How small can a country of 1.3 billion people feel? How many coincidences occur every day in a city of 22 million people?
I wondered this last night. It was the latest in a string of strange coincidences – all since I’ve arrived in Beijing.
Four months ago I spent a week in Shanghai filming a promotional video for a study abroad program. One of the students I featured was in her gap year, studying in China. While I knew she would be in Beijing in her second semester, it was quite a strange coincidence that she turned up randomly at a small, group interview I conducted for a volunteer program last night.
While this may seem trivial, it isn’t when you put it in perspective.
Just a day after I landed in Beijing, I ran into a couple that a former colleague had introduced me to while I was in the US. I now work for the company founded by this couple.
During this coincidental encounter, the wife happened to also be with a friend of hers, who turned out to be an acquaintance of mine as well!
The eerily coincidental meetings continued during my second week in Beijing. I ended up in a WeChat (微信) group with a guy I played tennis with in my hometown…many years ago when I was in middle school. I had no clue he was in Beijing.
Finally, just randomly on the street, I have run into my roommate on the opposite side of the city from where I live (Beijing is a huge city). I have run into my former roommate and a classmate I studied abroad with whom I hadn’t seen in three years.
A short while ago, I heard an interesting Chinese expression on a recent episode of This American Life: “不巧不成书.” It means, “No coincidence, no story.”
But that expression doesn’t quite do it for me. Yes, these coincidences make for great stories, but sometimes coincidences feel more meaningful.
That’s where yuanfen (缘分) comes in.
Yuanfen is a difficult concept to define, and even for a big yuanfen believer like myself, I’m not sure if I fully understand the concept. My Chinese-English dictionary defines it as the “lot or luck by which people are brought together.” I’ve also heard it described as a sort of “binding force” that connects people in any type of relationship.
I think of yuanfen as a combination of serendipity and destiny. It’s definitely not fate because the Chinese have an expression, “有缘无份” (you yuan wu fen) meaning even if two people were brought together by destiny, they weren’t meant to stay together for whatever reason. Blogger Pamela Haag wrote a great post about foreign words, untranslatable in English. She listed yuanfen as one of them and explained, “It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two.”
Though my encounters in Beijing have not been of the romantic kind, I like to think that yuanfen occurs not just between people but also with a job or a place.
I certainly think I have yuanfen with China. To this day I don’t know what sparked me to take Chinese my first year at college. It was just a strong gut feeling. However, my mom will tell you it’s because my first babysitter, who happened to be from mainland China, cast some sort of spell on me!
Funnily enough, 20 years after I had lost touch with that babysitter, we found each other living in my college town. That’s a yuanfen story for another post.