Here is a rundown of what happened at the last Socrates Cafe. The topic was: "what is fate?"
About the last thing I expected to be talking about in a discussion on fate was Forrest Gump. But he manages to wean his way into almost any topic over here. As I said tonight, and I will repeat here, if anyone who is coming to China, the first thing I am going to tell him is to make sure he is very familiar with this movie. It makes a great point of reference. Indeed, American movies are brought up not infrequently in conversation to make or disprove points about the culture, and one needs to be aware of this. And I am not sure "it is only a movie" is the best reply. Probably much better to refer to a movie that is well-known over here in order to make your own point. Roman Holiday, for some bizarre reason, is widely known over here.

In any case, I had never thought of the metaphysical implications of Forrest Gump’s utterance, "life is a box of chocolates." But at one level, the idea that life is a box of chocolates can suggest that the basic events of life are there before hand, just like the box of chocolates is, and that you are merely opening them up. This gets us reasonably close to the idea of fate, the notion that the events of our lives, too, are there before hand and we are merely experiencing them and not actively creating them. However, once someone explained the image in that way, few people were disposed towards the doctrine. Instead, people wanted to admit that while part of life may be given to us, it is always up to us to make of it what we will. In this respect, they were more or less like my students back in the states and even used some of the same images. If the land is given, we can plant what crop we want and whether it grows is up to us, etc.

About the only concession to fate I was able to get concerned the area of romance. Almost all the women in the room had this belief in fate when it came to their romantic life, that somehow they were fated to meet the person they would marry. The Chinese term here is Yuan2 Fen4. When pressed how they could believe in fate in one are and not in any other, there was no response except that they did not really see the problem

I have been reporting our discussions of this night to a number of people, telling them that I was surprised at my inability to find anyone to defend the notion of fate when I know there is a long cultural history of fate in China as there is in ancient Greece and India, two other cultures I have studied. Sure enough, most of these folks were willing to concede much to fate. What they declared was that the young people’s attitude towards fate was just one of the ways in which they were becoming Westernized and losing touch with traditional culture