salutant

Topic: a memorable goodbye

Wen Junhui: Actually, I haven’t experienced that kind of profoundly deep parting, maybe it’s because I’m still young. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had a lot of farewells since I was young. So it’s always been like, gradually growing accustomed to saying goodbye, then encountering a new kind of goodbye? It’s that kind of process. Even as a child, I was constantly saying goodbye. It wasn’t that I was away from home, since my mother came to all my schedules, but I was jumping from one project to the next. As soon as one film finished shooting I would go to another set. Another shoot or another advertisement. So there were always these little farewells. Maybe a significant goodbye would be leaving my homeland to a foreign country for debut.

Actually, during the time when we were trainees, a senior said to us, “You are going through hardships now, but after you debut, you will look back and realise it all had meaning”. When I think back to those days, there is so much frustration and sadness, but at that time, I thought this goodbye hurt the most.

Back then, I held the hope that, even if I quit and returned to China, I could slip back into my past life. But one day, I realised all my classmates had graduated high school. Suddenly, they were doing their own thing and moving on to university. And then I realised all the friends I used to see in middle school were no longer in Shenzhen. There was a feeling then, like the realisation of Ah, the place I miss is one I cannot return to.

But to look back at it all again, I instead feel a sense of growth. It’s like I’m saying goodbye to my past all over again.

Isn’t there a saying, “we will go through a second adolescence because we are repeating the same things we did in our youth.” It’s like when I embark on my own progress, but bear witness to the growth of others, I regain that original mindset and feel like I have not changed. But at the same time, I sense that the people around me have changed so much. And so, I suppose I am also growing up.

It’s just a regret that I hold. I don’t want to face that kind of goodbye. But I recognise the feeling.

Source: 中国有磁味 “China has Taste” episode 12 bonus clip [xiaohongshu/red note link]

Translation comments

• [中国有磁味] is a food themed travel/talk show that aired in 2023. Junhui was a guest on the last episode of season 1, so the topic of conversation turned to farewell and partings. Junhui’s story wasn’t aired in the final cut, so I only came across this clip when scrolling XHS.
  


• I immediately wanted to capture and translate Junhui’s comments. His words resonated with me because this kind of intangible goodbye was something I keep revisiting in my stories — where the tender absence is not so much for a place or a person, but a state of mind or a time you can no longer return to. I’ve explored it in once again, love, and it’s a theme in my current WIP. You may miss a person, but really you miss walking to school together, turning around in class to steal their pens, leaning over their shoulder to copy their maths homework. You can meet up again as adults but it will never be the same.
  


• (Tinhat mode) There’s other things here that I, as a Junhui thinker, want to vault up and gnaw over in my cave. Being adapted to a transient, unsettled life. Being okay with constant goodbyes (thinking he’s okay with constant goodbyes), arrested development of a prolonged adolescence, measuring himself by observing the people around him. Junhui so rarely opens up about himself, so I’m pinning this as source text for future characterisations.
  


• (Fan mode) Jun was so awkward haha. I’ve translated him more profoundly than life because I want the sentences to make sense. Jun’s a little like Mingyu because he speeds through words like he wants to finish his story and move everyone’s attention from him. He jumps through 5 ideas and doesn’t connect the dots or develop each concept and always says “this”, “that”, “like that”, “that feeling” 那个 那个 那个 hahaha please sir give me a noun.
  
  
  It was refreshing because I always see SVT as industry veterans in their comfort zone. But outside of kpop, their lives are just starting. I don’t realise how young and inexperienced they are until a show like this, where Junhui is the rookie amongst veterans. The way the others confidently hold the camera, talk through a story, engage the other hosts and link concepts, I can tell Junhui has so much to learn (and I am excited for him).

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