Is it really difficult to do it when the family is neatly organized

Photo/ Xiao Zhenduo

Under the same roof

Text/Jiang Man

Published in China News Weekly, Issue 1015 on October 4, 2021

The classic line of Hong Kong TVB dramas, "The most important thing for a family is to be neat and tidy", is really difficult to do now.

Winter vacation is approaching, and the family still can't be neatly aligned. My parents would go to the warm coastal cities to be migratory birds and would meet old friends; I wanted to hide in a quiet place to write; my husband had long planned to go back to his hometown and meet with his brothers every year to burn a bunch of winter fires; the daughter said that she was tired for a semester and wanted to go to the southern islands to collect shells. In a small family, everyone has big ideas.

The boundaries of the ego world expanded again and again, and we were all lone warriors, fighting our own windmills like Don Quixote.

Every morning, like birds looking for food, we flew to each other's territory. The child spends the whole day in school. Wives and husbands are on the run in their respective industry matrices. There is no intersection, no resonance. In today's information age of rapid change of knowledge and skills, parents are worried that they will be out of the middle age in the accelerated changes of the times, and how much a young person has to learn to gain a foothold in the modern jungle. We are used to short alliances, long separations. Therefore, the off-duty person has to sit in the car for a while, smoke a cigarette, and listen to a song before he can muster up the courage to return to the order of the family.

At night, our children's homework and personal phones divide us into islands, and it is difficult to keep pace in our respective worlds. Every joint action in the family requires a well-prepared opening ceremony. Candles, gifts, and flowers decorate grand, beautiful, yet tedious rituals that are replacing the tacit understanding that was once natural.

We are in the same bed and dreaming, and we are quietly falling apart.

In the era of farming, living together naturally requires one heart and one mind, and brotherhood is bound to be the time of synergy and cooperation. Climbing trees requires someone to paddle their feet, and casting a net requires someone to row a boat. Fight father and son soldiers, fight tiger brothers. "Heavenly Immortals" sings: You carry water to me to water the garden, you weave cloth to me to cultivate the field, this is a cooperative mode of life, and love and dependence are also slowly generated in these sharing and cooperation.

Ang Lee made a family ethics film "Push hand", although it was a family affair in the 90s of the last century, it also exhausted the crisis of traditional family separation: Master Zhu, a taijiquan master who crossed the ocean and reunited with his son, could not cross the gap between culture and concepts, and his daughter-in-law Martha was like water and fire. The heavy thumping sound of a kitchen knife chopping on the cutting board and the crisp clanging sound of the oven belong to a different world. The soft tai chi shape and the cold typewriter have nothing to do with each other, and even the diet is clear. Under the same roof, the father and daughter-in-law are independent and suspicious. The bond of the family is no longer the glory of the ancestors and the son inheriting the father's business.

But home is home after all, it is a time of reunion, connection, care, concern and common growth. Behind countless compromises, we learn to respect, forgive and tolerate, and also learn to leave a quiet and empty moon land for our families.

At the end of the film, Martha rearranges her father's room and hangs a sword on the wall that her father likes. Master Zhu's son explained to Martha that Tai Chi pushers: Relax, don't resist, and don't disconnect contact. It's a metaphor for building new intimate relationships in the modern family.

We are no longer neatly aligned, we walk in our respective worlds, but still miss and remember. There are always some moments of common growth, with each other, winding paths, and little support.