weeks later however, I was surprised to see that this randomly decided title had imparted a curious motif to the story: The lighter appeared thrice in the script—when Julian tried to light the cigarette for Brendan before his death, when Julian tried to light his own cigarette before Hailey’s death and after the victim’s death, but he failed all three times as each time his dark desires extinguished the sparks of conscience, until eventually his long-forgotten conscience that came back with his lighter pushed him over the edge. How ridiculous it was, I thought, that such an arbitrarily decided title ended up giving the whole script its theme. I lamented how that thing called “central idea” in our Nine-year Compulsory Education Chinese literature syllabus was so epically dispensable.

       To my greater surprise, more of such retrospective discoveries about the script came later—not from myself, but from my cast and crew—the paradoxes of “deserving” and “not deserving”, “should-have-dones” and “shouldn’t-have-dones”, for instance, of which I was not aware while writing them. What a writer consciously creates is but the tip of an iceberg, while the immense bulk remains undiscovered between the lines he himself penned—those colossal questions and panics about our living condition that have existed all along, at times drowned by the triviality and caprice of everyday life. What writers do is but to find the tips which barely emerge, and let the remaining seven-eighths continue their quiet existence in the boundless glacier. But with the discovered one-eighths, we, as the floating and struggling, rejoice, even though our life remains a short drift—short but magnificent.

        My sincere gratitude goes to my former teacher Ms. Jean Luah with whom I came up with the original idea for this script three years ago, and whose continued encouragement has helped me realize this ambition.

        Salutations to all cast and crew of “THE LIGHTER”!

Meicen Sun  

Princeton University 

Thanksgiving, 2009