#169: Call it destiny. Call it fate.

Camellia Yang (0:22)

Chiwi Journal Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chiwi Journal Podcast.

I spent a good chunk of this year watching Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope on repeat.

If you haven't seen it, the film follows Parthenope, a woman born in the Sea of Napoli in the 1950s. It traces her whole life, her youth, the family tragedy that breaks her world apart, her rise into academia, and her quiet march into old age. It's really about how a person's life seamlessly mirrors the city they belong to. Gorgeous, painful, and entirely unrepeatable.

And then comes the theme song, Riccardo Cocciante's Ero Gattuto Provenzo. Please excuse my Italian pronunciation.

His voice breaks through the silence. Rusty, tone open, almost bleeding into the ear.

Ero Gattuto Provenzo, it was all foreseen. Even the end of it, all was written into the script.

It's not just a song about a breakup. It sounds like someone standing on the far shore of time, looking back at their whole existence and lighting out this deep, inevitable sigh. Mixed of tragic helplessness and absolute surrender.

And that feeling is what I've been chewing on all year long. Call it destiny. Call it fate.

It's that erring sensation where you are running forward as fast as you can. But if you stop and listen real close, you can hear the faint sound of gears grinding above your head. Every high-stakes decision you thought you made with your own free will. It turns out you were just turning the next pre-printed page of a book you didn't write.

Looking back at my own wandering route, from China to New Zealand to the UK and now here to Portugal, I've come to realize something. My previous free will was really just me being gently but firmly pushed around by an invisible hand.

Take my time in New Zealand. Ending up in the most isolated island nation in the thousand hemisphere was a complete fluke.

I had just finished my studies. Facing that ultimate existential terror every international student knows. Do I go home or do I stay? Visas were changing constantly. Job prospects were brutal. My rational brain was overdriven calculating 24 hours and 7 days. What are my odds? How many months of rent do I have left? What's plan B? I sent out dozens of resumes into the void in Auckland, staring out at the thousand crowds in the night sky consumed by panic. Then, right as I gave up and started packing my bags, destiny threw a curve ball. On a random trip to the South Island, I hit it off with a girl who happened to work for Air New Zealand in Shanghai. Weeks later, out of nowhere, an Air New Zealand recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn for a role, in the exact same department as her. During the interview, the hiring manager barely asked about my qualifications. She took one look at my shaved head, which had shown off weeks earlier for childhood cancer fundraiser and hired me on the spot. She pushed my visa through in record time. At the time, I gave myself a pat on the back. My perseverance paid off, I thought I got lucky. But now I see it for what it really was, a granted stay. New Zealand's vast, almost echoing silence was a pit stop. It hit the pause button on my hyperactive life, so I could finally hear myself think. It was a cosmic buffer zone, a protective sandbox designed to make me strong enough for what was coming next. Because the second my life settled into a comfortable groove, good income, stable job, a predictable middle-class future, that invisible force struck again. Not as a gentle nudge, but as a burning, almost pathological rustlessness. I'd wake up to Auckland's clear blue skies and feel this massive void in my chest. Is this it? Am I just going to die a comfortable death right here? Two panic attacks later, I did something everyone called insane. I quit my six-figure banking job, cold Turkey, and moved to the UK with zero backup plan. My rational brain was completely offline. Moving to London meant burning everything that I had built for nine years in New Zealand. It meant throwing myself into a ruthless shark tank at 30, completely empty-handed. My friends begged me not to. Are you crazy? You fought so hard for stability, and you are just throwing it away. I had no logical answer. All I had was an inner voice screaming, You have to go. If you stay, your soul dies here.

Looking back, my brain didn't make that call. My body, my gut was simply being dragged towards a magnetic pool from afar. My first few months in England were utter chaos. I landed right as the global pandemic erupted. I went from feeling competent in New Zealand to feeling like nobody in a gray, indifferent city. Standing in the cold damp of the London underground, watching crowds of emotionless faces rush by, I panicked. Did I rule my life? But it was precisely in London's vast, brutal and beautiful mass that my universe expanded. I met people who ignited my spirit. I witnessed the ultimate heights of art and absurdism. And for the first time, I saw my own resilience during pandemic and my own darkness, clearly.