Surgery of the animal's fate

The veterinarian’s fatalistic submission is a governing belief that fate acts through, and often disguises itself as, personal choice. A vivid blue mark on his right cheek makes that belief intimate from childhood onward, while the evacuation of his family and the uncertain fate of the Hsin-ching zoo give it an immediate historical setting. His resignation is not simple inertia: he is a capable, decisive professional, yet cannot believe that his decisions originate wholly in himself.

The mark and the sense of an outside force

From his youngest days, the veterinarian has felt that an outside power controls his life. He connects this awareness, perhaps, to the blue mark on his right cheek, an imprint that seemed to distinguish him from everyone around him. As a child he hated it; the taunts of other children and the stares of strangers could make him wish he were dead, and he imagined cutting the marked part of his body away. With age, however, he came to accept that the mark would not disappear. That gradual accommodation helped shape his resignation to fate: what began as a bodily difference he could neither explain nor remove became one of the forms through which he understood a life governed by forces beyond his command.

This is not an occasional superstition but a conviction that gives his experience its pattern. Most of the time, fate is like a quiet, monotonous ground bass, coloring the edges of daily life without calling attention to itself. At intervals, though, an unexplained shift in the balance makes its force overwhelming. The veterinarian cannot discover what causes those changes or find a regularity in them. When they come, he feels nearly paralyzed by resignation and sees no choice but to abandon his plans and give himself up to the flow. In his understanding, fate claims its portion; nothing he can do or think will alter the situation before it has received what it demands.

Will and professional competence

The veterinarian’s fatalism does not mean that he lacks resolve or ability. He is described as more decisive than most people, and he follows his decisions through. He excels as a veterinarian and works tirelessly as an educator. At school he earns superior grades and is selected as class leader; professionally, his colleagues recognize his ability and his juniors look up to him. These details complicate any ordinary picture of a fatalist as passive or ineffective. The contradiction is not between action and inaction, but between his ability to act and his inability to regard that action as fully his own.

Even a decision that gives him the brief satisfaction of exercising free will can later appear to have been arranged in advance. Fate, he thinks, can disguise its purposes as personal choice, laying bait that leads him to behave as he was meant to. The decisions he can claim as wholly independent turn out, on inspection, to concern trivial matters that scarcely required a decision at all. He compares himself to a titular head of state whose role is to place a royal seal on documents at a regent’s command, likening his position to the emperor of Manchukuo. The comparison makes his account of agency political as well as personal: visible authority, like apparent free choice, may conceal the power that actually directs events.

Family love and separation

The veterinarian loves his wife and daughter deeply, and would willingly die for them; he has often imagined such a sacrifice, even finding in those imagined deaths a sweetness. Yet his love does not dissolve his sense of separation. At times, when he comes home and sees them, he feels that they are independent people with whom he has no true connection, belonging to a place distant from him. He also recognizes that he did not choose either of them entirely on his own, though that recognition does not lessen his unconditional love. For him, the coexistence of devotion and estrangement is an insoluble contradiction, almost a trap laid within his life.

That contradiction becomes tangible when his wife and daughter leave. Their train is supposed to have reached Pusan, where a cousin employed by the railway can house them until they board a transport ship for Japan. The veterinarian misses their voices at breakfast and their presence when he wakes; the family home has become an empty official residence in which he no longer feels he belongs. At the same time, solitude gives his fatalistic sense of the moment a strange clarity. With his family gone, he can feel fate in his bones and flesh, as if separation has removed the everyday attachments that partly obscured its power.

Fate in the zoo at Hsin-ching

Left alone in the zoo residence, the veterinarian’s world seems simpler: for now, he need think only about caring for the animals. He and fate, as he understands it, are alone together. That inward simplification coincides with the collapse of political authority in Hsin-ching in August 1945. The Japanese Kwantung Army, Soviet forces, Communist troops, and Kuomintang troops may all contend for power, but in the veterinarian’s view fate is the city’s true ruler, while individual will counts for nothing.

The zoo itself has already given that conviction a concrete and terrible shape. Fate, he thinks, spared the elephants and buried the tigers, leopards, wolves, and bears the day before. He cannot know which lives will be spared next. The question is not merely personal: the same impersonal power he believes has governed his mark, his decisions, and his separation from his family now seems to operate across the city and among the animals in his care. His fatalism offers no prediction of what comes next; it is a way of facing an outcome he believes no individual can command.

When the veterinarian goes out to prepare the animals’ morning feeding, he expects that nobody will come to work. Instead, two Chinese boys, about thirteen or fourteen, are waiting in his office. Sent by the Chinese workers who had been there the day before, they have come because the workers assume he cannot care for the animals alone, even as political change makes ordinary contact with the Japanese precarious. The boys give no answer when he asks their names. He gives each two cookies and puts them to work; together they take a mule-drawn cart from cage to cage, distributing the animals’ particular feed and changing their water. Cleaning is reduced to a quick hose-down, since the zoo is closed and no visitors will complain about the smell. The scene does not cancel the veterinarian’s belief that fate governs events, but it sets that belief beside a small, practical act of care and help, carried out amid uncertainty rather than in control of it.