Chapter Sixteen let Ye regain contact with people and materials outside the project. External relationships made another interpretation possible, yet they left behind a sharper question: when Ye prepared to leave, would he first have to accept Lin's interpretation of the dispute before being permitted to leave with his own records?
After the archive dispute, Lin offered three options: continue in the original position, convert to a short-term consultant, or terminate the collaboration immediately. The three options appeared to preserve choice. Yet an attached note stated that only by confirming that "the earlier dispute arose from a personal failure of understanding" could Ye obtain a complete certificate of his work; if he refused to confirm, the project would issue only a departure record that omitted his specific contributions.
Equipment returns, the handover of interviewee materials, and confidentiality obligations all have concrete objects. Requiring Ye to complete these matters before ending the collaboration does not amount to hijacking. What truly needs examination is another exchange: why should a certificate concerning the facts of work be conditional on accepting some inner interpretation? If the one leaving must first agree that he has understood everything wrongly before the relationship is willing to acknowledge what he did, then the exit no longer merely manages actions; it begins to adjudicate reality.
Costs, housing, the transfer of credentials, and interrupted income all affect whether a person can bear the price of leaving, but what this chapter examines is not the full set of economic conditions for departure; it is whether the end of a relationship can also end a single interpretive authority: whether Ye can still preserve his materials, whether he can continue to raise factual disputes, and whether the act of leaving will itself be rewritten by the sole interpreter into a final confirmation of his theory.
Leaving Is Not a Loyalty Referendum
If Ye stayed, Lin could say that he had finally acknowledged that the project still deserved trust; if Ye left, Lin could equally say that his flight proved he could not face his own problems. Once two opposite actions are both absorbed by the same interpretation, choice loses its power of counter-evidence.
This is a separate matter from whether the choice itself is wise. Ye might have wished to stay for the sake of the work, his colleagues, or the interviewees, and he might have decided to leave out of exhaustion and a judgment of risk. His reasons can be discussed, and his commitments can generate proportionate obligations. But staying cannot automatically become evidence that Lin was right, and leaving cannot automatically become evidence that Lin was wrong. An action only shows what Ye did under the conditions of the moment; it cannot sign, on his behalf, a statement about the entire past.
Controlling relationships often expand partial decisions into declarations of identity. A departure gets written up as betrayal, a continued collaboration as submission, a reserved opinion as dishonesty. Decisions thereby no longer merely alter future arrangements; they are forced to rewrite the past. The first step of a reality check is to return an action to the question it actually answers: whether Ye continues to undertake a certain piece of work, not whether Ye accepts Lin's overall definition of him.
This book calls a common piece of reasoning the "responsibility eraser": since Ye formally made a choice, the party that set the options, held the materials, and stipulated the consequences no longer needs to account for its own conditions. The name does not mean that the subject bears no responsibility for his actions; it points out that a choice cannot erase the decisions other participants have already made. The existence of a structure cannot exempt Ye from responsibility, and Ye's making a choice cannot exempt the structure either.
Three Options Can Share the Same Premise
The number of options cannot by itself prove that interpretive authority has been dispersed. Continuing, consulting, and terminating appeared to lead to different outcomes, yet all of them required Ye to withdraw his objection to the archive, and so they shared the same premise. The menu allowed him to choose the speed of his departure but not whether to retain his own judgment.
Conversely, no organization can offer every option anyone might want. A project may abolish a position, may reject forms of collaboration that do not fit its actual needs, and may demand a clear answer. The crucial distinction lies not in whether Ye got his wish, but in whether uncontested facts were traded for narrative submission. Work already completed, version records already formed, and materials already submitted should be treated as verifiable facts; disputes about motive, trust, and responsibility must not quietly become hidden fields in the issuance of a certificate.
If the attribution of the work was genuinely contested, the institution could mark its status, preserve both parties' versions, and restrict the use of undecided content. Marking a dispute is not the same as deleting Ye's contribution. The former admits that one does not yet know or has not yet decided; the latter lets the one who controls the exit use an administrative outcome to manufacture a past in which the dispute seemingly never existed.
Collateral Consequences Can Bend the Exit Back Toward the Center
After Ye raised his departure, Cen, a fellow practitioner, received a reminder that continuing to provide Ye with housing might affect future collaboration with the project. Su, in turn, was required to hand over to Lin the records of assisting Ye in organizing the archive, in order to prove that the service had not been influenced by Ye's "one-sided narrative."
There may be genuine conflicts of interest between the project and fellow practitioners, and those who provide services also need to answer for their own methods. A reminder and a demand for records cannot by themselves establish that retaliation exists. One must verify who issued the reminder, under what rules, whether it applies equally to other disputes, and what it actually changed.
But if every step a supporter takes toward Ye requires a fresh profession of loyalty to Lin, then external relationships exist in name only. Although Ye left the project, new materials still had to pass through the approval of the original interpreter, and others reduced their responses for fear of collateral consequences. The exit ultimately traced an arc that delivered all observation back to the same center.
A reality check therefore looks not only at whether Ye walked out the door. It also asks whether people outside can verify materials with him without the permission of the original relationship, whether supporters can retain their own judgment, and whether the project can still use resource relationships to decide who is entitled to hear Ye.
Handing Over Facts Is Not Narrative Self-Admission
Ye held the interviewees' original footage and the unfinished edits. He could not disclose unrelated privacy in order to prove Lin wrong, nor could he treat shared materials as personal spoils. Leaving does not cancel responsibilities toward third parties.
The project required a list of material locations, access records, and subsequent recipients, and these matters directly protect the interviewees and the continuity of the work. Ye could confirm the list item by item. But if at the end of the list was appended "I acknowledge that my earlier objections concerning the modification of the archive are unfounded," then the handover was being used to obtain a conclusion of a different order.
The two kinds of sentence should be kept apart. The first states who delivered what and when, and can be verified against records; the second states how the dispute ought to be interpreted, which requires independent materials and continued discussion. Ye's fulfilling the obligations of the first kind does not mean that he agrees with the judgments of the second, and the project may not, because the judgments of the second kind remain unresolved, refuse to confirm the facts of the first.
This separation protects the project as well. Ye cannot invoke "I still have objections" as grounds for refusing all handover, nor demand that colleagues accept his complete narrative as the condition for respecting him as a subject. Preserving a dispute does not suspend every action; it requires each party to answer only for what can currently be proven and what it has the right to decide.
Contested Materials Require a Third Position
If the entire archive remained in Lin's custody, Ye feared the counter-evidence would disappear; if everything were copied to Ye, the interviewees and the project might lose necessary protection. What is needed at this point is not the immediate selection of a "truly neutral person," but the establishment of a third position with limited authority: preserving versions, recording access, and providing verification within the scope of the dispute, without declaring the complete facts on behalf of either party.
A third party may still err, lean toward one side, or depend on the same source of funding. Its reliability comes from the boundaries of its mandate and from reviewable procedures, not from the name "third party." Who may submit materials, who may view which contents, how long records are kept, and how errors are corrected — all of this should be statable.
RC's "processual completeness" yields a concrete requirement here: a relationship may end without judgment being forced to close the case on the same day. Temporary indecision is neither a punishment of either party nor a default verdict that Ye is right. It simply refuses to use the authority of the exit to manufacture an epistemic finality.
After Leaving, Can Materials Still Return
A month after moving out of the dormitory, Ye discovered that the project's public introduction still listed him as the maker of some of the footage, while the internal certificate said only "auxiliary work." He submitted version documents to the project and received an automatic reply: "The collaboration has been terminated; member opinions are no longer accepted."
If the end of a relationship simultaneously deletes the standing to correct facts, the institution can unilaterally complete the past after one's departure. Current managerial authority and the authority over the historical record need to be distinguished: that Ye no longer takes part in everyday decisions does not mean that he vanishes from work that has already happened, and that the project continues to use the materials does not mean that it must accept Ye's interpretation of every dispute.
A reviewable ending preserves at least a limited point of re-entry. Such a point can stipulate its objects and deadlines — handling, for example, only attribution, wages, the ownership of materials, and errors in the record, without reopening every relational conflict — and it may close the case when repeated submissions bring no new material. The function of a boundary is to give a dispute an object, not to keep the one who left inside the institution forever.
If the project later discovers that the same version error affects several members, the pattern should return to the rules and the archive system rather than congeal into a list of "high-risk leavers." Public learning requires preserving how errors happened; individuals should not, for having once proposed a correction, be made to carry a personality label in perpetuity. Recording errors and recording dissenters are directions that must not be reversed.
Forgetting Also Needs Boundaries
Preserving everything does not automatically protect the subject. Ye might not want the old project to continue keeping private accounts unrelated to the work, and interviewees might also demand the deletion of copies that are no longer needed. Unlimited retention for the sake of future verification would turn the reality check into another form of continuous observation.
What needs to remain is the minimum of material capable of supporting specific rights, responsibilities, and version relations. Irrelevant emotional descriptions, unverified judgments of character, and monitoring records long since stripped of use should not exist forever on the grounds that they "might be useful someday." Preservation and deletion must both answer the same question: what does this material protect now, and who bears the risk of its continued existence?
Staying Cannot Be Automatically Interpreted Either
Ye finally chose to complete the handover over one month. He still held that the modification of the archive required review, and he also acknowledged the project's genuine responsibilities toward the interviewees. Lin wrote the decision up as "the member regained his willingness to collaborate after communication"; Ye demanded that it be changed to "the member completed a limited handover while retaining his objection to the archive."
The difference between the two formulations does not lie in tone. One expands the fulfillment of obligations into inner submission; the other merely records the actual arrangement. If the institution can accept the latter formulation, it has begun to allow shared work and interpretive disagreement to exist at the same time. If it insists that all collaboration must be translated into endorsement, the loop of hijacking is still running.
Supporters can commit the opposite error. If Su were to interpret Ye's staying for a month as proof that "he still has not escaped control," Su would once again be using an external theory to cancel Ye's present judgment. Support can point out options and risks, but it cannot require the person concerned to prove his lucidity by leaving. Leaving is not a rite of recovery, and staying is not pathological evidence.
Four Reality Checks
When a relationship ends, four questions can be used to examine whether interpretive authority has genuinely loosened.
First, can an action retain a limited meaning? Leaving only indicates which relationship is being terminated or changed — is it expanded into a verdict on character, the past, and every dispute?
Second, can uncontested facts be detached from narrative submission? Must certificates of work, version records, and handover confirmations be exchanged for acceptance of some total interpretation?
Third, can external relationships form independent observations? Can supporters, fellow practitioners, and custodians verify materials within clearly defined mandates without first proving their loyalty to the original center?
Fourth, does a limited return still exist after the relationship has ended? Can facts that have already occurred be corrected, can undecided disputes be preserved, and can the person withdraw from continuous recording once the purpose of preservation has been met?
None of the four guarantees that Ye made the right decision, and none proves that the project necessarily had controlling intent. What they offer is a point of entry for counter-evidence: if the one leaving can complete the handover while retaining his objections, if external materials can exist independently, and if factual errors can still be corrected, then Lin's interpretation no longer possesses the capacity to swallow every outcome.
What Ye actually obtained was not an undamaged exit, but an exit that would not rewrite his past on his behalf. The economic burden and the conversion of credentials still exist and should be handled separately in a ledger of resources; what this book confirms here is only that a subject need not first surrender his reality to the sole interpreter in order to be entitled to end a relationship.
The next chapter hands the question to the helpers. Once the original center steps back, the supporters who hold the archive, the housing, and the professional knowledge may themselves become new centers of interpretation; whether help remains limited will determine whether Ye has truly returned to a position from which he can continue to judge.