see! The world is truly vast
Ten years of the past is unbearable, and the tear stains are reduced by clearing the bottle.
Alone on the clouds and upstairs moon, how many people in the end of the world still exist?
The book "First Class" mentions that by the ninth year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1670), the "Jiangzuo Liulong" generation of the Jiading Hou family was left with only the oldest Hou Xuanhuan. At this time, the Qing Dynasty had been dingding for twenty-five years. A leafy family can now be called withered. For Hou Xuanfan, the glory brought about by the fame of "Jiangnan Sanfeng" and "Jiangzuo Liulong" quickly disappeared in the past twenty years. After the death of the Ming Dynasty, no one in the Hou family had ever been an official, and without any clan to be an official, the family would inevitably decline. By 1677, Hou Xuanhuan, the last of the "Six Dragons of Jiangzuo", died.
Later generations of hou descendants still lived silently in Jiading, but they never regained the fame of their ancestors. The descendants of the Hou family became "remnants" and studied, but did not conduct scientific examinations or become officials. Keep your distance from politics. Compared to their ancestors, they also seem to understand what can be done and what cannot be done. Song Lihua, the author of "First Class", briefly mentioned this sentence: "After the Qianlong Dynasty, during the Jiaqing, Guangxu, and Republic of China periods, Jiading edited the county chronicle three times, and the Hou family never appeared in the list of editors again. "If we remember the beginning of the Hou family's lintel in "The First Class", then this period of time has almost lasted for five generations of the Hou family. In the face of the secular judgment that "the rich are not more than three generations", the Hou family challenged this statement with their own muscles and bones. Although it is still circled in the rule of "gentleman's zeal, five generations and slash".
The story of the Hou family in Jiading, Jiangnan, told by "The First Class" is concluded by Hou Xuanhuan. The Hou family's "posthumous name" after him is nothing more than a curiosity of history. For twenty years, from the summer of 1645 to 1677, the Hou family paid a huge price for the term "loyal filial piety.".
Of this huge cost, what else are we ignoring?
In times of turning upside down, men can take the initiative, but women seem to be perpetually passive. Although in the book "First Class", Song Lihua also told the women of the Hou family, but compared with the male members of the Hou family, the women of the Hou family have little information, but they also paid for the word "loyal filial piety". The women of the Hou family have grandmothers, mothers, daughters-in-law, and daughters, and under the plaque of "Loyal Servants and Filial Pieties", their existence is like the decoration pattern of the plaque. This group of unknown women said very little when explaining their whereabouts. When their men take the initiative to choose their own destiny, all women can do is to silently inherit the next fate. Men can spurt their blood and draw knives quickly. But the women of the Hou clan could not do it. At a time of greater change, they have a more important identity---- orphans and widows. This identity requires these women to endure with greater patience and loneliness, for a long time.
If we notice the in-laws of the Hou family when we read "The First Class", the women who enter the Hou family gate and the women who step out of the Hou family gate are not unknown people. But at the time of the Revolution, only they could not choose for themselves, they could only choose Zhang Ben for the men. Use your youth and memories to face pain for a long time. For some women in the Hou family, they have lost two homes in a blink of an eye. One is the husband's family, and the other is the mother's family. The women of the Hou family who appear in "The First Class" are blurred, and their endings are either to die with their husbands, or to green lanterns and ancient Buddhas, or to support them independently, but in the reputation of "loyal servants and filial piety", there is no them.
We can only use imagination to make up for this lack. In First Class, we can occasionally hear them choking and their hearts drying like ashes in the dead of night. They haven't received the attention they deserve in history, but we now know that they paid no less than anyone else. Compared with men's pleasure and revenge, women's pain will last for a long time, a long time........
In the Sui and Tang dynasties, women at least had epitaphs, and the women of the Hou family had only a few words at most. But in the price paid for the times, their fate and that of men is actually one.
Shi Jingqian in "The Death of Wang" actually depicts the lack of women in Chinese history, "The Death of Wang" to tell the core characters--- Wang occupies only one-tenth of the space in the book, Shi Jingqian in "The Death of Wang" uses a large number of chapters to tell the county life and human condition where Wang once lived. By the end of the story, the inevitability of Wang's death has been sufficiently explained. There are only a few records about the "death of the Wang family", but Shi Jingqian let us see not the end of the death of the Wang family, but the end of the death of the Wang family in what circumstances. In "First Class", the author Song Lihua cannot be harshly reprimanded, and even if it is replaced by someone else's jian pen, the woman of the Hou family is still invisible. Most of their once glamorous people, once regarded death as a homecoming, and once had deep affection, can only rely on our speculation.
Through our identification, we know that she was also the daughter, wife and mother of so-and-so. They suffer and suffer. We don't know. Looking at it this way, when Chen Yinke wrote "Liu Ru is a Biography", his eyes were indeed like a torch. He saw a flash of light in the depths of history. When we argue for men and women, we don't realize our own hindsight.
Which of the ancestors in history or the ancestors who will eventually become ancestors will do better?
=======================================
Every reading moves towards the vastness! The Short Book Collection
2020 Collection: 712丨 Don't become like a dull diner