If I were to say that at the beginning, my purpose in following my fourth brother and his wife was to fulfill our teacher's legacy and to promote the embroidery technique that our teacher taught me.
Later on, my fourth brother's wife's perspective changed me, and my idea was no longer simply to promote embroidery skills.
I will think more about my students, their employment, their lives, and their development.
At the same time, I also understood what it means for an industry to support a group of people.
The handmade custom clothing industry was initiated by my fourth brother and his wife, and will be passed on by more people through our joint efforts.
Perhaps in an era of rapid industrial technology, a piece of clothing can be quickly formed and have beautiful patterns with the help of machines.
But for us craftsmen, the meanings of ready-made clothes that are all the same and handmade clothes that each have their own independent soul are always different.
After running the business for many years, I also have many apprentices, and some of them even become teachers in the major that I developed at Suicheng University.
Although I have many apprentices, neither of my children has inherited my skills.
With the persuasion of my family members, I didn't take it seriously in the first place, so I ignored them even more.
It doesn’t matter whether my son inherited the gene or not. After all, his ambition is to become a well-known editor. Not only me, but my whole family knows it.
If sons are not important, then it is even less important whether daughters inherit the gene or not. I am a woman myself, and I have the freedom to live the kind of life I want. I have never been bound by the idea of favoring boys over girls.
Then my daughter naturally doesn't have to be bound by this kind of thinking.
Xiaodan liked painting when she was very young, and she often used branches to draw people, animals, flowers and plants on the ground.
Later, when she went to school and started studying, she began to modify her textbooks. Every picture in the textbooks could no longer be recognized as it was originally.
But all the paintings she transformed are beautiful without exception.
I have always paid more attention to Xiaodan than Jianhui because Jianhui is older and more sensible.
After discovering Xiaodan's interest, I asked my fourth brother's wife's family if there were any good places to cultivate an interest in painting.
Her eldest sister-in-law's family helped introduce a painting teacher to her. The teacher was an old painting teacher who had gone to the countryside a few years ago and could not stand up after returning due to rheumatism.
In her spare time, I often send Xiaodan to learn painting from him. I originally thought that Xiaodan would like to develop in the direction of designer, and I am also happy to see her develop in this direction.
In my heart, she is a very talented child, and she can be considered as an alternative inheritor of my job.
But after she entered high school, she told me very bluntly that she would not study design in the future. She wanted to become a painter. She wanted to inherit her teacher's will when he was young and become a painter who could hold exhibitions across the country.
When I first heard her wish, I was not surprised. After all, children grow up in waves, and they have different ideas in different periods of time.
It wasn't until Xiaodan graduated from high school that she suddenly told me that she wanted to push her teacher to travel around the country to sketch.
My first reaction was, is she crazy?
I hadn't lost my temper in all those years, and that time I really used all my strength to calm down the anger in my heart.
I patiently persuaded her: "Xiao Dan, your teacher is a man after all, and he is a man with a disability. If you go out with him, it will be bad for your reputation. Besides, who will take care of your teacher's food, clothing, housing and transportation? You? You have had trouble taking care of yourself since you were a child."
After all, I always felt that Xiaodan was still young, and because of the health problems she suffered in her early years, I felt guilty towards her. I have taken good care of her and protected her very well over the years.
Maybe it's because of my overprotection that she has the naive and stubborn personality she has now.
In response to my question, she did not immediately refute it. Instead, she took out a notebook from her bag, opened a page and handed it to me.
"Mom, actually I was the one who proposed this travel sketching plan. I had this idea a long time ago, but the teacher has been rejecting me because of his health. He also told me about these problems you raised. No, it's more than these, even more."
"I wrote down all these problems one by one in this notebook, and I also listed the solutions in detail."
"There are some solutions that I came up with on my own, and I think I can solve them. There are also some problems that I found I can't solve by my own strength, so I asked a lot of people, and you gave me some advice. If you still stop me from traveling and sketching after reading it, then I will choose to listen to you."
My daughter's sudden understanding made me feel a little sad.
I started looking through her notebook and found that she recorded the problems in great detail, and listed in detail who gave her the advice and the reasons why she adopted it or not.
It was then that I realized that my daughter’s dream of becoming a painter was not just talk. She had been working hard for it for a long time and had been constantly making plans.
After reading it, all my worries disappeared. I was so relieved that my daughter had finally grown up. Not only did she go traveling and sketching on her own, she also secretly contacted one of my students and said she wanted to go together.
As a mother, this was the first time I used my power to help him.
I did not let the student resign. Instead, I gave her an opportunity to study on a business trip, which can be regarded as a little support for my daughter's painting career.
Later on, my son found a partner, my daughter became an excellent painter, and my body was no longer young.
After Jianhui had a child, I retired from my original job. Except for some special work that I had to do, I handed over the rest to my apprentices. I stayed at home, enjoying my grandchildren and living a happy life in my old age.
After Xiaodan started holding art exhibitions, I asked Jianhui to accompany me to several of them. Her paintings were very popular and the exhibitions were very lively.
Like me, she fulfilled her teacher's legacy.
Her teacher passed away when she was 25 years old. Since then, she has always taken me as an example, wanting to work hard to do well in painting and fulfill her teacher's last wish.
When I was 82 years old, I could no longer see clearly and could hardly hear. All I could do every day was to bask in the sun on a lounge chair in the yard, waiting for the nanny my son hired to take care of me.
On a sunny afternoon, I finally closed my eyes forever.
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