This article is from the WeChat public account "Tamen" (ID: DT-Tamen), author | Liu Dan, Editor, | Wang Chaojing, pictured | [email protected]。
Nowadays, many young people in first-tier cities are too busy to take care of themselves and begin to send cats home for parents in fourth- and fifth-tier cities to "take over".
Now there are many young people who call cats their daughters and sons, and the relationship between people and cats is somewhat subtle similar to the relationship between parents and themselves. If the cat is their own "child", how do parents view this "grandson"/"grandson"? If we are the "mom" /"dad" of the cat, is our maternal love for the cat also full of unilateral control like the "all for your own good" that our parents do to us?
In the post-90s and post-00s generation, there are more mixed feelings with cats in addition to "parent-child relationship", "friend relationship", "roommate relationship" and "pet relationship". In today's article, we're trying to present this complexity.
01 "It's all for your own good"
After dreaming about cats for three consecutive nights, I opened Taobao. Shopping records show that I placed an order for a flight case, insulation cover, thermal pad, insulated liner; cat litter, cat litter box, cat scratch board; pet check-in warning stickers; and a cat fleece vest in one day.
My cat is called Liu Meixiang, two and a half years old. The first Spring Festival of its cat life stayed alone in Beijing, and I found a pet shop brother to feed it every day. In time for the outbreak of the new crown, the cat's stay time was extended from 7 days to more than 20 days. In the Spring Festival of 2021, various places advocated "local New Year", I did not grab the number of nucleic acid, and stayed in Beijing to accompany it.
Liu Meixiang is timid and grumpy, and she has to be sprinkled in an air box, and she can't stand being placed in a small pet store cage. By the end of 2021, I had resigned and laid down for a long time, losing the legitimate reason for not going home during the Spring Festival. Friends were planning to go home, and after I moved to my new accommodation, I hadn't found a trusted door-to-door cat feeder.
To make matters worse, there were a steady stream of confirmed cases in Beijing during those days. Thinking of the news of burying kittens alive and killing dogs in the door in the past two years, I didn't have the courage to leave the cat alone for half a month. Thinking about it, randomly checking Liu Meixiang back to my hometown in northeast China became the best choice at the moment.
In the more than two years since she changed from a stray cat to a pet cat, liu Meixiang has to endure things including but not limited to being touched, being held, being cut nails, being taken to a new environment, being sent to a bath, and being anesthetized for sterilization.
Being checked back home collects all the elements that make the cat unhappy: the airport, the crowd; being loaded into the air box as a "special baggage", wrapped around the internet pocket, placed on the conveyor belt, and then sent into the aerobic cargo hold of the plane; the noise of the plane's rise and fall, the bumps; being taken outside, riding, being taken out of the air box, accepting the look and touch of strangers.
Actually, I never knew what the cat was thinking. So it's not so much a challenge to the cat as it is a challenge to me— I'll completely lose control of Liu Meixiang's random check-in for more than two hours.
Two weeks before I left, I alleviated my guilt by constantly buying things for the cat, "I've done so much for you." I also planned to go to the Lama Temple to pay respects, but then I thought that I would move to Shanghai in the next year, and I didn't have time to pay back my wish, so I gave up.
The horoscope tells me, "The sun will meet your guardian planet, Pluto, on Sunday, and you need to consider the long-term implications of the decisions you make." The day of check-in happens to be Sunday. The next day, my friend's flight to Beijing was cancelled and she was forced to stay in Beijing for the Chinese New Year. This time difference became a turning point in the cat's fate, otherwise I would most likely ask her to take care of the cat.
Anyway, on Sunday when the sun was combined with Pluto, I made a decision for the cat. Before boarding, it yelled in the air box. "It's all for your own good," I watched it disappear, I wanted to say this to it, and I thought it was for myself.
02 Desire to control
Mika is a typical girl name. When he was wandering in the park, he also had a brother, who was well-built and was named Iron Pillar. Liu Meixiang cat, as its name suggests, is a beautiful cat. Other than that, it doesn't have any "girl look like it", so much so that when I was beaten and bitten, I thought about it and named it "Mei Shu" in the first place.
Liu Meixiang didn't like humans very much, including me, of course. This is manifested in the fact that it does not have much patience to accept my touch, and when friends come to my house to see the cat, there are several fixed viewing points: under the sofa, under the sheets, or in the gap between the wardrobe and the wall.
I consider myself Liu Meixiang's mother, or more precisely, her adoptive mother. Liu Meixiang's birth mother, Rhubarb, is a cat raised by the property owner in the park where my former boss is located. The property owner seems to be an animal lover, and in my year on the park alone, I have seen him raise cats, raccoons, alpacas and two corgis.
Rhubarb was not sterilized and gave birth to a litter of infected kittens in the spring of 2019. It and its children were therefore abandoned. All I know is that there was a kitten that was adopted by a colleague, and in the fall, there was only one kitten with a sick eye followed the rhubarb, and the rhubarb was pregnant again.
Liu Meixiang was in the second litter of kittens. When I met it, it was about two months old, thin and small, but because it had been mixed up in the streets since childhood, it was both vigilant and fierce. I lured it closer with cat food, then picked up the back of its neck, stuffed it into a cat bag, took a taxi home, and put it in a cage prepared in advance.
It howled in its cage and didn't stop for two days. I put it out, put away the cage, and it sped up to the curtain. After a few more days, it shifted its position and hid behind the cabinet. For the first two weeks of my cat ownership, I could only be sure by the daily reduction in food and water in the bowl that I really had a cat, and that the cat was still alive, in my home.
"If you want to control your desire for control, why do captives still demand gratitude?" In early December 2019, I posted this weibo post. Friends advised me not to expect too much from the cat, it is just your roommate.
Just the next day, the cat climbed into the corner of the bed and hid behind the quilt. I saw its furry ears, like the dorsal fin of a shark exposing the surface of the sea. There was a danger lurking under the calm, and I wanted to touch it, and it didn't hesitate to swing its fist. This punch basically tamed its "cat set": the boxing king Mika. A few months later, the boxing king Mei xiang ushered in a highlight moment: with a small body of 6 pounds, he punched two 10-pound announced puppet cats.
After surviving the long Spring Festival holiday in early 2020, after more than 20 days of separation, the cat and I began to get acquainted. On the night of returning to Beijing, the cat circled around me, rubbed my legs, and snored against my arms, while not forgetting my original intention, and from time to time it also hit me. If we apply the logic of human behavior, this state may be understood as: love and hate are intertwined.
A "pet detective" told me that moving is the most important factor that leads to the loss of pets, as well as "being lost" – humans want a better living environment, but cats and dogs do not understand, they are forced to come to a new home, overcome their fears, adapt to the environment, until the next move.
I found this pet detective precisely because I "lost" my cat on my first day of moving into my new home. Maybe I accidentally opened the window and the cat took the opportunity to escape. Even more frightening than that was the suspicion that I had gone downstairs twice to throw garbage, and perhaps the cat had slipped into a cardboard box and had been carried downstairs by my own hand to my aunt who had collected the waste.
Zheng Zhi has a novel called "Thunderbolt", the protagonist is a writer who has no job and cannot write anything, he moved into his new home not long ago, the cat is gone, and life begins to accelerate out of control.
In the story, the cat runs away after a scolding by the protagonist, and I remember scolding my cat a few days ago. The specific reason is forgotten, but most of the time, the cat will become fierce when I forcibly hold her and stroke her. Happiness it doesn't deserve me, the story ends. I couldn't help but look out the window at the air conditioner—that's where the protagonist finally found the cat's carcass.
At about six o'clock in the afternoon, I contacted the detective on Taobao and chose the cheapest package, 4500 yuan. According to the process, I will wait for him to come to the door to sign the contract and pay a deposit of 2,000 yuan.
This expense meant that I had to give up on buying something for my new room and find a shift as soon as possible. At early seven o'clock, the detective called. In a hurry, his car was stopped outside the fifth ring road. It is said that the golden time to find the cat is within 72 hours after the cat is lost, and I both want him to come quickly and vaguely hope that he will come more slowly.
The former tenant suddenly sent a message telling me that the floor of the bedroom was hollow. I tucked my phone into the gap at the edge of the platform and turned on the front camera. A chopstick, a key, a half-cut pencil, and a lump of hair wrapped around dusty wood chips appeared on the screen. The countertop is covered with a tiger carpet, and inside is all kinds of garbage, just like the two sides of my life in the north drift. I turned my phone and kept adjusting the angle, and there were two blue-green spots of light deep in the ground. It was the reflection of the cat's eyes.
Found the cat! But before it's time to celebrate, you have to call the pet detective to cancel the order. Just after eight o'clock in the evening, his car was slowly passing through the fifth ring. The delay caused by traffic restrictions and traffic jams saved me thousands of yuan, which is the day I am most grateful for the traffic in Beijing.
After the cat disappears, do I hope the pet detective will come soon? Am I sure he can find the cat? It must be admitted that my motivation for finding a pet detective is similar to the motivation for placing an order for consignments, just like when looking for cats around the neighborhood, I saw cats pacing leisurely on the side of the road, on the roof, and in the green belt, and they ran away when they saw the living people approaching, without a trace, and I almost accepted the result of not being able to find the cat, and persuaded myself that if Liu Meixiang became one of them, she might be happier than before.
03 Cats as some kind of "granddaughter"
The plane's climb can feel weightless, and landing is accompanied by impacts and bumps. I never paid attention until the cats were randomly checked in, and even during the smooth flight phase, the cabin was always full of noise. I don't know how Liu Meixiang in the cargo hold understands all this, but when I saw it again, it was already on the baggage carousel.
The cat curled up in the deepest part of the crate and looked fine. The problem is that, according to the local control policy from this day onwards, returnees from "key areas" need to undergo nucleic acid testing at the first time of arrival, and then be sent to the isolation hotel to wait for the test results.
It didn't work to have a test report within 48 hours before departure, so I took the cat on the bus and came to the hotel less than 3 kilometers from my house. Returnees from other places stand in line in the lobby to check in, and the delivery staff enter and exit with the revolving door in the lobby. My dad came too, and he took the cat from the revolving door, and before he could say a word to me, the door took him outside.
I hid the matter of raising a cat from my family for more than a month, and then first told my mother, and my mother understood that "your father will go crazy", followed by an emoji that covered his face and shed tears.
It's hard to say whether my dad is a bit clean or a little awkward, he likes dogs, and when he encounters puppies on a walk, he always has to stop and look at them for a while, but he doesn't dare to go up and touch them, he is dirty, and he is afraid of being bitten. This has been further amplified by the epidemic: our small town only had a few confirmed cases in early 2020, but for more than two years, he must wear a mask when he goes out.
After informing the family that I would take the cat home, my dad also dreamed of the cat. Packages were delivered to my dad from all over the country, and he left work every day with a new courier box. The box couldn't go in, and my dad would wear gloves outside the door, spray the box from a light khaki color to a wet brown with alcohol, then unwrapped the package, took out the things, handed them home, and sprayed his hands again.
My dad rarely shops online, and my colleagues feel strange, but they can react quickly: the children in the family are coming back. He didn't tell his colleagues that the couriers had nothing to do with him and were bought for cats.
Probably after I graduated from college, my direct communication with my dad became very limited. The last time he called me, it was the phone of a colleague with the same name as me. As soon as the other party opened his mouth, he was surprised: Girl, how did your voice change?
Every time I came home, the night before I left, my mom would always organize my dad to sit with me for a while, "You talk to her!" The topics of the conversation are just a few: when to get married, when to get a stable job, when to go back to home. He and my mom didn't seem to expect me to give any decent answers either, but as parents, it was still necessary to ask. Speaking of my college classmates who returned to their hometown some time ago and earned two or three thousand yuan in salary within the system, they also felt sorry for her.
Many things about me, my life, and my cat are outside their scope of experience. For this furry "granddaughter", they talk about disgust and fall into action, but they show up as an instinctive "generational relative".
My dad had planned to make a tree for the cat. When I was a child, I raised rabbits, and he made a rabbit cage with one room and one hall. This time, when he had figured out the sketch and picked out the wood, the cat climbing rack that my mother had ordered online had been sent to the house.
Seeing a cat climbing frame tall, wrapped in sisal and fully equipped, my dad knew that his tree was useless.
A few days ago, my dad flashed his waist. He claimed that it was the cat's responsibility: the cat always hid under the bed, and he knelt down every day to watch the cat, accumulating fatigue. Having said that, the cat pestered my mother and didn't pay much attention to him. Cats have their own criteria for judging: my dad barks cat cats every day, and it is actually my mom who feeds and shovels every day.
I said that in order to win the cat's liking, my dad would have to put down his body and do more practical things. My mother said, in fact, your father's figure has long been put down, but the waist can not be put down.
04 From "Liu Meixiang" to "Melon"
From Beijing Guomao (nearby Old Broken Little) back to the small county in the northeast, Liu Meixiang became the "melon" in my mother's mouth. When she was a child, there were also cats at home, people had leftovers to give the cat a bite, in the winter it was cold, the cat burrowed into the bed and stuck to people for warmth, cats and people do not owe each other, there is no concept of "raising cats".
After Liu Meixiang returned home, my mother and colleagues exchanged experiences. The daughter of colleague Hu Jie brought the cat home from the school dormitory in early 2020. The mother and daughter had a stalemate over this matter for more than a month, and Sister Hu did not like cats and dogs, and when she was a child, she was scratched by cats, "At that time, I was really not satisfied with cats, and I was not satisfied with the children's approach."
Worried that her daughter's cat raising at school would have a conflict with the dormitory or be found and punished by the school, Sister Hu finally relaxed. After the cat came home, Sister Hu did not let the cat get close to her, and the kitten seemed to be humane and walked around her. Sister Hu touched the cat, but the daughter had to bathe the cat and cut her nails, and Sister Hu was afraid that her daughter would be injured and had to go to help.
One day she was resting in bed, and the kitten walked over to the edge of the bed, stretched out its front paws, and gently patted her. Sister Hu saw the kitten's sparkling eyes and was suddenly moved, "I can be better with it." Husband and daughter always told her that the cat's eyes are like you, the cat's favorite is you, Sister Hu knows, the father and daughter put this fool on.
Later my mom said the cat took the toy to her. I also said to her, you see, the cat likes you so much!
One day there was only my mom, me, and the cat in the house. She talked about many of her sneaky tears, such as the first year of being a class teacher, she did not communicate with the students, and finally the class leader led the whole class to fight against her, "each other is scarred"; and later into menopause, sometimes my father said a word casually, she was sad alone for a long time.
"So, if there's anything you don't want to hold on to yourself, you have to tell me." She told me so.
During the time when I was hiding the family's cat, I had just entered the work, thinking that I was very busy and did not take the initiative to talk to the family. "Have you changed your avatar again?" Every time I change my WeChat avatar, my mom will take this opportunity to chat with me. At the end of December 2019, I confessed to my mom that my WeChat avatar was actually my cat. My mom said, "I just feel like this cat is in your house!"
She and the cat seemed to accept each other smoothly. Last summer, I went home for two weeks, and then my mom and I went back to Beijing, and at night, the cat ran to the bedside and licked our hair. It is said that it treats us as its little children (or maybe little brothers).
I can't say whether it's "motherly love" or shampoo flavor that drives the cat. Now I have left my hometown and moved from Beijing to Shanghai. For now, the cat has not shown any sadness. It can speed up in the spacious living room, roll on the floor with underfloor heating, spread out its belly on the bed to bask in the sun, and be free from check-in and moving.
My younger brother went to college abroad, and my aunt also had two cats. Of course, the two children had to pull out and compare. My aunt sent her cat in the family group, and my father would block it with Liu Meixiang's photo and unilaterally announce Liu Meixiang's victory. The cat nest was in the couch. The cat sniffed my mom's pant legs. The cat scratches its tail on the back of the chair. The cat scratches the figure on the TV.
Living in Beijing and Shanghai is not much different, and the life in my hometown is also like that, what happened to work, what I ate for dinner today. But the cats were adorable every day. Cat hair drifted into my grandmother's rice bowl, glued to my dad's pants, my mom's coat, and from the northeast to Beijing to Shanghai, stuck to all my luggage.