Hesitation & Honesty
Honesty is one of the most complex topics morally. It is easy to lie, and lying seems good a lot of the time. It is never good to be dishonest. [Proverbs 8:1-11; John 8:21-32; James 3:8-18; 3 John] But one does not always have the choice to do good, even if one always carries the obligation to. One does not always realize they are lying, even though one carries the burden of truth always. People blind themselves and are blinded at the same time; it is one motion. Telling the truth is therefore often the most difficult and convoluted thing one can do. The characters in Hesitation demonstrate this.
Disonesty is most typically understood as active and malicious lying. In "Upstairs in the Tavern," our protagonist meets a friend of his named Weifu in a tavern. The two catch up on recent going-ons; mainly Weifu telling the protagonist of his recent errands. First, the friend had to relocate a flooded family gravesite on request of his mother. Unfortunately, Weifu could not come down from the north until well after the flooding, so when they dug up the grave there was nothing left, not even hair or wood chips. He merely puts some mud in the new coffin he bought and has that buried in its new place. The friend puts it this way: "I'd achieved what I'd set out to do: I'd done enough to fool my mother, to set her mind at rest. . .If my old friends could see me now, I sometimes think, they'd disown me. . .But that's how I am."[1] After this, the friend's mother asks him to buy a flower for a girl she knows – there is some history behind this flower purchase, it is not a romantic thing, but Weifu is more wanting to do this than he was move the grave. Regrettably, the girl had died of sickness quite some time before, and neither Weifu nor his mother had realized. Weifu gives the flowers to a younger relative of the girl. "Now, all I had to do was tell Mother how pleased Ah-Shun [the girl] had been, and the job was done." Weifu also again laments the consequences of his lying just after this: "Completely pointless; but time passes, at least."[2] He understands that this habit of "white lies," of smoothing things over, of "making things easier," numbs life completely. It makes it seem hollow and empty and without direction or grounding. Nonetheless, Weifu is satisfied with his lies. Then there is Aigu's predicament in "Divorce," which is malicious and dishonest but not lying. Contrary to the title, Aigu's husband cheated on her and she wants not a divorce but justice. Aigu is quite livid about her situation and the fact that no one seems to care about bringing justice to her and her husband. She is taking the situation up with higher authority in an attempt to be given what she wants. She says to Mr. Qi, said higher authority, "It was that wicked whore who seduced him into throwing me out. I'm his wife – carried in on a bridal chair, with all the proper ceremonies! And you don't get rid of me that easily."[3] The husband in question is here too of course. Naturally, all the two end up doing is scream at each other. Mr. Qi is of no help. Him and the other people Aigu had been to before all tell the pair to shut up and just divorce. Aigu likely never said one incorrect thing, but honesty is not about not lying. Honesty is telling the truth. Dishonesty is not just lying, it is not telling the truth. Aigu does not really care about true justice, but is seeking her own gain and prioritizing her own wants above the entire world and framing it as "her justice;" that is dishonest. Everyone in this story is more than willing to obscure the truth, to save face for the sake of some idea of society they have, and it is only their motivations behind their dishonesty that put them at odds with one another and not their core motivations or inherent disposition. Of course, a cheating husband is not a situation one finds themselves in if everyone in the marriage is being honest. It is the husband's severe dishonesty that perpetrated this mess, but it seems to have brought out the tendency of dishonesty in everyone.
It's not always clear when someone is intentionally snuffing the truth for their own gain as opposed to not knowing that they're lying to themself. The protagonist of "In Memoriam" reminisces on a relationship of his with a girl named Zijun. Their relationship to begin with is rebellious, garnering disapproval for some of the elders around them, particularly Zijun’s uncle, but once they move in and become more "official," the relationship begins to die, and economic hardships so great that they have to kick their dog to the curb in order to survive put the nail in the coffin. One thing is unclear, though – when exactly did Juansheng, the protagonist of this story, stop loving Zijun? The relationship takes a nosedive once Juansheng is given his letter that fires him, but there were signs before this:
"Investigation revealed its [Zijun's unhappiness] usual cause: some secret feud with the landlady, the hens the casus belli. But why did I have to drag it out of her?
"I don't mind tightening my own belt, I tried to tell her, but I can't bear to see you slave like this. She gazed in sorrowful silence at me; I decided I had better say nothing, either."[4]
Juansheng is not the clearest on his own feelings, and perhaps neither is Zijun. Things grow colder, and Juansheng starts spending more time at a library just to be out of the house. The pair eventually separate. Zijun returns to her family and dies. The protagonist concludes his relationship as such: "I shouldn't have told her the truth. For the sake of the love we once shared, I should have smiled and told her lies for ever. Truth is a luxury not everyone can afford; to Zijun, it had brought only desolation. Lies bring their own hollowness, but they do not oppress like the truth."[5] Our protagonist was unable to work for his relationship – sure, he gave his all to provide money and all the things needed for life therefore, but he gave nothing to the relationship. He wanted something a relationship couldn't give, and held on to his rebellious feelings from before long after they stopped existing. His inaction, his unwillingness to be rigid, leaves him very cold and lifeless at the end of the story. By the time he decided to be honest, the relationship was long gone. 'Brothers' shows a more direct ignorance: the protagonist's brother, Jingfu, falls bed-ridden with some kind of sickness, and the protagonist, Peijun, scrambles to find some way to treat him. The protagonist wants a Western doctor – Western in practices and not in ethnicity – to tend to his brother, as they have the more knowledge about diseases and the more advanced methods for treating them. "Normally he was a great enemy of superstitious forebodings, but there seemed to be something horribly ill-omened about Jingfu's face and voice, as if the sick man himself had some kind of presentiment."[6] This is just after telling Jingfu that he has 'just a cold' – a lie. Peijun calls in a traditional doctor because the Western doctor cannot arrive for some time, and the traditional doctor diagnoses the disease as scarlet fever. This sends Peijun into a spiral, and he begins to plan in his mind for Jingfu's death. The Western doctor eventually arrives and diagnoses Jingfu with measles. This at first dumbfounds Peijun, but once he is given the prescription for it, he is relieved. The next day, even before medicine, Jingfu is recovering. Of course, the traditional doctor lied to Peijun, for reasons undefined, but Peijun had quite severely primed himself for the lie. He had lied to himself quite a bit already, but how would Peijun have known it was a lie? He had no knowledge of medicine to help him; he only could guess, could fear. Even if Peijun had no choice, as unfair as it is, Peijun was dishonest, and this is sin.
Even worse, even more malicious than the distortion done of ignorance is the distortion that is so bent it's cause and motivation cannot be determined. The protagonist of "Our Learned Friend" is a new teacher for a woman's school. We are introduced to him the day before his first lecture, as he is preparing it still. One interesting detail is that this protagonist identifies himself to others as Gao Erchu, which in Chinese sounds just slightly different from Gorky, in honor of Maxim Gorky, a Russian socialist writer that Gao admires. Gao holds himself to a high standard, but he does not seem to meet that standard. When he goes to the women's school for the lecture the next day, he is woefully unprepared and puts off doing any preliminary preparations. His lecture, at least he thinks, goes horribly, and he has a breakdown giving it: "He felt an irresistible desire to glance down at his audience: the classroom was now an ocean of eyes, of dainty little equilateral triangles perched upon delicate nostrils, swirling into a single glittering mass, rushing towards him."[7] He decides that woman's colleges are a plague and sets to resign that very day. The protagonist's hallucinations make it difficult to determine what really happened, how things really are, and they mislead Gao himself. Our protagonist seems to not measure up to Gorky at all, but is that the truth? Is he a great writer and taken hostage by these circumstances? Is he thoughtful and genuine but suffers at the hand of insecurities? Gao sturggles with self-image with a scar he has on his head. Where did those insecurities come from? It is too complex to see through, at least in this short story. There is also the distorted reality regarding Xianglin's wife in "New Year's Sacrifice." Xianglin's wife is an enigma. We're never given her name; she's always just called "Xianglin's wife," for various reasons but mainly because the girl intentionally hides her name, something the protagonist of the story makes a note of. The protagonist of the story is returning to his home town for the New Year's Festival and encounters Xianglin's wife, now a beggar. She asks him about life after death. When she dies the day after, the protagonist is internally prompted to recall his history with Xianglin's wife. When the protagonist first meets Xianglin]'s wife, she is brought over by someone else offering her to be a servant. Her husband had died and she needs work, she said. This story would decay and change and decay again as time goes on. Her mother-in-law comes by to pick her up not long after she begins her servant work, for she's been set into a marriage and she had tried to run away. Xianglin's wife hates the marriage but is physically forced into it. A couple of years pass and Xinaglin's wife returns, saying her husband and their son had died. The village pokes fun at her once she comes back and insists that she really wanted the marriage, so she shuts down completely. "Realizing – from their smiles, from their tone of voice, perhaps – that they were mocking her, she merely stared. Soon, she didn't even bother to turn round."[8] Eventually the protagonist's family make rid of her, when she turns to being a beggar. She dies an enigma, nothing about her ever being clear.
It is hard to tell if Xianglin’s wife is trying to deceive the village or herself. It is just as unclear if she is being deceitful at all. This is the final, ultimate consequence of sin. When dishonesty entered the world with Adam’s rebellion and the same of his seed, it did not just allow people to hide the truth but shattered reality as we know it. In the world as we inhabit, we have no way of knowing exactly what is true and exactly what is false, what is real and what is imagined, what is artificial and what is natural, what is fabricated and what is created. More than being led astray, more then blinding ourselves, the Earth itself is dishonest and cannot portray reality as it is. It cannot give us the plain Truth. Sin has left us fumbling in the dark, unable to truly grasp anything, without any way of comprehension. When Rahab lied to the men of Jericho about the presence of the Hebrews, she sinned against the Lord by obfuscating reality. It does not matter that to hand over the men of the Lord to die would have been sin; the option to lie is still a sinful one if there is no better alternative. Take hope. Christ has suffered the wrath of God on behalf of all of creation, so that we may walk without sin; He died for the sin of dishonesty, too. The Lord is working in us not just to make us more willing to tell the truth but to have a better grip on the world we live in, a comprehension of our true situation. When we submit to Him, we give up our love of distortion and seek after the truth. In this life, though, we will only have an imperfect view of the world, for Christ will keep us imperfect until His return to establish His Kingdom. On this day, all things will be made new and all sin will be no more.