Note: No major spoilers for the drama in this essay.
I come from a place where to be able to enjoy rain is a privilege. It is a place where rain, when it’s torrential enough (it too often is), ravages homes and entire cities; a place where rain can kill. To enjoy and appreciate a rainy day in means you are lucky enough to live in a sturdy home on high elevation, safe and unbothered from rising waters and strong winds.
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What is our relationship with the natural world? What is our place in it?
I didn’t think a drama would low-key encourage an audience to consider these questions but one did.
Rainless Love in a Godless Land (the English title is cheesy but the Mandarin title sounds better: 无神之地不下雨 or Wu Shen Zhi Di Bu Xia Yu, literally translating to ‘It doesn’t rain in a godless land’) is a 2021 Taiwanese drama (available on iQiyi) from the same screenwriter and production as the 2019 hit Taiwanese drama Someday or One Day (which now also has a movie version and a Korean remake on the way). Some of the latter’s main cast members also crossed over.
Rainless is based on the animist mythology of the Amis people, Taiwan’s largest indigenous ethnic group. Their tradition includes believing that ‘all things have their own spirits’. The spirits are called ‘kawas’ while ‘sikawasay’ or ‘cikawasay’ is the priest that communicates with the spirits. The kawas on Earth could be anything and everything from the wind to rain, while spirits in heaven would include the god of the sun and the god of the moon. (At present, Western religions like Catholicism and Christianity are part of Amis culture, along with Han Chinese folk religions.)
The drama’s story is winding, unfolding incrementally, and an all-around mindfuck – in that signature style also found in Someday or One Day.
The starting point: all the kawas are being evacuated from the human world just before the last rainfall because the damage humanity inflicted upon nature is now irreversible.
Then Tian-di, a jolly Taipei tour guide that loves rain and has strong faith in the kawas, throws a wrench into the gods’ plans as she tries to take control of her own fate.
What follows is a story that dares to take on daunting themes such as the climate crisis (plus humanity’s bleak future because of it), the nature of faith, existentialism, and human fears of facing both lies and truths.
In the near future, Earth will become desolate. Orad – the messenger of Kakarayan, the god that created the whole world – shows Tian-di this vision in the Reflection of Time early on. She is shocked (too innocently so) but also claps back:
“I am just an ordinary person. You think too highly of me. I’m not trying to change the world. My existence in this world doesn’t matter. The only thing I can change and the only thing I want to change is to live my simple life a little bit better. As for something that will happen a few hundred years later, I don’t think I’m able to change anything. So it has nothing to do with me.”
To me, she sounds exactly like every other person’s view on the climate crisis, most especially major decision-makers who wish to ignore it because it’s a future they think will not arrive in their lifetimes.
The drama admittedly touches on only the topmost layer of this deeply complex problem. It defaults to basic and repetitive imagery like a trash-covered beach, dead corals, and a polluted lake. But I can forgive this. In this way, the drama is managing expectations: it will not make any serious commentary on the issue nor will it wade into complexity. Fair enough.
What it ends up doing instead is (perhaps arguably too subtly) advocate for an alternative attitude towards the natural world – one that’s seemingly a nod to indigenous traditions and beliefs.
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Where I’m from, rain does not sound like quiet spattering on the windows. It doesn’t arrive in small droplets from the sky, more often gentle on the clay or concrete tiled roofs more suitable for freezing winters.
In my tropical land right above the equator, rain falls hard on corrugated metal roofs. The loud roar drowning everything else can make you feel scared and uncertain.
But sometimes, if you’re lucky, it can lull you to sleep.
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Animist lore firmly underpins the story. Each episode starts with an animation of mythology that’s relevant or hints at what’s to come. While I cannot confirm how much of it is accurate to Amis people’s folklore, the pre-episode myths constantly remind us of the values (of respect and care for the natural world) the drama hopes to convey.
Orad beautifully describes the kawas as ‘a kind of existence’. As obvious representations of nature, they bless the world and give it life. But as humans abuse and take them for granted, they become empty and lifeless.
To be sure, this drama is a romance. It’s an epic love story as the world burns, with two characters you can easily be invested in. While it can feel somewhat clunky in parts once the plot finally unravels, Orad and Tian-di make you root for them to the end.
This drama also touches on several themes and can be viewed through various lenses. For example:
There is much about faith and religion: the practice of religion, how it informs one’s choices in life, and whether it is worth it.
Existentialism is not so subtle in this story. You can fall into rabbit holes (pun intended for this newsletter’s theme) of that sort for sure.
There’s something about accepting and facing our impact on people and the world around us, rather than hiding from it, in order for things to change. (Side eye to the climate deniers.)
And then there’s memory. This is a major through-line in the drama and its storytelling. In fact, this world has its own Comb of Memories. You can probably already guess its purpose. Memory, as a concept and abstract thought, has always been fascinating to me. I’ve distilled much of my thoughts on it in my essay on the Japanese novel The Memory Police. Rainless pretty much explores the same ideas around how humans are made up of memories and that we’d be empty without them (for example, how can we grieve what we do not remember?).
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I now live in a place where rain is largely considered an inconvenience. Plans are made to account for whether it will rain or not, and grey skies affect moods and mental health.
Then there would be times when rain, especially in a storm, overwhelms this part of a rapidly warming world.
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Clearly, there’s a medley of things happening all at once in this story. I could never tell where things were going, not even in later episodes. By the end of it, it felt like a proper mindfuck. In some ways, it could also feel quite rushed or even tied up too neatly. But for me, it was still such an enjoyable watch.
A quick note on the acting. I was impressed with Fu Meng Bo. It’s hard to talk about his performance without spoiling major plot points. But I will say that his attention to his character’s demeanour, body language and facial micro-expressions really shines through in particular parts of the story. If you watch it (or have seen it), you’ll know what I mean.
Equally, I loved Yan Yu Lin, who played the Wisdom God Li Pu Hui. I think that to fully appreciate him in Rainless, one must have seen him in Someday or One Day too. To see him in both dramas is to be treated to his incredible range as an actor. In other words: his range is kind of insane.
The same can be said for Alice Ko, who starred in Someday and also crossed over to Rainless. She was brilliant in Someday and I think she delivered again here. You could tell that this time she enjoyed playing around with a character you just love to hate.
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Rain is clearly meant to represent blessings and life in this drama. The last rainfall was supposed to come and signal the end of the world. The act of summoning rain means inviting those blessings back in. Without water, there’s no life.
When all’s said and done, Tian-di finally does her own rain ritual. She does the same one her grandmother always does as a sikawasay who communicates with the kawas or deities.
“Rain rituals are important,” Tian-di’s grandmother says.
When it comes, Tian-di steps out to meet the rain she prayed for. Her eyes light up, embracing the water from the sky.
I saw that as the drama’s comment on the show’s apparent overarching theme of the climate crisis and humanity’s role in it. (Of course, I’m also curious about whether the production made an effort to lower its environmental impact.) That scene reinforced the message of how humans should engage with the natural world.
Tian-di revels in the rain once more, clearly overjoyed by it. Perhaps this is what humanity’s approach should or could be: that we embrace and respect nature as it already is, instead of ignoring it or bending (read: breaking) it to our will.
At one point, we see Tian-di as a child under the rain. That felt like a reminder of more innocent times when I, too, played in the rain, enjoying it rather than seeing it as a nuisance or being afraid of it.
After Tian-di’s ritual, more people meet the rain, too. They play, they dance.
“Share the blessings!” they say.
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Rain is often seen as an inconvenience, even dangerous and deadly where I’m from.
But maybe, if we’re feeling a little less jaded and a lot braver, it could simultaneously be something else, too. Maybe, like everything natural to Earth, it just is.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis…
If you haven’t read my welcome post, I mentioned that I’d like to conduct an experiment: for every essay, I will include a piece about the climate crisis so we’re in the loop even when we’re lost in our own rabbit holes. So here we go.
This essay is actually very relevant to this section of the newsletter – how exciting! Let me share with you a piece from The Guardian dissecting how the world’s food systems (though of course largely in the West) are not equipped to handle the climate crisis. I’ve read (and listened) a lot about this (mostly for work), about where our food comes from and about how utterly homogenous they are. It’s a great interactive read.
Thank you for reading. If you like what you see, feel free to subscribe (if you haven’t already), share this on social media or forward it to your friends.
See you down another rabbit hole!