Zhang Youyi
A classical woman who is traditional to the bone is abandoned by a modern man who is romantic to the bone, and the next scene that should be staged is: women end with a tragic life, while men spend their lives happily after harvesting romantic love.
Zhang Youyi is the traditional woman, and Xu Zhimo is the man who is romantic to the bone. Their marriage was a kind of obedience in the eyes of Zhang Youyi, and a kind of rebellion in the eyes of Xu Zhimo, so they went through divorce after they got married. Xu Zhimo finally harvested his romantic love, but did not go through this life happily, but Zhang Youyi, who crawled out of the grave, lived out the style of a modern woman.
The marriage of Zhang Xu and Xu was placed in the residual temperature of feudal society, and it could be called a door-to-door pair. The Xu family is a famous wealthy merchant in the Jiangnan area, with many industries and a large scale, and Xu Zhimo has also grown up in brocade and jade food since childhood. And the Zhang family is not backward, both a famous and prestigious family, but also a veritable family of scholars, the second brother and the fourth brother were admitted to xiucai at the age of sixteen and fourteen respectively, causing a small sensation in the local area.
With the aura of being a door-to-door pair, Zhang Xu and the two established a marriage relationship, linking the two big families together. For this marriage, the traditional Zhang Youyi is not difficult to accept, but for Xu Zhimo, who pursues freedom and ideals, the marriage has not yet begun, and a flower of evil has blossomed in his heart.
Through Xu Zhimo's poems, we can feel the romance in his body through the words, for such a romantic poet, how can he lack love in the world of marriage, marriage without love, he would rather not.
But at that time, although he rejected this marriage in his heart, he was only an eighteen-year-old youth in the end, just like the young men and women in Mr. Lu Xun's "Wounded Death", in that year, the result of running away from home could only be the beginning of another tragedy. Therefore, Xu Zhimo still had self-knowledge, succumbed to the family's arrangement, and grievanced to marry Zhang Youyi back home.
Zhang Youyi in Xu Zhimo's heart, like a feudal remnant of the label, this preconceived thinking, but also led him to always see her as a thoughtless puppeteer, never willing to talk to her about the world outside of life.
In fact, Zhang Youyi is not a conservative woman, she was influenced by her second brother Zhang Jiasen and fourth brother Zhang Jiaxuan since she was a child, and she has always been eager to read, and when she was 12 years old, she also walked into school for three years, until she was 15 years old because of marriage. After getting married, Xu Zhimo's father, Xu Shenru, also gave her a personal trainer, so she was not an uninformed woman.
She could talk to her brothers, who were no less knowledgeable and accomplished than Xu Zhimo. But in front of Xu Zhimo, she always couldn't find an effective language to communicate with him. The conversation between them always seemed to be Xu Zhimo questioning her, and she always couldn't find any words to respond to him. In the long run, she was more "antique" in Xu Zhimo's heart, until one day, Xu Zhimo desperately abandoned her pregnant with Liujia in order to pursue his romantic love.
After bidding farewell to the painful seven-year marriage, after this baptism, Zhang Youyi gave birth to a child in Bo in Germany, relying on the 200 US dollars per month living expenses given by Xu Shenru, she began a new journey in life.
She studied French and German in Germany, and also took early childhood teacher training courses, showing another side of her personality and re-planning her life without Xu Zhimo.
In 1926, Zhang Youyi returned to China, and when she returned again, she had transformed into a strong and independent new woman. Some people say that Zhang Youyi was born in the changing era, and in her body, there are two pairs of bones, one belongs to the oriental traditional women of the old era, and the other is the Western-style women of the new era.
This assessment is very pertinent, judging from her interactions with the Xu family after her divorce, as a traditional Chinese woman, she has done almost all the responsibilities of a Chinese daughter-in-law. For the combination of Xu Zhimo and Lu Xiaoman, she generously expressed her blessings. Out of love for the Xu family, she kept in touch with the Xu family as a daughter of a cadre; after the death of Xu's mother, her funeral was also handled by Zhang Youyi; the same was true after Xu Shenru's death, and even after Xu Zhimo's unfortunate death, it was zhang Youyi who came forward to handle it.
Her personality has won her a very high evaluation, Liang Shiqiu said: "Those who know her have not disrespected her, and there is no one who does not bless her." In her body, it perfectly presents the tenacity and forbearance of oriental women, as well as the beauty of dedication.
As a new woman who embraced Western ideas, she also achieved amazing results in her career. After the death of Zhang Youyi's parents, she settled in Shanghai, worked as a German teacher at Soochow University, and later served as a vice president at the Shanghai Women's Commercial Savings Bank, starting her business career.
In 1910, Zhang Youyi founded a bank and became the first female banker in modern Chinese history, unexpectedly drawing a strong mark on the history of Chinese banks. The Huangpu Branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Shanghai, now located on the second floor of No. 480 Nanjing East Road in Shanghai, is the women's commercial savings bank that Zhang Youyi once founded.
At the same time, she also runs a clothing company called Yun Xie, and after work from the bank, she will go to the clothing company to understand the business situation of the day. After several years of accumulated practical experience in the commercial sea, she was even more successful in the shopping mall, and even played with stocks, becoming the tide of the times and the leader of the business community.
In that era of rapid changes, Zhang Youyi can also be regarded as a model for a new woman, opening a company, speculating in stocks, sitting in office buildings, and doing new things. Instead of abandoning herself because of divorce, she regained herself from the ruins and fulfilled herself with another stubborn personality.
Zhang Youyi is a serious woman, with maturity and stability that does not match her age, and is usually silent, such a woman does not have an advantage in love marriage. In Zhang Youyi's later years, she also confessed that she was not an attractive woman, and she was serious. Although the words reveal a woman's self-improvement, they are also mixed with deep helplessness.
Her seriousness was doomed to not be able to spend her life with poets who pursued romance, but the courage she had that did not require the protection of men was also commendable and encouraged today. Some people say that Zhang Youyi was abandoned, not so much as a bullying and domineering, temperamental man who dumped an unarmed weak woman, but rather a sensitive and fragile, sentimental man who left the shrewd and capable female Haojie.
No one knows how deep the trauma of her marriage with Xu Zhimo is, and she has never considered the gains and losses in this marriage, otherwise she would not have maintained various ties with the Xu family. Unable to play the role of a virtuous wife in the eyes of her husband, she has fulfilled all the roles that a woman should play in a different capacity.
Or liang Shiqiu's evaluation is more appropriate: she quietly and strongly lived her years, she did her duty, responsibility to her husband, responsibility to her husband's family, responsibility to her son. Those who have fulfilled their responsibilities deserve respect.