Text/Lu Su
Source/Reader Magazine, Issue 3, 2017
Ten Mile Red Makeup.
It will make every woman who hears it yearn for it.
It is said that the women of the former family of solid families came out of the cabinet, and the huge dowry queue was ten miles away.
That battle, that pomp, that scale, that momentum, how lucky a woman can be.
What is important is the domineering spirit that tells the world that it does not care about it and rejoices and does not obey the comparison.
I heard Grandma tell a story of "Ten Mile Red Makeup".
After one of my grandfather's aunts got engaged, the family hired dozens of carpenters and worked for almost a year to buy the dowry.
On the day the bride left the cabinet, the mahogany furniture sent one bar after another, and the procession of sending the marriage was endless, so that the distance from the mother's family to the husband's family was not long enough.
The first dowry at the beginning has reached the door of the husband's house, and there are still several dowries that cannot be carried out in the mother's house, and they have to circle around the village and the mountain road before the dowry is out.
It is said that this is a once-in-a-century "ten mile red makeup" grand situation, people along the road to the side of the road to see the liveliness, stop the car, please the candy, the bride's candy sent a large wooden box.
It was so lively, as if every passerby was a relative of Hexi, as if the villages that passed by were doing happy things.
Unfortunately, on the night the bride married, the husband's family caught fire, and the exquisite furniture that had been placed in the courtyard that made the neighbors envious, along with the dowry of the pressure box that had not been opened, were reduced to ashes in the fire, and even the gold and silverware that could not be burned were gone.
The husband and father-in-law of great joy and great sorrow pounded his chest and said that he had dreamed of a white-bearded old man saying to him, "When the auspicious time arrives, a write-off is written off", he did not believe in evil and ignored it, and did not expect it to be fulfilled.
Fortunately, the bride's family is broad-minded and solid, while helping the family to reorganize the rivers and mountains, while inviting the monk to do things, and at the same time inviting the carpenter to re-make the furniture, the bride is also a famous virtuous and virtuous, beautiful as a flower, this marriage can continue.
Image source: Panorama Vision
I don't know if it is in response to the local saying of "more and more burning and more prosperous", and later the husband's family is really getting better and better, everyone says that it is the bride Wangfu, who brought the wealth of the mother's family to the husband's family.
The plot of the burning of the husband's family was gradually deliberately deleted from people's memories, and the allusion of the ten miles of red makeup came to an abrupt end when the bride married into the husband's door.
Later, one day in the museum, I suddenly encountered the marriage custom of "Ten Mile Red Makeup" elsewhere, and I was fixed there and generally could not move.
The story of the grandfather narrated by the grandmother after saying "Ten Mile Red Makeup" came to mind:
Grandpa wrote to Grandma a pink love letter of "the sweater is bought, the needle for the sweater is also bought, just waiting for you to come";
Grandpa fell from the sky in the middle of the night to find Grandma in a pile of refugees on a broken dock, and the two held their heads and cried; they held a simple and grand Western-style wedding in the chaos of war;
The joy of their short life of love and the pain of their long separation; their separation, their death...
As clear as the movie picture, as if I had seen it with my own eyes, my chest was propped up by the surging sadness and despair, and I desperately endured and endured desperately, so that I finally did not collapse on the spot and cried... If you can love, let the whole world know.
If you can love, live, and grow old together.
This is the red makeup a woman wants for a lifetime.
Lu Su, source: Reader Magazine, No. 3, 2017, original title "Ten Mile Red Makeup". Editor on duty: Hu Tianyue