Hey, something I’ve been wondering since I first watched CQL: in ep 5, there’s a line where Wen Qing is talking to Wen Ning and says something like ‘Our family has been doctors for centuries, but I can’t cure my own brother’ (that’s verbatim from the US Netflix subtitles) and I’ve always wondered about that word, ‘cure’. As someone who lives with mental illness, I’m a little sensitive to the idea of a mental affliction being ‘cured,’ as though it’s a malady to be remedied, as though there’s something ‘wrong’ that can be ‘fixed’. The word ‘cure’ brings up all that discomfort for me, but I only know English, and I’m curious to know how accurate the concept of a ‘cure’ is to the actual conversation taking place there? I think a lot about the way neurodivergence is discussed in CQL, and I don’t want to misjudge connotation based on translation error.
hi there! so this ask is *checks* a month old yikes, but i’ve been thinking about it for a long time so here we go (finally)! :D
so here’s the scene in question:
[ID: two screenshots from episode 5 of the untamed. wen qing is speaking to wen ning. the subtitles read ‘我却治不了自己弟弟的病’ and ‘but i can’t cure my own brother’. /end ID]
with regards to your grammar/language question: 治 can mean both “to treat” and “to cure”. there are certain sentence constructions that can make it clear which it is, but not all of them do so.
for example, 治好 is definitely ‘to cure’ - the grammar there is [VERB + 好] can mean either “to finish VERBing” or “to VERB well”. so, to finish treating = to cure.
however, in this case, that’s not the construction that’s being used, and I would say it’s not clear-cut. “VERB + 不了” is “to be unable to VERB”. because 治 is ambiguous on its own, what she says here, “我却治不了自己弟弟的病”, comes down to “but I am unable to treat/cure my own younger brother’s illness”.
what I think is maybe a more complicated issue is the idea of mental illness and/or neurodivergence in CQL and how understandings of it impact our perceptions of the characters/narrative.
I’ve seen a lot of interpretations of Wen Ning’s affliction in CQL to be neurodivergence, but I’m actually quite surprised when I hear this. i believe the illness wen qing and wei wuxian refer to when talking about wen ning is his susceptibility/weakness towards resentful/yin energy, which manifests in fainting spells and long bouts of unconsciousness. to me, that is not analogous to mental illness or neurodivergence so much as something like epileptic episodes brought on by exposure to specific triggers. by CQL canon, we know that he has not always had this -- he contracted the illness after his encounter with the guanyin statue that sucked away part of his soul when he was a child, and this now gives him a weak constitution and makes him largely unsuitable for night hunting, especially unsupervised. this is what wen qing is trying to treat and/or cure. in mdzs, he does not have this condition, and wen qing never mentions anything about trying to treat or cure him at all.
given that this condition is most likely a creation for the sake of getting around censors at least in part (basically: a way to create a reason for why wen ning isn’t “dead” -- in addition, probably was also meant to increase wen sibs screentime/sympathy), I’ve always seen it as a bit of a handwavy physical condition that was tacked on as opposed to an actual statement about his character, if that makes sense.
in general, I’m hesitant to outright assign labels of neurodivergence or mental illness to mdzs/cql characters because I think that labels like that are inherently societally and culturally dependent. with the rise of identity politic rhetoric in the US and all of that kind of getting tangled up with our conceptions of being ND or mentally ill, I worry about trying to analyze mdzs/cql through such a lens because identities are so inextricably tied to environment. even if both i and a character could be “diagnosed” with the same condition, I think it would be undeniable that our experiences of such would be very different because we come from different cultural backgrounds. not just, chinese author vs american reader but like, fantastical xianxia chinese conception of a character vs chinese-american conception of identity.
alskdjfl idk if this even makes sense, but!! basically, I actually don’t think that CQL discusses or really portrays neurodivergence at all, not in such terms. I think it’s completely appropriate and valid to headcanon and interpret characters in ways that resonate with you! i certainly do, lol (morally scrupulous twin jades anyone? :D 🥃), but im nervous about asserting that any CQL characters actually are/have xyz condition because I don’t think that a discussion on that front is particularly meaningful. I know that this hesitance comes both from my own views on what neurodivergence/mental illness mean and how useful those terms actually are, and also from a very personal anger over some moral injunctions that I’ve seen people place on portraying characters’ “real” or “coded” mental states that are seriously misguided, harmful, and extremely culturally american in their claims (that will probably be a separate post though lol).
that isn’t to say there isn’t value in thinking about how one can interpret characters in one way or another, or that there isn’t value in discussing how unintentionally, a character might fall into archetypes that evoke certain identities and how that subtext might or might not impact a person’s experience or takeaway from the media! but I think all of that has to be contextualized as opposed to generalized. /o\
this.... came out a lot less coherent than i wanted it to be, but my brain is Not having it for some reason. I hope that I at least managed to answer your question/help you along in your continuing thought process!!! :D
(ko-fi)
