Countless stepmothers are ashamed: how Xu Yanji, the daughter of the writer Xu Dishan, treated the children left by her predecessor

How to deal with the children left by the ex, in today's world where divorce rates are always high, is a real problem that many women who remarry or ladies who marry non-first-time men need to face.

In recent years, there has been a lot of news about stepmother abuse of her stepson. Even beating a child to death is not a new topic. For example, tearing the corners of the child's mouth, breaking the child's ankle tendons, pricking the child's palm with the tip of a needle, scalding the child's buttocks with red-hot iron tongs, poking the child's abdomen with a sharp blade, dripping the child's body with boiling water, etc., is really called all-round. Abused children are always skinless and scaly. The child becomes the scapegoat and victim of the broken marriage of the parents, and becomes the specific object of the stepmother's resentment. The stepmother also became almost synonymous with malignancy. When the media talks about the abuse of children by stepmothers, they often use words such as tragic death, extermination of humanity, and madness. This also shows how ferocious the stepmother's methods of abusing her children are.

There was a TV series called "Mother's Heart after Spring", which was a family bitter love drama about the Republic of China period and earned the tears of countless viewers. The image of the stepmother in the play subverts people's traditional impressions, and the joys and sorrows of life make the audience feel the greatness of maternal love beyond blood relations. In addition to being moved, the audience expects that the stepmothers around them or the stepmothers all over the world can treat their stepchildren like the protagonists in the play.

Xu Yanji, the daughter of Xu Dishan, a famous writer and scholar of the Republic of China, also served as a stepmother. After graduating from Beijing Agricultural University in 1954, Xu Yanji was assigned to work at the Hebei Institute of Agricultural Sciences, and in 1957 he was classified as a rightist, and he was beaten as a counter-revolutionary for joining the Catholic Army of Notre Dame when he was in high school in Nanjing. During this period, the children died prematurely, divorced, and were sentenced to prison. After completing his sentence, he worked in an extremely difficult rural area in Hebei. Xu Yanji, who was 38 years old before the Spring Festival in 1971, went to Mei County, Shaanxi Province, to visit his brother, whom he had not seen for 17 years, and also looked for a place for himself. Later, it is said that he married a farmer surnamed Wei in the official village of Wugong County, where his brother was located. Old Wei was illiterate, 10 years older than Xu Yanji, and dragged a boy named Koko, who was less than 10 years old. Koko's birth mother was a woman who escaped from Gansu and died at the age of 29 due to illness.

When Xu Yanji chose to marry Old Wei, one of the reasons was also because Keke had lost his mother since childhood, and he had no impression of his birth mother, so there was no comparison, so he would not dislike his stepmother. At the same time, Xu Yanji also considers from the perspective of the child that he is a newcomer, and the child will definitely not be used to it, and he must give the child a process of adaptation. For example, after living together for a while, I found an opportunity to change Koko from what she had always called "feed" to "mom", rather than forcing. She wants the child to feel that the life of the stepmother is better when she arrives home than the father and son before, and she is good to him.

Because Old Wei is a middle-aged son, the natural treasure is not good, reluctant to let his son suffer a little grievance, and even the education he should have can be given up, but Koko is more lonely than other children in the village. After Xu Yanji went, he persuaded Old Wei to allow Koko to go out at night to play and go to a neighboring village to watch movies. Take Koko to the big town to broaden his horizons, eat something he hadn't eaten before, and sit with his children on the railroad to watch the train. Later, he also took his children back to Nanjing to visit his old mother. In this way, the child is naturally close to her stepmother.

Xu Yanji is not blindly accommodating to children, but distinguishing between right and wrong and adhering to principles. Once, Koko was asked to look after the newly bought chicks at home, but the child left the house to play, so that the chicks were lost. But the child lied that he had been at home. Xu Yanji thought that the loss of the chicken was small and the lie was big, and announced that he would be punished for beating the palm of the three plates. As a result, after only two boards of koko, he cried out in pain and promised not to lie again, so he spared a board. He did not take into account Lao Wei's unhappiness and unhappiness. On another occasion, Koko went to the production team at night to help his parents keep work, but he lost his notebook because he slept in the courtyard of the team headquarters until he was awakened by the rain. This is a big deal, because the production team has no bottom, and the situation of Lao Wei and Xu Yanji's half-year labor is not clear. Old Wei Nest was furious and said that he was going to beat Koko for the first time. Xu Yanji did not approve, believing that the work was not the child's task, and it was understandable that he would panic and lose the book before he woke up. Koko was not beaten as a result. The notebook was then found, and Koko learned his lesson. When tutoring Koko to write an essay, the child shed tears when he lifted the pen and did not want to write. But Xu Yanji did not have a soft heart, tears returned to tears, and the composition had to be held out. Later, when he graduated from the Science Andke Teacher's School, his Chinese score was the first place in the five classes of the same grade. The child was naturally grateful to her stepmother.

Later, Xu Yanji was rehabilitated and restored to public office. Later, because he had to take care of his old mother, he applied to be transferred back to Nanjing. Lao Wei also followed her to agriculture and settled in Nanjing. After teaching in Shaanxi for three years, Koko was transferred to Nanjing because of the one-child policy. As a well-known and highly educated woman, it was not easy to marry an illiterate old farmer, although there were factors affected by the socio-political environment at that time. But she regards her stepson as a stepdaughter, and carefully cultivates and adjusts, Xu Yanji's deeds can make countless stepmothers today ashamed, and it is more worthy of their emulation and learning.

Reference: "I am the daughter of the fallen peanut" (author Xu Yanji)