Which Story is True

When I started to write this blog, I intended to make it like a diary with daily updates. Unfortunately I seemed to have overestimated my resolution in keeping writing - the last update was about 10 days ago. I did get very lazy during the holiday season. Our Thanksgiving holiday started with a five-course dinner with Leslie, who came to the bay area to spend the holiday with her sister on Wednesday. We joined a friend and her family  in having a great seafood hotpot instead of turkey at her place Thursday night,  when I cooked HongShaoRou (红烧肉), their most-missed dish from me. The next day was a sunny day, so Gang and I hiked in Point Reyes, and ate apples by the sea (as what we did in Hawaii). Saturday was the "shopping day", when we spent the entire afternoon in the newly opened outlet in Livermore, and finally bought a pair of matching sweaters, one for Gang and the other for me. The long weekend ended with another hotpot last night, when a friend brought all the raw materials and pots over to my place and played SanGuoSha, a popular board game in China for hours.

But the highlight of the holiday, at least in my opinion, is the movie we watched yesterday, Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee. It's the best movie I've watched this year. It's similar to Li's previous movies such as Lust  Caution and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in terms of the heated discussion it has already triggered; though it's different in the sense of its new topic. I couldn't help wondering which story is true - the one counting for more than 80% of the entire movie about how Pi co-existed with the tiger during the adventure, or the one explaining how four people in the lifeboat killed and even ate their partners to survive. If the movie had finished ten minutes earlier, I'd happily buy the idea of this drifting adventure with animals, supported by beautiful scenes of the sea and fish stocks. But the second story, if true, turns the entire adventure into a disgusting struggling for survival.

Let's examine the assumptions one by one. If the first story is true, what looks discordant in the movie includes:
- The long introduction of his name, which in my understanding has two implications - 1) it's hard to tell the real story on the face of it; 2) it's hard to understand/explain a human being, just as you can't exhaust writing Pi no matter how hard you've tried;
- The rude French chief and the Buddhist sailor on the ship, who barely appeared later. If the entire story is about Pi and animals, why bother to mention these two in the movie?
- The locked cage and escaping animals. It's clearly shown in the movie that animals are locked in cages, and it's hard to imagine when the ship sunk and most people were unable to escape, these animals could get rid of locks and jumped out.
- On the floating island, when Richard Parker was eating a meerkat, other meerkats didn't get panic or escape. Also, the flower with human tooth and the acid water didn't make much sense in the real world. (There is an article on internet saying meerkats can never appear in that part of the world.)
- Most importantly, if the first one is true, why the movie spends so much time showing how Pi told the second story to the two Japanese investigators with so many details included? Since Pi was only asked to tell a story about the sunk of the ship, he didn't have to provide such a detailed story.

If the second one is true, all the above the irrational plots can be explained. But the only question I have is why? What's the point of telling an inhuman story in such a beautiful way? I'm an atheist, and I simply don't understand how people can still believe in God after surviving this.

Whatever the true answer is, Ang Lee is successful, and his movie makes audience think about the movie, and wonder what's the tiger in their heart. Great movie, recommend without reservation, though it does bother me for a long time.