Stuck in the Past: The Psychology of the Transmigrators
Imagine waking up one morning and realizing, with absolute certainty, that you will never again hear your mother's voice, never see your friends, never browse the internet, never eat your favorite restaurant's cooking. Not because they are gone, but because you are. You have been sent four hundred years into the past, and there is no way back.
The Weight of Permanence
Most time travel fiction treats the psychological dimension of displacement as a minor inconvenience, something the protagonist adjusts to within a chapter or two before getting on with the business of changing history. Illumine Lingao is unusual in taking the emotional reality of permanent temporal displacement seriously. Five hundred people have lost everything they knew. Not to death or disaster, but to a rupture in time that is, in its way, more absolute than either. A person who loses a loved one to death can visit a grave, look at photographs, talk to mutual friends. The transmigrators cannot even do that. The people they left behind will not be born for centuries. Their entire world has been erased as thoroughly as if it had never existed.
The novel does not dwell on this constantly — it has too many other stories to tell — but it returns to the psychological dimension often enough to give it real weight. Different characters process their loss in different ways, and the range of responses the novel depicts is surprisingly nuanced for a work that is primarily concerned with technology and politics.
The Stages of Loss
In the early days after the transmigration, denial is the dominant response. Many of the five hundred simply cannot accept what has happened. They expect to wake up, to discover it was a dream or a hoax, to find some technological solution that will send them home. This phase passes quickly for most, replaced by the raw shock of realization. The tropical heat of Hainan is real. The mosquitoes are real. The absence of electricity, running water, antibiotics, and mobile phones is aggressively, inescapably real.
What follows is a period that closely resembles grief, and in many ways it is grief — grief for a world that still exists in potential but is utterly unreachable. Some transmigrators become withdrawn and depressive, unable to muster the energy or motivation to participate in the collective project. They go through the motions of daily life but are clearly elsewhere in their minds, replaying memories, torturing themselves with thoughts of what they have lost. A few become functionally incapacitated, unable to work or interact meaningfully with others.
Anger is another common response, though it takes varied forms. Some are angry at the circumstances, at whatever cosmic accident or deliberate act sent them to 1628. Some are angry at the leadership for making decisions about the group's direction without adequate consultation. Some are angry at themselves for having volunteered for the expedition that brought them here. And some displace their anger onto the local population, developing a contemptuous attitude toward the "primitives" among whom they are forced to live — a psychological defense mechanism that transforms helpless grief into a more manageable sense of superiority.
What They Miss
The specific things that transmigrators miss reveal as much about the nature of modernity as they do about individual character. The obvious losses are the big ones: family, friends, romantic partners, careers, life plans. A young man who was about to propose to his girlfriend will never see her again. A woman whose elderly parents depended on her care has abandoned them involuntarily and irreversibly. A graduate student whose dissertation was nearly complete will never defend it. These losses are profound and permanent, and no amount of purpose or achievement in the new world fully compensates for them.
But it is often the small, mundane losses that prove most psychologically corrosive, precisely because they are so constant. The transmigrators miss hot showers. They miss cold beer. They miss music — not just the ability to hear a favorite song, but the vast ocean of recorded music that was always available at the touch of a button. They miss movies, television, video games, social media. They miss the ability to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere in the world. They miss the sense of safety that comes from knowing that a hospital with modern medicine is never more than a short drive away.
They miss privacy. In their new world, life is intensely communal. There are few private spaces, little time alone, and constant social pressure to participate in the collective enterprise. For introverts and people accustomed to the anonymous freedom of modern urban life, this is suffocating. They miss the ability to simply close a door and be alone with their thoughts, to choose solitude without explanation or apology.
Food is a surprisingly powerful source of psychological distress. The diet in 1628 Hainan is monotonous by modern standards — rice, vegetables, fish, pork, with limited seasoning and no refrigeration. Transmigrators who were passionate about food find themselves craving dishes that cannot be replicated with available ingredients. The absence of chocolate, coffee, and refined sugar is felt keenly. Some transmigrators become obsessed with trying to recreate modern dishes from seventeenth-century ingredients, a project that is equal parts culinary endeavor and psychological self-medication.
Coping Mechanisms
The transmigrators develop various strategies for managing their psychological distress, and the novel's portrayal of these strategies is one of its most humanly truthful elements.
The most common and arguably most effective coping mechanism is immersion in work. The industrial project provides an endless supply of challenging, absorbing tasks. A mechanical engineer who might otherwise spend her evenings spiraling into grief instead spends them designing a new lathe. A chemist who misses his family pours that emotional energy into perfecting a sulfuric acid process. Work provides structure, purpose, distraction, and a sense of accomplishment that partially offsets the sense of loss. The leadership encourages this tendency, not only because the work needs doing but because they recognize its psychological value.
Community and shared experience serve as another crucial support. The transmigrators are not alone in their displacement; they share it with four hundred and ninety-nine others who understand exactly what they are going through. This shared experience creates bonds that are intense and rapid, similar to the bonds formed among soldiers in combat or survivors of natural disasters. The transmigrators develop their own internal culture, their own jokes and references, their own rituals and traditions that blend modern and seventeenth-century elements. This culture becomes a source of identity and belonging that partially replaces what was lost.
Some transmigrators cope by "going native" — immersing themselves in the local culture, learning classical Chinese, studying traditional arts, and building relationships with local people. For these individuals, adaptation is not merely a survival strategy but a genuine embrace of their new reality. They find beauty and meaning in a world that others see only as a diminished substitute for what they left behind. They marry local partners, raise children, and gradually come to feel that the seventeenth century is home rather than exile.
Others cope through creative expression. Musicians compose new pieces, adapting modern musical knowledge to the instruments available. Writers keep journals or compose fiction that processes their experiences. Artists sketch and paint the landscapes and people around them. These creative activities serve a dual purpose: they provide emotional outlet, and they preserve something of modern culture in a form that can be shared with others.
When Coping Fails
The novel does not pretend that everyone adapts successfully. Some transmigrators remain chronically depressed, functioning at a minimal level and requiring ongoing support from the community. A few experience more severe psychological breakdowns — paranoia, dissociative episodes, or complete emotional collapse. The novel mentions, without lingering on it, that at least one transmigrator takes their own life in the early months after arrival.
The community's resources for dealing with mental health crises are limited. Among the five hundred, there are no trained psychiatrists or psychologists. A few people have some background in counseling or social work, and they do what they can, but the demand far outstrips their capacity. The leadership eventually establishes a rudimentary support system — regular check-ins, peer counseling, a policy of rotating people out of particularly stressful assignments — but it is improvised and inadequate.
Alcohol becomes a problem. The transmigrators can produce rice wine and eventually distilled spirits, and some use these to self-medicate their depression and anxiety. The leadership struggles with how to handle this: prohibition would be unpopular and probably unenforceable, but unrestricted access to alcohol is clearly causing harm. The compromise — rationing, social pressure against excess, and intervention in the most severe cases — is imperfect but functional.
The Next Generation
As time passes and the transmigrators begin to have children — both with each other and with local partners — a new psychological dynamic emerges. The children born in the seventeenth century have no personal experience of the modern world. For them, 1628 is not exile; it is simply home. They grow up speaking seventeenth-century Chinese alongside the modern Mandarin of their parents, eating the local diet without nostalgia for foods they have never tasted, accepting the rhythms of pre-industrial life as natural and normal.
This is both a comfort and a source of quiet grief for the transmigrator parents. Their children will never fully understand what was lost. The stories of the modern world become just that — stories, increasingly abstract and hard to believe. How do you explain the internet to a child who has never seen a computer? How do you convey the experience of flying in an airplane to someone who has never traveled faster than a horse can gallop? The gap between generations is not merely the normal gap between parent and child; it is a gap of four centuries, and it widens with each passing year.
Yet the children also represent hope. They are the living proof that life goes on, that meaning can be created in any era, that the human capacity for adaptation is greater than the human capacity for despair. Watching their children grow up healthy, curious, and happy in a world that their parents still sometimes experience as a prison, the transmigrators are forced to reconsider what they mean by loss. Perhaps the world they left behind was not the only possible good life. Perhaps the world they are building, for all its hardships and limitations, can be a good life too.
Illumine Lingao earns its emotional power not through dramatic confrontations or tragic plot twists but through this quiet, sustained attention to the inner lives of people in an impossible situation. It understands that the greatest challenge of time travel is not technological or political but psychological: the challenge of finding reasons to keep going when everything you loved has been taken away, and the only direction available is forward.