Bing Xin, the "Old Man of the Century", lived for 99 years, and she was born in 1900, spanning the entire 20th century. What many people don't know is that in the year that Bingxin died, another talented woman of the Republic of China who was once the same name as her also died, and her name was Su Xuelin.
Ice heart
In the middle of the Republic of China, there was a combination called "Ice and Snow Smart", ice is BingXin (Xie Wanying's pen name), and snow is Su Xuelin. However, Su Xuelin and Bingxin did not have much deep intersection with each other, and people collectively called them "Ice and Snow Smart", only because the two were similar in age and talented, and they were both rookie female writers in the Chinese literary scene of that era.
Born in 1897, Su Xuelin was 3 years older than Bingxin, and when he died in 1999, he had already gone through a long life of 102 years. Su Xuelin has made great achievements in the field of literature, but her life has a big regret and a big controversy.
Su Xuelin
Unfortunately, she had been married to her husband for 36 years, but refused to share sex with him, so that she had no children and no daughters in her life, and she was alone in her later years. The controversy is that she spent half her life opposing Lu Xun and became the leader of the "anti-Lu army" in the last century.
< h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > progressive youth Su Xuelin, who finally failed to escape arranged marriage</h1>
Su Xuelin's grandfather, Su Yunqing, served as a county commander and was the most vocal person in the family. When Su Xuelin grew up to be 18 years old, her grandfather began to find a mother-in-law for her, which Su Xuelin strongly opposed, she received a new education, in her bones she recognized "marriage freedom", hoping to one day talk about a vigorous love.
Young Su Xuelin
However, the family does not think so, and her grandparents and parents urge her to get married as soon as possible, afraid that it will be difficult to find her in-laws when she is older. In order to avoid blind dates, in the autumn of 1921, the 24-year-old Su Xuelin decided to study in France, knowing that this decision would be opposed by her parents and elders, so she did not inform her family until the day before her departure.
After coming to France, Su Xuelin was finally relieved that she could pursue true love like the girls there. However, due to cultural differences, Su Xuelin's emotional road was not smooth, and in the past few years in France, she has not talked about any serious love.
Fast forward to 1924, Su Xuelin suddenly received a letter from her family, saying that she should immediately go home and marry a man named Zhang Baoling.
Zhang Baoling
marry? Su Xuelin, who had not yet experienced the feeling of love, could not believe the words in front of her, but she quickly understood that this was not a dream, she knew every word, and the meaning was obvious. The order of his parents and the words of the matchmaker have always been the mainstream of Marriage in China, and Su Xuelin, who is still unmarried at the age of 27, naturally cannot escape this pass.
But Su Xuelin chose to resist, and she wrote back to ask her parents to help her dismiss the marriage, and as a result, her parents wrote a letter to scold her. Su Xuelin's mother was already very ill at that time, and while blaming her daughter, she played the "sadness card", claiming that if Su Xuelin did not follow the wishes of her parents, the two elders would have no face in front of people, and as a mother, she would not be blind even if she died.
The two letters from her parents completely extinguished Su Xuelin's will to resist, although she was a progressive young woman, she was also deeply influenced by chinese traditions, in her concept, filial piety is still the first important thing, if she does not follow her parents' wishes, it is a great filial piety.
So the following year, Su Xuelin returned to China from France and married Zhang Baoling, a man of the same age whom he had never met. As a new-school woman, Su Xuelin finally failed to escape the arranged marriage at home, which has to be said to be very ironic, and what is even more ironic is that this marriage will become the biggest tragedy in her life, and not only for her, but also for the young man named Zhang Baoling.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > 36 years of marriage is a strange road, and the lives of the two talents have been delayed by marriage</h1>
Why did the Su family let Su Xuelin marry Zhang Baoling? This is actually a deliberate consideration. Although it was an arranged marriage, Su Xuelin's family still considered her daughter's academic qualifications, so they specially selected Zhang Baoling, who was also a student studying in foreign countries, for her. When Su Xuelin studied in France, Zhang Baoling also studied in the United States, and he studied science and engineering, which was very different from Su Xuelin's liberal arts.
Due to the large difference in disciplines, Su Xuelin and Zhang Baoling do not have a common language, and Zhang Baoling, who was born in science and engineering, is full of "straight male atmosphere", which is simply a fatal blow for Su Xuelin, who has always been looking forward to romantic love.
Su Xuelin and Qiong Yao took a group photo
Once, Su Xuelin pointed to the moon in the sky and said to Zhang Baoling, "Tonight's moon is so round." As a result, Zhang Baoling came to the sentence: "No matter how round it is, there is no circle that I drew with a compass." Such a boring dialogue, how could Su Xuelin have a good feeling for Zhang Baoling. However, their marriage was decided by their parents and elders, and it was impossible to violate it, although they knew that they could not get along, and finally the wedding was held.
After marriage, Su Xuelin explicitly refused to sleep with her husband, although Zhang Baoling felt greatly insulted, but his personality has always been weak, plus Su Xuelin is already a well-known talented woman, fame and social status far more than him, so he had to rely on his wife.
In the first few years, Su Xuelin was willing to "live together" with Zhang Baoling in order to block the leisurely mouth of the outside world, in fact, the so-called cohabitation was just eating together, and the two had their own bedrooms, which was similar to today's young people.
After a few years, Su Xuelin was not even willing to maintain such a superficial couple, she chose to separate, and since then she has ignored her husband.
One thing that can reflect this state of affairs is that Su Xuelin was teaching at Wuhan University at the time, and the school heard that her husband Zhang Baoling was an engineer, so they invited him to teach at Wuhan University and entrusted Su Xuelin to contact him.
Asking his wife to contact her husband is a perfectly normal thing, but the funny thing is that Su Xuelin actually does not know Zhang Baoling's contact information, and even where he lives and what job he is doing. However, she was unwilling to tell the school the truth, so she could only contact her father-in-law (Zhang Baoling's father) first, and then the father-in-law told her husband.
This anecdote fully shows that the marriage between Su Xuelin and Zhang Baoling has long existed in name only, not so much that they are husband and wife, but rather strangers, not even acquaintances and friends.
The marriage has long been broken, why did Su Xuelin and Zhang Baoling not choose divorce? This is actually related to Su Xuelin's ambivalence. Just as she compromised with arranged marriages for the sake of her parents, she was reluctant to divorce herself in order to maintain her "traditional good woman" persona.
Su Xuelin does not mention divorce, and Zhang Baoling, who has always been obedient, will certainly not mention it, so like Su Xuelin, Zhang Baoling has also lived a lonely life and has never had other women in his life.
Zhang Baoling died in 1961, 36 years after his marriage to Su Xuelin. Although Zhang Baoling is not as famous as Su Xuelin, he is also a heavyweight in China's engineering circles, and on his terms, even if he reaches the age of forty or fifty, he can easily marry and have children. But he chose to "stay" with Su Xuelin for a lifetime, rather than passing on his smart genes.
After Zhang Baoling's death, Su Xuelin returned to singlehood, when she was 64 years old and had long passed the golden period of marriage and love. For her husband Zhang Baoling, Su Xuelin has been reluctant to mention it, until the last year of her life, at the age of 102, she said the truth: I already have literature as a pursuit, what else do I want my husband to do?
It turned out that in the heart of the talented woman Su Xuelin, literature was the most important, and Zhang Baoling was just a hurried passer-by in her long life. Understanding this, it is not difficult to understand why Su Xuelin is willing to be tied to Zhang Baoling, who she does not like, for a lifetime, because in her opinion, whoever marries her is the same, and she who has lost her enthusiasm for love actually does not care about marriage.
Su Xuelin and friends
I have to say that Su Xuelin's views have always been very avant-garde to this day, but when she made such a choice, why didn't she delay Zhang Baoling's life, from this point of view, is Su Xuelin a little selfish?