Past Lives
The stories we tell ourselves
In Past Lives, we follow childhood sweethearts Hae Sung and Nora Moon (previously Na Young) from South Korea to New York City, where they contend with notions of immigration and identity, choice and consequence, destiny and fated love. It’s a beautiful film, one that transcends your traditional romantic drama in a very satisfying way. I’m not a movie buff by any means, but it ranks among one of my favorite movies of all time.
Unsurprisingly, when the movie was over, I began to think about soulmates—the romantic kind, of course. The ones who always end up together in the end, despite the odds. It’s how things had to be, according to the scripture of Hollywood. Past Lives expands on this via the concept of in-yun:
It’s an in-yun if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes.
In-yun is less about a predetermined outcome than it is about the forces that conspire to make a life possible, specifically when it comes to relationships. Whether as strangers or lovers, it connects us beyond time and death, ties us to the ballast of a shared narrative woven by the tiny encounters that punctuate our days. That hello with your local barista, that unacknowledged moment of quiet delight with someone you don’t (yet) know on the subway—under the spell of in-yun, chance has the opportunity to take on meaning, to become a lasting serendipity.
Seven years ago, I won a trip to New York City to have breakfast with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics. I learned of this the same day I had submitted my two-week notice for my first job out of college. An American Express card loaded with two thousand dollars was attached to the letter. Bring a friend, it said. I brought two.
This was a trip of many firsts. First time on a plane as an adult. First time staying in an AirBnB. First time dancing in a gay bar. First time being offered a drink in a non-gay bar. First time ever seeing snow as it fell through the neon glare of Times Square. First time in NYC. It felt like something out of a movie, and I was living it.
On the last day, after my friends had departed, I went to the library near Bryant Park. A cute girl was sitting at one of the tables. Her red peacoat and black beret indicated to me that she was an artsy city person, the kind that SoCal, sun-bummed me would have never had the guts to approach. I was feeling bold that day though. There was magic in the air. Naively, I asked her, a total stranger, if she could watch my luggage. I wanted to buy a souvenir in the gift shop, I said, without the hassle of carrying my things around. She said yes.
I ran inside and walked around the gift shop, pretending to browse as my mind began to reel. What’s the next move? What should I say when I return? Oh fuck—what if she runs away with all my shit? You naive Californian! This is the city! The City! I bought a self-help book and hurried out. Thankfully she was still there, and so was my luggage. She smiled at me, settling my panicked mood, and asked if I found what I was looking for. I smiled back, with the shy, impish grin of a child, and said yes.
We talked for some time, and when I learned that she was leaving for home in a few hours, I asked if she wanted to explore the city with me. She said yes.
First time exploring an unknown city with someone I had just met.
Back in California, I knew I had to go back. One day.
Once, a lowly grad student was struggling to understand Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle at a coffee shop in Vermont, when an unknown woman walked through the door. All the seats were taken except for the one beside him. Behind her mask, she asked if she could take the seat—and sit six feet apart, of course. Behind his mask, he said yes.
The woman had recently been on a few bad dates and was ready to be single for awhile. She had plans with her friends that morning, but at the very last minute they were cancelled. She didn’t know what to do with the rest of her day, so she decided to go to a coffee shop, with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death in hand.
Immediately the tension was palpable. He ignored it and threw himself back into his equations as she wondered behind the red cover her book: how to start a conversation with him? Some time later, the boy rushed off to relieve himself in the bathroom. She decided then: I’ll ask him for a pen when he returns. He came back, and a pen was borrowed. They talked. They talked and got deep, wanting to see who was really behind the mask. The pen was returned afterwards, but not without a phone number in his hand.
Fate implicates story, and stories are powerful, for better and worse. You know the Didion quote. I get tangled up in mine all the time. I romanticize, dramatize, idealize the people and events in my life, which sometimes leads to disappointment. Other times I’m brought to my knees out of sheer awe for the mental motions my mind is capable of. Sometimes they’re all we have to buoy ourselves against the existential tide.
The struggle—my struggle—is remaining in touch with reality. It’s recognizing that I am more than the recursive, fleeting impressions of my sequestered landscape, the likes of which are often storied into existence, conforming it to my narrow, patterned ways. Ultimately I am better served in contact and connection with something Other, to others and principles and cheap canvases, where my imagination has a chance to become something more.
Sometimes we need to witness first-hand the ending of certain stories in order to realize that this is all they were: something beautiful, something tragic, something wholly human. We are more than the stories we tell ourselves, as their endings like to remind us. The endings are the beginnings are the endings.
The boy was heartbroken. He had been heartbroken before, but not like this. His entire world had fallen apart. The image he had of himself as a descent, loving man no longer made sense, had been completely shattered. He had never broken someone else’s heart before, her heart, and felt he had done so clumsily. The worst of his pain came from the possibility that she would never recover from his actions. He blamed himself constantly and was convinced that he would never love and find love again.
How could he? Guilt consumed him. Sin devoured his soul. His shame tormented him day and night, much like the hardened theories of a compromised Raskolnikov.
And yet. In time, with much discipline and inner work, held up by the arms of his generous friends—many alive, some dead—he found a way through his self-pity and constant abnegation of his self. Perhaps fate had deemed he was ready. In-yun decreed that there were other stories to be read and written.
He began to wonder—what’s still here for me? what do I want to do now?—and turned his gaze toward the future. Would he chase his ghosts like the haunted Hae Sung, only to find that he was more like Nora Moon? That the two were never so distinct, always one, their stories and being as necessarily entwined?
For the first time in his life, he has nowhere he needs to be. He is not obligated to any job or person or city, despite the desire for stronger commitments. Where will he go? Hazily reflected in his eyes is a city. Nourishing communities. Trials and tribulations. Possibility waiting to be shaped into something new, something his, something beyond the stories he tells himself.