Sociologist Li Yinhe once said when discussing the marriage system, "The marriage system has gradually declined and begun to decline." ”
In other words, people are increasingly reluctant to get married.
According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the national marriage rate was 7.2% in 2020, the divorce rate was as high as 43.83%, and the data of the 2020 China Fertility Report showed that the number of unmarried women in China has reached 6 million.
Women do not marry, there are many reasons, some people are worried that the lingering pity when in love will become the chai rice oil and salt after marriage, some people are unwilling to bear the risk of marriage, afraid of not being able to balance work and family.
Whether to marry or not is not a question of right or wrong, but an open question of weighing the pros and cons.
If you don't get married for the rest of your life, what will the future hold? Will women who never marry for life regret it when they get old?
More than 300 years ago, there was a group of women in ancient China, in order to resist the oppression of feudal marriage customs, they preferred to tie up their long hair, never marry for life, and voluntarily became "self-combing women".
What is a self-combing woman
The word self-combing is derived from the old combing ceremony. At that time, unmarried women had a long braid hanging behind them, and when they got married, their mothers or female elders combed their hair, and pulled the long braids into a bun, which was close to the head, implying that they were married from a young girl to a human woman.
Self-combing, on the other hand, refers to some women bundling themselves to show that they will not marry for life.
However, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, arranged marriages were prevalent, and even buying and selling relationships, many women did not know what their husbands looked like until their wedding night. Raw rice is cooked to maturity, and then want to break through the barriers, it is difficult to go to the sky, most women can only admit their fate, miserable life.
The so-called self-combing woman began to appear from this time, continued for more than 300 years, and gradually disappeared after the 1930s. In the past 300 years, the self-combing women have had many stories of bravery or grief.
In 2017, a photographic collection called "Sister Yan" was released, which made the story of the self-combing women get attention again, and this photography collection won the Lianzhou International Photography Annual Exhibition Thorn Point Award, photographer Tang Jingfeng used old photos to let people see the story of "China's last generation of self-combing women" Mai Yanyu.
Sister Yan
Mai Yanyu, known as Sister Yan, once worked as a maid at the home of photographer Tang Jingfeng. Like many self-groomed women, Sister Yan was born in a poor family during the Republic of China period, her mother died very early, and as the eldest daughter in the family, she had to take care of her younger siblings.
Sister Yan has longed to read since she was a child, and her stubborn father believes that girls should not read. Sister Yan could only secretly buy books, and after being discovered by her father, she was furious: "Since you have money to buy books, it is better to send your brothers to school, and don't waste this money on yourself." ”
At that time, there was a custom that the younger brother could only marry his wife after his sister married, and could not be trespassed, and Sister Yan was once forced to marry by her father. At the age of 20, she realized early on that if she married in a vacuum, she would not live well for the rest of her life, so she decided to comb herself.
Yan Jie, who buys vegetables at the market
In order to get rid of feudal marriage customs and family oppression, is the main reason why most women choose to comb themselves, and in a movie called "Self-combing", the reasons why the heroine Yi Huan decided to comb herself are also similar.
Yi Huan's family was poor, and her parents could not repay their debts, so they had to marry her to the creditor to pay off the debt. After yi huan fought without success, he thought of combing himself. At the scene of her self-grooming ceremony, a group of people rushed in and tried to forcibly take her away. Yi Huan fiercely resisted, even using scissors to force him to die.
Yi Huan's mother came forward to persuade her: A woman's life is like this.
Movie "Self-Combing"
Just when she was hesitating, someone happened to pass by the river on the side by boat, saw the hysterical Yi Huan on the shore, threw a bag of money to save her, Yi Huan escaped the fate of being forced to marry, and also gave up her fantasies about the family, and followed the other self-combing sisters to work in the textile factory.
Whether it is Sister Yan in reality or Yi Huan in the movie, there are not a few women who choose to comb themselves in order to fight against fate. Every "person who came over" told them that the fate of the woman had always been like this, and she lowered her eyebrows and swallowed her breath.
Few people raise their questions out loud:
It's always been that way, right?
Three generations of self-combing women
Shunde, Panyu, Zhongshan, Nanhai, Zhaoqing and other places in Guangdong have become the most concentrated places for self-combing women because of the prosperity of the silk reeling industry and the development of the economy.
Shunde is rich, and there is a saying that "nine of the ten daughters do not marry". In the 1930s, there were 40,000 women in Shunde, more than 10,000 self-combing, and in some villages, there were only a few people who married in a year, and in some years, there was not a single bride in the whole village.
Looking back at the 300-year development history of the comb girl, there are three stages in total:
The first generation of self-combing women, born in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, when the rise of the southern silk reeling industry provided women with the opportunity to earn an independent living, female workers are busy with work, economic and ideological independence, determined to comb themselves, and never marry for a lifetime;
The second generation of self-combing women, because of the bankruptcy of the silk reeling factory, crossed the ocean, worked in a foreign country, became a mother sister by her own strength, rarely had contact with the opposite sex, and delayed the best age for marriage;
The third generation of self-combing women, deeply influenced by the second generation of self-combing women, was brought to Singapore and other countries and regions by the village water guests or female elders in the family to work.
Three generations of self-combing women were born in different historical periods, but they are in the same vein, they bear hardships and stand hard work, support each other, and are the indelible group memory in the history of women's ideological emancipation in China.
In the work "China's Last Self-Combing Woman" by writers Xu Chunlian and Lin Zhiwen, the portrayal of self-combing women is related to the portrayal of self-combing women.
Huang Yuerong, from Jun'an Town, Shunde, is the third generation of self-groomed women brought to Nanyang by the female elders of the family to work.
Different from the family where several sisters in the village are combing themselves, Huang Yuerong's family has no self-combing tradition, among the three sisters, the sister married to Singapore, the younger sister married to Hong Kong, 17-year-old girl Huang Yuerong, the style is elegant, the family urges her to get married quickly.
Huang Yuerong recalled, "At that time, I felt very good when I had money to earn money at work, and I didn't know if a man was good or not when I got married, and I had to give him children, and I couldn't accept it." I have long said that I am not married, I want to stand on my own. ”
How to stand on your own? Huang Yuerong thought of her sister's letter saying that working in Nanyang (the name of Southeast Asia in the Ming and Qing dynasties) could earn 100 yuan a month, and her heart was a little shaken.
The idea of going to Nanyang to work was supported by Huang Yuerong's mother, who also went out of her way to buy a rattan box for her, prepare her luggage, and send her to Singapore by the waterman in the village. The young Huang Yuerong, in the cramped cabin, is full of hope for the future.
Huang Yuerong eventually went to Singapore, she went to work in pizzerias, did cleaning in large supermarkets, but did the most and longest, or "Ma Jie", Ma Jie refers to the 1830s, some self-combing women who were originally engaged in silk reeling went to Nanyang as maids, which is a profession that many third-generation self-combing women will choose.
From self-combing girl to mother sister
When it comes to self-combing women, it is inseparable from "majie", and the birth of the mama sister group originated from the western capitalist economic crisis in the 1930s.
Affected by the economic crisis, a large number of silk reeling factories have closed, and unemployed women workers have been forced to abandon their homeland and take steamships that should be filled with silk to help domestic workers in Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore and other places. Among these female workers, some of them were originally self-combing women, and some of them swore not to marry for life when they went overseas, and they were all respected by local Chinese as "mother sisters".
Shunde people are known for their hard work, coupled with cooking skills, very popular in the labor market, higher than the prices of servants exported from other regions, known as "Shunde Mother Sister", only large households can afford it. At that time, Shunde's mothers and sisters were all over Southeast Asia, with more than 3,000 people, and there were more than 100 mothers in Singapore in The village of Jun'an Shatou in Shunde alone.
Mommy at work
Ouyang Huanyan, known as "Yan Taigu", is the most well-known and most talked about one of Shunde's mothers.
In 1932, 14-year-old Ouyang Huanyan and his sister left home and went to Nanyang one after another, determined not to marry and became a self-combing woman.
Ouyang Huanyan said, "My father died early, my family is very poor, and my mother has to raise three sons and three daughters. When we left home, my mother gave birth to three less daughters....".
This determination has supported her to run through Nanyang for half a lifetime. When Ouyang Huanyan was young, he worked as a domestic servant in the homes of Singapore's overseas Chinese leader Tan Kah Kee and former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
Among them, she has been in the Lee family for the longest time, ups and downs for 40 years, not only witnessing Lee Kuan Yew's advancement from an ordinary lawyer to the Prime Minister of Singapore, but also taking care of Lee Kuan Yew's 3 children growing up to adulthood.
Ouyang Huanyan and the three brothers and sisters of the Li family
Nearly half a century of master-servant love has also accumulated the deep friendship between the two countries. Li Weiling, a big miss who was taken care of by Aunt Yan, once sent her a family portrait after Mrs. Yan returned to China, and behind the photo was a blessing -
"You are a good memory of our growing up years, we take this opportunity to say thank you, and I wish you good health and all the best."
A young mother and sister who left home and had a humble status were fortunate to be cared for by her employer, and it was also an affirmation of her work and character.
Hug the elderly in the aunt's house
Since the comb girls worked in Nanyang when they were young, drinking coffee, eating curry, and sisterly gatherings were uncomfortable, and as they grew older, old age became a problem.
Although many self-groomed women choose not to marry, they are still afraid and uneasy in their hearts, worried that they will not have children to worship after death.
Some self-combing women choose to "not leave the husband's family", that is, nominally marry into other families as daughters-in-law, but in fact go out to work, usually support the nominal "husband" and "in-laws", live in the mother's family when they return to their hometowns, and bury them in the husband's family after death.
There are also some self-combing women who marry men who have passed away, commonly known as "buying a household registration", so that they can be buried in the man's family after a hundred years.
The more common choice for self-combing women for the elderly is "aunt's house". To this day, aunt houses are still widely found in Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhaoqing, Zhongshan, Panyu and other places in the Pearl River Delta region.
An aunt's house in Daling Village, Panyu Shilou
In the eyes of the people, although the self-combing woman is self-reliant, she has not been married, cannot live in her own home or relatives' house, and has no husband's family to rely on, and it is inevitable that the lonely family will be "obscure".
Even if you are a self-combing woman, you still can't get rid of the secular evaluation system. Without any sustenance, they had to live in their aunt's house, take care of each other on weekdays, and send them to the end of the group after they died.
Completed in 1950, Bingyu Hall is the most famous aunt house in Shunde. At that time, Bingyutang was only used as a self-reserved place for the year of the destiny of the combing women, and there were not many people living there, until the mid-1980s, when the policy was relaxed, the economy took off, and the self-combing women who were displaced overseas returned to their hometowns one after another, and the leaves fell back to their roots.
Ice Jade Hall
In this common home of self-grooming women, they are planted with fingernail trees and rice orchids imported from Singapore, and there are several thiseh trees in the yard, with straight trunks, no forks, and they go into the sky, symbolizing the sisters' single-mindedness and one heart.
Usually, the aunts gather in pairs in the Ice Jade Hall to play the Heavenly Nine Cards, noisy and noisy, no one will let anyone, every year the Beggars Festival, Guanyin Birthday, Respect for the Elderly Festival and Bodhisattva Birthday and other festivals, the Aunts will solemnly celebrate, Ice Jade Hall, is their small world.
Compared with the happy harmony of the Ice Jade Hall, xiqiao's life of combing women is very dull. QiaoJue Luzhai Hall is the place with the largest number of self-combing female tablets, mainly for self-combing women and widows who come to buy seats to live, retire, die and place tablets.
After buying a seat, some self-combing women went out to earn money to prepare for the elderly, and when they were old, they lived in the hall and their sisters as companions, living a day of asking for three meals and a night, and the green lantern ancient Buddha accompanied the rest of their lives.
Xiqiao combed the female Pan Sigu, who lived in the Zhaitang for 40 years
For them, the hall is not a habitat for the elderly, more like a resting place for the soul, plus it is a sacred place of Buddhism, and it is not allowed to laugh and have fun, compared to the Ice Jade Hall, it is naturally cold and cold.
There are no parents short, only sisters working together, such a life, when still young, is naturally pure and warm.
However, in the twilight of the year, it is inevitable to be miserable, even if it is as dashing as the Ice Jade Hall, it is difficult to escape the flood beast of time. A total of 325 self-groomed women are enshrined in the Ice Jade Hall, and the names of the living aunts are affixed with red notes, which are removed after they die.
Tablets in the Ice Jade Hall
These red notes, for the living, are the hourglass of life, and every time they are torn, their lives also enter the countdown.
Every self-combing girl thought about waiting for the other sisters to come to her death, but no one thought about how lonely and lonely the last self-combing girl was when she left.
In 2018, there were only 12 red notes left.
Choose to comb yourself, do you regret it?
Active or passive, the emergence of self-combing women is a natural stress in extreme environments. With the passage of time, the once huge self-combing women, after the founding of New China, there will be no new people to join, and there will be a silent withering in the future.
The story of the self-groomed woman should have been sealed off with the end of an era, but in recent years, the discussion of women's non-marriage has been so loud that these pioneers from a hundred years ago have been mentioned again.
While people take self-combing women as a subject study, they also care about this:
Do they regret their decision to comb themselves?
Liang Jieyuan, the 92-year-old sixth aunt, is the "youngest" group of self-combing women who are still alive in Shunde. The reason why she chose to comb herself is very simple, one is to help her family, and the other is to fear childbearing. Liang Jieyuan's mother had 12 children before her death, and only 4 survived.
Although she is old, Liang Jieyuan's hands are still neat, just like her people, clean, open-minded, optimistic, and have maintained basic decency and dignity throughout her life.
She is often asked a question: Do you regret being a self-combing woman?
"What's there to regret? Even if you get married and have children, there are good and bad, who can say for sure? Liang Jieyuan replied.
Liang Jieyuan, source: Zhihu @ Ah Tong Meow
Not all self-combing women can have such a stable life. According to the sixth aunt, she once knew a sister in a wheelchair who had a rough life.
The sister was sold by her family to work as a prostitute in Singapore at the age of 12, and later returned to China, fortunately married to a well-off husband. Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, and her husband died unexpectedly, so she chose to comb herself and never marry again.
Instead of offering to support the elderly, her children have cheated her of all the inheritance in her hands, and now the sister is insane and can only rely on others to take care of her.
Self-combing woman in a wheelchair, source: Zhihu @ A Tong Meow
For the decision to comb themselves, some people do not regret it, and some people have expressed their remorse. In the documentary "The Last Self-Combing Woman", 82-year-old self-combing woman Huang Ruiyun said to the camera, "At that time, I was young, I didn't expect to have an old day, if I got married, maybe I wouldn't be like a person now, alone." ”
When Huang Ruiyun was young, it was not that he did not think about getting married, but the men he saw did not like it, and he thought about working all day long, making more money to come back to his parents, and the years were faltering, and as he grew older, he stopped thinking about it.
Self-combing woman Huang Ruiyun, source: documentary "The Last self-combing woman: the pursuit of freedom, lifelong non-marriage"
There is no absolute regret, there is no absolute no regret, people are just accustomed to expecting a life that has not been there.
The enlightenment of self-combing women to modern women's marriage
I think of the last scene in the movie "Self-Combing":
Yuhuan and Yihuan were reunited at the train station decades after they were separated, and Yihuan was sitting in a wheelchair, and Yuhuan gave her a silent hug.
At this time, the camera turns, it is their young appearance, and the two stand side by side in the sun, slowly walking forward.
It is the gentleness of the self-combing women supporting each other and meeting each other for the end of their lives, and it is also the last sunset elegy of the self-combing women's era.
Liu Gu Tai Liang Jieyuan, in response to the donation of Bingyutang to the Shatou Village Welfare Committee a hundred years after the combing girl, said:
"There will be no more (self-combing women) in the future, why keep it?" Now people are really good, like a fairy life, girls no longer have to be self-combing women. ”
That's only half true.
In the past, self-combing women chose not to marry in order to rebel against feudal marriage customs, and modern women who choose not to marry have more initiative, for different reasons and similarities.
According to the data of the "White Paper on Contemporary Non-marriage in China" released by Lily Jiayuan and iResearch Consulting this year, the proportion of people who are firmly unmarried in the single group has reached 4%, of which most of them are first-tier cities, women, and people over 30 years old.
Women can hold up half the sky, and with the increase of women's economic strength and the improvement of women's social status, women stand in front of the crossroads of the times.
The survival experience of the self-combing woman has given us a lot of inspiration, to be economically independent, to plan ahead, but also to leave a series of problems that are still difficult to solve:
For example, the group pension is not reliable, what to do if you regret not marrying or having children, and whether the social welfare is perfect enough to preserve the dignity of an elderly person living alone.
Japan's NHK documentary "Ten Years of Seven Single Old Ladies Living Together" confronts the real life of unmarried people entering old age, which is thought-provoking.
These seven single old ladies live in different rooms in the same apartment, sharing room keys with each other, and although they live together, each of them lives independently. In the days ahead, they were healthy and mentally strong, but in a few years, they had to face the dilemma that someone might get sick, leave, and return to loneliness.
Japan's NHK documentary "Ten Years of Seven Single Old Ladies Living Together"
The topics they discussed gradually ranged from daily observations and news to whether to notarize property, whether to prolong treatment for serious illnesses, how to dispose of the remains, and where the graves were.
Every choice has pros and cons, and there are also possibilities of regret, what choice should you make? No one can help you. Just as the "picture is for reference only, please take the physical object as the standard" often marked on the product, everyone's life has a variety of opportunities, what you hear and see is for reference only, whether to buy it, when to buy it, lies in yourself.
The image comes from the Internet, if there is infringement, please contact to delete.
Resources:
1, the NG. "People who choose not to marry will regret it when they come to the end"
2. One. "She never married, worked as a nanny in my house for nearly 40 years, and the last generation of self-combing women in China is 88 years old"
3. KnowYourself: "A Group of Women Who Decide not to Marry for Life| Self-Combing Women: The Rise of Female Consciousness in Early China
4. He Wenzhen. "The House of Life Across History: An Anthropological Study of the Self-Combing Women's Residence "Ice Jade Hall" as a Living Space"
5. Shao Yifei. "An Analysis of the Origin, Composition and Basic Characteristics of the Custom of Self-combing Women: A Case Study of the Custom of Self-Combing Women in Guangzhou"