By Jane Sonnenschein · March 14, 2026

Before going to bed, I came across an interesting video on Xiaohongshu (a Chinese lifestyle and social media platform often compared to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest).

A German creator who speaks Chinese was talking in German, with some Chinese mixed in. She mentioned a Chinese word, yuanfen¹, and asked: How would you say this in German?

Her answer was Schicksal.

The comment section quickly came alive.

Some people said that wasn’t quite right. Schicksal is closer to “fate” or “destiny,” while yuanfen means something different.

Then someone asked, “So how would you translate youyuan wufen²?”

One reply was especially funny: “Well, that would be Schicksal.”

I finished watching the video and suddenly found the whole question fascinating.

On the surface, it seems to be about how to translate a single word. But once you think about it a little more, you realize that what is truly difficult to translate is not the language itself. It is the whole set of feelings, experiences, and ways of seeing the world carried inside that word.

With some words, of course, you can find something roughly similar in another language.

But when you try to express the full meaning, you discover that although the definition may be close, the feeling is not quite the same at all.

Yuanfen is one of those words.

Many people’s first instinct is to translate it as Schicksal—fate or destiny.

That is not completely wrong, but something still feels missing.

In German, Schicksal sounds heavier. It feels more like something that has already happened, something whose outcome has already been decided.

There is a sense of finality in the word, sometimes even a touch of helplessness: this is how things turned out, and there is nothing you can do about it.

It makes me think of the German phrase mentioned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Es muss sein.

It must be.

That feeling is not the gentle, almost invisible pull that accompanies an encounter. It is more like something you understand only when you look back: things have come this far, and somehow they could only have ended this way.

But the Chinese idea of yuanfen is not so hard-edged.

There is certainly a hint of fate in the word.

But it is not the same as “destiny.”

Destiny feels more like an outcome. It is heavier, more final, as though everything has already settled into place. The sense of fate inside yuanfen, by contrast, is more like an invisible but strangely real pull between people as they meet, draw closer, and walk alongside one another.

It is the feeling behind questions like: Why did these two people meet? Why did they become close? Why, at this particular moment in their lives, were they somehow brought into each other’s path?

You cannot prove that such a force exists, yet sometimes you cannot quite shake the feeling that it does.

That is what makes yuanfen such an unusual word.

It does not firmly declare: this was meant to happen.

It is more like saying: perhaps some things are not entirely decided by us. Perhaps some people enter our lives for reasons that cannot be reduced to coincidence.

Maybe that is also why I have always felt that yuanfen carries a faintly Zen-like quality.

It is a very Eastern kind of word.

It does not place so much emphasis on “the choice I made,” nor does it rush to explain everything through clear chains of cause and effect.

It reflects another way of experiencing life: knowing that many things are never completely under your control, and that sometimes all you can do is live through them, feel them, and eventually accept them.

It is almost as if there really is something invisible moving through life—not necessarily something mystical or religious, but something that quietly pushes you forward.

Who you meet, who walks beside you for part of the journey, who passes you by, where you stop along the way—very often, you cannot fully explain why any of it happened. Yet somewhere inside, you also sense that it was not simply a matter of “I decided this.”

Part of what makes yuanfen so moving is that it acknowledges how little control human beings sometimes have over life.

There is a very Eastern kind of gentleness in that idea: not everything can be obtained, not everything can be kept, and not everything can be explained. But if things have come this far, perhaps there is some reason of their own.

And perhaps that is why Chinese so naturally gave rise to the expression youyuan wufen².

Those four Chinese characters are especially difficult to translate.

Taken literally, they do not seem very complicated: there was yuan, but there was no fen.

The difficulty lies in the delicate emotional structure compressed into the phrase.

It does not simply mean that two people “didn’t end up together.” Nor can it be brushed aside with a light “it didn’t work out.”

Youyuan wufen often does not mean that two people had no feelings for each other.

Nor does it mean that they were never truly close.

Quite the opposite.

It often means: we really did meet. We came close. We walked seriously alongside each other for a while, perhaps very deeply.

But in the end, the relationship never grew into a complete ending.

The more I have thought about this expression, the more I feel that this is what makes it so subtle.

It is not that there was no yuan. The connection was there, and so was the depth. But in the end, there was no fen that allowed the two people to walk together all the way to the end.

So the phrase contains both regret and acceptance, both loss and a certain willingness to yield to what cannot be changed.

It is not that it does not hurt. It is that after enough pain, there comes a point when you can only admit that some things cannot be held onto through sincerity alone.

My relationship with my former partner feels very much like that.

We were together for ten years.

During those ten years, we were almost inseparable twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We worked part-time jobs together, studied together, started a company together, and built a daily life together.

The intensity of it went far beyond what people usually mean when they say they “were in a relationship for a while.” It was almost as though we had compressed into ten years an amount of time together that many couples would normally spread across an entire lifetime.

Later, someone—I no longer remember who—once said something along the lines of:

“You two basically used up, in advance, all the time another married couple might spend together over a lifetime.”

When I heard that, something in me moved.

Because in one sentence, it expressed many things I had never quite been able to put into words.

There was certainly yuanfen between us.

Without that kind of connection, we would never have come so close, nor would our lives have become so deeply intertwined.

But by the time we reached the end, I also began to feel that what had happened between us could not be explained by yuanfen alone.

There seemed to be something larger in it—something that, when I look back, feels more like destiny.

As though the relationship had carried a certain intensity from the very beginning, and at the same time, somewhere within it, a direction that would eventually lead us apart.

So in the end, yuanfen alone does not quite describe it.

Because by then it was no longer only about the strange chance of meeting. It was also about the weight of the ending.

But I cannot simply call it destiny either.

“Destiny” feels too large, too hard, too much like a hammer coming down with the final verdict.

Youyuan wufen is different.

It allows you to say that the relationship was real. That those years were real. That two people truly entered deeply into each other’s lives.

And at the same time, it gives you a way to accept that, in the end, they did not stay together.

That is why I have always felt that yuanfen and destiny are connected, but they are not the same thing.

Yuanfen is more like the invisible pull between people.

Destiny is more like the larger arrangement of things—the weight of where everything eventually ends.

And youyuan wufen is a particularly delicate, gentle, and painful Chinese way of describing what happens when two people did meet, did care, did go deep, and yet still came apart in the end.

So if we return to that video at the beginning, why does yuanfen always seem so difficult to translate?

It is not because German has no word for “destiny.”

Nor is it because people outside China are incapable of understanding those inexplicable connections between human beings.

What makes yuanfen difficult to translate is that in Chinese, it has never been merely a unit of dictionary meaning. Behind it stands a much broader cultural way of feeling.

Inside the word are, all at once:

the strange chance of meeting,

the reasons two people draw closer,

the depth of walking together,

the regret of missing one another,

and, when looking back, that small and gentle willingness to accept what could not be changed.

Chinese can bring all of this forward softly with just two characters.

In another language, it may take a full sentence—or even an entire paragraph—just to touch one part of what the word contains.

So some words are difficult to translate not because there is no corresponding vocabulary.

They are difficult because behind them stands another way of seeing the world.

I thought of a conversation I once had with my husband about Chinese idioms. I casually mentioned one expression: Dongshi xiaopin³.

He asked me what it meant, so I started telling him the story behind it.

When I finished, he looked at me in surprise and said:

“Didn’t you say that was a word? Why did you just tell me an entire story?”

Later I thought: perhaps this is one of the things that makes Chinese genuinely difficult for many people from outside the language to fully understand.

So many Chinese words and expressions—especially the ones that look so short and effortless—contain far more than a definition.

Behind them may be an entire compressed story, a scene, a judgment, a feeling.

All that thickness and density is hidden inside just a few Chinese characters.

Yuanfen is probably one of those words.

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Notes

1. Yuanfen (缘分) — A Chinese concept describing the often inexplicable connection or circumstance that brings people into one another’s lives. It can involve chance, timing, attraction, and a faint sense of fate, but it is softer and less final than words such as “destiny.” It is commonly used when talking about encounters and relationships that feel meaningful even when there is no clear reason why two people happened to meet.

2. Youyuan wufen (有缘无分) — Literally built from the ideas of yuan and fen, this expression describes two people who had the connection that allowed them to meet and become close, but not the circumstances or “share of fate” that allowed them to remain together. It often carries a mixture of love, regret, resignation, and acceptance: the relationship mattered and was real, yet it was not meant to reach a lasting ending.

3. Dongshi xiaopin (东施效颦) — A Chinese idiom based on an old story. A beautiful woman named Xishi was said to look even more beautiful when she frowned because of chest pain. Another woman, Dongshi, saw this and imitated her frown, believing it would make her beautiful as well, but the imitation only made her look awkward. The expression is used for blindly copying someone else without understanding why what they do works, often producing the opposite effect. The idiom is a good example of how a short Chinese expression can carry an entire story and cultural judgment within just a few characters.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 为什么“缘分”翻不成德语？

German version: Warum lässt sich „Yuanfen“ nicht ins Deutsche übersetzen?