Tang Fang Fang

A young, 18 year old Chinese girl committed suicide last night. She was a Freshman English major and not yet one of my students, but I saw her occasionally at English Corner and whenever I passed by her classroom, yet I can’t pretend to have known her. Her name was Tang Fang Fang. She was fairly short, thin, had a round, blemish free, bright face, black hair, and was always wearing her highly visible black-rimmed Harry Potter glasses. Whenever I saw her, she never failed to sport a smile and always greeted me with an enthusiastic, “Hello Brian!” She jumped from the 8^th floor of the freshman dormitory and landed on the road in front of the school’s bakery at 10:30 last night. I wish I had known what that smile was hiding.

What was she thinking as she put her foot up on that window ledge? Was she scared, nervous, mad, relieved, or anxious? In her three-second fall to the ground, did she wish to undue what gravity could not prevent, feel clarity, or feel nothing at all?

In my own class this morning, I tried talking to my students about the death that happened only 12 hours earlier. Yet, it was as if nothing had happened at all. My students were laughing and joking around, as if it were just another day, which I suppose, it was. I asked them if they knew what happened, “Yes”, I also asked them if they knew the girl, “Yes”, they replied with apparent frustration. The attention of the classroom was all over the place, people laughing and talking in Chinese on one side of the room, students laying down their heads in boredom on the other, with only a few students putting on an air of concern. What did this all mean to them? Anything? Nervous laughter rained supreme throughout the morning. Throughout the class I tried to discuss life, suicide, depression, and their meanings and causes, but this brought us nowhere. One life had simply ended and the world kept turning, without missing a beat, in the same manner as it had before.

What message was she trying to send us? Or was she simply upset because she constantly quarreled with the other girls in her dorm room and didn’t get along with her class, as the rumor tells it? One minute to pause and reflect upon life and it’s meaning would do everyone a little good here, but I have yet to see that. “What’s the point?” I asked my class, “What’s the point of it all?” but everyone seemed to regard this question with the same indifference that they have greeted everything else in the class.

Hopefully, there is more then this pathetic blog post, her parents and relatives, and some friends that will stop to reflect what the meaning of her death was, if it was anything. But maybe that’s hoping for too much.