Chapter 145
Wang Jiazhi is currently reading a book by a writer about stories in the northern countryside.
The women in the film are all very pitiful. Some of them were in love with their husbands before marriage, while others were arranged marriages. Anyway, no matter whether it is romantic or secular, marriage is the same.
During the day, she works like an animal to look after the children, and at night, she is beaten and scolded by the man. If the woman does not bear children, the husband will beat her. If the woman bears children, the husband will still beat her because he thinks the child will be too much to raise and suffer.
When a woman has a difficult labor, the pain is excruciating. Her husband comes in and hits her, pouring cold water on her. The woman is in excruciating pain, but dares not cry out for fear of being hit. If she is sick, her husband will hire a shaman or go to the temple to get a handful of incense ash. If this is not enough, he will curse her for bad luck, withhold her food and water, and hope she dies so he can marry someone new.
It is a kind of primitive, barbaric and uncivilized ugliness.
Men are bad, and so are women. It's just that women aren't as bad as men, because in a patriarchal society, wisdom is often useless in such a barbaric and ignorant environment. There's no reason to argue; they're inherently weaker physically than men, so they can only be ruled by men.
There's a story about a wicked mother-in-law who lived her entire life in a submissive manner, afraid to offend anyone. She feared her husband, father-in-law, son, brother-in-law—all the men in the family, and dared not offend any of them. She also didn't dare to offend the women in the family, including her mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and niece-in-law.
In order to vent her frustration, she insisted on marrying the child bride who had been arranged for her early.
A twelve-year-old girl became a daughter-in-law of Tuanyuan. She hung her daughter-in-law up and beat her until she passed out, then poured water on her and burned her with a red-hot iron.
She had her reasons. Her daughter-in-law didn't act like a daughter-in-law.
She took a whole day's bus ride to her husband's house, and no matter how hungry she was, she shouldn't have eaten three bowls of rice; she shouldn't have been so tall, not like a twelve-year-old child, but like a fourteen or fifteen-year-old child; she shouldn't have walked with her head up, but should have walked with her head down.
She is the mother-in-law, and she teaches her daughter-in-law only for her own good, and wants her to become what a daughter-in-law should be.
The daughter-in-law was tortured to the point of having nightmares every night and crying that she wanted to go home.
She said her daughter-in-law was possessed by a ghost and wanted to go home even though this was her home.
So he kept performing shamanic rituals and prescribing folk remedies for his daughter-in-law.
The daughter-in-law was tortured to the point where she was living a life worse than death by the "treatment" method.
She nearly bankrupted herself by trying to pay for her daughter-in-law's medical treatment. Seeing the money she'd earned from painstakingly picking beans, raising chickens and dogs, and watching her being so reluctant to buy medicine or even eat a piece of tofu when she was injured, the money she'd saved was wasted away like water. She was devastated and questioned the injustice of fate.
I've been kind to others all my life, burning incense and praying to Buddha. I'm such an honest and kind person, why should she have to endure all this? She spent most of her savings to buy a daughter-in-law, and now that she finally got one, she's dying. Other people's daughters-in-law are living well, why should she waste money in vain?
The people around her also enthusiastically provided her with folk remedies. They also believed that Tuanyuan's daughter-in-law was possessed by a ghost and did not behave like a daughter-in-law, and they were full of sympathy for her.
Everyone seemed to be fools, extremely ignorant and stupid. In fact, they just wanted to believe what they wanted to believe because they were the same kind of people.
Wang Jiazhi believes that human nature is universal, and so is the selfishness and ugliness of human nature. The people in the book are uneducated and don't know how to whitewash the truth, so they interpret this ugliness in a blunt and explicit way.
More refined people would interpret it in a more elegant way: hypocrite. For example, Kuang Yumin and Lao Wu.
They are no different from the men in the books.
The men in the book treat women as animals. If animals can no longer work, they lose the meaning of their existence, so they want them to die.
Old Wu and Kuang Yumin see her the same way, but they will give her a very romantic hat that cannot be disobeyed.
When she was suffering, they deceived themselves like the evil mother-in-law. There was nothing they could do and they were innocent.
Kuang Yumin wants to achieve great things and avenge his family, so he disguises his selfish desires as a righteous act. Old Wu also wants to avenge his family, so he also disguises himself as a righteous act.
Then they hid in the back while they dragged her, the animal, to the front to be tortured, humiliated, and killed, all while claiming it was all for the greater good. They had no regrets. If she couldn't bear the pain, they would despise her just like the animals in the books who screamed in pain during childbirth.
The reunion daughter-in-law was finally tortured to death, but people had no sympathy for her and thought she was a monster that brought disaster to the world.
In the end, they looked at her in the same way, as if she had harmed everyone and was unforgivable.
In the book, the reunion daughter-in-law was tortured to death, and the evil mother-in-law lost both her money and her people and cried until she went blind.
Wang Jiazhi felt heartbroken, but also happy.
People tortured her, almost to death, and falsely accused her of being a demon. But when this demon died, it brought them catastrophic disaster. It was as if, when they had tortured her, she had taken them with her before her death, perishing together with them.
Wang Jiazhi dispelled her thoughts and looked out at the boundless night.
The bedside lamp was on, and the deep purple tulips looked even more charming and mysterious in the quiet night.
He won't be back today.
She really wanted to share the two new books she had read with him, but she wondered if she would still have the enthusiasm to share them when he returned.
Wang Jiazhi is a bit of a loner, though not quite so much a loner as a person whose music is too highbrow for many. She's well-read, has a complex history, and a sensitive personality. It's rare to find someone like her.
However, she is a quiet person who seeks peace in a bustling environment. She needs to communicate and share. In the past, she could share with classmates and friends. Even if she didn't have any friends, she could still write articles. People would read her articles and give her feedback.
But things were different after she came here. Her social circle was limited to a few wives of officials. She was not interested in the topics they discussed, and they were unlikely to like the topics she was interested in.
So all along, the only person she could share with was Lao Yi.
For example, she would tell him about the books she'd read and the movies she'd seen. He'd also read many of the books and shared his thoughts with her. He hadn't seen a movie in a while, but he'd still listen to her stories and discuss the plots with her. He'd traveled a lot, not just to China, but also to Japan during his first study abroad trip and Russia during his second.
She liked to listen to him talk about the local customs and the things he had seen and experienced. It was a wider world.
A Well-Worn Man is an interesting book.
Because of this, she rarely realized that he was more than ten years older than her. In particular, she felt that many of his ideas were even more whimsical than her own.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
