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“Mr. Chiu bought noodles, wonton, eight-grain porridge, and chicken soup, respectively, at four restaurants. While eating, he kept saying through his teeth, ‘If only I could kill all the bastards!’ At the last place he merely took a few sips of the soup without tasting the chicken cubes and mushrooms.”

This quote appears at the end of the story. Mr. Chiu’s eating and drinking spree is a mirror image, and also a reversal, of his meal at the train station. At the train station at the story’s beginning, he seemed to be savoring the food, enjoying the atmosphere, and thinking contentedly of the journey home and his upcoming work responsibilities. All that has been abandoned by the time the story ends after he and Fenjin have been released. He eats and drinks without truly tasting or enjoying any of the food before him. Some of this may be out of bodily hunger over not having had anything substantial to eat or drink during his time in jail. His thoughts, however, are on nothing but revenge against the people that have wronged him. In this moment, he is no longer the scholarly person who places a priority on logic and reasoning, but instead someone who seems to have reverted to animal instinct and rage. In this moment, he has become the opposite of the man he was at the start of the story, and it is doubtful whether he will go back to who he once was. 

“Mr. Chiu was dazed to see the different handwritings, which all stated that he had shouted in the square to attract attention and refused to obey the police. One of the witnesses had identified herself as a purchasing agent from a shipyard in Shanghai. Something stirred in Mr. Chiu’s stomach, a pain rising to his rib.”

At this early moment in the story after his arrest, Mr. Chiu begins to realize how much the bottom has dropped out of his world and how precarious his situation is. He insists that he is innocent, but the police insist that he is guilty, and here is a mountain of paperwork that seems to prove it. The people who signed the witness statements are all strangers to Mr. Chiu. As he has never been to Muji before, he is a stranger to the town and to everyone who lives there. The purchasing agent from the shipyard, it is safe to say, is a complete stranger to Mr. Chiu as well. It may be interpreted that all of the people who wrote the witness statements were there in the square watching as Mr. Chiu was beaten and arrested but refusing to act. Not one of them is willing to stand up on his behalf, but all of them are willing to say he is a guilty man and that the police had acted correctly. Mr. Chiu has nothing but the evidence of his own eyes, which the police refuse to believe, to state his innocence, and this is a clue that the entire system is against him. 

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