The Unbearable Necessity of Regret

Andie Park
Jul 25, 2017 · 11 min read

A few months ago, I visited my parents in Kentucky. Casually, father told me that they may move again. Maybe somewhere to the Midwest, this time. Nebraska is a place we’ve never been to, he tells me. He’s hopeful and seems to have forgotten how burdensome moving around the last few times have always been. He doesn’t share the same indelible memories of my parents arguing over my mother’s abundance of Unnecessary Things and how her incredible talent at spending doesn’t help anything. He also doesn’t remember my younger sister crying because she finally felt that our house in Boston was the first that she considered a home. Perhaps he willfully forgot about how the process of putting our house on the market in North Carolina has only ever been an endless cycle of expensive renovations and initial offers that almost comically fall through at the last minute. I want to remind him of these onerous memories that don’t deserve repetition, but I simply ask him when. Maybe a year, who knows?

I go through my boxes to determine what to keep and what to leave behind. What should travel with them to Maybe Nebraska and what should end up in a Kentuckian dumpster. The dilemma was daunting as I was not prepared to make such choices but, if I shoved my belongings in boxes without thinking about them for years at a time, did it really matter where it will end up?

I unlocked one of my trunks and found an aging scrapbook gingerly laying atop the piles of notebooks, as if it were awaiting this moment. It was a lavender shade adorned with sloppy glitter and colorful pompoms — the overtly feminine qualities transport me to 2003 when I was overly insecure and desperate for an acceptable form of identity. I flipped to a page that had my future written out for me. The future that I wanted when I was a daydream ridden ten-year-old. On the page was a list of fill-in-the-blank sentences in which I listed out facts of my life and dreams that only a naive youth could possess without a trace of irony.

My best friend is Lindsey, Elise, and my dog Mistie.

My favorite color is glitter.

My favorite word is everything.

When I’m an adult I want to be a world-famous actress.

Ten years from now (2013!) I want to win an Oscar.

If I could marry anyone, it would be Billie Joe Armstrong.

If I could wish for one thing, it would be to travel to every country — including Antarctica.

My favorite saying is live with no regrets.

I’ve never taken an acting class in my life so I don’t know why I was enamored drama — perhaps I was driven by the idea of fame and its transformative abilities to take me to a more luxurious and romantic world.

I’m still utterly confused by what I meant when I wrote that my favorite word was “everything” — did that mean everything as in “every word to ever exist” or literally the word “everything.” Either way, my answer illustrates noncommittal I was (and still am) to making any permanent decisions in case I change my mind on a premade decision.

I’m slightly (entirely) embarrassed of my past obsession for Green Day.

I’m also ashamed as hell that I thought Antarctica was a country.

Embarrassment aside, that one page contained a moment that forced my ten-year-old self to plan for my future, probably for the first time ever. And it was because I was expected to fill out some generic sentences. And, at twenty-four-years old, my life does not even remotely resemble the words and dreams that I left on that page. My today, my everyday, is never what I imagined it to be. I never won an Oscar nor married Billie Joe Armstrong (deep down there is still some regret over that). I haven’t traveled the world nearly as much as I would like to. I have endless regrets. These are seemingly silly questions from an inconsequential scrapbook, yet I was forced to ask myself a question — to what degree of control do I have over my desires and life decisions?

Live with no regrets.

In the fourteen years since, I’ve conditioned myself to roll my eyes whenever I hear some version of that generic command.

I don’t live with regrets.

Never a regret — always a lesson.

No Ragrets.

Because I live with too many regrets. To believe that I have none would be self delusion.

One rainy day in New York, I was craving a slow-moving art film. I put aside all of the electronic distractions from my everyday life and sat down to absorb the world around me. I was alone in my living room in the middle of a bustling Harlem neighborhood — a small group of kids were playing on the street in the rain and I remembered what it was like to not be repulsed by the rain. They were uninhibited and skipped their small feet along the wet pavement. Their laughter as background noise, I sat through the montage of painterly images that is Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love. I was hypnotized by Maggie Cheung’s attentively delicate performance as Su Li-Zhen (referred to as Mrs. Chan), enchanted by her swan-like movements as she picked up hot noodles on a rainy night and wiped the sweat off her glistening forehead. I swooned a little when Tony Leung’s character, Chow Mo-Wan kindly introduced himself to Chan as her next-door neighbor, holding eye contact as if it were his sole responsibility. The passion was there yet it is as constrained as the cramped hallway that they shared in their apartment as tenants.

As they wander into the narrow streets of 1962 Hong Kong, Chow and Chan share the realization that their spouses are cheating on them with each other. Caught in the same marital crises, Chow and Chan bond over their navigation of betrayal and despair, sparking an emotional affair without the committed physical act of consummation. It’s towards the end when their relationship is undeniably intimate and Chan confronts Chow about the impact that their spouses’ affair on their own relationship. To which Chow replies:

“I understand. After all, it’s already happened. It doesn’t matter who has made the first move.”

In response, Chan asks Chow if he really knows his wife. He says nothing. The exchange temporarily shatters the dreamscape that Chow and Chan have built together to control their denial of their spouses’ extramarital affairs. Still, Chow remains nonplussed. Despite their vows as well as the heavy cultural expectation of marital fidelity, Chow has no control over his wife’s choices. He cannot regret something outside of his existential grasp. And, with that, they continue wandering the streets, digesting the choices of their loved ones while remaining powerless over them.

It’s a simple and restrained moment. The love that blooms between Chow and Chan is never displayed in the passionate style that most romantic moviegoers would expect. But when Chow confesses that he cannot regret something over which he has no control — I felt a surge of emotion that I wouldn’t have felt had Chow and Chan admitted their love for each other. The emotion was an amalgam of helplessness and liberation — as if I went for run for an endless amount of time before reaching a limitless shore of water. It was a foreign feeling. But it was the feeling a becoming an adult.

Since graduating college, getting a job, moving to Manhattan, and living on my own I expected freedom. I expected a more productive, uninhibited, brazen self. A self that could wander through the streets of New York without a feeling of worry because I had finally survived years of preparation. This was the dream. Yet, the process of wondering of what I could have been had I paid more attention. The distress of young adulthood is burdensome specifically because it’s a mental back-and-forth between regretting the past and worrying about a stalemate future. Had I made the right choices? What will I be in five years? Is it too late to want more for myself?

Countless nights, I kept myself awake by asking myself these questions — attempting to examine every part of my childhood in which I might have made the wrong choices.

As a teenager, a college student, watching In The Mood For Love was a surreal experience. I couldn’t verbalize what was so magnetic about watching Chow and Chan interact, barely holding conversation. Now, years later, the film is an incredibly visceral and sensory tour of passion permeating the local world that Chow and Chan occupy. The slow motion shots of Chan walking up and down stairs to buy some noodles on a humid evening, the sumptuous palette of reds, the quiet waltz of two shadows walking on an empty street — this time I feel the pulsating tension that has struggles to find release. The omnipresent framing of hallways, doors, and staircases throughout the film conjure a feeling of compression that I am now too familiar with. The diegetic whispers of neighbors gossiping over Chan’s appearance (“she dresses up like that to go out for noodles?”) mirror the paranoia that I feel in my interactions with coworkers, friends, strangers. The obligation to appease multiple forces is finally a feeling that I grasp and it’s cathartic to voyeuristically observe how two neighbors in a different time and world struggle with such obligations.

One night, Chow and Chan quietly play a semi-masochistic routine of roleplaying each others’ spouses, acting out possible sequences of how the affair actually began. Chan’s fingers flirtatiously dance on the edges of Chow’s jacket and tie (the same tie that Chan’s husband bought on a business trip abroad). They share a passionate and knowing gaze until Chan turns away in disgust. She is unable to digest the lack of shame that her husband must possess in order to pursue his own selfish desires, barely giving her any thought. Chan, like many married people, views marriage as a surrendering of individual freedom and selfishness. She casually reveals to Chow her expectations of marriage:

“On your own, you are free to do lots of things. Everything changes when you marry. It must be decided together.”

At this point, Chan and Chow have entered a relationship in which they decide together the conditions of their relationship. The passion exists between them, but they decide to not consummate their relationship, for they will not stoop to the level of their spouses. They feed each other steak in an American-style diner and put brightly colored sauces on one another’s plates to try for the first time. They rent a hotel room in which Chan encourages Chow to write his martial arts serial, a lifelong dream of his. They continue their playacting rituals in the hotel room, preparing to confront their spouses with their knowledge of the affair.

They fall in love.

They both know it, even without ever saying “I love you”, sharing one kiss, or having sex. Such restraint nearly bleeds through the screen and onto the scarlet walls of their hotel room.

Chow receives an offer to move to Singapore. He deliberates, mostly because of his love for Chan. He realizes that they can never be together and that she will never leave her husband for him. The next few scenes are a fever dream, as an unknown amount of time goes by and Chow is now in Singapore. Without telling Chow, Chan travels to see him and sits alone in his apartment. She even makes a call to his office, yet is unable to say anything, leaving him only a lipstick-marked cigarette as a message of her ghostly presence.

They never see each other again.

A year later, Mrs. Chan is back in Hong Kong with a young son and Mr. Chow is in Cambodia, wandering around a destroyed monastery. He finds a pillar with a hole and confides his love for Mrs. Chan. Plugging the hole with earth, he leaves his secret behind and moves on with his life.

The camera lingers through the monastery grounds, gazing at the doors and passageways from the outside. An epilogue follows:

He remembers those vanished years

As though looking through a dusty window pane,

The past is something he could see, but not touch.

And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

And that’s it. Two broken hearts and a vaguely remembered past are all that remain from a deeply devastating relationship. How can they both move on without wondering what could have happened if they unabashedly proclaimed their love?

Like any other human being, I have memories that have profoundly impacted my growth, but the moments themselves are visually hazy and difficult to procure. I can’t pinpoint what it was about a certain action or happening that caused a major shift in my life philosophy. Other moments are insignificant yet, if it caused me deep humiliation or amplified my self-consciousness, I can visualize every mundane and minute detail. We don’t necessarily have a choice on what we remember. It’s difficult to separate the sequential aftermath of the memory from memory itself. Our emotions destabilize the objectivity of our past and, in the blink of an eye, time flies and we’re no longer in the past and don’t know how we arrived to where we are.

Regret is an essential product of living. It’s a reminder that we have the fortune of having multiple choices to create better lives for ourselves.

Wong Kar Wai understands how the fluidity of time warps our emotions and memories. One minute, Chow and Su’s loneliness evolves into friendship. A minute later, it transforms into intimacy. It’s impossible to determine the exact moments in which their relationship morphs into something more serious. Within seconds, they drift apart without saying a word and Chow is whispering his secrets to a pillar that will never give him validation or wisdom. All he can do is live with his loss and remember that his love was somewhat achieved and shared with another person on this earth.

Maybe Chow and Chan are truly in love. Or maybe it’s a concentrated mix of hurt, denial, and need for emotional solace. While their relationship is predicated on moments of timid playacting, it’s not necessarily about each others’ spouses. Chow and Chan provide the emotional support that they expected from their marriages yet don’t receive. They are locked down by commitments made to someone else, so how can they fill the void with intimacy without tarnishing their own values?

As an outsider, Chow’s pain can be interpreted as regret — a cowardly feeling which resulted in a lack of initiative, courage, or passion. But there’s nothing weak or timid about Chow’s decision to move on. As frustrating as it was to watch these two drift apart, most likely never to see each other again, the process of suppressing our strongest emotions is something that is all to familiar and frequent. And that process isn’t necessarily because we, as humans, are too scared to take the riskier, sexier choice. It’s simply a result of everyday living, in which we must focus on the most immediate problems that we face in order to face the next day with a fresh mind and new ambitions.

Regret is an essential product of living. It’s a reminder that we have the fortune of having multiple choices to create better lives for ourselves. Whether our choices be temporary or permanent, the presence of regret is predicated on our own free will — we will always be wondering of what could have been had we chosen an equally available path. Watching Chow and Chan explore these possibilities without ever consummating their love for each other is an ode to the freedom of choice and the inevitable regret that will accompany each choice.

The next time I go home I will open the magenta trunk once again to read that page from my scrapbook. I can look at the handwritten curlicues of my youth with a smile on my face, knowing that I always had the power over my future and am strong enough bear the regret that will no doubt come my way.

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