I closed the door and paced back inside slowly against the pure summer night starry sky. Oh, what a lovely midsummer night it would have been!
I felt exhausted and heavy inside, so I went into my bedroom and fell into bed, but tossed and turned and had trouble sleeping. At that moment, I heard my daughter return.
“Mom, Mom!” She yelled, bouncing upstairs like a teenage doll.
I answered her in the bedroom. Chen’s mom came in after her with milk and a sandwich in her hand.
“Oh my God, I’m starving. I haven’t had anything in my belly since breakfast.” Manning gurgled and raised her neck to drink the milk, and I noticed that her fingers were covered in ink.
“Look at your hands! Can you reach out and grab a sandwich with such black hands? You’re a 23 year old girl, why do you still look like a doll? In the past, girls of your age would have gotten married and had two or three children.” Chen’s mother rambled on and on. She came to my house when my daughter was young, so she could lecture her like an old grandmother.
“This is not the ‘old days’, dear old Mrs. Chen.” Man-ping grunted and went to wash her hands.
Chen Ma put the tray on the table, and as she turned to leave, she said to me, “Don’t worry at all, Old Zhao and I will always protect you.”
“Thank you, Mama Chen. Thank you for your concern for me. Tell Lao Zhao and the cook not to worry about me.” I said. I was touched by her sincere concern.
“We really don’t worry about you when you are alone like this. If only Mister were still alive, it would be great.” She said to herself and closed the door and went out.
Chen’s mother is old-fashioned, whenever things go wrong, she always thinks that men are the only ones who can do anything. In fact, just before my daughter returned, I was thinking of my husband. For the first time since his death, I am not sorry for his passing. Thank goodness he is no longer there. Otherwise, he would certainly not have escaped a bout of abuse and persecution.
The bathroom door was closed, the faucet was rattling, and my daughter was in the shower, not even aware of what we were talking about.
My daughter, Man Ping, is a lovely and intelligent girl. She grew up after the liberation, so she doesn’t realize that a girl as well-bred and from a wealthy family as hers could have enjoyed much more. On the contrary, in a society that promotes equality, it was precisely her family that did not enjoy the same political and life treatment as others. Throughout her childhood, she was often in trouble because of her family background. For example, if she wanted to enter a high quality secondary school, she had to score at least 80 points in the entrance exam, while students from peasant and worker backgrounds could enter with as little as 60 points.
“That’s not fair!” I expressed my disgust at the time, fuming at the injustice my daughter was experiencing, “Why do you make such unfair rules?”
“Mom, it doesn’t matter. I can get an 80. I can get it, it’s not hard.” This was coming from a girl of only twelve.
“That’s not fair.” I was still upset about it.
“But, Mom, the teachers say that children from working and farming backgrounds have to do housework after school. Their parents can’t afford to tutor them in their homework. So if you can put yourself in their shoes objectively, you’ll see that it’s fair for them to make such a rule.” At a young age, she was already very reasonable and understanding.
Later, she was repeatedly treated differently. Whenever this happened, she always felt guilty and ashamed of her origins. Like other children of her status, she had to work twice as hard as the children of workers and peasants. She worked hard, excelled in her studies, and was the president of the student council at the prestigious Second City Girls’ High School, where she received numerous commendations and awards. She seems to have adapted easily and happily to the environment she found herself in. She had many friends, many of whom were from the workers and peasants. Although Man Ping was by nature a gracious and generous person, the burden of “shameful exploitation” often made her feel a sense of inferiority and self-condemnation, which made her very willing to help these friends of peasant and worker origin. She invited them over for refreshments, helped them with their homework, and sometimes went to their homes to help them with household chores. While I greatly appreciated her doing so, Chen’s mother strongly objected, especially when she lent clean clothes to her classmates and brought back their dirty clothes for Chen to wash.
She has loved music since she was young, so we bought a piano for her and hired a piano teacher for her. She was a member of the Little Friends Art Troupe at the city’s Children’s Palace at the age of ten. There she participated in drama and music groups. She spoke fluent Mandarin and English, so she acted as a little interpreter when English-speaking foreign guests came to visit the Children’s Palace. She learned to swim in Australia just after she learned to walk, so she was a volunteer swimming instructor in her class. At the age of fifteen, while still in high school, she was selected by the Shanghai Sports Association to be a holiday coach for the Shanghai Rowing Organization, thus becoming the captain of the first women’s rowing team in Shanghai.
Although we lived in a time of incessant political activism and a series of unfortunate encounters with friends and neighbors around us that would leave us feeling depressed and unsettled, I never had to worry about my daughter. I thought that she would be able to get into a famous university with good academic performance, be assigned to a more desirable unit after graduation, and find a trustworthy husband. I don’t care how much her salary will be in the future, I will subsidize her, just like many other parents in Chinese families.
I hope she will be assigned a job in Shanghai after she graduates. That way, she can live at home. But I can’t be sure about that. I know that many young people of her background are assigned to work in the border areas, which are backward and poor. This was the case with the children of several of my friends. As I watched my daughter, a teenage girl, grow into a fair lady, I didn’t know what was waiting for her. When I was in a better mood, I thought about the future of the third floor into a well-equipped apartment. For her to use as a small family. And raising my grandchildren was a great comfort to me. I was so absorbed in my dream that I could almost feel that little life, alive and kicking, was leaping in my arms right now.
I was surprised when my daughter told me that two famous actors teaching at the newly established Shanghai Film Academy had come to talk to her, suggesting that she be specially selected as a promising candidate for the Academy’s entrance exam. I saw that she was quite proud of it. But I differed from her in that I wanted her to work in a job where she could capitalize on her cultural knowledge, not on her appearance.
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