Full Circle

‘Heaven and Earth’ movie is one of the most unforgettable movies I’ve ever watched. It’s the story of a woman from a rice farming community in the war torn Vietnam. She led a normal life until the war broke out. She was raped, her family was displaced and her friends were killed. She ended up in a Saigon brothel and married an American GI. Her American husband brought her to the states. She worked tirelessly and eventually succeeded in business. She is Vietnamese by heart and her children who were born and raised in America could not understand her. She just wants to give everything she could only dreamed of to her children but she ended up fighting with them. Her husband became a burden when he started demonstrating syndromes of ‘war shock’, a psychological disorder. He eventually killed himself. In the last part of the movie, the heroine and her children returned to the land of her birth. She paid homage to her ancestors, forgave the people who did her wrong including herself, that’s when she came full circle.

Oriental belief teaches us that we have to suffer difficulties, experience joy, another set back before we achieve total happiness. It’s a cycle that we have to go through because we need to learn a lesson from it. The current crisis that we are experiencing right now is just a cycle. Oil prices that went up did come down. It’s the law of nature that whatever goes up must come down, eventually.