Does Time Steal Everything in the End?

“Echoes of the Rainbow” — even just hearing the Chinese title, “Time, the Divine Thief,” sounds like such a melancholy phrase. And indeed, the film Echoes of the Rainbow really is a film filled with quiet sorrow, its sepia tones beautifully rendered, like a carefully arranged little vignette of time passing. It doesn’t actually do anything to help anyone’s own sense of time, but it still gives me a sliver of hope — that time can let everything slip away, even though that, too, has nothing to do with me now.

The film shows us the texture of life for Hong Kong people of that era, and for viewers and nostalgic types alike, it offers a kind of comfort. The family endures the “baptism” of one storm after another — the lover emigrates to America, the family fortune declines, the older brother dies of leukemia, and in the end even the father, the pillar of the household, passes away too. After everything, the mother and the younger son finally find peace, and looking at a rainbow on the horizon, remark that the older brother was always “a big talker.” You could also say this is a film that teaches people how to forget sorrow.

I’ve heard a lot of phrases built around “carrying something through to the end” — Mao Zedong said the revolution must be carried through to the end, and some TV drama wants to carry love through to the end too. I used to just take note of the phrase without ever really thinking about what “the end” actually meant, because no one can really say what “the end” is.

In primary school, watching the animated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I used to wonder what the bottom of the sea was. Pass through the water, peel back the mud and sand and rock, and isn’t that the bottom? But later, in geography class, I learned about the structure of the earth, and learned that the earth is wrapped in thick layers all the way through — even if you could keep digging down, you’d never reach a “bottom,” you’d just come out the other side of the planet.

Once upon a time, some marvelous piece of software on the computer would have me utterly absorbed, though never for too long; street racing is every boy’s dream, and I too once played Need for Speed obsessively, though I’ve stopped now… There’s a method people use to teach themselves to forget — write down the people you once cared about in a diary, and after some time, look back and find everything has changed, the people are gone. I’ve done this myself, and got the same result. Later, even the notebook itself went missing. That’s when I understood: I’m someone who can’t stay focused on one thing for long.

Sometimes I make myself a hypothesis: if I fell in love with time itself, right up until everything in the world froze solid or vanished, what then could I possibly do? At most, I’d climb into some vehicle and travel the earth in lonely company with the air. I really do want to know — can the years truly become a divine thief, and steal everything away, right down to the very last thing?