Yang Lin cried for a whole day when she saw the “Luo Luo incident” hanging on the hot search.
The public opinion pointed to Luo Luo’s Weibo comments and even her drowning as a result of her Parents‘ years of indifference and oppression. There was no evidence to support that her death was work-related, but her parents repeatedly demanded compensation from the company, saying that the money was intended for their son’s down payment on a house. The netizens quickly associated with the drama “Ode to Joy” in the “Fan Sheng Mei”.
As the public opinion continued to ferment, many girls left comments about their experiences similar to Luo Luo’s. Yang Lin was one of them. Yang Lin was one of them, and we retrieved at least two dozen related girls who had similar Family structures: their parents favored their sons; from birth, they had to be humble and even provide for their brothers; during the Time between entering society and getting married, they would be extremely demanding for their belongings by their parents; Chun Tao, who was the same age as her, was paying for her brother’s living expenses during college at the strong request of her mother, and she had had five part-time jobs a day, and by her junior year, finally went off the deep end and went into the escort scene to earn money.
These kinds of stories are quite common in China’s isolated regions, where the notion of patriarchy is still a powerful historical inertia, and “Fan Shengmei” tries to peel away the damage by leaving Home and living in distant cities. They leave their homes and live in distant cities, but the power from their families is like a ghost that is hard to get rid of.
The actual fact is that you can’t force your sister to go to the desk, right? “
It was a dreary day in Shenzhen. Yang Lin was in his newly renovated dessert store, preparing to bake breakfast, when a link sent by a friend interrupted the plan. In that video, Luo Luo’s mother, in full makeup, jumped up from her chair and pointed and yelled at the other side in order to claim compensation from the owner.
These eyes, too similar to mom’s. Yang Lin remembered the way her mother glared at people, like a hammer hitting her heart one by one.
Yang Lin was diagnosed with moderate depression ten years ago and often cried. This time, she stopped worrying about breakfast and opened Douban, typed in the title “Realistic Fan Shengmei”, and wrote 3,000 words in one breath, with the past vivid in her mind, while crying. The first thing you need to do is to write a letter to the author. The words “beat” and “scold” are words that appear frequently, and she says that these are the words she always wanted to say to her family.
In 2009, Yang Lin failed in the college entrance exam, and her mother offered her two choices: marry or work. The next day, Yang Lin packed her luggage and left Pingxiang, Jiangxi Province, to find a job in Shenzhen by herself. She had to hand over 1,400 yuan to her mother in a monthly salary of 1,500 yuan, leaving 100 yuan for meals in the car.
In 2019, at the family dinner, Yang Lin’s mother was sitting in the middle surrounded by her aunts, and she was showing off her expensive new dress while imparting in an arrogant tone: What’s wrong with being expensive? You must spend your daughter’s money as much as possible before she gets married, so that you can’t spend it later when you get married.
In that moment, Yang Lin understood that she was a disliked second daughter, and her entire function to the family was to earn money.
Because of Luo Luo’s news, more people with similar fate were brought out. A girl named “Bug” wrote that from her living expenses when she was studying to her salary after working, most of it went to her brother to get married and buy a house, and her father took away her bride price for the wedding. The company’s main goal is to provide a better solution to the problem. There is also a girl who just graduated six months said, “did not take the money home surprisingly have a sense of guilt. “
“My parents came to me for just three things: borrowing money; getting into trouble; and pressing for Marriage. “Chun Tao talks about them in a calm tone. She is 31 years old and was born in a mountainous county in northwestern Fujian. She and Yang Lin share the same family structure, with sisters and a younger brother, both from parents who were unhappy with their two daughters and had another boy.
When she was a junior in college, her parents invested in a project that plummeted and owed half a million. Mother called Chun Tao, after the brother’s living expenses you are also responsible for, every two months to transfer 800 yuan, the tone is categorical. Still a student, Chun Tao had to start working part-time. At most, she did five small jobs a day, selling milk tea, as a restaurant waitress, she earned 11 yuan an hour, that is the best treatment.
Once, she saw the recruitment software in the recruitment of “Miss Manners”, also went to ask the question. From the other side of the argument, she heard, is to accompany customers to dinner and drinks. Accompany a meal can earn 500 yuan, she no longer hesitate. For the first time, she walked into a middle-aged men’s dinner, she was with four female college students, was arranged to sit in the middle of them, Chun Tao can not dress up clothes, a student look, the customer is quite civilized, but the girls can not interrupt, the atmosphere seems awkward, Chun Tao just head down to eat. This hour passed, the pay is equal to doing 50 hours of waitressing.
The girls were lined up and the client picked them out one by one. The man was attached to the girl next to Chun Tao, and even more excessive behavior. Chun Tao did not want to leave and drank with the customers until the early morning. She returned to the dormitory at 3:00 to sleep, then got up at 5:00 to waitress, and sat back in class at 9:00. By the time she graduated, she was able to provide her brother with $1,000 a month, and had saved $45,000.
Chun Tao had subtly revealed this to the family, the brother asked his mother, can not force his sister to go to the table, right? But the mother said, so what? There is money is enough.
Nothing can happen to my brother
When I think back to the past with my brother, Chun Tao’s mind is almost full of memories of loving and caring for him. Parents are self-employed, busy with business, little time at home, Chun Tao is the brother’s second mother. As a young child riding a bicycle, she drove her brother and nearly had an accident. Chun Tao’s first reaction was, “Nothing must happen to my brother, or I will be scolded to death. “She braked abruptly, throwing her brother out of the cocked back seat and hitting the barricade herself. Her brother scraped a little skin and she went into the hospital and received 13 stitches.
As a teenager, Chun Tao had little presence. The mother’s preference for her brother led to tension between Chun Tao and her mother from childhood, “talking quarrel but three sentences, must explode. “Every time Chun Tao and her brother quarrel, grandparents also do not care right or wrong, must scold Chun Tao. In the second semester of high school, she began to intentionally overeat, eat and then vomit, and as a result suffered from stomach problems, she hoped that her parents could see her abnormalities and care about her illness.
After graduating from high school, Chun Tao served as a female soldier for two years and had just turned twenty when she was discharged. She wanted to take the entrance exam again, but her mother had already arranged a blind date for her, and among all the conditions, the clearest criterion was a gift of at least three or five hundred thousand dollars.
The blind date didn’t work out before Chun Tao became the family’s first college student. In the second semester of her freshman year, she told her family that she wanted to prepare for graduate studies in finance. Her parents told her clearly: there is no money to pay, a girl, it is good to come out early to make money. At this moment, she knew that her family could not give her any help. She could only work part-time, apply for national scholarships, and get into the habit of keeping accounts.
The account book can no longer be found, but she can clearly remember that in one month, she only spent 138 yuan for Food, equivalent to only one dollar and a half per meal, which is the price of a tea egg. There is also a trick here, when she went to the canteen to eat, she would repeatedly use the spoon to scoop the free Soup base, the force should be light, so that you can fish out the ingredients, this time also do not care about the eyes of other students.
Chun Tao had never thought about her place in the family. She only knew that she was the older sister and had to set an example for her brother from a young age, to be independent and self-reliant. After leaving home to study, covering her brother’s expenses, lending money to her parents for turnover, and even family business disputes, relatives cheating and other family matters, all come to her. “You are the most educated in the family. ” her parents told her so.
Such experiences of growing up were like snowballs that rolled bigger and bigger in the consciousness of these girls, enveloping their sense of self. In several of the girls’ narratives, they are in turn angry at themselves, angry that they are pleasing personalities, angry that they have always been foolish and filial.
They could not help it, as if they would be given a moral warning if they stopped giving. A girl named “Yanzi” recalls that in the coastal rural home where she grew up, her 12-year-old brother never had to work, and she and her sister did all the heavy chores such as carrying water. If they didn’t do well, they were threatened to drop out of school.
At the age of 13, Yang Lin was admonished by her mother that it was your mission to make everyone in the family happy. She was the second daughter of the family and when she was born, the family had no money to buy her formula. When she was two years old and her brother was born, she was sent to a relative’s home to foster, and when she returned at age six, she felt “separated from her parents”.
As an adult, she was afraid of receiving phone calls from her family, and when she sent her parents red envelopes for the New Year’s holidays, she made sure to wait until bedtime, “so she wouldn’t have to deal with the conversations that would follow. “She is afraid to communicate with her parents, especially her grumpy mother.
A few months ago, that phone call from her mother made Yang Lin unable to let go. Because of the pressure of starting a business, she discussed with her brother whether she could take out a mortgage on the family house. The words soon reached her mother, who said on the other end of the phone, “I can’t control what you want to do outside. But do not involve the family, you take care of yourself. “
“Keep on giving birth, until it is a son.”
Even if one is living in Shenzhen, Yang Lin is not willing to go back home. The third year to Shenzhen, she moved her account out.
In Pingxiang, without a son in the family, will be despised by the neighbors. Wedding and funeral, only the son is qualified to conduct. For important ceremonies such as rituals, women are often only allowed to hold the hearth and rely on the men in the family to complete the core process. If there were no sons in the family, most of the old people were scribbled into the earth.
Yang Lin’s distant relatives, even after giving birth to seven daughters, would not rest, “keep on giving birth, until it is a son. “From a young age, my sister admonished Yang Lin: “If my brother had been born earlier, you wouldn’t even have been born in this world. “Yang Lin had to be meek and careful. She is aware that the bride price for girls is an intuitive return, where there is a clear price tag – 100,000 for those who have studied in junior high school, 200,000 for those who have gone to university, and up to 300,000 or 500,000 for those with higher Education.
Yang Lin’s mother, a slightly chubby, round-faced, shrewd rural housewife, is the boss of the family. As the economy is backward here, men go out to work, and most of the matters after marriage are decided by women.
In fact, Chun Tao’s brother seldom took the initiative to ask his sister for money, and Yang Lin’s brother’s character was not to fight or grab. Later Yang Lin figured out that his brother did not need to worry about anything. Those parents who are willing to give, actively buy houses and properties for their sons, that is their incense, which is their lifelong task.
When Yang Lin’s brother was in junior high school, his parents had already bought a house for his brother’s wedding in the county. Last October, at 11 pm on the weekend, Chun Tao’s father suddenly borrowed money from Chun Tao, saying he wanted to buy a house for his brother. During that time, Chun Tao had just failed to start a business and only had 30,000 in savings left. The father said, how much you have to give how much. Two days later, Chun Tao transferred over 20,000.
The socially agreed rules became part of their self-explanation. “My father does not care about things, only my mother to top it up, she is not easy. “There are girls growing up, trying to understand their mothers in this way.
But it is difficult to make them self-consistent after all this experience. Like a girl talking about a surgery she had in Beijing, no one in the family knows, while she worked for nine years, the money played to the family at least 200,000, but also for her brother to pay the Internet loan. The father, in turn, said in a joking tone, I do not expect you, the family events, or to find your brother.
Marriage, it’s hard
Chun Tao and Yang Lin are both 31 years old this year, they live alone in rented rooms in developed cities. In Chun Tao’s hometown, the average age of marriage for girls is 24 years old, while Yang Lin’s village, some of the junior high school graduation directly to the wedding, you can do without a license. However, they were fearful of their future family Life.
The moment when her mother was most pleased with Yang Lin was when she brought home a rich boyfriend. The boy was from Shenzhen, and on his brother’s wedding, he paid a gift of 50,000 yuan and covered the cost of all the cigarettes and alcohol, which was the first of its kind in the village, not only relieving her parents’ financial pressure, but also earning her face. His mother changed the way she treated Yang Lin and bought new bed sheets for them.
But three years ago, Yang Lin broke up with her boyfriend of five years. Yang Lin’s sister was hit by a “piggy bank” and couldn’t pay back the money she owed, so she committed suicide by turning on the gas. Because of this, the family stopped tolerating Yang Lin and kicked him out.
When parents focus their energy on their sons and cannot benefit their daughters, the sisters have to divert the pressure from each other. Yang Lin paid off her sister’s debt of 300,000 yuan before she passed away, but even so, after her sister passed away, her mother complained that Yang Lin did not do her duty as a sister to look after her.
After learning that Yang Lin had broken up with her boyfriend, her mother lied about her illness and tricked Yang Lin back home. She confiscated Yang Lin’s bank card and wanted to arrange a blind date for Yang Lin immediately. The mother felt that she had already lost one daughter and that it would be better to have the remaining one around.
In the following years, Yang Lin remained single. When a man approached, the first thing Yang Lin considered was whether the family structure was pure and whether there was a family history of mental illness. Then it was whether his mental strength was strong enough to hold his unstable depression.
Last year, on the National Day, Yang Lin went home to Jiangxi for four days. She felt like an alien, and all the ladies of her age with children and the aunts next door reminded her that it was time for you to get married. But this is for her, “it’s hard, really hard. “Marriage, children, she did not dare to schedule in the plan, that means uncertainty and responsibility, she was worried a lot. As she got older, her parents’ expectations on her bride price were gradually lowered, “The bride price started out at 500,000, then became 300,000, and now, at least 150,000. “
Chun Tao’s parents, on the other hand, set a strict material threshold for her significant other, and even if it is low, it should never be lower than the neighbor’s 120,000.
In addition to these conditions, the boy and family members of a stable and comfortable job is also important, the mother in accordance with such requirements to help Chun Tao screen out more than twenty blind dates. After all of them, Chun Tao’s Perception of the men sitting across the table gradually numbed, anyway, first to meet her mother’s requirements.
These influences continue to be projected on the girls’ personalities. Chun Tao likes money, and those specific numbers can give her a sense of security. So she remembers every income from the hard years, a month’s living expenses, a certain hourly wage, and the money earned from escorting alcohol. They have a clear sense of purpose because grabbing those are the ones that can solve the immediate troubles and can respond to the needs of their parents. It was like a scale was pressed in her body, a force pushing her to reach all the time. Chun Tao rejects jobs with mediocre earnings, she is willing to speculate and wants to seize the opportunity to get rich. After graduation, she plunged into the sales industry, facing enormous pressure, and two years ago she also went into investment, and lost money.
After writing her heart out on Douban and a big cry, Yang Lin went out to buy two dresses, had a beauty treatment, and invited friends to her home for dinner. When she came back, she bought herself two bouquets of flowers, a warm orange-red color. In her sweet store, there is an open balcony. She likes to water the flowers in the morning, and also likes to sit on the balcony at night after the store closes to light a cigarette and listen to rock Music. Yang Lin thinks it’s time to live for herself.
(All names in this article are pseudonyms to protect privacy)
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