Chapter 7 My Four Imaginary Enemies

The second daughter, Youshan, took the joint entrance examination for overseas Chinese students in Hong Kong, and was assigned as the first choice to the Foreign Languages ​​Department of National Taiwan University.Hearing this news, I breathed a sigh of relief. From now on, I don't have to worry about all four daughters marrying Guangdong boys. Of course I have no prejudice against Cantonese boys. During my six years in Hong Kong, I had many cute Cantonese boys in my class, who were quite popular with the teacher, but if I want to let all four of my daughters be kidnapped by those "beautiful boys" and "cool boys" to go, but reluctant.However, who daughters marry is their free will, to put it bluntly, or to put it more mysteriously, it is marriage, so why should a father worry about gains and losses?What's more, in this matter, the mother is often at the forefront, and naturally becomes the daughter's close adviser, or even a close comrade-in-arms. The target of the battle is not the boyfriend, but the father.When the father woke up, he was already under the enemy's back, and it was hard to turn the situation around.

In the eyes of a father, the cutest time for a daughter is before she is ten years old, because at that time she is completely her own.In the eyes of her boyfriend, she is the cutest when she is seventeen years old, because at this time she is just like a graduate student, and she has already turned her heart outward.Father and boyfriend are inherently contradictory.For a father, there is nothing more perfect in the world than an immature daughter, the only downside is that she will grow up, unless you freeze her for a long time, but this is probably illegal, and her boyfriend will sooner or later He will ride a horse or a motorcycle to wake her up with a kiss.

I didn’t use the cryo-sleep technique of the space capsule. Once the time passed, the sun and the moon rotated, and when I rubbed my eyes again, why did my four daughters grow up one by one, and the door of the fairy tales of the past was slammed shut, and I could never go back: The four daughters are Shanshan, Youshan, Peishan and Jishan.Almost like a coral reef.When Shanshan was twelve years old, Peishan, who was not yet nine years old, suddenly said to a visiting guest: "Hey, I tell you, my sister is a girl!" All the adults present laughed. Once upon a time, the ridiculous Pei Shan herself, and even the naive Ji Shan, were turned into "girls" under the magic wand of time.In the dark, there are four "young boys" sneaking up on me. Although they tiptoed and kept their voices silent, I felt that there were four pairs of eyes behind me. Like all bad boys, their eyes were burning and they had evil intentions. When the time came, he would stand in the light, put on a hypocritical smile, and call me "father-in-law".Of course I wouldn't answer him.How can it be so easy!I am like a fruit tree, which has been standing here for many years, wind, frost, rain and dew, and I have a share in everything.And you, the boy passing by occasionally, come to pick the fruit as soon as you stretch out your hand, you deserve to be stumbled by the root of the tree!

But the most annoying thing is that the fruit on the tree seems to fall into the hands of passers-by by itself.The tree monster pedestrian should not come to pick the fruit without authorization, but the pedestrian said that the fruit just fell, so he just picked it up.This kind of thing is always successful when the inside and outside cooperate.When I got married, wasn't there a girl who opened the door and greeted the robbers? "Fortresses are easiest to break from within" is true.But that moment is also, this moment also.The same person who hates cars when crossing the street hates pedestrians while driving.Now it's my turn to drive.

Over the years, I've gotten used to being around five women, the smell of soap and perfume in the bathroom, purses and hair curlers scattered on the sofa, and no one competing with me for drinks at the dinner table.It has been a long time since Wulu was called "girls' dormitory".As the dormitory supervisor of the "girls' dormitory", I naturally don't welcome strange male guests, especially those with ulterior motives.But the girls under my command, especially the first three, have already become "unstable", which reminds me of a poem by Yeats: My four imaginary enemies, no matter whether they are tall or short, fat or thin, studying medicine or literature, sooner or later they will emerge from the fog of my doubts and fears, and come forward one by one, or twist and turn, and murmur , or get straight to the point, and speak boldly, in short, I want to take his lover, my daughter, sorry, from now on.The invisible enemy is the most terrifying, not to mention I am in the light, he is in the dark, and there are "internal traitors" from my family to support him, it is really hard to guard against.The only blame is that the four daughters were not refrigerated in time so that time could not be cheated and society could not be polluted.Now they are all grown up, and there is no turning back; my four imaginary enemies, those four sneaky underground workers, are also full-fledged, and no force can stop them.It is better to act first, this matter should be resolved when the four imaginary enemies are still in their infancy.At least that's what the American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971) advised us to do.In a wonderful poem "Song to Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children" (Song to Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children), he said that after his daughter Jill was born, he was uneasy and felt that he didn't know where he was. There is a baby boy who is also growing up, and although he is still muddled and foaming at the mouth, he is destined to snatch his Jill away in the future.So every time a father sees a baby boy in a stroller in the park, he can't help but think: "Could it be this guy?" I fear, are infanticide) to unpin the baby boy, pepper his talcum powder, salt his bottle, sand his spinach juice, throw his head The crocodile played with him in his pram, forcing him to struggle away in dire straits to marry someone else's daughter.It shows that the poet used his future son-in-law as an imaginary enemy, and there are already precedents.

But it was too late.It was a big mistake not to act decisively and take extraordinary measures, as Nash said in his poem.The current situation, to use a common saying in history books, is already "the enemy has entered the depths"!The posters and newspaper clippings on the daughter's wall and under the glass mat of the desk were still images of The Beatles, Baiss, and David Casey, but now they all have boyfriends.At least the beachhead had been taken by the invading army, and the battle was lost.I remember that when we were young, this kind of photos were still classified as confidential. They were either hidden in pillowcases, pasted in dreams, or hidden in the depths of books, and occasionally turned out to be fascinated. How can there be such a 24-hour period? Enshrined in front of you?

Exactly which year and which month this group of suspicious-looking imaginary enemies began to invade Yu's house on Xiamen Street is impossible to test.I just remember that after moving to Hong Kong six years ago, the siege soldiers were replaced by a group of Cantonese-speaking teenagers.As for the details of the battle, you have to ask the female generals who are nominally defending the city. My "faint lord" can no longer figure it out.I only know that the enemy’s artillery fire was aimed at my mailbox at first, and those crooked handwritings can be guessed seven points after a long time; then they were concentrated on my home phone, and the "bullet point" was behind my desk. My Wenyuan is their battlefield, and there are always more than a dozen concussions overnight.Those Cantonese accents have as many as nine tones, which also makes it difficult for me to judge the enemy's situation.Now I took Youshan back to Xiamen Street, and it was my wife's turn to resist the Guangdong troops on the other side. I was on this side. As long as I kept an eye on the Taiwanese athletes, the task would be much easier.

Attacks on mailboxes are like silent movies of war, and it doesn't matter.In fact, I would rather an amorous teenager write love letters frequently, so that at least I can practice composition, so that Chinese will not be abandoned in the era of audio-visual education.The most terrible thing was that the phone was shot, and the series of warning ringtones expanded the battlefield from the mailbox outside the door to the hinterland of the study.What was even more frightening was that the imaginary enemy actually broke into the city and became a real enemy with flesh and blood. It was no longer imaginary for fun, just like a military exercise midway through, suddenly a real fight broke out.The real enemy is visible.Under the support of a certain daughter, he occupied a corner of the sofa. From then on, the two whispered and talked secretly. Even when they were facing each other, the atmosphere was too thick to dissolve, and the whole family was suffocated. Come.At this time, the sisters had already avoided the situation far away.Anyone can see that things are different.In case the enemy stayed to eat, the air would be even more tense, as if posing for the camera.The dining table was usually like a duck pond, but the four sisters seemed to be performing a pantomime at this time, even the chopsticks and spoons seemed to have got the news, and suddenly became cautious.Knowing that this presumptuous boy may not be the real son-in-law, (who knows which transformation the baby girl is in now?) But a faint hostility can't help but rise in my heart.She also knew that her daughter was like a ripe melon, and would die one day, but she hoped that she would not follow the conceited boy in front of her.

Of course, the four daughters also have their own misbehavior. When I was in an angry mood, I wished that the four imaginary enemies would appear quickly and take them all away.But when that day really comes, I will definitely regret it again.I can imagine the two great loneliness in life, one is the day of retirement, and the other is after the youngest child finally gets married.Song Qi said to me one day: "I really envy you with all your daughters by your side!" Really?At least for now, I don't think I have anything to envy.Maybe the youngest, Ji Shan, went on honeymoon with her imaginary enemy before she would sit with me on the empty couch, look through their childhood photo albums, and reminisce about the grand occasion of the long-distance grand tour with six people in a car. Or at the dinner table, the steaming heat, the bright lights shared by everyone.There are many things in life, just like the ripples on the back of a boat, which are beautiful only afterward.Thinking about it this way, I hope that those four imaginary enemies, those four clumsy young men, will be shut down a few more times and show up later.

In Yuan Mei's poems, she described giving birth to a daughter as "the second car in love and doubt".According to Yuan Mei, I hit the vice car four times in a row, and the hit rate is high enough.The four little girls in Yu Zhai have now turned into four little women, surrounded by imaginary enemies, if you ask me what are the conditions for choosing a husband, I'm afraid I won't be able to answer for a while.After pondering for a while, I might say: "In this matter, there is the marriage record of Old Man Yuexia, and no one can tamper with it, including Wei Gu. There are two lovers who have vowed to eachother, 'two people are of the same heart, and their benefits can cut gold', Why should I be against the sky and stick in the middle? What's more, life-long events are mysterious and unpredictable. I can't reason in advance, and I can't regret the game afterwards. Even if I hand it over to the computer of the 21st century, I'm afraid I can't calculate the probability. Not really Show generosity as before, pretend to be easy, gain a good name as an enlightened father, and when the time comes, bring a private seal and be the officiant."

The person who asked me laughed, pointed at me and said, "What do you mean by 'pretending to be relaxed'? It can be seen that you are not relaxed in your heart." Of course I am not very relaxed, otherwise I would not be their father.For example, the issue of race is very disturbing.What if my daughter is crazy and falls in love with a little weirdo who shrugs and spreads his hands and chews gum all the time?Rationally, I am willing to "have a son-in-law without discrimination" and be a generous citizen of the world.But emotionally, I'm not generous enough to let a guy with hairy arms like an ape carry my daughter across the threshold.Of course, it is no longer the era of "strict barbarian defense against summer", but it is unnecessary for a simple family to expand into a small United Nations.The person who asked laughed again, and asked me if I had ever heard that people of mixed race were smarter than ordinary people.I said, "I've heard it, but I don't care about having a gifted 'hybrid grandson'. I don't want a gifted child to call me Grandpa, I want him to call me Grandpa." The person who asked refused to stop: "Then what about provincial nationality? " "Provincial nationality doesn't matter," I said, "I'm the result of a marriage between Suzhou and Fujian, isn't it bad? My mother wrote a letter back to Wujin from Fujian, saying that someone there proposed to her. My natal family made a fuss and said, 'It's so far away! Why? Just marry a Nanman!' Later, my family found out that there was nothing suspicious about this young Hokkien man other than his language barrier. Over the past few years, the Guangdong boys have persevered and put a lot of pressure on my family. I wouldn't be surprised either. If there is a Taiwanese boy who is particularly flattering to me, and his ambition is not to talk about literature and poetry with me, I won't make things difficult for him. As for other provinces, from Heilongjiang to Yunnan, they speak various dialects As long as my daughter doesn't dislike him, I naturally welcome him." "What about knowledge?" "You can learn anything. You don't have to be a scholar. A scholar is often not a good son-in-law, let alone a good husband. There is only one thing: you must be proficient in Chinese. If you don't understand Chinese, it will spread disaster to my grandchildren!" The guest laughed again. "Does appearance matter?" He asked again. "You are so pedantic!" This time it was my turn to laugh, "My daughter will pay attention to this kind of thing, why should I worry about it?" The stupid guest wanted to ask more questions, but suddenly the doorbell rang.I got up to open the gate, only to find that my long hair was in a mess, and another imaginary enemy came to plunder Yu's house.