A series of numbers flash green on a man's arm. Twenty-three hours 48 minutes 41 seconds is all the time he has. When the countdown reaches zero, he will be dead.
It was the early spring of 2013. The optional course "Life and Death Studies in Films" was being taught in Beijing Normal University. On the first day, the class was shown the first 17 minutes of the film In Time and the last shot that the students saw was that the numbers had stopped flashing.
There was pin-drop silence in the class. Students were told to hear their own hearts beat.
Yuan Yufei, a sophomore, had expected the course to tackle film theories as other courses do, but surprisingly found the course go straight to the point. She was forced to confront the topic of death right away, which made her excited.
Lu Xiaoya, 63, is the course lecturer. She knows how people avoid the topic of death.
For instance, she knows a family that hasn't celebrated Spring Festival for 20 years as one of the family members died during the festival. She said this unbearable pain could lead to depression.
She hopes the course can inspire students to discuss the taboo topic. Topics like life and death, palliative care, near-death experience, funeral customs are all part of her syllabus.
Lu wants to "free the discourse power of death from philosophers' chair and white tower of hospitals." The course has 12 lessons and is held once in a school year. Every film clip displayed in each lesson is carefully selected.
The first lesson displays a clip of film In Time, in which the countdown of time turns the finiteness of life into anxiety; the second lesson shows a clip of film School Days with a Pig, in which whether to eat a pig raised by the whole class for three years arouses a debate on death; the third lesson displays a clip of film Dead Poets Society, in which a student Neil kills himself as he is unable to stand up to his father. For it, Lu raised a question: "Is death the only choice when facing contradiction between dream and reality?" Sometimes, Lu asks students to speak for a role in the film.
Lu's goal is not to ease the anxiety of death but to moderately provoke that anxiety.
Some students were so shocked after the first class that they refused to come back for remaining classes. Therefore, Lu suggests that those students who have experienced the death of a near one in past two years not to select the course.
After two rounds, the course has gained high reputation in the university. It has become so popular that 35 seats were occupied in one second when the course selection system opened in the spring semester of 2016.
Lu believes in an equation developed by Irvin David Yalom, an American psychiatrist, that anxiety of death is inversely proportional to satisfaction of life. The anxiety of death lies deeply in people's sub consciousness. People constrain, replace or sublimate the anxiety to others by their psychological defense mechanism.
Film Ikiru, or To Live, depicts a Tokyo bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe, who never asks for a one day leave during his 30 career. Lu's students evaluate his life as "nonsense".
Learning that he got gastric cancer, Watanabe is threatened by death and leads a different life. He spends years of deposit on luxury wine, gambles in casino, seeks romance in dance hall, hangs out with young woman and leads people to build a park, etc.
"There seems to be a crying behind these actions, 'I had not lived a good life, so I do not want to die'," said Lu.
"I want to tell my students that at the end of your life, if you want to die in peace, you have to make sure two things. First, make sure your life is meaningful; second, make sure you are valuable," said Lu, as earrings shone behind her grey hair. She has not dyed her hair since she turned 55 in order to "accept aging".
