Fate as an external force

Fate as an external force describes a power that appears to direct lives from beyond the individual, making personal choices feel less like acts of sovereign will than passages through which a prior design proceeds. The idea links a veterinarian’s lifelong sense of compulsion to the political and military catastrophe in Hsin-ching in August 1945, where human authorities seem unable to rival fate itself.

A private history of being governed

The veterinarian’s belief in outside control began early. From his youngest days he had a lucid sense that his life was governed by a force beyond himself. He associated this awareness with the vivid blue mark on his right cheek, a bodily difference that set him apart: as a child, he resented the mark and the attention it attracted, and at times wished he could remove it. As he grew older, he accepted that it would remain. That gradual accommodation may have helped form his resignation toward fate, so that an experience of visible difference became bound to his understanding of how little control a person possesses over the conditions of life.

The mark is not described as making the veterinarian incapable or indecisive. Rather, the narrative holds the external-force belief beside a record of competence. He became an exceptionally skilled veterinarian and tireless educator; he earned strong academic standing, was selected to lead his class, and won the respect of colleagues and junior workers. He was not a “fatalist” in the ordinary sense of a person who simply refuses to act. His life instead presents a more unsettling division: practical ability and resolve coexist with doubt that his decisions originate entirely in himself.

Decision and the illusion of free will

The veterinarian experiences fate most of the time as a quiet, monotonous background influence, coloring the edges of life rather than constantly overwhelming it. Its pressure becomes acute only occasionally, when an unexplained shift in the balance brings him close to paralysis. He cannot discover a regularity in these changes. When the pressure rises, he believes that he must abandon his own plans and yield to the flow; no effort of thought or action, he has learned, can alter the situation before fate has taken what it demands.

This surrender does not erase his capacity to decide. He follows decisions through and can feel a momentary satisfaction in having chosen for himself. But that satisfaction is unstable: in retrospect, a choice may appear to have been arranged in advance by an outside power, with the appearance of free will serving as a means of drawing him toward the required action. Only trivial matters seem fully independent, and even these, on examination, turn out to have required no consequential choice. Fate therefore operates not merely as an obstacle to agency but as an explanation that absorbs agency after the fact: the decision is made, yet its author remains in doubt.

The narrator makes this paradox concrete through an image of political authority. The veterinarian feels like a titular head of state who applies a royal seal to documents at the instruction of a regent who holds the real power. The comparison is to Manchukuo, where the public form of authority conceals its subordination. In the same way, a person may appear to direct his own life while serving as the nominal instrument of a power elsewhere.

Lives as passageways

The idea extends beyond the veterinarian’s account. Nutmeg reflects that her husband’s death is only one part of a life whose seemingly separate episodes now appear designed to bring her to her present work. She names the sudden rise and disappearance of her passion for fashion design, Cinnamon’s loss of speech, and her involvement in their unusual occupation. Looking back, she feels that these events may have been programmed toward a destination and that a long arm reaching from far away controls her movements. Her life, in this understanding, has been a passageway through which other things move.

Nutmeg’s reflection echoes the veterinarian’s sense that the self may be less an origin of action than a medium through which action passes. The two accounts differ in emphasis: the veterinarian describes an enduring worldview shaped from childhood, while Nutmeg recognizes a pattern retrospectively among changes in her life and work. Together they make fate difficult to reduce to a single prediction or supernatural rule. It is felt as an external ordering whose design remains obscure even to those who suspect they are living within it.

Hsin-ching in August 1945

At the end of the veterinarian’s reflection, fate expands from private experience to historical scale. In Hsin-ching in August 1945, its power is said to outweigh that of the Kwantung Army, the Soviet Army, Communist troops, and the Kuo-mintang. The passage does not suggest that these forces are absent; it places them beneath an impersonal power that seems to determine what will happen regardless of the claims of armies or individual will.

The surviving and dead animals at the zoo make this power legible through unequal outcomes. Fate spared the elephants and buried the tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears the previous day. The question of what it would bury or spare next remains unanswered. This ending carries the concept from a person’s uncertain authorship of his choices to a city’s exposure to historical catastrophe: outcomes are visible, but the governing pattern cannot be known in advance. Fate is thus both an intimate conviction and a narrative scale for confronting events that exceed any one person’s ability to explain or control.