Iwa ni Hana

The Chinese language has a rich vocabulary for sadness. Consider the Chinese characters that all have the meaning of “sadness” -

憂 愁 悲 哀 惆 悽 悕 悴 悵 惙 惻 愴 慘 慽

Now if you consider combined words that all have the meaning of “sadness,” the list could go on and on – from commonly used words like xin suan [心酸] to very rare words like liu li [懰慄]. In addition, if you also add to your list four-word Chinese words like qi chu bei qie [悽楚悲切], duan chang cun duan [斷腸寸斷] and so forth, you will probably add up with a dictionary of several hundred pages of Chinese words describing “sadness” alone.

Personally, I think the proliferation of words for “sadness” in Chinese is not confusing at all but adds precision as to the the exact shade of sadness one is describing. Among these many shades of sadness, there is one area that the Chinese language is particularly good at describing. I refer to dan dan de ai chou [淡淡的哀愁] – the kind of sadness that is light in touch on the surface. This kind of sadness is never so violent as drive you to put a gun to your head or jump off a bridge. In fact, this kind of sadness is usually not apparent on the surface, and no one knows how deep it cuts within. Within this category of sadness, there is one particular word I wish to highlight, and it is wu nai [無奈].

The meaning of wu nai

Wu nai [無奈] is short for wu ke nai he [無可奈何]. It is hard to translate into English but you may think of it as:

Something sad that cannot be helped due to lack of means or solution, typically brought about by forces that are out of human control, such as the passage of time and vicissitudes of the world.

Let me give a more concrete example -

Suppose when you were a teenager you used to have to an older friend who opened your eyes to a new world of ideas and art. You read the same books, listened to the same music, admired the same artists and watched the same films. You lived in the same intellectual universe with him and spoke in the wavelength. There were scarcely any topic you do not like debating with him on, and for once in your life you felt you had met your equal. And because he was a few years older and had more experience of life than you, you looked up to him.

And then (as is typical of the young and headstrong), the two of you had a quarrel that was really quite trivial in retrospect but instead of making up at that time, you parted ways, burned all bridges and never spoke again. Ten years passed. One day, news of that older friend trickled through to you. From what you gathered he had not really kept up with all the books, music and art. He embraced a lot of things that he once thought was low and vulgar, and associated with people he used to consider silly and ridiculous. It was like he had given up all the pride and sophistication you used to see in him.

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