Her mother, Huang Yifan, was one of the strongest practitioners of the May Fourth Movement. She was so beautiful that in her autobiographical novel “The Little Reunion”, Zhang Eiling once laughed at herself, saying that she must have been deeply embarrassed in her womb when such a beautiful woman as her mother became pregnant. Huang Yifan herself was full of new ideas and could not see her husband, so she divorced him and took off the responsibility of raising her children, not interested in being a mother to a couple of children. After the divorce, as a free and wealthy woman, traveled the world, lived a life of leisure, died in a foreign country, son and daughter did not take care of.
Huang Yifan came from a famous family, a young lady from the family of the governor of the Yangtze River Marine Division in the late Qing Dynasty, with a generous dowry. After she married Eileen Chang’s father, she was not as happy with her husband as she would have liked to be, but she and her sister-in-law, Zhang Moyuan, had similar interests. Because the siblings’ parents died when they were teenagers, she married her sister-in-law, who had multiple identities, not only as a sister-in-law, but also as a close friend, especially since Huang Yifan was very beautiful and Zhang Moyuan was not as good-looking as her. Later, Huang Yifan escaped from the marriage in the name of accompanying her sister-in-law to study abroad. Learning to paint while in France had appeared in the memoirs of Jiang Biwei, Xu Beihong’s ex-wife. In her essay, Eileen Chang said that she grew up loving her mother with a kind of romance, that she represented everything that was new and free in the way of life. And her father smoked opium and married an aunt, symbolizing the decadence of the end of the road. Zhang Moyuan returned to Shanghai from Europe after studying abroad, and Huang Yifan came back together to finalize the divorce with Zhang Eileen’s father. Zhang Moyuan became a professional woman working in a foreign bank, living by herself in a fashionable apartment and remaining single. A few years later Huang Yifan returned to Shanghai again and lived in Zhang Moyuan’s fashionable apartment. At this stage, Zhang Eiling, a middle school student in her early teens, clashed with her stepmother for visiting her mother without reporting, and was slapped by her stepmother, then beaten up by her father and imprisoned, for which she became seriously ill and was able to survive thanks to the careful care of her nanny. Her father sent all her belongings to the maids, claiming that she was only considered dead. From then on, Eileen Chang was naturally her mother’s responsibility. Her mother was also a school fanatic and had a passion for prestigious schools, so she naturally had to plan for her to study abroad. However, at that stage of her life, her mother’s life was too complicated to focus on her daughter, and her attitude towards her daughter was not that of a traditional Chinese doting mother. It’s always afternoon tea, flowers, refreshments, and, at the appointed time, a man who rings the doorbell and walks in in a Western-style modern apartment. And that’s when the daughter needs to have the good sense to go out and make room for her mother and her boyfriend. Zhang Moyuan was out working during the day, and there was no place this self-absorbed little girl could go. She went around and around on the roof deck of her apartment, the wind blowing desolately through the air, the sun deserted, and she thought agitatedly in her mind: Is it necessary to fall headlong from the roof of the building? To show her mother that she really didn’t care! She didn’t care about spending her money, living in her apartment, and getting in the way of rebuilding her new life. Later on, after she became famous, Eileen Chang once wrote bitterly about how it was definitely a test to be with a beloved person who was so familiar that she reached out for pocket money – even between a mother and her daughter.
She had peeked at the letters in her mother’s drawer, in which Rachel wrote to her distant boyfriend, reporting on her daily life, which consisted of nothing more than parties or painting, charity fundraising, and other daily activities of a celebrity, while complaining about having so many social engagements that she didn’t have enough time to go to book club, and so on. Such letters are both pretentious and sad, in the emotional world of Rachel’s heart, a single woman forever waiting for love, without the experience of trying to get out of a bad marriage or a pair of divorced and undisciplined children to serve as a backdrop for her life. Her daughter is too tall and unattractive, her temperament is too strange, growing up in old clothes given by her stepmother, her heart is full of grievances, her heart yearns for her mother to make up for her and pay attention to her; her son stays in her ex-husband’s house, suffering from bullying, being taken out by his stepmother and father at will, getting beaten up from time to time, his ex-husband not even allowing him to receive new-style education to save money, gradually growing more and more obscene, a beautiful little boy that everyone praised as a child did not The beautiful little boy that everyone praised as a child did not become beautiful, but was reduced to an object of contempt by all relatives, including his own sister. Her backyard is full of grief and love wounds everywhere. Men were attracted to her, but because of her status as a divorced woman, they could not make up their minds to marry her, and she was always in the middle of men, with no place to go. However, at that time, she lived a very active life, playing the role of the beautiful, rich, mysterious, learned and talented oriental woman who came from the noble family of the former dynasty. There was no place in her scenes for this pair of trailing children, and because there was nowhere to put them, Eileen was pushed flat against the wall.
In “Little Group Garden,” Zhang Eiling’s younger brother has a chance to visit his mother, who has returned from a long trip to the West, after he has easily escaped from his father and stepmother’s house. You go to Dr. so-and-so at so-and-so’s clinic on so-and-so’s road, get your films taken, say I sent you, and send the bill to me. This is the tone of a rich lady who is doing charity. The younger brother, who is used to being submissive, just keeps on answering, naturally, without any proof, he won’t really find the clinic on such-and-such road, and the doctor that mother said. This kind of careless, impromptu mother’s love, read, only call people feel full of paper desolation, life is completely uninteresting.
In her mother’s eyes, Eileen Chang was unattractive, unemotional, and clumsy, far from a standard celebrity. Once, when her daughter was stricken with typhoid fever, her mother took great pains to take care of her, perhaps because she had worked too hard, perhaps because she had made sacrifices that were not known to others. In “The Little Reunion”, Zhang Eiling explains this, and later her aunt tells her that her mother and the doctor also had an ambiguous relationship in order to see her, but there were too many such things in her mother’s life, so she was not extraordinarily upset to hear it.
In 1939, Eileen Chang was admitted to the University of London with the first prize in the Far East, and because of the outbreak of World War II, she retreated to the University of Hong Kong to study. scholarship to reward her for her intelligence and good learning. Her mother and a group of friends of red men and green women happened to be on vacation in Hong Kong at that time, living in the Repulse Bay Hotel. Because she had always been cold and miserable at school, the school administrators —– British sisters had always classified her as one of those students who, because of poverty, did not go home during the holidays but lived in school for nothing, but now she was responsible for driving her to see her mother and saw that your mother was actually living in the highest-end hotel in Hong Kong, and was stationed there for many days, so much so that the sisters’ expressions were extraordinarily The sisters’ expressions were extraordinarily stern, probably assuming that she was another child of a clever Chinese family who would take advantage of the situation. Naturally, Zhang Eiling is unable to explain, as she has been surviving in such a complicated environment since she was a child, wearing her stepmother’s old clothes to school, and being admonished by her mother to never be curious, and definitely not having the need to satisfy each other’s curiosity. Now when confronted with her grandmother, she could not tell that her mother’s money was not her money, so she had to pretend to be completely ignorant and unaware.
This time she got this scholarship, she was so excited to show it to her mother, who was then at the peak of a beautiful and famous woman’s life, and her relationships with men and women were so chaotic that her mind couldn’t get rid of the male/female relationship in the measurement of everything, and she mentally thought that her daughter and her teacher were having an affair, otherwise the teacher wouldn’t have given her money in the name of scholarship, but of course, she didn’t show any good or bad stance about it. When Eileen Chang left, she left that money with her mother in order to make her happy. Then the next time she went to visit, she intended to retrieve the money, but her mother never mentioned it throughout, so she did not dare to ask. At that moment, Eileen Chang was a pair of sharp scissors that finally cut the umbilical cord of affection between her and her mother.
Later, she told her aunt that after that experience, it seemed that her mother’s heart was finally indifferent to everything, and she had no more feelings. And aunt and mother, once a friend by the neck, the two have seen the world together across the sea. When the aunt Zhang Moyuan too much love this sister-in-law, so confused to completely do not think about her relationship with his brother, and bent on agreeing with her divorce, during the study in the United Kingdom, Huang Yifan and a Chinese student in love, monitor her married status, the young aunt Zhang Moyuan at that time came up with a faint idea – their own and that person married, with She had the idea of marrying the man herself and using her own identity to cover the world’s ears, so that the lovers could have a convenient way to get through their relationship, and she would be responsible for raising the children they had. However, by the 1940s, this pair of aunt and sister-in-law completely separated, once mixed together in the accounts, but also strive to calculate a clear, parting, for a cookie box belongs to each other, polite and modest half a day, one said you take it, one refused, said he went to buy a good. The whole thing has lost its former intimacy of a kind of me in you, you in me. The aunt heard Zhang Eileen talking about her mother’s various things, but with her usual light tone, simply said, before she left this trip, and I counted, I rushed to sell a lane, the money back to her.
In such a living environment, it is difficult for Eileen Chang not to care about money. After she lost her university education, she wrote and published her own novels in Shanghai during the fallen period, and became famous and had the ability to make money. In her essay, she boasts that the first time she encountered the word “gold-digging”, she rushed to claim it – branding herself as a total gold-digger. She had been saving money because she had suffered too much, and she had been determined since she was a teenager to pay her mother back, the money to be put in a beautiful box, buried in a dozen crimson roses, enough to prick her heart.
The last time her mother returned to Shanghai, Zhang Eiling insisted on returning two taels of gold to her mother, who was already old, old and alone, and no longer as sharp and hurtful as she once was. This once-modern woman, horrified and appalled by her daughter’s insistence on returning the money to her, dropped her tears and pleaded her case: “Tigers don’t eat their children hey ……”.
All the pioneers and indulgences of her life, up to this point, all became embarrassment, lest her daughter scorned the end of the embarrassment, she actually cried: “I all those things, they forced me to ……”
This is really the most miserable, most embarrassing sight in the world, however, the text of Jiu Li (Eileen Chang), she did not make any response to this, only in the heart of the faint response: you do not want also no more, nothing else. The aunt’s comment about selling a lane property in her name to pay back money to her sister-in-law also happened at this time, so it is clear that things have changed and the love account has been cleared. This is an end, after my mother left Shanghai, the Chinese mainland immediately changed its dynasty, she never returned to Shanghai, and Zhang Moyuan, and her own children never saw each other again.
After she left Shanghai, Huang Yifan lived in Malaysia for a while, teaching at a school, when she lost all her possessions in the war and was not well off. In the last two years, I read an article about an interview with a young colleague of Huang Yifan’s when she was teaching. According to her, Huang Yifan had never mentioned Zhang Eiling to her. This has something to do with the fact that Huang Yifan traveled for many years and his children were very light-hearted, but it also shows from the side that her daughter never became a spiritual pillar for her mother, a daughter she could rely on, trust and be attached to.
In 1952, seeing that the situation was not good, Zhang Eiling left Red China, while her aunt chose to stay in Shanghai. They both experienced several dynastic changes and made an agreement not to correspond with each other. Since then, the aunt and Eileen Chang have never met again. There is a beautiful picture of her aunt and her in “The Control Book”, with the aunt and nephew on the roof of their apartment building, dressed in a single cheongsam, smiling and talking. She wrote fondly, “This is how my aunt and I looked when we were in Shanghai together, and in my heart, she will always look like this.
When Eileen Chang came to Hong Kong, she had to live on her own, unable to do household chores and looking for a way out, and she had to suffer a lot. She also failed to finish her studies at the University of Hong Kong, and her mother wrote to her, blaming her for this. Huang Yifan was living in England at that time, and in her later years she lived alone by herself. However, Eileen Chang, who was looking for a way out, did not go to her mother either, in her understanding, because her mother was afraid that she would add to her burden by going. On the contrary, they were living alone in a strange place, in one and another rented house, but it was unattainable for them to get together and keep warm.
Her mother, who died of illness in the late 1950s, wrote to her daughter before she died, saying, “Now I just want to see you again. Later, she received what little was left of her estate. In her small reunion, she mentioned her mother’s legacy to her, describing it as a bitter smile. Such a heartless and tasteless mother-daughter love affair is just full of horror to read.
However, as readers, we all accept, because understand, this is true, real life, is such cruel, there are mother-daughter relationship than this more cruel. And even beautiful mothers and talented daughters are all bitter at the end of the day. Fundamentally, our life, in all its aspects, is bitter, especially when the traditional concept of family is destroyed. We need to see very soberly that, under the influence of the May Fourth spirit and the western wind, after a woman breaks free from family bondage and unsatisfactory marriage, she gains personal freedom and freedom of will, but she does not gain happiness as a result. The freedom of a woman who has given up her responsibilities and social identity does not always equate to happiness. Therefore, we, as women, should still be able to discern and be alert to such freedom advocates today.
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