Rong Jinzhen’s departure from home

Rong Jinzhen’s departure from home is presented not as a clean break but as a conflicted flight: he leaves like a bird from its nest, remains close enough to locate himself in a nearby valley, and nevertheless cannot return. The scene turns on this contradiction. Home is within reach, but guilt and the burden of what he has received make return feel impossible; only after leaving does he understand why he wanted both to go and to come back.

Departure as flight

The passage introduces the departure through the image of a bird leaving its nest, then immediately joins that image to the idea of running away. The comparison makes leaving feel instinctive, like separation from a place of origin, but the language of flight also carries a suggestion of evasion. It does not settle whether Rong Jinzhen is escaping a specific danger or simply unable to remain; the text’s emphasis is the act of departure as a break that he himself cannot yet explain.

A brief statement about work provides a nearby frame for that break: work can allow the past to be forgotten, and even the reason for forgetting can be cast off. The departure is not explicitly caused by work, but the juxtaposition connects leaving with the possibility of severing oneself from what came before. The passage then shifts from a general image of escape to an exchange that makes the separation personal. A voice demands to know where he is running, and Rong Jinzhen answers with a precise location: west of the speaker, in a valley about a kilometre away. His answer establishes physical distance without suggesting that he has gone far.

Near enough to return, unable to do so

The exchange moves from location to relationship. Asked why he has not returned to see them, Rong Jinzhen can only say that he cannot. The reply is not a claim that the journey is too difficult: the stated distance is small. Instead, the scene lets the obstacle remain inward and morally charged. The people addressing him treat homecoming as the expected course, while his inability to undertake it exposes a division between physical proximity and emotional access.

The rebuke that only a criminal cannot return home gives that division a harsh name. Rong Jinzhen answers that he is almost a criminal. The narration then sharpens the exchange into the verdict that he is his own criminal. No particular offense is disclosed here, so the language does not establish that he has committed a crime. Its force is figurative: he has adopted the accusation as a description of himself, making his own judgment an impediment to return. The departure thus has two directions at once—away from home in space, and inward toward a sense of culpability that the passage leaves unexplained.

The burden of having received too much

A later reflection turns from the difficulty of returning to the possibility that too much has been given to him. The passage imagines that abundance does not necessarily reassure its recipient. It may instead make him afraid to recollect, uneasy when he thinks, remorseful, and humbled. He might come to regard everything he has as the product of luck and another person’s benevolence, and therefore experience his good fortune as depressing rather than secure.

That imagined response makes the departure more complicated than simple rejection. The text does not identify what was given, who gave it, or whether Rong Jinzhen consciously understands this burden as he leaves. It does, however, place the accusation of ingratitude beside the suggestion that excessive generosity can itself make a person feel indebted and diminished. The language of criminality and the reflection on benevolence meet at this point: he seems unable to accept what he has received without turning it into a reason to condemn himself.

Blessing, curse, and knowledge after leaving

The passage states that some people who are loved become blessed, while others become cursed. It applies both possibilities to Rong Jinzhen’s movement: because of a blessing, he wanted to return; because of a curse, he wanted to leave. The paired motives resist a single explanation. Affection pulls him toward home, but the condition attached to that affection—or the way he experiences it—also presses him away. The text does not present leaving as proof that he was unloved; it makes love itself part of the unresolved conflict.

Its final reversal is that he did not leave because he had discovered this conflict. Rather, it was by leaving that he learned it. Knowledge follows the action instead of preceding it: departure becomes the condition through which he recognizes the opposed forces of blessing and curse. That sequence preserves the uncertainty of his original choice while giving the separation retrospective meaning. He moves away before he can explain why, and only from that distance can the wish to return and the wish to escape be seen together.

Narrative significance

The episode makes departure less a solved decision than a form of belated self-understanding. Its images and exchanges narrow the distance between flight and homecoming: a bird leaves its nest; Rong Jinzhen is only a kilometre away; a voice calls him back; and yet he cannot return. Each detail holds separation close to attachment rather than allowing it to become a simple abandonment.

The passage also leaves its accusation unresolved. Rong Jinzhen calls himself almost a criminal, and the narrator’s compressed judgment makes him his own criminal, but no external charge is supplied to explain the words. That silence directs attention to the felt weight of the past, gratitude, and self-reproach rather than to a revealed offense. His departure matters because it turns those pressures into action before they can be understood, then makes the act itself the means by which their contradictory hold becomes legible.