Whilst reading the “Tiger Fighter” piece by Ha Jin it was hard not to quickly catch on to the problem at stake here, which is a world wide message. Whilst taking a course on romantics, morals and religion there were many points in time where we spoke on the topic of morality. In Ha Jin’s ‘Tiger Fighter’ piece there is a problem at stake which is that these people are trying to recreate a book through film, in which there is a scene where a man must fight a tiger and defeat it. Already in the time that this story takes place there is no such thing as CGI, or computer generated interfaces, so this means somebody would have to fight the tiger. Where morals come into question is when this director allows somebody to do this, by tranquilizing the tiger.
Throughout this story the main character slowly falls into a bad mental state, it’s said that he had schizophrenia but I think if you look further into the text this fight with the tiger caused whatever mental state was triggered during the fight, not schizophrenia. I don’t believe a doctor at this time could diagnose something along the lines of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Along with this the director also knows that he is putting people in danger, and still lets this man acting as a tiger fighter to try again and humiliate himself in front of his peers.
Morally, to me this is all wrong, and eventually this director decides to kill the tiger for its fur to fake the scene, in a safe way. In doing this, however, and allowing the man who he’s made mentally ill by having him fight tigers karma struck back and the mentally ill actor almost killed the man inside of the tiger fur. After all of this they got the scene “right”
To me the story has a hidden message of doing things ethically or morally incorrect can get you what you want. There’s no hiding that in life, it would be a lie to say that you couldn’t get something that you want the incorrect way. However look at all the repercussions this director now must face. A tigers life on his hands, one man not the same man as he was, and another concussed as well as almost killed. These all fall down to this directors poor decision making skills. Ha Jin seems to be saying, “you can get what you want by doing it wrong, but can you face what you may end up doing to those around you?” Let me know if you agree or disagree, I’d love to discuss.