Whether it is the opera "The White-Haired Girl" or the movie "The White-Haired Girl", a few years ago, some voices on the Internet made some kind of quite noisy noise about this play. One of the opinions circulating among young people is that Xi'er should marry Huang Shiren. Marrying Huang Shiren, Xi'er and his father Yang Bailao will be able to live a good life, and her father will not commit suicide by drinking salt fontanelles.
Hearing such a statement, it is easy to remind people of Emperor Jin Hui's so-called "why not eat meat" in the past. Many young people today have no idea what China's semi-feudal and semi-colonial society is really like. The viewpoint they advocate is itself subjective and takes for granted and has no basis in reality.
In "The White-Haired Girl", why did Huang Shiren have to let Yang Bailao take Xi'er to pay the debt? Huang Shiren just fell in love with Xi'er's beauty, and from the very beginning, he had to hold back a bad mind to possess this beautiful peasant girl. This means that even if Huang Shiren falls in love with Xi'er's beauty, he can't really marry Xi'er. Huang Shiren is just using Xi'er as a plaything. This is also the fundamental reason why Yang Bailao is unwilling to take Xi'er to pay the debt. Because Yang Bailao knows very well that Xi'er entering the Huang family is equivalent to a sheep entering the tiger's mouth, and there can be no good results. If Xi'er marries Da Chun, at least the two families are equal. In that society, Xi'er and Da Chun can marry in the media. And Huang Shiren, the best treatment he can give Xi'er is a concubine, or an aunt's wife. But in the play, Huang Shiren wants to sell Xi'er to the kiln.
Some people may say that there is nothing wrong with being a concubine or an aunt's wife, at least you don't have to worry about food and clothing, and it is better than marrying Da Chun. People who say this kind of thing don't understand what kind of status a concubine or an aunt wife has in the big family of the old society.
In the old society, the vast majority of toiling people would not want to marry their daughters to rich families as concubines, and the daughters themselves were not very willing to be concubines for rich people. Because being a concubine itself is not fundamentally different from being a maidservant. The daughters of the poor have no sexual power of their own, while the lords and young masters of the rich families have almost unlimited sexual power over these girls. How many poor daughters can accept such a state? Yang Bailao in "The White-Haired Girl" will not be willing to take his daughter to pay the debt, and Xi'er will not be willing to go to the Huang family to be a maidservant. This was a very natural situation at the time. What's more, when Xi'er was taken captive to the Huang family as a maid, Huang Shiren quickly took possession of her. After that, the Huang family was ready to sell Xi'er. If Aunt Zhang hadn't told Xi'er the news, Xi'er might have really been sold into that abyssal fire pit.
In the old society, how many women who were sold into the kilns were subjected to completely inhumane treatment, they were insulted, trampled on, trampled on, and they were never treated as human beings. Many of these women died very quickly. Today's young people would think that if Xi'er marries the Huang family, is there really such a possibility?
At that time, if the daughter of a poor family really married a rich man as a concubine, her fate was also very tragic. Ye Weili, a scholar in the United States, in the book "Turbulent Youth" co-authored by her and Ma Xiaodong, talked about her family, especially the affairs of the older generation of feudal families, and mentioned that her grandmother was a concubine of her grandfather. The book also says that her grandfather had an even younger concubine who had been abducted from Henan and given to her grandfather as a gift. When the little girl got married, she was only fourteen or fifteen years old. It is said that on the day of the wedding, the little girl hid under the table and refused to come out.
The main function of the Ye family's aunts and wives is to give birth to sons, and these concubines have all given birth to their own sons. The son is the young master of the Ye family, but their own mother is still a slave. Later, most of the young masters born to these concubines participated in the revolution. One of the very important reasons is that these young masters of the year saw the extremely unfair treatment suffered by their mothers in that evil feudal family, and they were full of hatred and hatred for this feudal family and the evil old society.
That society is a society of class exploitation, a society full of class contradictions and class hatred. Some young people today are completely ignorant of this, and take it for granted that the daughters of poor families will live a good life if they marry into a rich family. This is basically impossible. Class exploitation and class oppression are hatred carved into the bones with a knife, and there is no way to solve such problems except revolution. Some young people today do not understand the class contradictions in class society, nor do they understand the class hatred between different classes, still less the sharp and fierce class struggle that will arise from them.
Working women in the old society not only suffered from the oppression of the entire class, but also suffered from the bullying of the male members of the exploiting class and the malicious harm of the female members. Men can humiliate them at will, and women from the exploiting class can also enslave them and trample them with brutality. Huang Shiren's mother was still abusing Xi'er in the process of enslaving Xi'er, and poked Xi'er's flesh with the hairpin on his head. In such a cruel environment, how can Xi'er survive? If she doesn't escape from such an environment, I'm afraid it won't be too long, and Xi'er will definitely die tragically.
Today, some women, on the grounds of the so-called decades of less struggle, must let themselves be thrown into the arms of the rich, even if they are fostered, even if they are being juniors, they are willing. Women who have this kind of thought, perhaps among them, a few people may be able to get their wish. When they leave those rich men, some men will give them a large sum of money so that they can live the rest of their lives. But for the vast majority of women in this category, they are unlikely to end up with such a fluke. Their future could be very bleak, even very unfortunate. The vast majority of them will be abandoned by those who have money. If such women continue to pester, then they may even be more violated by such men.
The so-called being fostered and the so-called being a junior are, in a sense, all bad Xi left over from the old society, the remnants of the outdated concepts of the old society, and incompatible with today's Chinese society. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, people paid more attention to equality between men and women and to mutual respect between the sexes. Such a relationship between the sexes is healthy and normal. The kind of men who still want three wives and four concubines today, and women who try to rely on their bodies to fight for decades less, are just an atavistic phenomenon of old Xi, which cannot last and will be spurned and despised by the public. Their desire to enrich themselves in this way is unattainable in most cases.
For those young people who hold the view that Xi'er should marry Huang Shiren, how can we make them realize that in old China, it was indeed a society full of class oppression and class struggle, and how can we make them realize that the concepts and Xi of the old society are a kind of retrogression in today's China, and even more a kind of decay and erosion. Reason with them? Tell them history? Will this have the desired effect? For all this, we could not have predicted. However, the truth that should be emphasized must still be explained, and the history that should be reviewed must not be forgotten. Perhaps, in the long-term subtle change, those young people's hearts and minds may have some changes, right?
(The author is a senior researcher at the Kunlun Ce Research Institute; source: Kunlun Ce Network [author's authorization], revised and released; the picture comes from the Internet, invaded and deleted)