Endings are also beginnings

“Endings are also beginnings” is the guiding expression for the book’s fifth and final section. It turns the return of Rong Jinzhen to Unit 701, which closes one part of the story, into a threshold: the narrative resumes not by continuing in a straight line, but by reaching back into the past and outward toward what may follow.

A Closing That Opens

The expression appears as a brief declaration at the start of the section called “In the End.” Its placement makes the apparent contradiction structural as well as thematic. The preceding events have brought Rong Jinzhen back to the high-walled compound, broken and tormented; the new section treats that return as an ending, but not as the final word on his life.

The section instead offers supplementary details about Rong Jinzhen. Its narrator describes the material as reaching in two directions at once: one hand touches the story’s past, while the other stretches toward its future. The image gives the expression its particular force. The ending does not erase what came before; it changes the perspective from which the earlier story can be read and leaves room for what remains beyond it.

Reframing the Earlier Mysteries

The narrator presents the final section as a key to the mysteries and secrets accumulated in the previous four sections. Those earlier elements, which may have seemed to lack brilliance on their own, are promised a fuller significance through the details that follow. In this sense, the expression describes a delayed revelation: the reader reaches an apparent stopping point, then receives information that alters the weight of what has already been told.

That promise is not a declaration that every strand will resolve into a single, seamless account. The narrator explicitly says the section disregards plot and narrative conventions as well as literary mood, and makes no attempt to form a unified, coherent story. Its varied, deliberately skewed arrangement follows the vicissitudes of Rong Jinzhen’s story rather than imposing a conventional ending upon them.

Narrative Principle

The expression therefore names both a way of reading and a way of arranging the book. The final section closes the preceding movement while reopening its evidence, allowing supplementary information to cast new light backward and to gesture forward without guaranteeing a tidy resolution. Its movement between past and future makes incompleteness productive: the story’s end becomes a vantage point from which earlier mysteries can acquire new brilliance.

The narrator describes surrendering to Rong Jinzhen’s tale and setting himself at its mercy, an experience that brings profound ease and satisfaction, almost like victory in battle. That response completes the expression’s paradox. To surrender control over the story’s shape is not simply to give up; it is to discover a different kind of arrival, one that permits the narrative to continue through recurrence, reconsideration, and the revelations of an ending that begins again.