of rapport entirely counterfeit.¹¹

Sound often carries orders or exchanges intelligence in the trilogy, or leaves recordings that can be turned back upon a speaker to identify him. The person at the other end of a call need not be visible for a relationship to be at work. Words can be replayed; they can also escape whoever first controlled them and reach another pair of ears. When the audio demonstration CD reaches Mary, sound passes from the maneuvers between two men into a home. Lives thought separable begin to hear one another.

But listening to a song cannot be absorbed entirely into these uses of sound as evidence. The music also gives the men a stretch of time temporarily free of assignments dividing friend from enemy. In that time, Chan need not prove that he really is a police officer, nor Lau that he is not a mole. They are simply in the same place, hearing the same sound. This ordinary moment is not meaningless because it is brief. The film does not invent a later reconciliation for them, but it lets the audience know that guns and secrets were not all there ever was between them.

If a new life is possible, much of it may look like this: someone can talk with you without merely taking a statement; listen without turning every sentence into a future instrument of control; stay with you without deciding on the spot exactly what kind of person you count as. Such moments cannot accomplish change on their own. They do give change a life worth moving toward.

Renew Each Day, and Renew Yet Again — The Great Learning#

Sleep, companionship, and music give a new life something worth moving toward. But if someone’s wrongdoing remains, how can such a life begin? Here the films draw on religious language. Wang Li seeks blessings and fears retribution; Infernal Affairs illuminates its characters through a time of continuing suffering, as though however far they run, the past always waits ahead. Following this path, religion can easily be reduced to a larger, more exact system of settling accounts: what cannot be recorded in this life can be recorded in the next; what other people do not know is known somewhere that never forgets.

But religious traditions also contain another kind of patience: a willingness to ask seriously how someone who has harmed life can relate to life from now on.

Aṅgulimāla, in the eighty-sixth discourse of the Majjhima Nikāya, has a history of killing. The story does not stop his life at the moment he is subdued, repents, or dies. He meets the Buddha, is allowed to become a monk, practices, and goes on alms rounds. One day he sees a woman struggling in childbirth, feels distress at her suffering, and returns to ask the Buddha for help. This man who has stopped killing begins to want to help another person’s life come into the world.¹²

The Buddha tells him to make a declaration of truth to the woman, invoking that truth to wish safety to her and her baby. But Aṅgulimāla cannot claim never to have deliberately taken life: that would be a lie. He knows his past; becoming a monk has not made it disappear. The Buddha therefore changes the declaration’s starting point to his birth into the noble life. Since then, he has indeed refrained from deliberately taking life. This new truth is already something he can invoke to wish another person well.

What moves us in this account is that it does not ask him to pretend to be innocent, nor to remain silent forever because his past is not innocent. The earlier killing is true; the subsequent not killing is true as well. A new life need not erase the first fact to acquire a truth of its own. When someone begins to change, what emerges is more than a judgment of himself. It is also a new way of relating to other lives.

Placed beside Wang Li’s fear, this story leaves religious imagination with more than a debt of guilt passed on to a child. She fears that her actions and Wang Bo’s will harm the unborn baby. Aṅgulimāla’s story describes a relationship moving in the other direction: someone carrying a guilty history can draw on a change that has already occurred in his subsequent life to help bring safety to a mother and child. New life need not merely remind adults of what they once did wrong. It can also call forth things they have not yet done.

The discourse goes on to describe Aṅgulimāla’s attainment of arahantship, then his being wounded by objects thrown at him when he goes out. He has attained liberation and helped the mother and child before he is injured. His change does not wait to be recognized until he has suffered enough. After the injury, the text also describes him experiencing the joy of liberation in solitude. The fruits of past karma still reach him, but do not retrospectively cancel his new life. His life accommodates the achievements of practice, help given to others, karmic consequences, and joy together; the narrative is in no hurry to convert them into one total.

What this Buddhist account describes is a life whose course has already been changed by intention, action, and practice. The change is real and can continue. The limitation of Wang Bo’s death becomes clearer by comparison: someone who has only begun to use his abilities anew has not had time to experience such continuity. The religious story is more willing than the commercial film’s heroic ending to let a person who has changed remain alive, with more to life than repayment, and with the ability to help others.

Aṅgulimāla can invoke a truthful blessing because his subsequent abstention from killing has already happened. The Gospel of Luke turns attention to the person who welcomes, showing how he gives a home again to someone still returning.

The prodigal son has already resolved, far from home, to return and confess his wrong. His father sees him at a distance, comes to embrace him, and only then hears his face-to-face confession. Clothes follow, gifts restoring his place as a son, and a feast. The son had prepared to place himself among the hired workers. But the father does not first prescribe a period of labor and probation, waiting for repentance to be proved before acknowledging him as his son. Acceptance itself has already begun to change how he can live.¹³

This is more than a generous father leaving a debt out of the reckoning. If the son had to finish changing on his own outside the door, until everyone in the household was sure he deserved to come in, family relationships could only be a reward for successful reform. Here, welcome and recognition first give him a life from which to continue. He need not prove in isolation that he is already whole enough. Grace is not an assessment of an achievement. It goes out to meet a person still unfinished.

The elder brother refuses to join the feast, and the story does not erase his grievance. He remembers his years of obedience and work, and feels that what his father gives his brother exceeds the recognition offered to him. The father goes out to appeal to him, but the story does not go on to say that he agrees to join the feast. The feast is real, the acceptance is real, and the fracture in the family is real too. Joy does not have to pretend that everyone already shares the same joy before it can happen on this day.

The father’s welcome gives his son a home again; the story of Zacchaeus places acceptance alongside the disposition of property. Jesus first proposes to stay at his house; afterward comes Zacchaeus’s declaration about giving to the poor and repaying what he has taken through fraud. The text does not wait until every repayment is complete before saying that salvation has come to this house.¹⁴ This sequence lets us see another relation between repair and acceptance: repair need not only prove that someone deserves acceptance; it can also be something they want to undertake after entering a new relationship. Zacchaeus is both the sinner people grumble about and a person still able to respond and decide what to do with his property.

Greeting, visiting, and eating are everyday actions, yet in these stories they change the order of encounter: rather than only waiting for someone to prove his change alone before letting him approach, the approach itself begins to make room for his response. That relationship cannot answer for him, still less complete the repair for him. It can turn him from someone awaiting assessment into someone able, and required, to answer in the presence of others.

The Buddhist story of practice and Luke’s narratives of grace are not the same. The former describes how new intentions and practice change a life; the latter describes how seeking someone out, recognizing them, and accepting them bring a person back into relationship. Finding a common “mechanism of atonement” cannot justify wiping out these differences. Yet both offer a richer future than the idea that those who have done wrong deserve only suffering. They allow people not only to stop doing harm but to know joy again, live with others, and accomplish something. New life is not another name for keeping one’s head bowed forever.

Everything needed to live anew cannot, then, be demanded from one person’s inner resources. There must be someone who responds, a community one can enter, and ways of living one already knows or can learn. This does not mean that any particular person who has been harmed must undertake unlimited acceptance. Wang Li’s wish to find a different life with Wang Bo is her wish; Mary’s decision to leave Lau is her judgment. If religious hope is rewritten as an appeal urging women to remain in dangerous relationships, the new life it promises becomes someone else’s imprisonment.

Another question remains: on what grounds does a community accept someone, and on what grounds does it exclude them? It can open a door, and it can also impose conditions of entry someone can never meet. In Lu Xun’s “Blessing,” the “guilt” imposed upon Xianglin’s Wife differs from Wang Bo’s and Lau’s actual wrongdoing. She is forced to remarry, then required to prove her innocence through more absolute resistance, even death. Having stayed alive itself becomes a fault for which she can be held to account. Aunt Liu tells her she is guilty, then offers a means of atonement: donating a temple threshold. The temple accepts her money; Fourth Uncle’s household still will not let her take part in the rituals. Rules from different places press upon the same person. She has paid, and still has no place.¹⁵

After donating the threshold, her spirits briefly return and she can reach out confidently to do her work. That small change deserves to be seen. She believes she once again has a place in which to live, work, and participate in customary rites with others. When she is later stopped, the harm is not only that the money has been wasted. A relationship just restored has been denied again. Merely advising her not to be superstitious or seek recognition outside herself lets the people and institutions actually excluding her off too lightly.

This also reminds us that who gives recognition is more than a procedural question. Some people need to stop causing actual harm; others need to escape guilt imposed by someone else. Putting both in the same line to await forgiveness only strengthens an unjust tribunal. A new life sometimes requires returning to a relationship, and sometimes requires leaving one maintained through accusations of guilt. Acknowledging that someone can still live well should not be conditional on their accepting the guilt others have assigned them.

“There is still a future” is therefore more than something a generous person says to someone repentant. It also asks the speaker to consider whether they have made room for that future. Lau, meanwhile, has forced his own future into two possibilities: become someone who was always innocent, or wait for the past to destroy everything he has now. The danger of his crimes being exposed is real, and his fixation on a complete self makes other lives harder still to imagine. He cannot keep looking for a way out by removing the past. What is needed is a world in which someone can carry an incomplete history, be subject to necessary restrictions, and still have things to do and relationships to enter.

Such a world has not fully developed in these films. But in stopping, protecting, sleeping peacefully, and welcoming, something of its shape has already become tangible.

What Passes Is Like This River — Analects, “Zi Han”#

Once such a future has taken tangible shape and is subsequently lost, how does the audience remember it? The Infernal Affairs trilogy does not follow its characters’ lives in a straight line. The first film gives us their encounter and its outcome; the second returns to show how they entered these lives; the third interweaves Chan’s days before his death with Lau’s days after it. The ending the audience already knows does not coincide with what the characters know at the time.¹⁶

This arrangement is often treated as a puzzle: the later films supply earlier causes, and everything can finally be explained. But explanation is not all that looking back does. The second film gives histories to positions that seemed ready-made in the first. Private conspiracy appears within the legitimate position of the police; affection, exploitation, and betrayal appear within criminal relationships. Good and evil, which viewers first recognized by their labels, must now be reconsidered through particular actions. It is not that good and evil cease to exist. Labels can no longer spare us the effort of understanding.

The distance the third film creates hurts more. Returning to Chan’s lifetime, we see him living days in the consulting room that still hold promise, while we already know his death from the first film. Returning to the time after his death, we see Lau continuing his inquiries in the world left behind. As the two timelines alternate, the same “afterward” carries different weights: the days Chan is still hoping for have already been cut away, as the audience knows; Lau really has survived into later life, but gradually closes off the ways he might live with others.

Yet knowing the ending can also make us overbearing viewers. We begin to see all Chan’s ease as a brief respite before death, his love as happiness about to be taken away, and an ordinary encounter as a connection destined to fail. Viewers use what a character does not yet know to explain everything about him in advance. This can look compassionate. In fact, it extends death too far backward, allowing it to occupy even the time when he was alive.

Chan is not, at that moment, living through a doomed past for the audience’s benefit. He is living his present, hoping some things will continue, finding some people worth seeing again. Our later knowledge of his death cannot make those hopes never have occurred. A hope that is finally disappointed is different from a hope that never had meaning. Perhaps this is what is most worth cherishing in the third film’s return to his lifetime: someone already defined by an ending is given time to live his days again.

Later events do indeed rewrite earlier meanings. On a first viewing, the audio shop can offer simply an engaging encounter. Return after learning the men’s identities and fates, and the same encounter gains a weight it did not have before. When Žižek discusses retroactivity, he is identifying how later relationships reorganize the meaning of existing traces, not claiming that past events can physically happen again.¹⁷ So it is in the film: the audience hears something new, but the people in that earlier moment have not thereby acquired advance knowledge of what comes later.

Precisely because these two positions cannot be collapsed, listening again is more than mourning. The song brings back the loss and also the relationship before that loss, when it was not yet finally determined. Chan and Lau were once able to meet as two people with a shared interest; they were not born fit only to stand at opposite ends of a rooftop. This fact cannot supply a reconciliation that never happened. It does prevent their eventual enmity from passing itself off as the only relationship they could ever have had.

In “On Looking with Open Eyes,” Lu Xun criticized the way narratives close our eyes to life. A gifted scholar succeeds in the examinations and marries by imperial decree, overriding parental commands and the matchmaker’s authority. The question of whether the marriage system is good is reduced to whether this scholar can win first place in the examinations. One person’s good fortune hides a shared predicament. Rewarding suffering afterward can likewise make actual harm seem to have been made good. Yet Lu Xun did not automatically count a more horrific ending as clear-sighted: praise of tragic heroism and of blood and iron can deceive as well.¹⁸

Bringing this caution to Wang Bo, we need not rush to choose between being moved and exposing the feeling as a deception. We can grieve his final action and continue to think about how else he might have lived. Bringing it to Chan, we need not belittle the restoration of his name after death. His identity being restored and his loyalty acknowledged matter. But recognition still cannot encompass everything taken away. The achievements of an officer killed on duty do not include, and cannot replace, the restful sleep, conversation, love, and ordinary troubles a person might have known afterward.

If all that remains when we finish watching is that the bad man has at last been punished and the good man has at last been recognized, tragedy has repaired an order for us. Who died, who must care for what follows, and who will never have another chance to change can all recede behind the conclusion. Other people remain in the films to make that retreat uneasy.

Wang Li must continue. Dr Lee still has her own life and will still remember the man who could fall asleep in her care. Lau’s wife Mary decides to leave and later brings news that their child can say “Daddy.” The word hurts precisely because it points to a relationship still happening, one about which we cannot presume to know too much. We cannot know how the child will come to understand the father, or declare that a visit means the marriage has been restored and someone finally forgiven.

The child has learned a word; the world is opening for this child. The father’s past has already deeply affected that world, but should not become the only question the child must answer for the rest of their life. A child owes adults no proof of innocence and has no responsibility to carry on completing the redemption the story left unfinished. Mary’s visit is an event in her life and the child’s. It does not mean she has undertaken the task of salvaging Lau’s entire life. This child will learn many more words and come to know many more people. The father’s story is weighty, but it should not weigh so much that it hides the rest of the world.

Chan, too, once encounters a former girlfriend, May, with a child. The age May gives differs from the age the child states, leaving the father’s identity as a suggestion the film does not fully explain.⁸ Chan receives no complete account, while May is also arranging her life with the child. The information she withholds maintains a distance between their lives and his, and also deprives Chan of some possibilities. We can regret this loss without deciding, because Chan deserves sympathy, that everyone else’s choices should revolve around making his life complete. If a future has value, it cannot belong only to the protagonist we most readily sympathize with.

Beginning again, then, is no longer only a phrase addressed to the past. It can point toward what there is to do tomorrow, whom there is to see, a time in which to rest, a way of being together that does not demand continual self-defense. Someone needs to change; someone needs to leave; someone needs back a life they have given up for too long. These days may not be heroic, or enough to make a film’s climax. They are nonetheless where a wish can become more than a slogan.

Those who counseled Zhou Chu were still willing to say that there was a future. Having watched so many good people die and so many people fail to become the good people they wish to be, perhaps we should be more careful not to learn to recognize someone only at the ending. The trust protected on that journey was real. The rapport while listening to music was real. The peaceful sleep in the consulting room was real. Their later loss does not mean they were never real. That they were real is reason enough to go on grieving, and to go on hoping for what else a life might hold.

The cover is an original conceptual illustration.