[Answer] Will a Guy Regret Losing a Really Good Girl?

[Answer] Will a Guy Regret Losing a Really Good Girl?

Perhaps the reason A Chinese Odyssey became a classic is precisely because of its twisted, circuitous emotional entanglements. All the time travel, the postmodern structure, all the laughter, anger, jokes, and scolding are merely an outer shell concealing the most fragile and tender part at its core. The story could be told as A Chinese Odyssey, or as Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, or in any other genre whatsoever—but no matter the shell, what moves us is always the softness and sadness at the deepest level.

We do not necessarily need to travel through time to return to the past. In dreams, we always find our way back into those stories we can never return to again, watching tragedy replay over and over like the Pandora's Box in the film. We may never become the great hero standing atop seven-colored clouds, yet we face the pressure and challenges of life no less daunting than the Bull Demon King. We may not need to wear the golden headband to suffer the agony of severed love, but even if we were willing to put it on, it would not necessarily earn us the invincible golden cudgel. Those who are moved by A Chinese Odyssey have, in one way or another, probably seen the shadow of their own lives cast within it.

Missed chances and regret, joy and sorrow—we have witnessed every kind of union and separation in love stories, yet we never foresee our future selves inside them. At the time, perhaps we felt our hearts stirred, perhaps we were reluctant to let go, perhaps we wanted and hoped to cherish what we had—but we never truly understood what the other person really meant to us. Only after losing them, only after calling out Zixia's name seven hundred and eighty-four times in our dreams, do we realize that everything has already become the past, that the rest of our lives will have nothing more to do with them, and that all the vows and warmth of those early days have turned into helplessness and irony whenever memory returns. As Joker says, "There is no greater pain in this world than this."

Perhaps at the very moment he put on the headband, Joker recalled an afternoon many years before: he sat by the roadside as if time itself had gone astray, while she passed by at ease, leading her mount. Her smile in the sunlight seemed almost celestial. And it was that single backward glance on a summer afternoon that became the most enduring and beautiful part of the entire story. Many years later, Nalan Rongruo wrote: "If life were only like the first meeting, why should the autumn wind make the painted fan mourn..."