Title: A collection of thoughts on Shen Wei
Fandom: Guardian
Content notes: Spoilers for the whole series; lots of questions I don't have satisfying answers to; things that matter to me when trying to write (which may not matter to anyone else)

Summary: Poetry and flailings toward an understanding of Shen Wei.

(The views expressed herein belong to the author and are not intended to be considered definitive... even by the author. There's a reason I use the word flailings!)


*****

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
-- from "A House Called Tomorrow," by Albert Rios

He says he’s been waiting ten thousand years as if he experienced them all. He hasn’t. I found that out after I’d started writing for this fandom, and I stopped being able to write him at all. I'd thought: this is what it looks like when you've had ten thousand years to accept your fate, but still have hope for the good things you've been promised.

A decade or two, for me, is just not enough to wear down all the sharp edges of his losses from the past and replace them with -- what? A grad student and some colleagues? And then there are all the new losses: the deterioration in Dixing, the genocidal murderer in charge of the SID for years, the scheming and backstabbing of Dixing's government...

But Shen Wei looks happy. Content, at least. I don't understand that.

I keep trying, but my stories falter when they crash into What is Shen Wei thinking?; they are carried though, if at all, by What would Zhao Yunlan do? (But that’s a different essay.)


Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes
you cannot even breathe deeply, and
the night sky is no home, and
you have cried yourself to sleep enough times
that you are down to your last two percent, but

nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
-- from "Saltwater," by Albert Ross

Did he really spend his whole life (in the past) searching for his brother? His twin, whom he lost at such a young age -- the one bound into a pillar we never see Shen Wei spend much time with. The one he never mentions until he has to, and then never admits to.

Maybe we caught them in a rough patch, and Shen Wei had spent the last ten years coming to visit every week, carrying a boxed lunch and incense and a hope for filial connection. But too many insults to his hair and his clothes and his obligations wore him down, and he had to take a break for his own mental health. If we'd caught him a few months before, or after, we'd have seen those lunchboxes stacked neatly in his fridge. Maybe he was devoted, and we just don’t get to see it.

But it makes no sense to me that the first emotional resolution that we get at the end is between the brothers, if Shen Wei is not devoted. So he must be. And yet I don’t see it. So I don't understand.

And then I can’t write Shen Wei.


I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
-- from "Variations on the Word Sleep," by Margaret Atwood

I believe in Shen Wei’s love for Zhao Yunlan. I can’t help it. It’s the most obvious thing, watching them together: Shen Wei loves Zhao Yunlan.

But ultimately, it doesn’t help me, because it doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking. When does he decide that Zhao Yunlan is Kunlun? How much of what he does is based on the need to protect the timeline? (How much of his need to protect the timeline is his love for Kunlun?)

And before that, why did he become a professor? What did he want, when he first came to Haixing, and how has that changed over the years? We’re given a few glimpses of who Shen Wei was, and then some hints of who he is -- but I can’t bridge the gap.

I want him to be angry, or grieving, or desperate in his love; something that would make his story make sense to me. He grew up in a war, lost everyone he'd ever cared for, and woke up in a changed world. As far as I can tell, he basically just dusted himself off and kept moving.

I keep trying to make his story about trauma, and there are certainly ways that his attitude toward his own suffering bears that out. But I can’t make the pieces fit.


but if you can wash or handle
artifacts like this...
...
without a pathological
fixation on the day you will stumble
and drop it, or smack it
against the sink divider or brush
it with a hand reaching
for the letter opener, you are ‘junzi’:
a superior person, as Confucius had it.
You probably make love
to your spouse without imagining
betrayal and pay taxes
without complaint
because you think nothing
in truth belongs to you.
-- from "I Foresee the Breaking of All That Is Breakable," by John Estes

This is as close as I’ve come to understanding Shen Wei: he doesn’t expect to change the world. He engages in right action, as best he can determine it, and he lets everything else run through him like water.

He isn’t devoted to his brother, who has turned away from right actions; but as the older brother, he is responsible for the other.

The world he grew up in is ten thousand years away, but that doesn’t weigh on him, because attachment to impermanent things is not a way to right action. (He has regrets, but those are as expected as rain and as useful to hold.)

In a conversation recently, I opined that Shen Wei probably thought of himself as Hei Pao Shi all those years when that was the only thing he was called. But I've changed my mind: He has always been Shen Wei, because losing his name would deny his family. He has always known exactly who he is.

I have to admit that I'm not certain of my thoughts here; I'm not even entirely sure what my thoughts are. Certainly there's no reason for my flailing to affect anyone else's view of Shen Wei, if you have one that works for you. As I keep saying, I don't understand.

I have only vague memories of Chinese philosophy from my literature classes. I never studied it. Maybe I don’t recognize Shen Wei because I’m culturally ignorant of his archetype.

But I have this one thin thread, and for me at least, it's working.

I finally finished two stories, one of which features Shen Wei -- not as a point of view character, but as a significant one -- and for both of them, I can trace What is Shen Wei thinking? from the beginning of the story to the end. (They were still carried along by What would Zhao Yunlan do?, but that’s still a different essay.)