The Taiwanese show Had I Not Seen The Sun tells the story of a young serial killer, who seems to be a psychopath but has some reasoning behind what he’s done. Part 1 of the show gave us details of why Jen-Yao became a serial killer, but Part 2 dives into what happened to Hsiao-Tung after the traumatic incidents of Part 1. The first part ended with a shocking revelation: Jen-Yao is fresh out of his first stint in prison for stabbing one of his classmates, but he also meets a blind girl with the same tattoo as Hsiao-Tung. How is this possible? Well, that’s what we find out through Part 2. Tien-Ching is a radio DJ. She’s blind and lives by herself, but she’s also happy and eager to find someone to be with. This is where Jen-Yao comes in. But does it work out between them? Who is Tien-Ching really, and why does she feel a connection with Jen-Yao? Plus, why did Jen-Yao kill a kid? Let’s find out in this recap of Had I Not Seen The Sun Part 2.
Spoiler Alert
Who Is Tien-Ching?
Part 2 begins with Jen-Yao meeting Tien-Ching, the girl with the butterfly tattoo, but she’s blind and looks entirely different from the Hsiao-Tung he knows. On the other hand, everybody believes Hsiao-Tung killed herself after the incident, and since Jen-Yao was in prison, he didn’t know about anything that went down until 2014. Despite not being sure who she is, Jen-Yao is genuinely attracted to Tien-Ching, and Tien-Ching also feels like they could be a thing. So they end up seeing each other. After a while, Jen-Yao notices that Hsiao-Tung’s parents are close to Tien-Ching, which means he’s definitely right about who she is, but how can he find out the truth? Well, through Hsiao-Tung’s parents, of course. Turns out, Hsiao-Tung felt suicidal back in the day, and she ended up trying to take her own life by scratching her face out. Ouyang-Ti had uploaded the video of her assault on the internet, and she felt like all the comments were climbing onto her body, so she ended up trying to cut them out of her skin. This is when we first see Chi-Chi.
It’s confusing who Chi-Chi is. She’s dressed like a young girl, she feels like a stranger, she never shows up when other people are around, and her interest in Hsiao-Tung feels strange. Turns out she’s actually a new identity Hsiao-Tung made up to deal with the trauma of her assault. Hsiao-Tung’s only request for Chi-Chi is for her to help her kill herself. But instead of actually committing suicide, I think Hsiao-Tung’s Chi-Chi helps her hide away while another identity takes over. This identity is the biggest shock of the show. Throughout part 1, we thought it didn’t make sense that Jen-Yao, a serial killer who hates everybody, was interested in talking to Pin-Yu. He was supposed to be quiet, and even Shen-Mu told him he shouldn’t speak to Pin-Yu. But we never understood why he suddenly agreed and then disagreed to talk to her. Additionally, why did Pin-Yu have a dream where she was attracted to Jen-Yao? Well, it turns out it’s because she is literally in love with him.
It’s revealed in the middle of Part 2 that Pin-Yu is actually another identity of Hsiao-Tung. Her face is the exact replica of a friend of Tien-Ching’s, a woman named Joy, who was close to Tien-Ching when she was at work. Why was Tien-Ching blind then? That was also part of her identity; it helped her deal with the trauma of not being able to see anybody’s expressions, but that’s also why she briefly saw Jen-Yao when she met him. Ultimately, when Tien-Ching learns of her true identity, she tries her best to convince Jen-Yao to fight his death sentence so that they can finally be happy together, but does he actually do it?
What Kickstarts Jen-Yao’s Revenge Journey in Earnest?
While Tien-Ching’s still reeling from the realization that there’s nothing wrong with her eyesight, she ends up having to deal with another crisis. Che-Li, one of her rapists from back in the day, has been dealing with a crisis of conscience. He’s married now, with a kid on the way, and the guilt of his actions has started weighing on him, leading him to try to track down Hsiao-Tung, even though everyone believes she’s dead. Eventually, he follows her mother to Tien-Ching’s flat and puts two and two together, realizing who she is even before Tien-Ching has fully managed to come to terms with her past. He tries to force his way into her flat so he can get her to accept his apology, completely ignoring how much distress he’s putting her in just by reminding her of the past. He still doesn’t care about her well-being; it’s just peace for himself he wants, even if it comes at the cost of hers.
This finally causes Tien-Ching to crack, and Chi-Chi takes over her body, letting Che-Li into the flat and then smashing a glass vase over his head. Jen-Yao ultimately has to show up and keep her from killing Che-Li, letting the bewildered man scramble off while he takes the broken shards of glass from Chi-Chi’s hand. She’s not done though; she takes the opportunity to plant the seed of revenge in Jen-Yao’s mind; she reminds him how nothing would ever have gone wrong with Hsiao-Tung’s life if she’d never met him, and tells him he doesn’t deserve to live because of how he failed to protect her when she needed him most. Hsiao-Tung herself had never expressed this sentiment to Jen-Yao, and she still wanted to celebrate Christmas with him after everything, but the fact that Chi-Chi managed to voice these thoughts meant they must have occurred to her somewhere in her subconscious mind. The revenge begins with Fan Wei-Ting. He goes after Jen-Yao himself, but when he teases Jen-Yao and makes the whole Hsiao-Tung assault a joke, Jen-Yao gets furious and beats him to death. It’s through Wei-Ting that Jen-Yao manages to get a hold of the whole gang, now having created their own den of illegal business.
Chi-Chi’s breakdown escalates to the point that she makes a long cut in her arm with a shard of glass, landing her in the hospital, where Hsiao-Tung’s parents refuse to let Jen-Yao see her, also blaming him for not protecting their daughter. As he’s walking out of the hospital, he sees Che-Li’s face on a billboard, and this is when he decides every last one of these monsters needs to die. He targets Che-Li in a parking lot while he’s walking up to his car on the phone with his pregnant wife. He knocks him out and takes him to a “Dexter”-style killing room, with plastic sheets all over the place and Jen-Yao wearing a splash-resistant jumpsuit. He uses the cleaning fluids he’d stolen from Big K’s car wash, pouring them down Che-Li’s throat and cutting off his pleas. He’s learned his lesson from the killing of Wei-Ting, whom the police identified using his fingerprints and dental records, so he does a careful job of removing Che-Li’s teeth and fingerprints before he dumps the body somewhere.
Meanwhile, Shen-Mu has stumbled across a student who’s being bullied by another of the rapists, Jung-Tai, who’s now become a teacher at the school they all used to attend back in the day. He’s been harassing this girl because he thinks she’s worthless because she’s not doing well financially, and her parents apparently went to prison, meaning she lives with her grandma now. Most recently, she’s tried to report this bullying, causing Jung-Tai to target her even more ruthlessly. Shen-Mu catches this on video and later approaches the girl, offering to help her. Maybe she relates to her as someone who grew up with just her grandma, even though, in her situation, it was her grandma who was abusive. Ultimately, she helps the girl expose the bullying on social media using a hidden camera, and Jung-Tai gets fired. He figures out someone must have helped the girl and tricks Shen-Mu into coming to see him, at which point Jen-Yao shows up to intervene and kills Jung-Tai.
After he disposes of his body, Jen-Yao and Shen-Mu basically have a bit of a catch-up, including him introducing Shen-Mu to Tien-Ching in the hospital, and then Shen-Mu starts laying down a few rules. They both know that Hsiao-Tung’s memories are buried deep under Tien-Ching’s consciousness, and the only way she can lead a normal life is if she never finds out what happened to her back then. This means not only do they have to eliminate every other rapist, but they have to make sure the media never links it to Hsiao-Tung’s story either. This means Jen-Yao will have to be more careful, and more importantly, that he can’t see Tien-Ching anymore. Shen-Mu also does background research on all the rapists, including En-Ya, the rival ballerina, who played a key part in what happened to Hsiao-Tung. She even gives Jen-Yao detailed maps of where his targets will be and where the local CCTV cameras are, leaving him as well-prepared as she can.
His first target is Meng-Hung, definitely the easiest of all the remaining rapists to get. Shen-Mu had already visited his noodle shop before, and it’s obvious he’s the least “happy” of the old gang, given his financial straits are significantly worse than all the others. His is the murder that really earned Jen-Yao his reputation, because after a few quick stabs in the dark of the night, he sits down and finishes the last bowl of noodles Meng-Hung ever made. Meanwhile, Shen-Mu’s targeting the two other women who were there on the night of Hsiao-Tung’s rape: En-Ya, who’s now an influencer, and Wen-Ling, who seems to work an office job. Wen-Ling, who turned a blind eye to Hsiao-Tung’s rape and even lied about how she seemed to be asking for it, suffered the same fate not long after; she’s been involuntarily recorded by Ouyang-Ti, and after the footage is uploaded for the world to see, she breaks down, just like Hsiao-Tung did back in the day, except she’s also haunted by the ghost of Hsiao-Tung, a manifestation of her own guilt for letting the boys get away with it back then. But she kills herself, thinking she’s being murdered by the ghost of Hsiao-Tung.
When Shen-Mu visits Wen-Ling, she’s open about how she was planning to kill her, but that seeing her have to live with the weight of this anxiety is a far greater punishment. When it comes to En-Ya, now a successful influencer, she’s really easy to bait. All Shen-Mu has to do is pretend to be calling from a brand looking to collab with her, and she has her address. When Jen-Yao shows up dressed as a delivery driver, En-Ya doesn’t even look at his face, allowing him to attack her and stuff her in a massive box, which he uses to transport her to the woods, where he finally kills and buries her. At this point, Ouyang-Ti becomes a more concrete threat, because he’s seen Jen-Yao out and about and deduced that Hsiao-Tung must live somewhere in the area, which leads Jen-Yao to go about killing him a bit hastily, having to flee the scene before he can finish the job after Ouyang-Ti’s mother, Li-Yen, shows up.
He’s not the one who has to finish the job, though. Li-Yen takes over for him, strangling her own son to death after she finds him, much to Jen-Yao’s shock. Because he was shoddy and got caught on camera, the police now know Jen-Yao is the murderer, and he rushes to the house of Yu-Hsiang, the final rapist. He sees how his wife’s just as much of a monster as him, beating their son so regularly and violently that the poor kid has to wear an eyepatch. He probably identifies with Shih-Yu, this abused boy, given he was regularly beaten by his own father. That’s why Yu-Hsiang’s wife is the first to go, with Yu-Hsiang following just after. But when the boy calls out, “Don’t forget about me,” Jen-Yao starts hearing the words of everyone’s disapproval coming out of his mouth. Most crucially, he hears Chi-Chi’s voice telling him it was all his fault, so he puts his hands around the little boy’s throat and strangles him till he’s dead, stumbling out afterwards. After this, he has only one last task to accomplish: he goes back to his mother’s flat, where he knows his dad’s been hiding out, and he kills his old man too, finally calling the police and turning himself in. This is the end of his story, in a very real sense. The documentary director, Ta-Wei, seems to have figured most of this out and, in the end, goes to Li-Yen and says they’ve cancelled the documentary, but also tells her that she and her son were never innocent to begin with, which might have been the last push she needed to give up, as we see her passing away in a hospital bed not long after.
What Happens in the Epilogue?
In Had I Not Seen The Sun’s ending, Jen-Yao gets executed, and he believes himself that he deserves to die. He’s got nothing left for him, and he killed an actual child, so there’s no way he can escape this fate. But still, it seems the ending of the show is a happy one for Hsiao-Tung because she finally escaped the hate and the death. She’s seen walking out of the beach and into the ocean, but this could mean freedom in two ways. Either she’s decided to give up for real, or she’s actually free. She’s wearing white, and it looks like she’s genuinely at peace. But the show then shifts to an imaginary scene. This is if Jen-Yao and Hsiao-Tung got together that Christmas as they had planned, and everything had gone well. Guess Jen-Yao’s death made it seem like everything was finally okay, so we can imagine they would’ve been happy together if they had had the chance to get together.
