Author: Weird
Wang Liuyun, a 53-year-old cleaner at an office building on Beijing's East Third Ring Road, sighed against the walls of the white corridor during his lunch break:
I should be a little bit like Li Bai, living in the clouds all my life, so it's painful.
But after thinking about it, she thought it was over.
Or like Du Fu, live steadily.
In the eyes of colleagues, Wang Liuyun said very little.
Most of the time she spends her time immersed in work, sweeping the toilet during the day and picking up scrap at night, and by this way of consuming labor, she can make herself less delusional.
Wang Liuyun's delusion is to paint.
After half a lifetime as a farmer and half a lifetime of muddy water, at the age of 50, she decided to run away.
Wang Liuyun left her husband and daughter and went alone to a free studio in Fujian to learn painting, then went to Shenzhen, Henan, and now lives in Beijing.
At seven o'clock in the evening, Wang Liuyun left work.
First, I took a bus, then rode my own black bicycle, turned into the crowded shantytown of Anjialou Village, and pushed open a low door - this is the room that belongs to Wang Liuyun.
The indoor space is less than six square meters, and all the cabinets, beds, and clothes are picked up, but Wang Liuyun lives very comfortably.
She took out several paintings from under the bed, including Italian seascapes, cats in the grass, and lone sails between landscapes, and explained them with relish.
Wang Liuyun pointed to the monastery on the Italian coast and proudly told reporters:
Women are never allowed in this place.
But you know what? After painting it, I landed on the island.
At the age of 50, a rural grassroots woman decided to redraw her life.
Wang Liuyun did not like the willow character in her name, she felt that the willow tree was "sparse and weak, soft and sickly".
I am as useless as the willow tree, and the misfortune and stumbling of half a life are like the willow tree.
The name was given to her by the second sister.
Wang Liuyun was born in February, and the willow tree had just sprouted. The second sister, who was washing her diapers by the pond, saw this scene and thought of the word Liu Yun.
Now that the second sister is no longer alive, Wang Liuyun remembered to change his name - how good it is to call Tsubaki tree.
Born in February, it is fragrant and tall, and can also be used as a beam for shipbuilding.
From childhood to adulthood, Wang Liuyun longed for him to become a useful person.
In fact, she has this ability too.
Growing up in a remote mountain village in Hunan, she came from a poor family and her father was disabled.
But Wang Liuyun has been fighting for anger since he was a child, and he was stunned to be admitted to the key high school in the county.
In the countryside in the early 1980s, it was a proper school bully.
Unfortunately, she was a girl.
The family was reluctant to pay for her education, and it was the right thing to go home to do farm work and become a laborer. In this way, Wang Liuyun's academic qualifications forever stopped at high school.
But she still did not accept it and did not accept her fate.
At the age of 20, she took the five dollars she had saved and found an agronomist to learn to plant trees.
At this time, it is the time of reform and opening up, and the whole country is vigorously engaged in greening construction. Wang Liuyun, a family farmer, has been paying attention to the news of the newspapers and broadcasts, and she is keenly aware of the opportunity.
Through the fruit seedling business, Wang Liuyun, who was in his early 20s, saved a small treasury. But what she didn't expect was that every man she met since then had come for her money.
Whether it was introduced by others or known to themselves, in less than a week, they began to borrow money.
It is difficult to find a man who is wholeheartedly good to himself, and after getting married and having children, the other party immediately reveals his original form:
Secretly change her passbook to her own name;
Domestic violence, infidelity, bringing women into the home;
Threatening the life of the child, never agree to divorce.
Wang Liuyun is still thankful that he died in a car accident when his daughter was 7 years old.
He doesn't die, it's me who dies.
It was seven hellish years:
The money was lost, the body was full of injuries, and the mental state was in constant fear and collapse.
Four years later, Wang Liuyun took his children to a small coastal village and met her second husband, Lao Lin, a good-tempered old single stick in the countryside.
The two can't talk about love for each other, they can only say that it is ok. As Wang Liuyun said:
He was the moving piece of wood.
In a home, he avoids gossip and avoids evil words, and he should also accompany him.
For a widow who is often at the center of the whirlpool of rumors, Lao Lin is very practical.
At the age of 50, Wang Liuyun left everything behind and came to Fujian to learn painting, becoming an outlier in the eyes of everyone in the village:
The woman was mentally abnormal.
This was the first half of Wang Liuyun's failure in the secular sense.
As she herself summed it up:
Although positive and diligent, but in the end lonely like autumn grass.
Wang Liuyun was always lonely.
Her partner was never the two husbands.
I like Du Fu the most and have lived with him for many years.
Du Fu's difficulties and poetry can be understood by Wang Liuyun. Since she was a child, she has been a kind of little girl with keen observation, love of nature, and soft and romantic heart.
I would stare at a large rock for an afternoon, study its textures and bumps, and give it a big hug when I said goodbye.
▲ Wang Liu painted a mountain stone
As a teenager, several coal miners in the village pursued her. It's a pity that chickens talk to ducks, and there is no need to talk at all:
You said that the buckwheat flowers on the mountain beam were very elegant, and he said that the thing tasted bitter and was only for pigs to eat.
When he was young, Wang Liuyun had always longed to marry a teaching gentleman, and he had no money and was fine, at least he could talk.
After marrying Lao Lin, in her busy farm work, she would get on a bicycle and go to the county library to read books. Gorky, Tolstoy, most of the bookshelf is the masterpieces of Russian masters.
Wang Liuyun, who had not been able to pick up the books for many years, began to be very uncomfortable.
In a word, she often had to read it back and forth to understand its logic and meaning. But gradually, she began to be able to memorize the essence of the passages and perceive the layout of the entire novel.
After reading the Russian literature in the library, she went to xinhua bookstore to read poetry collections and learn ancient texts.
It was Wang Liuyun's middle age, the most comfortable and happy time.
All this, the daughter quietly looked in her eyes. Therefore, when 50-year-old Wang Liuyun decided to learn to paint, only her daughter understood her "escape":
My mom, really lonely.
It was painting that enlightened Wang Liuyun.
While learning to paint, she went around doing odd jobs and odd jobs. When she was in Zhejiang, she deliberately went to Fuchun Mountain, but found that the scenery in front of her was not as beautiful and beautiful as Huang Gongwang's pen.
Later, she learned that Wang Ximeng, the genius painter of her favorite "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", lived deep in the court and died young, never appreciating the great mountains and rivers.
Wang Liuyun realized that what they painted was not realistic, but ideal.
At the age of 53, Huang Gongwang just came out of prison and ran to the temple to paint and make a living.
"Since he can be reborn in the sludge, why can't I?"
At the age of 53, Du Fu died of poverty and illness.
"And I'm still alive, so I have to live myself!"
It was with this idea in mind that 53-year-old Wang Liuyun came to Beijing.
What does it matter if you sweep toilets, pick up waste, or live in shantytowns?
"Pick" a square by the bed, pick up the paintbrush, and at this moment, she is in the clouds.
The first time I saw Wang Liuyun's video, I was shocked.
An ordinary aunt of the corridor, but can easily count Du Fu's poems, Li Bai's madness, and Huang Gongwang's life.
Walking on the night road from work, the red scarf around her neck and the determined gaze were like a ball of fire.
A 53-year-old rural aunt, far from her family, came to Beijing alone to paint.
Isn't she an independent woman in Woolf's struggle to have "a room of her own"?
The difference is that the dilemma faced by Wang Liuyun's generation of rural grassroots women is much more severe than ours.
It is not easy to live with dignity.
Remember han Shimei, the "peasant woman poet" who gave a speech on stage not long ago at the invitation of UN Women?
At birth, simply because the posture was unpleasant, just because the old man said that "a child lying on his stomach grows up to be unfilial", her mother pressed her head in a urinal pot and tried to drown the child.
At that moment, Han Shimei had not even opened his eyes to look at the world.
Of course, she survived.
Like Wang Liuyun, she is talented and talented, but because she is a girl, she does not deserve the right to education.
At the age of 19, for a dowry of 3,000 yuan, Han Shimei was sold by her mother to her current husband.
We can also imagine that if Wang Liuyun, who is in her early 20s, does not make money on her own, her fate will be more or less similar.
This is the general survival status of rural women after the 70s, the more remote, the more severe.
Bound by his original family, unhappy marriage, and living environment for half a lifetime, Wang Liuyun is not the first, nor will he be the last.
What she accomplishes in her paintings is not only the sorrow and frustration of her half life, but also the disobedience to the various female disciplines she has been subjected to.
Last year, while teaching art at a rural primary school in Henan, Wang Liuyun learned that a female classmate in her class had been beaten and cried by a boy. She told the girl directly:
Don't be afraid, go fight back.
The girl and her friends listened and all laughed. Crying and crying, I don't dare to fight back. But Wang Liuyun told the group of girls very seriously:
Women should do anything without fear.
When many young people are lost in the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Wang Liuyun is sighing:
This is a good time! Why didn't I come to Beijing sooner?
Even if you walk in the narrow alleys of shantytowns where two people can't stand side by side, the people who come from the opposite side will always take the initiative to give in. This made Wang Liuyun moved:
All those who are humble and inferior and have no culture are cultured as soon as they arrive in Beijing.
Here, she felt unprecedented equality and freedom: everyone came to work, closed the door, and everyone was entitled to dream.
Wang Liuyun plans to work for a few more years in a down-to-earth manner, save some pension money, and work until he can't move.
It is best to have spare energy to go to Xinjiang and Tibet to have a look, which is where she wanted to go in her 20s.
Maybe she will become the same as Su Min, who drives a motorhome and drives herself, and has been walking on the road.
Going home is a matter of not rushing to complete.
As Beauvoir describes:
Free women are being born;
Once she has won ownership of herself, perhaps Rimbaud's prophecy will come true:
Among them, there will be poets.
When the woman's boundless bondage is removed, when she can live for herself and through herself, and when men let her go, she will also become a poet.
50+ painter Wang Liuyun and poet Han Shimei, their appearance is really good.
It's nice that they can have titles that exist only because of their self-worth, apart from whose "wife" and whose "mother" they are.
A belated victory is also a victory.
Finally, I would like to say a word to Aunt Wang Liuyun:
The word "willow" is actually very good.
You see, it's soft in texture, but it's constantly flexible.
It can withstand half a life, and it can also withstand every vibrant spring.
Resources:
1. Video source: She talks "Waiting for You to Leave Work" column episode 3
2.GQ Report: "A Peasant Woman, with Her Art Class"