Chapter 15 Men are not solid supports

Men are not solid supports ——Story of Yingying St. Clair one My daughter put me in the smallest room in her new house. "This is the guest room!" Lina said with standard American pride. I smiled.According to Chinese thinking, the guest room should be the best bedroom, so she should use her own bedroom as the guest room!But I said nothing.Her intellect is like a bottomless pool, when a stone is dropped, it cannot even hear a plop. As much as I love my daughter, who once shared one body and one mind with me, she was born and slid out of me like a fish.Since then, I can only stand on the shore and watch her glide.I had to tell her my story, it was the only way to get inside her and drag her to safety.

Her closed and narrow room was like a coffin.I should have reminded her that this was not a nursery under any circumstances.After thinking about it, she wouldn't listen to me.And she had already said something earlier: don't want children.She and her husband were too busy drawing things that would always be built and entered by someone to think about having children.There is a word that I can't pronounce well, and it refers to people like them. How do you say that word?It's called "take acid", yes, "take acid"! Once my daughter accidentally heard me say this word, and laughed on the spot.If she was a child, I would have slapped her for being so rude, but now, not anymore.Today, I depend on her and her husband to support me with daily expenses.So sometimes, when I take money from them, I always feel hot, but what can I do?

I can't figure it out, what's the use of drawing such a bunch of flashy houses?It's full of weird things inside.My daughter is very rich, but everything in her family is flashy, just to look good, and some of them are not even good-looking.Look at the coffee table next to my bed, a heavy white marble countertop is supported by a black stand with thin legs.A discerning person should understand at a glance that this table is top-heavy, and it is impossible to place anything on it.And on this coffee table, there are vases as thin as a spider's foot that are only big enough to hold a flower.Just give the coffee table a little shake and the vase will tip over.It's really dangerous.

In this house, I saw many dangers, but my daughter was completely unaware of them.I am very sensitive to certain omens. two Years ago, when I was a carefree little girl in Wuxi, I was amazing.The strength of the Chinese is that they are wild and stubborn.I was smiling all the time, feeling good about everything, too good to listen to any other words.I'm small, I'm pretty, and I have small feet, which makes me very proud.I ran and jumped on the cobblestone path, and I didn't know how many pairs of expensive foreign calfskin shoes were worn out. I also like to let my hair braid loose. Whenever this happens, my mother would shake her head and scold me: "Oh, Yingying, you are like a drowning ghost in the lake!"

Falling water ghosts refer to those female ghosts who throw themselves into the river. They throw themselves into the water for losing their virginity or being wronged. According to legend, their hair is disheveled like this.I just laughed stupidly when I heard it.Mom dotes on me very much, I look very similar to her, so she calls me Yingying, which means clear image. Our family is one of the richest people in Wuxi.There are dozens of houses in our family, and in each room, there are heavy and elegant tables and cabinets, decorated with jade incense burners or jade cigarette jars. They are used as room decorations, no more, no less, just right.But to me, these jade cigarette jars are just ordinary containers for cigarettes.Once, my brother and I took one of the five cans, poured out the cigarettes, and went to the street to use it to scoop up the dirty water in the gutter, hoping to scoop up some treasures from it, and make ourselves as good as the people in the market. Dirty as a child.

Our home is very luxurious, with silk rugs, antiques, ivory carvings and so on.But now when I recall our hometown, what impresses me the most is the jade smoke pot that I used to scoop up the sewer water. I don't know that what I hold in my hand is a treasure. About my old house, there is another thing that I still remember. I was sixteen years old that year, when my youngest aunt got married, the house was full of guests, and it was very lively.There was a new guest on the table, a friend of the groom. He was a little older than my eldest brother. According to his seniority, I called him uncle.He drank a little too much, and his face was flushed. "Yingying," he said hoarsely, "are you full?"

Suddenly being noticed by everyone, I was a little embarrassed, and smiled at him shyly, thinking that he would probably bring out some special and delicious sweets for me.Unexpectedly, he took out a watermelon and put it on the table. "Break the melon!" As he said, he picked up a knife and pressed it on the watermelon.Just listening to "pop", the overripe melon was cut into two, and he just grinned wildly, revealing a golden tooth.Everyone at the table was laughing, and I was flushed with embarrassment, not understanding what they were laughing at. Really, even though I am self-willed, I am still innocent. I don't understand at all what the action of opening melons is a metaphor for.It wasn't until the night when I married this man six months later that he got drunk and forced me to say "Pogua, Pogua", that I didn't understand the meaning of "Pogua".

He was a heinous, bad man, and to this day I feel sick just thinking about him.I don't know why I want to marry this man?All of this was caused by my little aunt's wedding. Early the next morning after the wedding banquet, most of the guests who had come to the banquet had left, so that in the evening, my half-sisters and I felt that the house suddenly became deserted.We sat around the table, drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds while chatting. My half-sisters were born to my father's aunts and wives, while I was born to my wife.We also talked about boys.My younger sisters have no high hopes for everything in life, including their own marriage.

When they asked about my criteria for choosing a mate, I just replied proudly: "I don't like any of them." I say this not because those boys didn't pay attention to me. I know how to attract the attention of the opposite sex and win their praise.It's just because I have always thought too much of myself, so that I don't have any boys, I think it's my heart. There are two sources of human thinking, one is innate, inherited from your parents or even your ancestors, and the other is instilled by others.For some reason, when I was eating melon seeds, I thought of the man who yelled "broken melon" the night before.At this moment, a gust of wind outside the window broke the stem of a flower arrangement on the table.Suddenly I had a premonition that I would marry this man.When this idea popped up in my mind, what I felt was not excitement, but surprise. I was surprised how I had such an omen.

At the dinner table that night, I heard my father and my aunt and uncle talking about this man.Several times later, I was in the yard of my uncle's house and found him staring at me intently in the yard of his house opposite.Every time at this time, I also raised my eyes to fight against him, not to be outdone. My daughter doesn't know that many years ago, I was married once, twenty years before she was born. Of course she didn't know how beautiful I was at that time, far more beautiful than she is today, unlike her, with a pair of countryman-like big feet' and a big nose from his father .To this day, my skin is still delicate and smooth, and my figure is slim, just like a girl.It's just that when I smile, deep wrinkles have been carved on the corners of my mouth.

And my slender feet, which were praised by many people before, are now swollen, with cracked heels and calluses.And my sixteen-year-old eyes, which were once bright and shining, are now full of yellow spots, dull and dull. But my eyesight still sees almost everything.As long as I want to know, I can still see through the wall of my daughter's rice bowl and see how many grains of rice she has left. Just one afternoon after my marriage, on the beautiful Taihu Lake, I remember that it seemed that from that moment on, I began to fall in love with him.He gently lifted my chin with his hand, stroked my cheek, and said, "Yingying, you have a pair of tiger-like eyes. During the day, they recharge their energy, and at night, they become golden eyes." I can't laugh at all, even if he is writing poetry, such lines are too bad.I just feel that some kind of hope in my heart is faltering.You often feel this way when you have connected your body to someone, but your heart cannot communicate with him.But more or less, I have begun to fall in love with him. I've changed, and I've become a stranger to myself.I dressed myself up for him, kept changing my hairstyle, and showed my charm in the bed, hoping to have a son. It was on the night of swimming in Taihu Lake that he planted this child.My omens came true again, and I knew it was a boy, and I could see him in my womb: he had the same big, wide-set eyes as my husband, slender fingers, and a plump buttocks. Earlobes and broad forehead. Maybe it's because I've been too happy, so I gradually tasted the pain, but even when I was the happiest, there was always a kind of timidity and uneasiness beating on the top of my eyebrows, and gradually, this uneasiness Started to move down, dived all the way to my heart, and, started to materialize. My husband started traveling north on business matters shortly after we got married, but our trip wasn't over until my belly swelled. The wind in the north is cold, it sucks the bone marrow, and the blood will freeze. This howling wind also took my husband away from my bed: I learned from my aunt that he had an affair with him At. After going on like this for a while, when I gradually turned from being disappointed in him to hating him, my little aunt told me that he had many concubines: dancing girls, American wives, prostitutes, and even one of him was younger than me My cousin, she mysteriously went to Hong Kong not long after, my husband disappeared without a trace. I should tell all of this to my daughter Lina: I was once so beautiful and rich that any man would have dreamed of having me, yet I was neglected and abandoned by my own husband.I was only eighteen years old that year, but my youth had already left me.At one point, I really wanted to throw myself into the water and be a disheveled ghost.I should also tell Lina that I killed the child in the womb because I hated this man. Abortion is not considered a crime in China, but at that time, I was always a little soft, but thinking that it was the evil seed left in my body by that hateful villain, I gritted my teeth and wanted to get rid of it.When the nurses took this lifeless blood clot out of me and they asked me what to do with it, I gave them an old newspaper and told them to wrap the blood clot in it like a fishmonger and put it in the newspaper. Just throw it in Taihu Lake. Now, in the eyes of my daughter Lina, I am quite a little old woman, and that is only because she sees me with the eyes of the flesh.If she learns to look at me with the eyes of her mind, she'll see a tigress, and she'll have to be careful. three The Year of the Tiger I was born in was really a bad year.Anyway, that year was very unlucky, the plague spread in the countryside, people in the city were panicked, and the babies born that year couldn't grow up... This plague god stayed around for four full years, but I miraculously survived under its shadow. It was many years later, when I was an adult, that my mother told me. Since my husband betrayed me, I became disheartened and disheveled like a drowning ghost all day long. I simply covered the mirror with my clothes, and I didn't even want to look in the mirror.Finally, I left my husband's house and went back to my mother's house. Later, I lived in a cousin's house in the suburbs of Shanghai, where I spent ten years doing nothing. Their whole family treated me very well, because I lived with them as my cousin's goddaughter.His house is very old, crowded with three-bedroom families, but I didn't go there for the sake of happiness. I went there to find the tranquility and simplicity that I had been looking for for a long time.There, the relatives who came and went were all rustic farmers. We ate in the greasy and dark kitchen. If you were not careful, the flies would land on your rice bowl in black, like red beans. I lived in such an environment for ten years, no longer a girl but an abandoned woman.I began to yearn for life in the city.The people there are like flies in the country, clustered in dark clusters, everywhere, and there, the communication between men and women is casual and ignored. I put on a fashionable dress, permed my hair, and repackaged myself.I was tired of living at home for many years, so I decided to become a working woman. I became a salesman. I have become beautiful and charming again, which itself is a gift from God.My clothes are even more expensive and elegant than those sold in stores.It was here that I was diligently doing my job, and it was here that I met Clifford St. Clair, a big white American man who had met me when he came to our shop to buy bargain clothes. "Mr. St. Clair." He introduced himself in English. As soon as I heard the name, I had a premonition: I would marry him. "Such a name looks like a saint: St. Peter, St. John..." He continued in broken Chinese. At the time I neither liked nor hated him, it didn't matter anyway, but I knew very clearly that there was always something between me and him. St. Clair courted me for four years in his own unique way.Although I am not the boss, he always greeted me politely, and when he shook hands with me, he held my hand for a long time, so that my hand was wet in his sweaty palm.He was dignified and clean, and he maintained his good manners after our marriage.It's just that the peculiar foreigner's smell emanating from his body can't be washed off. He was very attentive, very attentive.He often gave me little gadgets: silver lighters, brooches made of car glass, and so on.He gave me these trinkets with the look of a millionaire giving something rare to a country girl. I'm not trying to put on airs, but I grew up in a wealthy family, and I've seen so many good things that others can't even imagine.But I still politely accepted his gift every time, and expressed proper thanks, without indifference or encouragement to him.But I knew that one day, I would marry him, so I wrapped these worthless trinkets carefully and stored them in a box. Daughter Lina always thought that it was her father who rescued me from that impoverished life.She is both right and wrong. Lina didn't know, her father waited patiently for me for four years like a dog waiting in front of a butcher shop, how did I agree to his marriage proposal in the end?That was until 1946. A letter from Tianjin informed me that my husband had died.I knew before I opened the letter that he must be dead.Sure enough, he was dead.He was killed by a young maid.When he got tired of playing and tried to throw her away, she stabbed him to death with a sharp knife. I think I've forgotten about him long ago, but once I got the news of his death, I still felt a pang of pain: This lecher, who would pull all kinds of smelly and smelly things on the bed, even the servants, well now, he deserves it!After the pain, I felt a vast emptiness again. Immediately I decided, I decided to let St. Clair marry me. Sheng brought me to the United States. The living room here is smaller than the one I lived in China.Wearing oversized American clothes, doing all the work that is supposed to be a babysitter, speaking foreign languages ​​with clumsy tongue rolling, and learning to live in the West.I also gave birth to a daughter. She seems to be separated from me by a river. I can only stand on the other side to see her forever. I have to accept her way of life, the American way of life. All of this, I can only let it go, after a long time, I am also indifferent, it doesn't matter anymore.I am no longer a vivacious tigress, I was a mere ghost when I promised to marry St. Clair. Can I say to my daughter without shame: At that time, did I love your father?Indeed, this man warmed my feet every night and praised my cooking skills. When I gave birth to him a little tiger girl, when I took out the gadgets he gave me that I kept carefully, He was moved to tears. How can I not love him?But that was no longer the love of a living woman, it was just a ghostly love.Do you know what a ghost is?That kind of intangible, intangible, ethereal shadow... But now, I love San very much, and we love each other deeply.I confide in him about a past I've been hiding for years.Now, it's time for me to tell my daughter this too, I don't want to take all this with me in my grave. This is what I do.Years of suffering and pain have made me more sensitive and effective to all omens.I had to poke my daughter with the sharp horn of pain to wake her up.She will fight me today, because we both belong to the tiger, and fighting is the nature of a tiger, but I will fight her because I love her. I heard the downstairs daughter talking to her husband, it was purely meaningless generality, they just lived together under the same roof. Long before the vase was smashed, I knew that the tea table would be overturned, the vase would be broken, and my daughter would come upstairs to inquire...