In traditional China, the village, as a stable space for social relations, gives farmers a variety of feelings, values, and honors, among which the fundamental point is “passing on the family name”. One of the fundamental points is “passing on the family name”. The authors of this paper found in their rural survey that for the rural elderly, “extinction” means that everything about them will disappear into thin air with the death of the last offspring. The last offspring dies and everything about them goes up in smoke. If a man is capable in the village, if he has no son or grandson, people will think that “his life is ruined,” while women are scolded as The woman is called an “extinct woman”. In the village, the most serious situation is to give birth to a son, but did not let the son get a daughter-in-law, which means that two generations are extinct; or parents finally help their son get a daughter-in-law, but gave birth to a daughter, the young couple does not want to have more children, so that the parents are over 100 years old but become a “waste of life “.
Being in a typical acquaintance society like the countryside, competition is face-to-face and there is no escape. Unlike the city people, villagers can not care about neighborly relations, so for those who “can not keep up with the laggards”, it is also very cruel. The author’s research found that the extinction is often the beginning of villagers’ withdrawal from village social relations, for fear of being called “extinct women” and “extinct in one more generation”. “one more generation to be extinct”, “one more coffin to be buried “, the villagers either no longer see people, or deliberately disturb interpersonal relationships, or flee to the city away from acquaintances, becoming the village of “outsiders “.
The fear of extinction
When I was investigating in the southern countryside, I heard the local people’s comment about farmers who have no male descendants, saying “they are ruined for life”. No matter how capable a person is, as long as he has no sons or grandsons, people treat him with two overlapping mindsets: on the one hand, they sympathize with him, and on the other hand, they look down on him, and whichever mindset they have, it is because he is a wastrel.
In order to experience the meaning of life and realize the value of life in the village, the farmer must ensure that he has a long line of male descendants, otherwise he becomes an invalid. A wastrel is a person who lives a life with no purpose, no meaning, and has difficulty in establishing himself in the village.
The foundation of a farmer’s life
Xiuniang, a widow in her 60s, had a belief that she would work hard to bring up her only son and give him a wife. She had no other demands on her close family members or relatives in her mother’s family, but hoped to introduce a marriage to her family. But she also knew that after all, her family was too poor, and she was so unkempt, which girl would be willing to come to her house to suffer humiliation. Seeing that the only son’s age into the twenty-two or three years old, the matter of finding a wife is not even a shadow, the older mother is more and more worried, many women on the Bay to her family matchmaking, but none of the success. And after the wave of part-time jobs, almost all the local girls ran away, while her son was dead set on not going out to work, the matter of marriage has been hanging in this way.
In 2007, Xiu Niang was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was usually full of energy, and always had the energy of not giving her son a kiss, but after learning that her days were numbered, the whole person immediately collapsed. She said to her family and relatives who came to visit her, “I’ve lived for more than 60 years, and I’ve lived long enough, but an old woman in the house was not sent to the mountain, and a child did not ask for a family, so I can’t even squint when I die! “Said very sadly, so that listeners are moved to tears.
When she died, my interviewee Ma Hua happened to be present. She asked Ma Hua how much time she had left to live, and Ma Hua told her truthfully that she had a few days to live at most, so she said the above again. Her son was feeding her when she said that, probably because he was preoccupied after hearing Mahua’s speech, and because he was already weak, he didn’t swallow a mouthful of rice, and it got stuck in his neck, and his eyes suddenly glared, and he died.
“Death is not squinting eyes”, is the meaning of death, indicating that the speaker has a major preoccupation is not completed, and therefore full of taboo and fear of death. The reason why Xiu Niang died with reluctance is not because she is only sixty years old, far from living enough, mainly because she has more than 80 years old mother-in-law is still alive, the next has more than twenty sons did not start a family. The two major tasks in life – life, death and burial and the collection of relatives to complete the match, she did not complete, which can calmly go to die, which face to see her dead husband and ancestors, the world behind her imagination, how to squint her eyes.
A woman like Xiuniang, who died without completing her life’s task, meant that she did not achieve her destiny. The term “life” refers to a life experience in which the peasants, after completing the most important tasks of life as culturally defined, can consciously experience the meaning and value of life in their village life and social interactions, i.e., after reaching old age, they feel that it is worth dying even after living all their lives. Specifically for the elderly, when they have sons and achieve peace of mind, they will focus on building the foundation of their lives, mainly assisting their husbands to provide for their in-laws and build houses and wives for their sons.
There are two main preparations: one is to buy a coffin for the old man, which is usually done when the old man is 60 or 70 years old, and most of them are supervised by the old man himself; the second is to prepare a decent funeral for the old man, and to start saving money before the old man dies. This task is generally easier to accomplish.
Difficult to do is to the son to complete the marriage, which is the most important task in life. As the old saying goes, “raising a child to get a daughter-in-law”, having given birth to a son, parents have the obligation and responsibility to get him back a family, and the elderly are mainly concerned here. Building a house is just a complementary measure to get a daughter-in-law, it is easier to get a daughter-in-law if you have a house. The primary purpose of getting a daughter-in-law is to give birth to grandchildren and pass on the family name to the husband. When you get a daughter-in-law and a grandson, both the older women and men will be completely settled in their hearts, which means that the last life is achieved.
“One more generation to be extinct”
In the villages, there are always bachelors, so there are always old people who have raised children but cannot find a wife. So, is the question of the life of such an old man unresolved? There are two cases here: one is when all sons are not married, and the other is when all sons are not yet married. Older women in these two states share the same fate and have different fates. Qingzhu and Guozhi are typical of these two types of women respectively.
Her husband died of leukemia seven or eight years ago, and her three daughters were sent out of the house a long time ago. Her husband left her with two major tasks in life, and it almost didn’t crush her.
At the time of her husband’s death, she was still full of hope, because although her son was over 30 years old, there was still a great hope for a wife. After her husband’s death, she still took care of the house and the fields to make the home look like a home, so that other people’s daughters could look at her son. Her strong and unyielding spirit convinced all the people on the bay. But in the past year or two, Qingzhu obviously did not have the previous energy, people also lost weight, aged a lot, in addition to the age of the reason, mainly to see the son’s hope of marriage more and more remote, she fell into despair.
The desperate Qingzhu slowly lost her former enthusiasm, both for her family and for the village. The family’s fields were either given to others or abandoned, except for some food rations. The only son is getting lazy to spend his days, and she is too lazy to move her mouth to say so. The life of the mother and child seems to be a day monk hitting a day bell, lacking the vitality of other families. Ma Hua said that Qingzhu was not too enthusiastic to interact with people in the past two years. In the past, as long as Qingzhu had some spare time every day, he would go around, chatting, helping people with small tasks and giving them a hand. For example, when making sweet potato flour in winter, she took the initiative to help people, and after this one was done, she went to that one, and helped almost all the people in the bay, never asking them to call her, and never eating at their place. During the double robbery season, as long as she was there on the public sunbathing pads, she would give people’s rice backwards and forwards as well. However, in the past two years, she was rarely seen on public affairs in the bay, and she did not bother to go to the door, even to the nearest and closest Mahua’s house.
As Qingzhu herself said, the reason she became so decadent and decrepit, and even withdrew from village interactions, was that everything she did “seemed worthless”. In other words, what she did before was hopeful and valuable, preparing her son for a family and creating a good village atmosphere for his future family life. Now that her son is having trouble getting married, there is no point in doing all this. As a result, she lacks the motivation, heart and enthusiasm to take care of her family and intervene in the village.
Qingzhu also has a sense of self-protection when she withdraws to a certain extent from the village acquaintance society. For one thing, because of her particular situation, she is very sensitive to many things and therefore vulnerable. For example, how would she feel when she was chatting with a group of elderly women and people’s grandchildren and heavy grandchildren were hot around them. In addition, if she joins the chatting circle, the original atmosphere of talking about everything will be broken, and people will be shy to take care of her, so she will not take the initiative to join. Secondly, when she gets involved in village affairs or interacts closely with people, she will inevitably get into trouble with them and offend them, and the conflicts often put her in a passive position, because people often call people like her “a woman of the last generation “, “more than one generation to absolute”, which will touch the most painful part of her soul. People like her can’t afford to offend anyone.
“One more generation to be extinct”, meaning that if you have a son, you have to ask for a daughter-in-law and grandchildren, otherwise, even if you have a son and no grandchildren, you are still If you have a son and no grandchildren, you are still an “extinct woman”, so since you are an extinct woman, why do you want to have a son in the first place? Let the son also become “extinct people”, which is not an extra generation to extinct it. After the son is extinct, it is the same as their own extinct, so two generations are extinct, it is better not to have a son in advance, on the extinction of their own generation. “One more generation to extinction”, said their own son but can not give him to discuss on the mother-in-law, there is no greater sin than this. When people scolded this, as the woman who gave birth to a son, her entire spiritual defense would be breached, causing a complete mental breakdown. Therefore, Qingzhu tried to keep her distance from others in her daily life in the village, and no longer had as much in-depth interaction as before, let alone easily offending people so as not to get angry and hurt herself. Qingzhu had lost enough heart and courage to intervene in village life and gradually closed himself off.
Sister Guo, Qingzhu’s uncle and sister-in-law, is now 74 years old. She has four sons, three of whom are bachelors, aged 50, 41 and 35 respectively, and are basically unlikely to get married again. But Sister Guo’s state of mind is completely different from Qingzhu’s because she has a son who has a wife and now has two grandchildren. Although Guo often worried about her three sons who did not have a family, and was scolded for “producing three more coffins to bury,” she did not feel the same despair about life as Qingzhu. However, she did not feel the same despair about life as Qingzhu did, and no one cursed her as a She was not cursed by anyone as an “extinct woman”. Sister Guo had two grandchildren, so her son’s generation did not become extinct, and she was not an extinct woman. Although Sister Guo was not perfect in the issue of her final destiny, she finally completed it and was able to squint her eyes when she died.
The mental trauma of being “queenless
As a rural woman, Qingzhu’s life would have been “ruined” if no miracle had occurred. The young man who has found a wife is unwilling or unable to give birth to a daughter after the first child, and now there is another kind of “multi-generation extinction”. After having a daughter in the first child, the young man is unwilling or unable to have another child, thus causing the older generation to be abolished. This is how the Shuquan couple was abolished.
The couple, now 57 years old, had been classmates from elementary school to junior high school, and became lovers through a match made by their former classmates. 1980 saw the birth of their first child, a son, followed by three girls. Their only son, Xiaolang, was very competitive and did not let his parents worry about anything else but money along the way. Xiaolang went to university after the college entrance exam and was assigned to work in a state agency after graduation, which made his parents a lot of face in the bay. Xiaolang found a girlfriend in 2007, got married and soon became pregnant. Ben Heung was of course very happy to see this, but she also had doubts, that is, her son is a public family, the daughter-in-law can not have a second child, so Ben Heung then suffered from the daughter-in-law first child phobia. Once, Ben Heung told his son the doubts in his mind, full of expectation, “Your father raised you a child, if xx (daughter-in-law’s name) to raise a child would be good, your father this room also passed on. Xiaolang ignored his mother’s “old thoughts” and If she raises a daughter, will you still treat her badly? Seeing her son like this, Ben Xiang could not say anything more.
God always plays tricks on people, and whatever they are afraid of will follow. Ben Heung’s daughter-in-law did give birth to a granddaughter. Ben Heung told me that when she heard the news over the phone, she felt that the sky was falling, that a great disaster had hit their family, and that there was no hope. It took her a few days to calm down from her daze, and for a long time she did not dare to reveal this to outsiders. At the same time, she was more worried that her partner Shu Quan could not stand the shock and would do something out of the ordinary, but she did not expect her partner to look as if nothing had happened, as if it was not his daughter-in-law who had given birth to a child. However, huge changes and even ruptures are quietly happening in this family.
The most obvious change is actually the calm Shuquan. After the birth of his granddaughter in 2008, Shuquan became extremely impatient and increasingly irritable, and began to endlessly argue with Ben-Hsiang. He had never scolded his wife, but within six months he had driven her out of the house twice, and each time Ben Heung had to run to his sister-in-law’s house to hide for seven or eight days. Finally, Ben-Hsiang could not stand it anymore and ran away to the city where his daughter-in-law worked to work. Shuquan, who was alone at home, drank even more, and after drinking, he went around the bay bragging and talking crazy, and the people in the bay teased him like a monkey. Every time I met him, I could smell the smell of alcohol from a distance, and his neck was always red with alcohol. He also made some yellow jokes about the young brides in the bay, regardless of their generation, so that people could not avoid them. Not only that, he started to visit the widow’s house in the bay and openly give help to the widow’s house to do things, which became a laughing stock in the bay.
During the Qingming period in 2009, Shuquan, who had always been very active in tomb sweeping and ancestor worship, slept at home while others went to pay respects to their ancestors. The old ritual student in the bay asked him if he was still a human being when he didn’t even want his old son and mother. He argued that the old man and his mother have become a billet of mud, what else do you want to come. In the past, it would have been hard to imagine that these words came out of Shuquan’s mouth.
In 2008, Shuquan still cultivated a few acres of fields, but in 2009, he abandoned all the fields, living like a retired worker, wandering around in the bay all day, doing nothing. Ben Xiang kindly advised him, “at home or to do something, which people in their fifties will be idle at home. He cursed, “Still do? Do I strip eggs, anyway (generation) extinct, (stove) collapsed, what is the use of doing up? This is the logic of all the extinct people’s thinking, Qingzhu, Shu Quan is not the same.
In terms of social relations, in the past, whenever someone killed a “New Year pig” during the Lunar New Year, he would go over to help burn the fire and scald the pig’s hair, and his patience and carefulness in scalding the pig’s hair was well known in the He was known for his patience and care in the bay. In 2009, he even “forgot” to go to his elder brother’s house. His family a few years ago a deep well to pump water for drinking, because of the large amount of water, he let several other families on the Bay to take a ride, and even do not even let people pay for electricity, because his family “a child with state wages “. However, during my investigation in May 2009, he stopped letting people pump water for no reason, reasoning that “he is not their old man”, making the family very embarrassed.
I learned that in the year or so after the birth of my granddaughter, Shuquan not only disturbed his main social relationships in the village, but even withdrew from the local value evaluation system, becoming an “outsider” to the village. “. During my investigation, his sister-in-law kicked him out of the house once in front of me, and explicitly expelled him twice else, determined not to let him enter the house in a deadly manner. Today, the only place in the bay where he is welcome is the kiosk, as he goes there every day to consume a bottle of dipotassium.
It can be concluded that after hearing the news that his daughter-in-law had given birth to a girl, Shuquan, who was calm on the surface, was actually dead inside. The people in the bay know very well that the reason why Shuquan will become this embarrassment, is completely extinct after the reason. The moment his daughter-in-law gave birth to a daughter, it was destined to be his fate afterwards.
In the middle of my investigation, Ben Heung returned home from the city where his daughter-in-law worked and did not intend to go back. Honuka seemed to have recovered from the gloom of a year ago, still showing a grace and elegance not normally found in rural women, not at all like an extinct queen. But her heart is not as strong as this, she confessed that leaving to work, in fact, is a very irresponsible performance. She had the idea of getting by and abandoning her rural home, because as long as she stayed in the village for a day, she would have to carry the psychological pressure of being an “extinct woman”, and she would not be able to let go until she died. It is difficult to let go. Although as long as you are nice and don’t get into altercations with people, no one will say anything about you explicitly, but you can’t fool yourself, you are an extinct woman from now on. After half a lifetime of hard work, it was hard for her to accept to end up as an extinct woman. But her reason still control the emotions, she can’t like Shu Quan like the family tossed out of shape, she can not want the reputation, but still have to think about the city son – son although working outside, but always come back every year after the Qingming, and therefore to give him in the village to earn fame; and, she and her partner’s bones always have to be by the family to Therefore, it is necessary to make the family relationship better. Therefore, Ben-Hsiang is determined to come back and take care of his family again.
In the cultural sense of the village, Ben Heung and his wife had the same fate as Qingzhu – they were wasted in this life. If Honaka’s case is still somewhat special because her son is a public family member, then the new generation of young people in the village are increasingly reluctant to have more children and hold the idea that it is the same for both boys and girls, and the chances of their parents’ generation being ruined increase, and the “late “It will no longer be special. In order to be able to hold grandchildren and not be abolished in their later years, many mothers-in-law can be said to have gone to great lengths, but still could not get what they wanted, so that the eventual establishment of life became a problem.
However, in the eyes of the younger generation, the old people want to hold grandchildren, inherit the family is feudal thinking at work, is the performance of the brain is not enlightened, so they are in the “advanced” thinking Therefore, they completely ignore the “backward” thinking of the elderly under the leadership of “advanced” thinking, and even take “advanced” over “backward They even take pride in “advanced” over “backward. Just as Xiaolang ignored the “old thinking” of his mother, Ben Xiang, the result is that the old generation is inevitably abolished in name only, while the young people do not perceive in any way the mental trauma of the old people being The result is that the old generation is inevitably and rightfully abolished, while the young people do not perceive the mental trauma of the old people being abolished, let alone the real reason why the old people have changed so much. Xiaolang, who graduated from college, did not know that his father’s change was caused by himself, and he blamed it on his father’s addiction to alcohol.
The new generation of young people have completely changed their mindset, even if they do not have male descendants, they do not have the feeling of “wasted”. Nowadays, the generations of people over 40 or 50 years old, because of the deep-rooted idea of inheritance, really can not be eradicated, so they work half a lifetime to raise children, but may not have grandchildren. So, all they do is just “one more generation to extinction”, and in the end, it’s still a basket case. Therefore, they are likely to be a wasted generation.
Recent Comments