Click here to watch the clip from the first episode of "A Long Journey".
A year ago, I met Candice, an international student in Canada who fights cancer, on social platforms, and through her, I met Kristen Zhou Qianyi. They were fellow patients in the same group, with young female stomach cancer patients from all over the world.
Knowing such a group, I felt familiar and strange. They have academics, careers, family and love just like us, but cancer has dragged them to a lonely battlefield. I don't know what they'll think of the documentary, and at the same time, in the countdown that has already sounded, I don't know if we'll have the courage to face the storms that may come with them at any time.
When the shooting officially began, the harsh background of reality was indeed beyond our expectations. Because Qianyi is a very special existence, her own energy is ten thousand times brighter than the label of cancer patients.
Qianyi is singing jazz on stage.
She has a natural jazz voice, has been a singer for a while; at the age of 25, she quit her job in Guangzhou, went to Germany to re-study undergraduate, and continued to write the physics dream of middle school; during the study abroad, she relied on self-study to make up for the foundation, obtained full marks in many subjects, and gradually found a direction on the road of scientific research.
It was in this way that she was diagnosed with advanced cancer without a family genetic history and no other clear causative factors. This is something that makes it difficult for all those who have come into contact with Qianyi before and after the camera to digest. However, Qianyi's mood was more stable than many of her friends, and she was very clear that she wanted to leave something behind.
Optimism and strength are the comfort and admonition that all young cancer patients will receive. But while Qianyi is trying to seek medical treatment, she is incomparably honest with herself and the world. This can also be seen in Candice Xu Xinyi's body, she is younger than Qianyi, only 26 years old, but has a maturity and indifference beyond this age.
The pain and the torture of drugs made Qianyi lose a lot of weight.
Qianyi has a social account called Frank and I— yes, she named the terrible tumor in her stomach Frank, which is very much in line with her usual second-year and romantic personality. Here Qianyi wrote that she would like to live, but "the fight against cancer is like a lame inspirational performance." It really makes people scratch their bodies — make beauty lovers lose their hair, put tubes in their bodies, make their arms full of pinholes, numb her heart, and fight a battle that she knows she's going to lose.
Qianyi's German friends and I have this feeling, we sometimes pay more attention to our words, do not want to say anything wrong will make Qianyi sad. But once, on the day we saw a doctor in Shanghai, we lined up at a Hon bang restaurant. She had been quiet on a bench by the side of the road, and suddenly she said to me, "Am I particularly mournful?" I said, "No, you've always been strong." She is indeed emotionally stable in front of the camera, occasionally funny. But that day she blurted out, "It's all fake." Actually, I'm a very sad person." I sat next to me, unable to think of a word to respond to for a moment.
Qianyi took a nap in the car.
I learned a week later that the doctor in Shanghai had not given her a new treatment plan that day. For her, the door closed again, and there were not many doors left. This is a more realistic portrayal of the fight against cancer.
For a young patient with advanced cancer, any words of comfort are actually powerless or even hypocritical. Because you know that the wedding scene she had imagined and the day she got her certificate in physics should have been in the near future.
What Qianyi has been looking for is not the determination to fight, but the courage to say goodbye. This is also what all her family and friends are trying to accomplish with Qianyi.
In the last two weeks of Germany, Leipzig under the epidemic was not allowed to go from house to house, but Qianyi's friends secretly gathered for her, and they did not know how many meals they had eaten.
A good friend of seven years heard that she was going to return to China, and immediately flew from Sweden to Germany, risked a fine, crossed the home observation, and saw Qianyi on the same day.
Qianyi hugged and said goodbye after a small gathering with friends.
The day linda and Bradley were in Guangzhou, it was already 11 p.m., and Qianyi's stomach had begun to feel uncomfortable, but she insisted that she wanted to go downtown again. Linda later told me that they had sensed that this was the last time Qianyi came to them, so she sang David Bowie and said goodbye.
And the love of Qianyi's family is the most difficult to express. Qianyi's mother has actually been unable to accept the camera, because the surface of the calm she may never want to drive, she has just been making every meal, the red stewed meat, roast goose roast duck, fish cake in the film, are Qianyi's favorite dishes; Qianyi's father's eyes are actually always red, he will always smile and say, Qianyi wants to shoot, we all listen to her; the younger brother insists on the driver's post, and the sister will definitely take her where to play.
The younger brother is driving Qianyi to the hospital.
"Cancer hasn't redefined my life, I'm still me, I love science and music. Physics and music don't lose their meaning because of cancer. Qianyi persisted until the last moment. She has said that if given another chance, she would not try to change anything, even the cancer she had experienced. It's a state of mind that sounds hard to understand at first, but it reminds me of a legend about the creation of man: in ancient Roman mythology, Diocalion and Pina created humans by throwing stones from the top of their heads and behind them, "man has since become a hard species, and has worked hard to prove to us where we came from." ”
After returning to China, Qianyi drank the milk tea she had in mind in Germany.
In 2022, the epidemic is not over, and the war is spreading in new lands. Together, we feel the "paradoxical, generically inevitable domination of destiny." In such an era, perhaps only long-term courage is the solution to all problems.
Finally, once again, I would like to express my respect and gratitude to Zhou Qianyi, her family and friends, Xu Xinyi and her parents, thank you for your trust and support to us. I hope that everyone will remember the brave appearance of the two girls, even if they are strong and disguised, that is what they want to stay behind.