When watching Yan Geling's "Little Aunt Duohe", there is a sentence that is particularly touching: "(They) have been arguing and quarreling for a lifetime, but they have quarreled into a piece of flesh and bones", how many young couples have spent their lives in bumps and quarrels. Many times, marriage is not a complete piece of the years of quiet good, like the frozen warm pulse in the advertising film, often in the glass slag to find sugar to eat, with that little happiness to tolerate life tasteless exploitation.
When I first read "A Woman's Epic", I felt that the title of this book was very grand, and this woman must have some earth-shattering achievements, but Tian Sophie in the book is an ordinary woman immersed in marriage, and the great thing about her life is that she is bitterly loving a husband who "can't look up" to her, and with her iron tenacity, in exchange for the gratitude of her husband Ouyang Yun in his later years, he finally had "white head not separated".
Sophie can be any traditional woman who silently pays for the family and sacrifices herself, consuming her youth and life in a loveless marriage, when the length of life is measured by the personal value of this woman, this selfless and determined dedication is undoubtedly great, as a wife and mother to achieve this epic tragedy.
Ideally, marriage is an intimate relationship that makes people feel secure. But inevitably, marriage is sometimes a helpless choice, a concession to various real pressures.
Sophie is a woman full of enthusiasm for life, always rampage, simple and direct. She was born in the city, watching her widowed mother's material frugality, and painstakingly whitewashing her decent appearance with the least amount of money. The young girl Xiaofei's natural yearning for romance and beauty is squeezed by the humble reality and has nowhere to be placed.
So when sixteen-year-old Xiaofei, because of the loss of sweaters, scared from her classmates to run away from home to join the revolution, it indicates that she will fill this spiritual gap in her life - to escape from her original family. And such a growth environment for a few cents and a few cents and even a lot of trouble, pregnant with the worldliness in Xiaofei's bones, what she escapes is actually the inner self.
Xiao Fei fell in love with the bookish family, elegant and erudite Ouyang Yun, almost fatalistic. Ouyang Yun is her missing "ideal self": a spiritual aristocrat who is detached from all low-level worldly tastes and has a literati style.
Ouyang Yun is a person who completely separates the spirit and body, he knows his outstanding appearance and personal charm, and he is also willing to enjoy the overtures and care of the opposite sex. He quietly accepts Sophie's enthusiasm for "sending it to the door", while calmly and clearly knowing that Sophie will not be his life partner.
At the same time as interacting with Sophie, Ouyang Yun met Sun Lily, the same family background, the same love of literature, the same dust of this dirty world, such a woman is Ouyang Yun's ideal soul mate. When Ouyang Yun bluntly proposed his new lover to Sophie, Xiaofei became pregnant, and under the historical background of the 1940s, it is self-evident what kind of storms a woman who is unmarried and pregnant will face.
For the sake of the child, Ouyang Yun and Sophie hurriedly married, there was almost no honeymoon buffer, and the daughter Ouyang Xue was born. In the long period of more than thirty years after marriage, the relationship between Sophie and Ouyang Yun was like a square that had to be integrated into a circular gap, in order to attract Ouyang Yun's attention, Sophie memorized the dictionary, read famous works, dressed herself as a female figure that her husband liked, and even had an extramarital affair with the young man of the troupe...
Sophie's overly full of love is reciprocated by Ouyang Yun in a sexual way, because in addition to the "sex" that does not need to pour emotions, Ouyang Yun instinctively "can't see it", making him stingy to respond to Sophie's fierceness with any emotional effort. "Sex" is not only Ouyang Yun's way of escaping from face, but also the only emotional belonging that Sophie can control. In a "happy" marriage that seems to have love and sex, it is actually full of rifts that outsiders can't see.
Ouyang Yun never went to see Sophie's drama performances, and his contrived and exaggerated performances made him stab him in the back. Sophie's butterfly-like dress has no connotation but aesthetic vices, and Sophie's repeated persecution and crying have plunged his pursuit of the ideal of spiritual purity into the mud.
Sophie, in order to love Ouyang Yun, refused to truly appreciate and love her chief Du Han, almost broke with her mother, endured her husband's emotional betrayal again and again, in order to satisfy Ouyang Yun's squandering of money "as dung", she worked hard to earn money, and even her mother sold mahogany furniture that she had cherished for decades, borrowed money for Ouyang Yun's "admirers" to eat and drink every day, and finally died of exhaustion on the stove...
In order to make Ouyang Yun "happy", Sophie was exhausted by economic pressure and could not breathe, Ouyang Yun in order to make his wife feel that he was happy and eat every day, standing on their respective positions, this twisted marriage relationship between the two people are very painful. Sufi's wing is nothing more than an ordinary wife's emotional feedback from her husband, and Ouyang Yun wants to find someone who thinks with him and has a spiritual level of communication.
Originally the closest couple in physical distance, they each lived under the same roof as an "island", immersed in their own "unobtainable" like knotted vines strangling each other. Psychologist John Gottman proposed in Happy Marriages:
A solid marriage relationship is growth, only on the basis of mutual understanding, can we work together to face the difficulties of reality, and the feelings of both parties will continue to deepen in this process. What Sophie and Ouyang Yun lack is this commonality to fight against the storm brought about by marriage itself, and this passive attitude can only be dissipated over to a long time in the end.
Marshall Luxemburg proposed the four elements of "nonviolent communication": observation; feeling; need; and request. The same applies in the marriage relationship, in the sexual contradictions, the most difficult thing to do is not to hold subjective opinions to observe and feel each other's emotions, truly listen to respect each other's needs, and give and accept under the premise of the other party's acceptance.
When her daughter Ouyang Xue was more than ten years old, she said to Sophie: "Mom, your love is very stupid." The teenager's cold eyes are sober, just like you and me who look at the story from a third perspective. We can judge and rationally analyze the feelings of others, but when we are in it, we lose this transparency and determination. The reason why the authorities are confused is that they are unable to extract their personal feelings completely rationally.
Sophie's love, just as her mother loved her, tried to warm Ouyang's heart with material satisfaction and dedication in life. In a special historical period, when she was hungry and puffy, she could go alone at night to catch toads in the countryside for more than ten kilometers and stew soup to replenish her husband's body. When Ouyang Yun was talking to a group of students who were rubbing rice in the dining room, Sophie was willing to nibble on steamed buns every day to save money to supplement her husband's expenses. Her love is affordable, booing and greeting warmth, with the smell of life's fumes.
Ouyang Yun never considered how the family's expenses were not enough to make ends meet, whether it was porridge or broth that drank into his stomach. He was anxious about the situation, concerned about the development of literature, bitter for the harshness of the times, cut his teeth for the exaggeration of the officialdom, he went into the countryside, he was overwhelmed by the suffering of those working people, and he despaired of his weakness caught in the cracks of history.
When his wife is suspicious of his personal style and repeatedly tries to pluck out a definite love from his feelings, he is more and more bitter, he is sick and weak for the times, Sophie is jealous of her imaginary "love enemy", and they build a gap in emotional communication in their respective thinking languages.
With the starting point of "I am for your own good", Sophie uses her heart and lungs to express her love for Ouyang Yun, and the clumsiness pours out of her brain. Ouyang Yun spent half his life looking for his "soul mate", from a female student to a female nurse to Sun Lily, like a thirsty traveler in the desert, looking forward to the collision of ideas that can be understood by one look.
From the beginning of meeting Sophie, Ouyang Yun set a limit on their relationship - "she doesn't understand me", even if Sophie is willing to change for love, hoping to truly enter his closed heart, but the solidified cognition of class differences has prompted him to completely cut off the way his wife tries to communicate in a cold and violent way.
Ouyang Yun looks at Sophie as a walker, but it is the incomparable white moonlight in Duhan's heart, and Duhan appreciates all the beautiful shining points on Sophie's body, and can't ask for it and loves it for a lifetime. And these excellent qualities, in Ouyang Yun's eyes, are only worldly that cannot be put on the table. The inequality of love is often unreasonable, and mortals mostly go around in this emotional dislocation, and the regrets of a lifetime are lost to the impermanence of fate.
Psychologist Hay Chikaizent Mihay said that we usually have a threshold for happiness, such as self-limiting conditions for marital happiness, the other party's family background, personal conditions, personality traits, emotional expressions, etc. If the partner meets this presupposition, then the happiness of the marriage will be more.
These subjective well-beings determine the satisfaction we draw in our marriages. But how many other halves are there that are perfectly suited? Therefore, the happiness of marriage lies more in co-operation.
Sophie's subjective happiness is to marry a husband like Ouyang Yun, so she expresses her love for her husband in her own way, and this kind of too devout love makes Ouyang Yun feel suffocated. Ouyang Yun's subjective happiness is to find a soul mate like him, so he spends decades ignoring his wife's efforts and anxious in the loss of not getting it.
Behind the act of giving and receiving, we have not come out of the essence of self-pleasing, how to get out of this psychological area, and be willing to break the limit of "self-happiness" is the crux of what many of us who are in marital difficulties need to learn and face.
I have seen a foreign writer talk about China in the 50s and 70s, to the effect that he was very envious as a literary creator, and that the turbulent years were an inexhaustible source of creation. The prosperity of literature is sometimes cruel with blood, it is undeniable that the 1980s and 1990s were the heyday of the modern literary blowout, and a large number of outstanding writers rose, such as Chen Zhongzhong, Lu Yao, Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Wang Anyi... What makes their work difficult to get away from that complex era.
Yan Geling
Yan Geling is also the same, she is good at burying all kinds of women into that historical background, the complexity and barbarity of the big era, shaping the turbulent fate of the characters, these flesh and blood female figures, is a bright flower blooming in the chaotic world. Tian Sophie is placed in the current society, she is difficult to see, because ordinary life has the power to annihilate everything.
The turmoil of the times provided the most profound test for the marriage of Tian Sophie and Ouyang Yun. The Qinggao of Ouyang Yun's intellectuals was trampled into the sludge, and the weakness of the literati could not be resisted, only the worldly and spicy Tian Sophie could not have any "face", and when her husband was criticized and beaten, she rushed to throw herself up and shouted slogans, so it was really so rescued, this was what Sun Lily, who ran all over the city to buy a bouquet of water lilies, could not give.
Ouyang Yun was sent to the farm, truly experienced the taste of hunger and fatigue, and realized how precious the brown sugar and eggs that Sophie had exchanged for her hard work were, and how grateful he was. Only a tough and optimistic woman like Sophie can survive the hardships of life, serve the elderly father for Ouyang Yun, and support a family that is in turmoil. Sophie's goodness is buried in ordinary days, and it is the cup of boiled water that you want to drink when you are thirsty.
Sophie enjoyed the suffering of reality, and every bit of hard work accumulated a deeper love, slowly but powerfully delivered into her husband's heart. Sophie is the crutch that Ouyang Yun can live on, and it is in Sophie's shaped figure and wrinkled face that he awakens that belated love, even if this love is more grateful and admired.
Wang Xiaobo said it very well: "When people are young, they feel that there are people everywhere, and other people's affairs are your business. After middle age, I feel that there is nothing in the world except my family. ”
In the process of reading the book, I think of many real-life people. The marriage between Sophie and Ouyang Yun is not equal and proportionate, like many couples of the older generation. In order to live, they were wrapped up in the chaos of the times into a family, there are many unavoidable, there is no way, the two unrelated people hard into a husband and wife, their grievances are in a lifetime of quarrels, and the hidden pain of missing love in a lifetime will eventually become a beach of family warmth in the foam of each other.
Life is cruel and warm, marriage is just a mirror of reality, even the darkest life, it is also bittersweet mixed. "Young couples and old companions", a "companion" word soaked through the wind and frost of the years, so that many contradictions laugh and hate.
Such a couple could be our grandparents or our parents.
In the book, Ouyang Yun was seriously ill several times, and once hoped that he would end his life to free Sophie from endless suffering, but Yan Geling let him survive again and again, so that Sophie, who was already more than fifty years old, took Ouyang Yun's arm and walked by the moat in the evening, talking about the suffering she had suffered before, Ouyang Yun's confidant, maybe this is closer to real life...
Time is the most merciless, and time is also the most tender, isn't it?
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