A few days ago, a girl sent me an email, the content of which was a bit heavy, to the effect that she grew up in a rural area and had a very hard life since childhood. The loneliness and disappointment of struggling on her own made her feel gloomy at times.
I don’t know how to reply, but I would like to tell you the story of Jianning.
Jia Ning is one of my older sisters who grew up in a village where the annual per capita income was only about one thousand yuan. She also has a younger brother who is only four years old, and if you estimate the tuition fees for both of them, you can see how difficult it was for her to support her two children through college on that meager income. The educational environment at the school was even worse, as Jia Ning lived in the school from the upper elementary grades on, with a bungalow and several large bunk beds crammed into one school for the girls, no heating in the winter, and all the children’s fingers were covered with shocking frostbite. Because of the strong preference for boys over girls, from the beginning of junior high school, girls began to drop out of school, either of their own accord or under duress, and the nine-year compulsory education requirement became null and void. As a result, Jia Ning became the first girl in her village to go to college.
Jia Ning says that she is grateful for her journey. Compared to other girls her age who liked to study but were forced to drop out of school, work hard, and marry hastily before the age of 20, she felt incredibly lucky. It’s not that no one advised her parents to let her drop out of school to “save money for her brother’s education,” but they still sent her to college, and there was nothing in that! If you ask her mother, she’ll just say, “She likes school, so let her go. “
After graduating, I found a job at a fledgling design institute. In the first six months, her salary was only 700 RMB per month, and she worked overtime every day. We all felt aggrieved for her, but Jia Ning thought it was a good place to work, because there were few people and she was in charge of everything.
I don’t know how long the lights in her office stayed on every night before she got tired and left, nor do I know how she found time after work to take the title of construction engineer. As her experience grew and she was in her prime, people came and went in her seven or eight years, and many of her friends told her to quit, but she felt that the company had something in common with her, so she stayed there. Her boss is a woman who is a little older than my mother, and she treats Jia Ning like her own daughter because of her hard work in the beginning of her career.
Over the past few years, Jia Ning has lived a solid and satisfying life, and has slowly realized many of her wishes that were previously unattainable for financial reasons.
For example, she wanted to travel, but she had never been anywhere before, but after her work, she performed well and was often sent by the company to visit and study all over the country, almost all over the world, and recently to Korea and Japan. For example, she wanted to go to graduate school, and when she graduated from college, she was eager to work to support her family, and the year before last, she saved enough money for tuition and finally got a master’s degree at Tongji University.
I went to visit her in the late spring of last year in that small northern town. The red brick road was straight and clean, and the French plane trees stretched out their lush branches in the middle of the road where the sky met, and the sunlight slanting down shone on her face. We walked arm in arm, the heels of our shoes kicking on the road, the sound of the hunting wind in our ears.
Because of poverty, she spent her childhood in poverty, spending most of her teenage years worrying about whether she would be able to go to school tomorrow, and even the brightest days of her youth were filled with cheap clothes and gloomy debts. Now, she is almost 30 years old, has paid off her debts, and is still working hard to earn money, but the timidity and shyness of her youth have all faded away, and new wishes and hopes have grown up behind her plain and busy work. Life had finally given her a gift, and she was willing to accept it.
At that moment, I felt that there was no one more beautiful than her.
I’ve been reading Camus’s essays lately, and they are so beautiful. In particular, the part where he talks about poverty is very touching. Camus says, “For me, poverty has never been a misfortune: the light spreads its treasures here, and even my rebellion is made to shine brightly. I can even rightly say that this rebellion has always been for the sake of the multitudes in poverty, so that their lives may rise to the light”. In any case,” he added, “the beautiful hot weather that accompanied me through my childhood kept me from feeling any resentment. I lived in poverty, but not without a certain pleasure. I felt that I had immense power. Poverty is not an obstacle to this power. “
It may be, as Camus said, that cold and heat, distance and travel, fatness and fragility are not obstacles to such strength. I asked Jia Ning, if there is an obstacle, what do you think it is? The single woman has been facing a “wave of blind dates coming her way” for the past six months, so she frowned and lamented that perhaps the biggest obstacle was not loving.
The biggest obstacle may be the lack of love. Anxiety and insecurity are the result of not loving, procrastination and laziness are the result of not loving, giving up and leaving are the result of not loving. No wonder Steve Jobs said, “You have to find the love in your heart. No wonder Xiong Peiyun would say about his writing in his book Free on High: “I can’t sleep every day, I want to learn more about the world, I want more time to write. The only thing I need to have the willpower to do but haven’t done is to talk myself to sleep early.
Dear girl, everyone would like to have a good journey, but others will never know all the hardships and struggles you are going through, so any consolation from the other side of the fence is pale and weak, and I can’t even tell you the consolation, so I can only tell you this story. If it can give you a little bit of light, a little bit of courage, and a little bit of strength on the night road that you don’t know where you are going.
Since you have already gone so far, why not go further for a while? There may be light not far away.
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