Better Days: Coming of Age Amidst the Trauma of Bullying
“Does anyone know the difference between ‘was’ and ‘used to be’?
“‘Was’ means it has passed.”
“In fact, both of them mean that it has passed, but the difference is that ‘used to be’ conveys a sense of loss.”
— Better Days (2019)
Loss of innocence is a common theme in coming-of-age films. The genre often focuses on the transition from adolescence to adulthood, where the protagonist overcomes obstacles and reaches new revelations about themselves and their world (Buechel 24; Hardcastle et al. 1). In Better Days, director Derek Tsang situates this loss of innocence within the context of school bullying, at once telling the story of a young girl’s journey to adulthood and critiquing the broader societal factors that make her path particularly painful. The film depicts a blossoming relationship between Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu), a high school girl, and Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee), a street thug, two lost youth who find solace in each other. Amidst difficult circumstances, the two of them share a protective companionship and grow to become the very type of people they needed in their most vulnerable moments.
The film depicts Chen Nian’s loss of innocence through the corrosion of her trust in the adults around her. Before any of the bullying began, she already had to approach life with a more pragmatic outlook than her peers. In the first scene at her house, the camera pans over a map with ‘Peking University’ and ‘Tsinghua University’ circled, as well as a wall plastered with certificates and neat post-it notes (00:12:08). As Chen Nian quietly studies alone, a group of creditors begin banging angrily on the door, shouting for her mother to come out and pay them back. Chen Nian’s father is never mentioned in the film and we are left to assume that she was raised by a single mother who is frequently away from home, selling contraband goods to pay off her debts. The relationship between mother and daughter is in a sense close, yet distant. When her mother finally comes home, Chen Nian tenderly helps to do her hair but obviously holds a certain degree of resentment, for she walks away when her mother says, “I know I’m not a good mother. Be patient. Once you graduate from university, we’ll escape this hellhole. I know I owe you.” (00:16:36) Yet, she watches tearfully from the window as her mother leaves home again at dawn, revealing the complexity of her emotions, which are perhaps a mix of resentment and love. Both the set decoration and dialogue reveal a fixation on the upcoming national exams, an event often viewed as a ‘make-or-break’ opportunity for people like Chen Nian, who come from a less privileged background (Tsang). As she later juggles both the pressure of facing the exams and the trauma of being bullied, she tearfully calls her mother to seek comfort (00:43:20). Evidently, they can only communicate through phone calls due to the physical distance between them. At the same time, there is also emotional distance, as Chen Nian sobs quietly and finds herself unable to confide in her mother about the bullying. She swallows her pain because her mother is too far away to be a pillar of support and she also does not want to worry her. However, Chen Nian soon comes to the realization that there is no adult in her life to help her. Her homeroom teacher informs her that the school will suspend her bullies but still give them a second chance by allowing them to take the national exams, effectively leaving them with no real consequences. He continues by saying, “There will always be shadows on your path. But when you look up, you will always see the light.” (00:39:36) It is a well-meaning attempt at encouragement, but one that likely feels empty to Chen Nian, who has no light to look up to when her bullies can continue to torment her outside of school. Days after, she arrives home to find her bullies waiting for her with a box-cutter and a cage full of mice. She calls Zheng Yi (Fang Yin), the police detective assigned to her case, as she runs away but he does not pick up, leaving her at a loss in her terror. When he does return her call, he is immediately called back to the interrogation room by his colleague, causing Chen Nian to recognize that even the police cannot help her because they are too busy (00:49:20). Ultimately, she has no adult that she can rely on—not her mother, not her teachers, nor the police.
Chen Nian’s only sense of security therefore comes from her relationship with Xiao Bei and the film shows how they reflect each other beneath superficial differences. At the beginning, there is a distinction made between Chen Nian, who is studious and has a bright future, and Xiao Bei, who will not amount to anything as a street thug. When they become closer, Xiao Bei opens up and reveals that not only did his father leave him, but his mother also effectively abandoned him, blaming his existence as the reason she could not get married again (01:01:20). They both lack parental love and are outliers in society, hence showing each other kindness in a world that does not treat them kindly. More than just companions who share in their loneliness, they protect each other and they protect those in whom they see themselves. When Xiao Bei sees a gangster pressuring a young boy to steal, he punches him, with violence being perhaps the only way he knows how to defend. When an adult Chen Nian sees the young girl in her class who is likely a victim of bullying, she walks home with her to provide safety in the same way that Xiao Bei did for her in her youth. They were both let down by the adults around them and they both had no one else there for them but each other, hence driving them to help others who are vulnerable. The same could be said for why Xiao Bei so fervently protects Chen Nian. While Chen Nian still has a connection with her mother, Xiao Bei has been completely alone for years and learned to fight for himself. Perhaps he grows attached to Chen Nian in part because she tried to protect him when they first met and also because he sees potential in her that he does not find in himself. He is therefore willing to go to the extreme for her and even take on the blame for a murder, so that Chen Nian can fulfil her dream of going to university. When they see each other again in a prison visitation booth, the film visually depicts their similarity by overlaying an image of the other in the glass partition as the shots switch between the two of them (02:00:18). When Xiao Bei asks if Chen Nian is afraid, she says, “I used to be. I’m still a little scared.” and he in turn replies, “I used to be afraid, but not anymore.” (02:03:52) This exchange expresses how they have grown through everything that has happened, and again shows how they are indeed very similar with the slightest of differences. Their relationship is central to the film, serving as a flame of hope amidst the darkness of its violence. As the two of them go through their own transformations and self-discovery, it is made obvious that they very much mirror each other in their present reality and in their dreams for better days ahead.
The other focal point for the film is of course Chen Nian’s own psychological growth. In the beginning, when the bullies’ victim was her classmate Hu Xiaodie (Zhang Yifan), she did not do anything about it, likely because she did not want to jeopardize her academic success by incurring attention from the bullies. The broader atmosphere in this film is one of high pressure as the national exams loom ahead. In their classrooms, desks are piled with stacks upon stacks of textbooks and papers, and the students rearrange their desks in order of their mock exam rankings. It is an environment in which academic performance matters more than anything else and as we have already seen, that is especially important for Chen Nian, who is relying on her results to create a better life for her and her mother. Her turning point comes when Hu Xiaodie commits suicide by jumping from the top of the school building. In that moment, she decides to walk up and cover Hu Xiaodie’s face with her jacket, shielding her from the phone cameras of her schoolmates (00:05:53). This may have stemmed from a sense of guilt, as a flashback reveals that Hu Xiaodie had previously approached Chen Nian to ask why nobody helped her even though they all knew she was being bullied (00:34:12). While finally not a bystander, her actions unwittingly mark her as the bullies’ next target. Yet, this is the start of her transformation from someone who keeps to herself, to someone who stands up for what she feels is right. In her first encounter with Xiao Bei shortly after, when he is being beaten up by other thugs, she quickly calls the police to report the incident (00:18:00). This is unlike in the past, when she might have just continued walking and ignored them. When the bullying towards her intensifies after she reports the three of them, Xiao Bei begins to protect her by walking her to and from school. This therefore adds a symbolic sense of safety and security to the act of walking someone home in this film. When one of her three bullies becomes the new victim of the other two, Chen Nian shows her emotional maturity in how she is able to forgive and sympathize with her, offering to walk her home. Years later, when she has become an adult with the ability to protect others, she accompanies one of her students after school to protect her from bullying. From passive to active bystander, from protected to protector, Chen Nian’s journey of growing up gave her the courage to stand up against bullying, something she could not do at the start.
Beyond just a story about Chen Nian and Xiao Bei, the film also looks at the larger phenomenon of school bullying in China. The bullies in the film are not one-dimensional antagonists, but shown to be a symptom of larger societal issues, in particular the adults who enable them. When Zheng Yi has dinner with a senior detective and discusses the rise in bullying among the youth, the senior detective’s words reveal some of these issues: “Just because these cases happen on campus, it doesn’t make the school responsible. If you go to the principal, he’ll only pass it on to the teachers. If you go to the teachers, they’ll only pass it on to the parents. Then the parents will say, ‘I work in Shenzhen, I only see my kid once a year.’” (00:37:52) The adults fail to protect the victims because no one is willing to take responsibility for what has happened. The film shows that when such cases occur, performative actions are taken like installing metal barriers on the parapets and firing Chen Nian’s homeroom teacher for negligence, but nothing else is really done to resolve the root cause of bullying. The senior detective’s last sentence also identifies the issue of absent parents in China as a driving factor in school bullying, with many parents leaving their children behind to work for long periods of time in other cities. In such cases, the absence of parental guidance in children’s lives or a strained parent-child relationship can contribute to both bullying and victimization (Zhang et al. 113–32). As for main antagonist Wei Lai (Zhou Ye), it is not the lack of parental guidance but the wrong type of it. Her parents put pressure on her to achieve, believing her to be better than her peers and refusing to admit that their child can be at fault. This is revealed in the police officer’s conversation with her mother, who retorts, “Things aren’t always what they seem. For instance, what’s the background of their parents? Why was the child emotionally disturbed?” (00:41:34) Her mother evidently enables her bullying, and their family’s comparative wealth also provides reason as to why Wei Lai relies on money to solve things with both of her victims. The film also offers a glimpse into the situations faced by the other two bullies, Wei Lai’s ‘sidekicks’. After their suspension, Luo Ting (Liu Ran)’s father brings her outside their classroom and begs the homeroom teacher to forgive her, before beginning to hit her in the corridor (00:38:49). In a later montage, she carries her father home after he passes out drunk outside (01:54:14). Although Wei Lai is the instigator behind everything, Luo Ting is responsible for most of the aggression. While in no way a justification for her actions, perhaps she bullies people because it makes her feel stronger at school compared to when she is at home with her father. On the other hand, Xu Miao (Zhang Xinyi) seems to have become entangled in the bullying only because she was afraid of being bullied herself. When the three of them chase Chen Nian from her house, Chen Nian hides in an industrial trash can, only for Xu Miao to discover where she is when her phone rings (00:48:35). Instead of telling the other two, Xu Miao pretends not to know, saving Chen Nian from getting caught. Unfortunately, Xu Miao becomes a victim too later, showing again that bullying will not resolve itself if everyone simply chooses to ignore it. By and large however, the film is sympathetic towards the youth, even the antagonists, and critical instead of the society that has nurtured bullies and turned a blind eye to their victims.
In Chinese youth films, social issues are examined but ultimately softened by ending on a moralistic or sentimental note (Zhou 31). The film itself is gritty in its portrayal of school violence, but still transmits a message of hope through the relationship between Chen Nian and Xiao Bei, showing how they make it through hardships by relying on each other and are able to eventually emerge stronger. Although the two of them end up facing the consequences for unintentional homicide and its concealment, the source of Chen Nian’s pain has ultimately disappeared from her life for good. At the end of the film, they are able to move on and finally have the life they so desperately wished for in their youth. The book Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema posits that coming-of-age “appears not only as a psychological or biological process, but as a product of society where culture influences individuals and itself becomes a part of the development pictured in these films” (Hardcastle et al. 2). This means that in film, the growth of a character often parallels some form of transformation in the place that the story is set. Chen Nian was bullied in school, and when she becomes a teacher, she notices that a child in her class is being bullied and becomes the protective adult figure that she did not have. One person can make a difference but the issue is still larger than the individual. Therefore, the most important question yet that underlies Better Days may be: Will Chinese society itself be able to transform? Or will it continue to let down the youth and let them slip through the cracks until they can no longer endure?
Works Cited
Better Days, [少年的你]. Directed by Derek Tsang, performances by Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee, Lian Rui Pictures, 2019.
Buechel, Nicole Frey. “The Indivisibility of Change: The Challenge of Trauma to the Genre of Coming-of-Age Narratives.” IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, June 2018, https://doi.org/10.22492/ijah.5.1.02.
Hardcastle, Anne, et al. Coming of Age on Film : Stories of Transformations in World Cinema. Cambridge Scholars, 2009.
Tsang, Derek. “China’s ‘Better Days’ Puts Destructiveness of School Bullying at the Forefront”
Interview by Robert Abele. Los Angeles Times, 31 Mar. 2021. www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-03-31/chinas-better-days-puts-destructiveness-of-school-bullying-at-the-forefront. Accessed 18 Apr. 2022.
Zhang, Wenxin, et al. “Research on School Bullying in Mainland China.” School Bullying in Different Cultures, edited by Peter K. Smith et al., 2016, pp. 113–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139410878.009.
Zhou, Xuelin. “Changing Representations of Youth: ‘Youth Films’ in the People’s Republic of China.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Apr. 2014, pp. 21–41, https://doi.org/10.21866/esjeas.2014.14.1.002.