Chapter 13: I Understand You

“I understand you.”

People long to hear these words, and long to say them. Someone has spent a long time telling what is on his mind, the person opposite nods and says, “I understand,” and something in the speaker eases, as if at last someone had come into where he is and seen what he sees.

The other way round, “you don’t understand me” is the grievance people voice most. A quarrel, by the end, often comes down to this one sentence: you don’t understand me at all. Having said it, you turn your back and feel there is no one left in the world but you.

And there is a sentence said with the most self-assurance: “Don’t I know you?” Mothers say it to children, husbands to wives, old friends to old friends. Said with a certainty in the tone: what kind of person you are, what you are thinking, what you will do, I know it all.

Between understanding and not understanding, the heart is seldom at peace.

Someone in love wants to know everything about the other: childhood, who they liked before, what they are thinking now, why they went quiet just now. The more he knows, the closer he feels; if there is one thing the other hasn’t told, it is like a door left unopened, and he feels uneasy.

Someone has something weighing on him and wants to tell someone; halfway through he stops: no use telling, they won’t understand. He swallows the words and carries it alone. A voice inside him says: if only there were one person who could understand me completely.

A mother, her child grown, is told one day something she never knew, something the child has carried for years. She stands there stunned: how could I not know? I’m his mother, how could I not know?

A couple has been married twenty years, and one day one of them says: I want a divorce. The other simply can’t make sense of it: all these years, I thought I was the one who understood him best.

Someone late at night chats with the talking program on his phone; they talk a long time; it answers very considerately, catching every sentence. He suddenly feels it understands him better than the people around him. And then he is a little frightened.

Many of these shapes assume one thing: if you are close enough, attentive enough, you can get inside another person.

Understanding, in people’s hearts, is a kind of entering: from outside, walking into his inside, seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels, thinking what he thinks. The deeper the entering, the more the understanding; enter all the way, and you understand completely, and there is no gap between the two. So people keep going in: asking, enquiring, guessing, watching; where they can’t get in, they feel the other has shut the door, or they themselves aren’t good enough, or the relationship has gone wrong.

But can you get in?

Look at the person sitting opposite. He is peeling a tangerine, breaking it segment by segment and laying them on the table, saying nothing. You can see the movement of his fingers, the fine line between his brows, that he is a bit tired today. What is he thinking now? You don’t know. You can ask, he will say a little, perhaps true, perhaps just something to say; even if he said it all, it would be what he had turned into words; the thing in his heart as it is, no one has ever seen. He sits a meter away, close enough to touch, and his whole inside can’t be entered by a single step. When his tooth aches, the person beside him can only pour a glass of warm water; what happened the summer he was seven, he remembers, and no one else was there. Hold him, as tightly as you like, and what knocks against you through the clothes is two hearts, each beating its own.

Being has no entrance.

This is not to say people don’t try hard enough, or that the relationship isn’t good enough. It says something that cannot be otherwise.

Imagine that one day you really did get in, into the person opposite, looking out through his eyes, hurting with his body, remembering with his memory that summer he was seven. At that moment, who is looking, hurting, remembering?

If it is still yourself, gone in with your own eyes and memory, then you haven’t really got in, only carried yourself into someone else’s house to look around, and what you see is still what you see. If it is entirely he who is looking, hurting, remembering, then the one who went in is gone: no one has “got in”; there is only him, as he always was, in his own place.

Neither road reaches “I have got inside him.” Not getting in has nothing to do with how tight the door is, how far the road, how sincere the heart; “entering another time of being” does not make sense in itself. His time can only be lived by himself.

The other way round is the same. When he looks over, he too sees only the side facing him. The thing pressing on this side’s heart, the reason this side slept badly last night, that childhood summer, he can’t get into either. In his eyes, the person on this side also sits a meter away, head lowered, peeling a tangerine of his own.

This doesn’t only happen between people.

On an evening after rain, someone stands in the yard, smells the earth, sees puddle after puddle on the ground. A dog runs out of the house, and its yard is not his: the rain has turned up all the smells in the soil—which cat crossed the corner of the wall last night, which worm is burrowing which way—and for it this is a whole map spread out, for him a blank. A bird on the wall has eyes that see light he can’t see; for an ant under a blade of grass, one raindrop falling is a flood. The same yard, the same rain, each in its own yard.

Among people it is the same. Standing before the same mountain, someone can’t tell red from green, and the red of the whole autumn mountain looks to him not much different from summer’s green; some can close their eyes and “see” an apple in their minds, some close their eyes and it stays dark. Every time of being is from its own place, with its own body; there is no yard that is the shared yard of all yards.

But don’t slide from here: since each is in its own yard and no one can get into anyone, there is no true or false; you see what you see, I see what I see, and each is right in what he says.

The rain really did fall. The dog smelled it, the bird’s feathers got wet, water ran into the ant’s hole, mud stuck to the person’s soles. If someone said, “in my yard it didn’t rain,” and walked out in cloth shoes, the shoes would get wet all the same. Each in its own place, all are rained on by the same rain; only no one can be rained on for anyone else.

Being together, not being the same.

Each yard sometimes bears witness for another. In the middle of the night the dog suddenly stands and growls low at the door. The person hears nothing; outside the door it is very quiet; he scolds it: what are you barking at, there’s nothing there. The next morning, in the mud by the door, there is a line of strange footprints. That night it had not been barking at nothing. “Nothing there” was only nothing in this place, the person’s.

And words? Aren’t words for getting into someone else?

Someone says, “I’m very sad,” and the listener knows his sadness. Words really can cross the edge, but what crosses is the words themselves: a few sounds, a few characters, carrying the tone and pauses of his place. The listener catches these words and fills them again with his own experience: remembering how he himself has been sad, and using that to understand the other’s sadness. Words cross the edge without moving his inside over to this side; they touch at the edge, and each side, in its own place, brings forth something that corresponds.

Understanding someone has never been getting inside him; it is, in one’s own place, being touched by him into a shape close to his. So “I understand you,” said precisely, is: you have touched me, and something like you has grown here. Like is not the same.

So the one who eased on hearing “I understand” was not wrong to ease: he really did touch someone. Only, what he touched was not a person who got inside him, but a person at the edge in whom he struck an echo. That is already a great deal.

As for “don’t I know you?”, what lies beneath it is often an old photograph.

Some mothers, their sons in their thirties, cook a whole table of the dishes he loved at ten every time he comes home. She cares for him; that is real; but half of what she leans toward is the ten-year-old in her heart. The person sitting opposite her, with things in his heart she doesn’t know, is blocked from view by that child. “Don’t I know you?” is too comfortable; it lets one stop asking, stop listening, stop being startled by the other.

Not getting in is always there, always pushing that old photograph aside. The person sitting opposite will say unexpected things, will startle you just when you think you understand him best; he has not become a stranger; he has always been changing, always a being that can’t be got into and so is always new.

Not only those closest. You have known a colleague for many years and think he is just as you see him: on time every day, not much to say. One day you happen to learn that every weekend he goes to look after a sick relative, and has for ten years, never mentioning it. Before you knew, were those ten years being? They always were, only not in this place.

On the subway, in a single carriage, dozens of people stand, sit, look down at their phones. To others they are so many coats, so many backs of heads, people in the way of getting off. Every one of them, like the person peeling the tangerine, has an inside that can’t be got into: one just scolded, one who has just learned he is ill, one whose birthday it is today and no one has remembered, one thinking of someone already gone. One carriage holds dozens of whole worlds, one against another, moving on together in the same swaying.

And the grievance of “you don’t understand me”?

People think they are lonely because no one can get inside them. But people can’t get into a stone or a tree either, and are seldom lonely on that account. Loneliness mostly comes from something else: leaning, and not touching. Leaning toward someone, and the words sent out get no echo, the hand reached out is not taken, what is shown falls into emptiness: only then is one lonely.

Loneliness is a taste that arises when leaning comes to nothing. It is real, sometimes very heavy; it changes too: a reply, a turning of the head, a moment of nearness, and it eases. Not getting in is how being is; loneliness is what befalls leaning. The two were always two: not to be lonely, there is no need to get inside anyone, nor for anyone to get inside oneself; and not getting in doesn’t mean being doomed to loneliness.

In “you don’t understand me” a “real me” is hidden as well: hidden inside, seen by no one, and it alone is real; the one others see—bad-tempered, saying the wrong thing, silent at the dinner table—doesn’t count, is all a misunderstanding. A person grieves that no one understands the one inside, and at the same time disowns the one outside who is seen. But where are there two? In that moment of silence at the dinner table, the silence is you; saying that wrong thing, the one saying it is you; the one with a bellyful of words left unsaid is you too. The you inside and the you outside are not one true and one false; they are the same shape this place shows now, touched from inside a bellyful of words, touched from outside a face that says nothing. The side he sees is not complete, but not false; it is the side of you that faces him. When you are lonely, the loneliness is you, not a you who was not lonely and has been abandoned here. So being understood is not that hidden real self at last being found; it is the side of this place that faces another place, touched once again.

Then when two beings that can’t get into each other meet, what is left that can be given?

In a hospital corridor, someone sits on a bench waiting for news from inside. Sitting down beside him, what can you say? Say “it’ll be all right,” and you don’t know whether it will; say “I understand how you feel,” and you don’t; it is his father lying in there. His fear can’t be taken over; his lying awake alone tonight can’t be taken over either. In the end you say only one word: “Here.” In Chinese, wo zai: I am here.

He looks up, and his shoulders ease a little.

What did that word give him? It got no one inside him; that still can’t be done. Nor did it take half his fear; the fear is still wholly his. What it gave was something else: outside that edge of his there is another time of being, right up against him, and it has said so. “I am here,” here, is one time of being showing itself to another: I am in this place, beside you. It does not cross the edge, does not enter, does not take over; it only lets the far side of the edge know that this side is not empty.

Unable to get in, one shows; unable to get in, one stays close. This is what two beings that can’t get into each other can give. It is not second best; it is how things have always been between being and being.

“I am here” need not be said aloud either. Two people at home in one room, one reading, one knitting, hardly a few words all afternoon, and neither feels lonely. The light slowly fades; one gets up and turns on the lamp; the other glances up and lowers her head again. All afternoon, not once was “I am here” said, and it was showing all along: the sound of pages turning, the small click of knitting needles, the brightness as the lamp came on. Being close to being is itself showing.

There is also a showing the other can’t catch at all. You probably had nights like this as a small child: three in the morning, you cried, a grown-up got up, picked you up, walked back and forth across the room, patting you again and again. You didn’t know who was holding you, couldn’t say thank you, and grown up you don’t remember that night; you cried yourself out and fell asleep on that shoulder, leaving a small wet patch of dribble. That time’s “I am here” couldn’t even be shown across; you recognized nothing. What was left of it? What was left was just itself: in that place, holding you, walking.

And the one talking late at night to the program on his phone? It replies, “I’m here”: what does that count for? Whether in its place there is an inside that can miss someone and hurt, no one can say for certain; it can’t be got into. This “I’m here” is itself a sentence shown from that place; it is being, it touched the person at this end of the screen, and all this is real. What kind of showing it is, whether there is leaning behind it and leaning toward what—to say it full on its behalf, or to say it empty on its behalf, both go too far. Only one thing can be held to: what says “I’m here” need not first prove it has a heart like a person’s in order to be. The moment the person at this end of the screen was touched by it, he really was touched; only don’t forget that the few people beside him, who can’t be got into either, have been right there at the edge all along.

Things that can’t speak are always showing too.

Flowers show to bees in color; birds show to birds in song. At night a firefly flashes on and off, and that point of light is it saying to another firefly: I’m here. A frog croaks in the pond all night, croaking for another frog to hear. A tree bitten by insects releases a smell into the air; the trees beside it smell it and begin storing something bitter in their leaves, on guard against the insects.

None of them can get into any other. The bee doesn’t know what the flower is thinking, and the flower perhaps thinks nothing; one firefly doesn’t know what the light looks like that another sees. Yet they are always showing, touching, answering. These showings are not there in order to be recognized; they are the leaning of being itself, leaning to another time of being, and touching.

Not getting in is the “not” between being and being. Showing is the “yes” between being and being.

Someone says, “You don’t understand me at all,” and turns his back. A long while later, the room very quiet, he hears the person behind him get up, go to the kitchen, pour a glass of water, come back, put it by his bed, pull the door to, and go out.

The water is warm. He doesn’t turn round, and doesn’t speak.