preface
Many things in the world unfold in time and space as well as in cause and cause. Many behaviors of individuals are inherited from families with similar genes, and the whole family is subordinate to the social background of the whole regional culture. This is a story of three real people: Chaoshan people on the deep-rooted complex of kinship, let him have to replace the younger brother’s life, in order to hide the fact of his brother’s autism; In Shandong province, where the sex ratio is heavily skewed, she does not have an only daughter in her family, and criminal cases involving sky-high bride prices are the stories she is used to hearing. Under the laid-off tide, each family life is not good in the northeast, a house is enough to let relatives break up, no longer exchanges. Three people are no longer living in their hometown, but the memory of the old place has long been in the blood. They poured out pieces of the past with a thumping noise that filled the room.
My life, I have to live for my brother
Ron’s younger brother suffers from autism, also known as autism, autism Spectrum disorder (ASD), which is a serious developmental disorder.
The father had made great efforts to take care of his sick son, but lack of knowledge and a shameful avoidance attitude had caused the younger brother to miss the best time for treatment.
Coincidentally and reasonably, Ron revealed in the interview that he had the tendency of ADHD since childhood, and often wandered and forgot everything. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is another common psychological and behavioral disorder in children. According to statistics, about 2/3 of ADHD patients have the characteristics of ASD. Since he has been studying in a boarding school, Ron has not been affected too much on the surface. When studying in Hong Kong, I saw a more regular psychiatric department before I was diagnosed. Now I go to the hospital every two or three months and take medicine for five or six years to make a big improvement. It is no longer a problem to focus on one thing.
After completing his undergraduate studies in Hong Kong, Ron enrolled in postgraduate studies at Oxford University. Although he may have inherited a similar genetic disorder from his father, he took a very different path from his younger brother. It was lucky for him, but it also gave him a kind of “obligation” to his less fortunate brother.
Under the identity of his brother, Ron helps his brother take care of all the affairs that need to be done by himself. He wants to refuse, but be born in Chaoshan, the complex with deep-rooted to kin relation, let him be unable to refuse again however.
His father’s different attitude towards him and his brother also made him once out of balance. He had been sympathetic and jealous of his brother, but now he was more guilty.
Narrator: Rondoudou, born in Chaoshan, Guangdong province.
More easily distracted; Agreeableness is moderate; General empathy; High openness; High conscientiousness
My parents were both Cantonese and divorced before I was born. My dad didn’t even know I existed when we got divorced, and my mom didn’t tell him. She said that my father was doing business abroad. Later, I knew vaguely from my relatives that they were divorced.
A few years after my father divorced, he had a son again. My mother was very angry when she heard of this. She kept a competitive attitude and was very strict with my study. Ironically, my half brother is autistic. Before where people understand these, in their eyes, autism is retarded. My father on this matter is very taboo, probably chaoshan people are superstitious karma, he felt that the children have problems because their parents are immoral, so it has been trying to hide.
By the time I was about to graduate from primary school, my mother had heard about it from somewhere else and was happy for a long time. My father was in a good financial situation at that time, and I was going to enter junior high school soon and needed regular tutoring, so my mother decided to take me to see my father.
The first time I met him was at a hotel. My mother took me to the lobby and told me to go up by myself. After that, I saw each other several times, but since I had never lived together, the relationship was always very formal. Every time I met each other, I was very embarrassed. Later, I met him at restaurants three or four times a year, and he gave me tuition and living expenses.
We hardly ever talk about the past. I once casually asked him why we got divorced, and he said he didn’t want to talk about the past. I didn’t particularly want to know, and I didn’t blame any of them. After all, divorce wasn’t such a big deal in my generation.
But there’s one person I’ve always had mixed feelings about — my half-brother, who has autism.
My father was very secretive about his brother’s autism, and we never broached the subject. It wasn’t until I went to college, when my younger brother entered puberty, that he became more and more irritable. I suggested taking him to see a doctor in Hong Kong, and it turned out he was autistic. But by then it was too late to develop his independence. He went to a disability school for a while, but my dad picked him up when he found out that the carers were abusive. Then he hired two babysitters to take care of him, and he watched TV and played games at home every day.
My father once asked me insinuately whether I would take care of my younger brother when he was old. I didn’t say anything at that time, of course I didn’t want to. But we Chaoshan people take kinship very seriously, and I still promised to do as much as I could for him, which seemed to be my duty. We look very much alike in spite of our half-blood. My dad sent his files to a private high school, usually he does not go to class, to the end of the semester I will take the exam for him, including some documents and data is also I do for him.
If you just look at the file, my brother looks like a normal person, but it’s me who replaces him. Over time, I even had the illusion of living under his identity. We had little contact except for a few meals together. He never talks, and I don’t know how to communicate with autism.
In fact, I don’t want to, I have been psychologically resistant to this brother.
On the one hand I sympathized with him, but on the other I envied him and even hated him for a time. On the one hand I sympathized with him, but on the other I envied him and even hated him for a time.
My dad started a trust the year I graduated, and the beneficiary was my brother, and I’ve been running it. Later, I helped my brother get permanent residence in Hong Kong. Of course, I did all the formalities.
I’m reluctant to do this, but I’ve never said no and probably don’t know how to say it.
A relative once asked me how I felt about my brother, but I didn’t say anything. On the contrary, it is the ignorance of our parents that has delayed the best treatment time. In fact, as long as autistic children receive proper treatment and training when they are young, they can take care of themselves and live like normal people.
But on the other hand I was jealous of him and even hated him for a time. I was the normal kid, but my dad seemed to care more about him. He had arranged so many things for him over the years. And my birthday he never sent me a blessing, I was admitted to the university to send him a text message, he only replied with three words, “I know.” I even got a great job and I talked to him.
At home, my brother doesn’t have to do anything to get attention and care. Occasionally life is too tired, I will also come up with the idea of exchanging life with him. Really, In a way, I envied him. At least I never worried about school or work.
I often wonder if this is some kind of causal balance. We share the same father, but exhibit the opposite intellectual traits. While being a normal person has to bear all kinds of daily life stress, as a child with autism can lead a carefree life.
Of course, not everyone is as lucky as my brother. In reality, more children with autism are living a miserable life because of family economic reasons.
But at the same time, I can imagine how hard it is for ordinary families to take care of children with autism. This is also why every time I see the news about parents abandoning autistic children, although I know it is immoral, But I don’t have the heart to easily condemn them.
I remember my college professor once said that in an environment with no wind and no waves, everyone would support various ideas of great love. The real test of the individual is only in reality, when there is a price to be paid for these ideas. I often feel guilty that I haven’t lived up to the test. My uneducated dad, on the other hand, was far more insistent on this than I was.
Every family must have a son
Educated parents and an enlightened family environment keep Apricot from becoming the direct party of son preference. However, when grandma died, the wreath without her mother’s name shook off the horrible smell of the “divorce”, and there were numerous criminal cases of bride price in the news, which were enough to let her see the horror of gender injustice in that land, and then she made the decision to save herself and escape.
The train that connected her hometown with Beijing cut off the oppression and backwardness of her hometown and made her life look brand-new. And those who frequently run away from unhappy marriages and are repeatedly caught back; Where are the exits for girls who are arranged to marry before they reach adulthood in order to provide dowry money for their older brothers?
Narrator: Almond cat was born in Liaocheng, Shandong Province.
Prone to anxiety; High openness; The strongest resistance to pressure; Be introverted; Modest stimulus
When my grandmother died, a large wreath with the names of all the men in the family, including the newborn baby boy, hung prominently in the center of the hall. But her own daughter, my mother, who cared for her until her death, never got a chance to write her name on the wreaths of the collective memorial. My granddaughter is a stranger among strangers. She only put a piece of white cloth on her shoes. She can’t wear filial clothes like the children of my uncle’s family.
Have you ever heard of the word “divorce”? It sounds like a curse. If a family from Liaocheng, Shandong province, is described in this way, the next generation of the family has only daughters and no sons. The daughter could not be included in the family tree, so the family disappeared from the family list, thus becoming “divorced”.
China’s first only children were born in the 1980s, but Liaocheng’s people have plenty of ways. No matter my father or my mother, there is not a single family in the three generations of the family. About half of the families are only children, and the other half are one sister and one brother.
Why is the second baby brother? I don’t know what they did. I’m just a sister with a brother. My brother is only one year younger than me. My mother planned to give birth in the Spring Festival precisely. My younger brother was taken to his hometown in the countryside when he was born and raised by his grandparents. He didn’t come back until two years later. My parents registered my brother’s hukou according to my birth date. For a long time, I thought we were really twins.
Growing up, I didn’t feel like I was being treated differently because of my gender. But my brother, who has been separated from his parents since birth, has a far greater sense of insecurity than I do — he haggles over the amount of snacks our parents give us, bathes first and puts to sleep first, seeing this as evidence of “preference” and then bursts into tears at every moment when he feels unfair.
In my family, where both parents were educated, son preference may have become impractical, but the social rule of “you have to have a son” is still embedded in their mindset.
In my hometown, a lot of bad criminal cases are related to the bride price
In addition to having a son, he must also marry a wife for his son. In Liaocheng, young people don’t have many choices. City peers are determined to take an examination of civil servants, into the hospital school to obtain career establishment. A lot of such position monthly income is more than 1000, but need parents take tens of thousands to buy.
But in parents’ eyes, the money must be spent — because a stable job can make a child more competitive in the marriage market. Work, marriage, and children are the most important things, and each one is worth paying a lot of money for.
Here, marriage is a transaction between two parents.
Liaocheng has always been a marriage of the man to the woman to give dowry customs. Of bride price digital is very exquisite, basically can be summarized as “full a green” (ten thousand purple five dollars, plus one photos of red one hundred, plus one hundred green fifty, one hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars), “three catties two” (with a scale out three catties 3200 yuan bills, RMB one hundred and thirty-six thousand), “thirty-one thousand eight hundred, the husband’s family home together” this a few kinds.
In addition to the bride price, I have to prepare the wedding room for my son. For urban families, adding a bride price to a wedding room is not too difficult. For county and rural families, one marriage is enough to ruin a man’s family. In the countryside, the bride price is usually given directly to the woman’s parents. If the elder sister gets married, the bride price is the principal of her younger brother’s marriage.
Of course, the rural origin itself is a subtractive factor, and the imbalance between men and women in rural areas is so severe that the requirement for rural boys to marry a wife is simplified as “only if she is a woman”. Many boys work outside the home, parents spend more than two hundred thousand at home, finally married for their sons, or to buy a wife.
In Liaocheng, a lot of vicious criminal cases are also related to dowry. For example, marriage fraud to get dowry money, marital discord due to the return of the dowry resulted in a blood case.
A small family conditions are very poor, parents ruined, also use the mother got compensation for a car accident, very not easy to gather enough two hundred thousand bride price to his son married a daughter-in-law. But after getting married, the wife ran away. A young man angry at his father-in-law and mother-in-law, stabbed them to death, a stab wound.
Of course, the news didn’t cause a particularly big stir. It was just something for everyone to talk about, and it was over.
I still can’t see these things as part of my daily routine. In my opinion, this placidly repeated life is the biggest curse of this land to people. I felt angry and aggrieved at all this.
I know a lot of people who want to escape. All the women who survived birth screening, who survived being traded in their marriages, who fled halfway through their unhappy marriages, do not want to return to the place where they were born and raised. Many rural girls have gone to the city to work in the retail industry, earning two or three thousand dollars a month. As long as the basics are guaranteed, they will try to keep themselves in the city through free love.
I’m in Beijing now, unable to predict what my life will be like next year, hanging out with so many “abnormal” people, constantly refreshed by human diversity. Beijing amplifies what makes everyone different. In my view, there is also the value of dignity and freedom in the constantly rising house prices.
Until the building collapses.
The ancient story, is a history of conflicts about money, but also a picture of the northeast under the background of the decline of the figure group.
State-owned factories were the backbone of the Gu family. Food, clothing, housing, work, education, the factory took care of everything they needed to live. They lose their guard, their sense of upward mobility, and their control over their lives.
“Live like this for thirty years, until the building collapses.” As state-owned enterprises were reformed in the 1990s, ancient families lost their jobs one after another. Unable to fight back, they let themselves be laid off, demolition, and the subsequent stock market crash, dragging themselves into the deep whirlpool of the era.
No one can completely get rid of the environment and the imprint of The Times, it is even like a kind of hegemony.
Just after graduating from the ancient, also under the inertia of the choice of state-owned enterprises. After six years on the job, he left the system. The job offered him a decent income, a satisfying working environment, and even a good chance of getting a welfare housing assignment. But the seemingly steady routine of his life made him feel out of control. Like the power plant that once did everything, a house makes a familiar family stranger. Nothing about the system made him feel safe.
Freed from the inferiority that grew out of his family’s economic background, he poured out his old stories one by one, just like his mother, who even dreamed of accusing her of discontent.
Narrator: Ancient, born in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang province.
Prone to anxiety; Medium openness; Agreeableness is high; Moderate stimulation; High conscientiousness
That year, my first love was strongly opposed by my girlfriend’s mother, after she had visited my house.
I knew that everything in the house was so shabby that it frightened her. “My colleague’s daughter talked to her, she bought her an ermine worth tens of thousands of yuan, and also bought one for her mother.” That’s what her mother said. When my girlfriend broke up with me, I dumped her, saying, “I’ll make your mother sorry.”
After the anger, I also understand her mother’s concern, which is based on her life experience.
Northeast people do not believe the story of poor ghost turned over, also did not have the courage to sleep on brushwood taste gall. People’s fate, often in the first job, has been predetermined. And where this job takes you depends not on individual effort at all, but on unit effectiveness and the direction of The Times.
Jiamusi in Heilongjiang is an old industrial base in northeast China. When I was a child, the rich family in my mind, is the jiamusi power plant of the dual-career family. The Jiamusi power plant, formerly known as pseudo-Manchuria Electric Power Co., LTD., was expanded several times after 1949 and became one of the largest state-owned enterprises in northeast China with thousands of employees. Once, the power plant gave out annual bonuses, each employee received 2,000 yuan, and several police vans arrived to escort the workers off duty. It was the mid – ’90s, and I’m still impressed.
Primary schools, secondary schools, shops, cultural palaces, cinemas, health clinics… The factory took care of everything in the life of its employees. My grandfather is a veteran of the power plant. He works in the boiler room. My family lived in one of the family courtyards assigned to grandpa by the power plant. My primary school and junior high school, go up of is power generation children school.
I grew up in the plant area, but my parents are not plant workers. My grandfather in order to let the second uncle “not become the blind stream in the street”, take the initiative to leave, let him take his own class. My father had a good academic record. After graduating from high school, he went to the countryside to climb the mountain. His family didn’t want him to go, so he hid his household register. My father had to fend for himself and went to a garage of about 300 people. My mother’s oxygen plant below the power plant is a “small unit” outside the larger unit of the power plant, nominally part of the plant, but with very different incomes and power plant employees.
In 1993, I was in the third grade. My mother salary every month 300 piece, my father factory benefit is not good, salary still is less than my mother. At that time, my father complained about the family eating fried bean sprouts every day. My mother choked him and said, “You give us 150 for a month, and you need to buy you 20 cigarettes. What else would you like to eat?”
I don’t see anything wrong with sprouts. Long-term material shortage, let the young I learned to wait and patience.
When I go out with my family, I never ask for food, much like my mother. “Don’t put others to trouble” was a motto that my grandmother passed down to my mother and I inherited. We strive to be the most obedient, the best behaved, and then passively wait for our fate.
I have been the power plant children of the primary school’s most outstanding students, always no doubt to take the first grade. Primary school a school, the students ran out of crazy play, and then pinched the time, the group to my home copy homework. When I was in junior high school, my mother still acted as a parent representative to share her education experience in front of the whole school. I was the only good news in the family.
Since the mid – ’90s, when factories closed one after another, my relatives came home one by one. Timber mills, textile mills and Asia’s biggest paper mill cannot afford to keep going. My aunt in the mill, in order to continue to operate, mobilize the staff to raise money, each pay 3,000 yuan, can continue to work. She didn’t pay and went home.
My mom’s oxygen factory is gone.
My mother and her colleagues were transferred to the power plant to sweep the dust, the cleaners. Get up at four or five o ‘clock every day and get the work done before everyone else goes to work. I’ll go there again in the evening. Until she retired in 2007, my mother worked at the power plant for a little over a thousand dollars.
Around 1997, my dad stopped working for the first time. The factory didn’t close. He didn’t get laid off, but the factory had no money to pay wages, so he sent them all home. A year later, he returned to work in the factory, on behalf of the factory as Party A, all over the country to investigate equipment. It was the only time I can remember when my family was financially well off.
For the next decade or so, my dad talked about the year he traveled around the country. Because before long, the factory is still yellow, millions of sold to individuals, became a private enterprise. My father, like many employees, was given a one-time buyout for nearly 30 years of service and paid $10,000.
By the end of the 1990s, with the industrial decline of the northeast, my family had fallen into the urban underbelly.
I watched this process go on for years without seeing my parents struggle, and it made me feel strangely calm, as if I was swimming down a river with no end in sight in the current of The Times.
After no longer working, my father used to run a mahjong parlor at home. For a long time, I fell asleep with the sound of mahjong collisions. After my grandfather retired, he became obsessed with mahjong and lost most of his small pension at the card table. My aunt and uncle both thought grandpa’s pension was being used to supplement our family.
Nights of mah-jongg playing, drinking, drunken street fights, and all the people who came home were at a loss as to what to do with their unscheduled lives.
One of my uncles, after being laid off, drank all day and soon became paralyzed. My dad had two cerebral infarcts and had high blood pressure for years. But he didn’t seem to care, and I couldn’t persuade him to continue his drinking and eating binge with his friends while taking his medicine.
They tried to squander their lives as if there were no tomorrow.
Just as the all-encompassing power plant suddenly fell apart, nothing about the system made him feel safe
In 2000, I entered the city’s top high school, a school that brought together the city’s top students and wealthy. These are young people wearing thousands of Adidas running shoes that I didn’t even realize existed for more than a decade. As if overnight, I saw the widening gap between the rich and the poor in a city, but also more clearly see their own plight. I was afraid to go out with my classmates. The anxiety of not bringing enough money was always with me.
In the same year that I was admitted to the senior high school, the bungalow of the power plant was demolished. The house that my family lives with grandpa adds up, can divide more than one hundred square three house. But my elder sister-in-law said, later grandfather don’t live with us, let my home cent a two-bedroom, my grandfather cent a one-bedroom. My mom said they let grandpa live alone so she could share the house later.
In these straitjacket times, the building was the only hope for a change in living conditions. I didn’t see it coming. It changed both our relationship as a family and my mother’s mental state.
At that time, the eviction room was 650 square meters, with 90 square meters costing nearly 60,000 yuan. My family could not afford the money. My mother went to grandpa and told him, “How much you gave uncle Two before, how much you gave us.” Grandpa denied giving money to uncle Two, so he didn’t give us any. My family scraped together 30, 000 dollars from my grandmother’s savings over the years to buy the house.
The atmosphere at home has become very tense because of the house. In previous years, grandpa’s side is a big family to spend New Year’s Day together. That year, my elder sister-in-law asked my father, this year how to spend New Year’s Day, my father said, come to the house. He didn’t realize that my family and grandpa were living separately now. On the morning of New Year’s Day, my parents were busy shopping and cooking for the whole morning. As a result, no one came home. My dad called my second uncle and they said they had finished eating in my grandpa’s one-room apartment.
My mother was angry in the heart, this temper immediately up, and my father scolded. During the argument, my mother was beaten. She was so wronged that she ran to grandpa and swore at the whole room. When my father found out, he called my grandma to my house and pointed at the old lady. It means you call my dad names and I call your mom names.
Since that outbreak, we haven’t been together during the Spring Festival. My father and I went to grandpa’s, and my mother went to grandma’s alone. The relationship didn’t thaw until grandpa died. She didn’t want to force a smile with grandpa during the festival. She only rehearsed the theory with my aunt in her own mind, but she never got the chance to explain it face to face. My mother was filled with grievance, feeling that she had received no financial support from her grandfather, and that she was being treated as a source of family conflict.
It gradually became a knot in my mother’s heart. She told me over and over about her grievances, even in her dreams, arguing. As time went on, she became more and more depressed, unable to get pleasure from watching TV, going shopping and other entertainment. The only thing she could concentrate on was stocks. She was extremely sensitive to money, and only changing figures could stimulate her near numbness.
In 2008, the whole people invested in the stock market, my family put all the savings into the stock market, a loss of tens of thousands of yuan, nearly halved the capital. On one occasion, my father told me on QQ that all the money we had lost had come back. Later just know, after this time, into the capital became large, although there is a temporary profit, but when I go home for the New Year, the loss has become a certainty, a crop of leeks were cut.
After the crash, my parents tried all kinds of jobs. My father is arranged by the second uncle to power plant a hotel to play more, that is, to do night security. After working for two or three years, I went to the hospital to play in the blood bank and did not take off duty during the Spring Festival. My mom used to brush dishes from morning till night and went to the dry cleaner’s. Whatever they did, they didn’t get more than a thousand dollars a month.
I was still the only good news in the family. I was admitted to a key university and recommended for graduate study. I was the only one among my relatives and peers. After graduation, I joined a research institute of the Space department in Beijing. When my relatives knew this, they asked my mother, “How much did it cost you to find this job?”
On my side of the street, there are no stable jobs that can be solved for free. Only the chimneys of the power plant still smoke, while the surrounding large state-owned enterprises have disappeared, leaving behind only a few family courtyards and dilapidated factory walls. Those fathers who went to different factories in those days, who is worse than whose ability? It’s just fate.
By my sixth year at a central enterprise in Beijing, my income had increased several times as the unit benefit had improved. This is one of the few companies that can still divide apartments. Based on seniority, I only need to wait another year or two before I can get a house near my unit at a fraction of the market price. Most of my colleagues live nearby, and I often see retired staff in the canteen. In the WeChat group, watching everyone discuss the key primary school branch that will be built soon, I suddenly feel suffocated: will I spend my whole life here?
My job is to design a one-meter camera on a satellite. I imagined one day leaving the system, only to find that I didn’t know what else I could do. In a place where Internet start-ups are in full swing and hot money is churning in all directions, all this looks like a political task. If you’re buried in your work, things seem tense and organized, and progress is clear. It’s just a sense of stability. It’s like the system has a boundary over the whole unit.
But in my opinion, this was not a stable boundary, so I finally forced my head and rushed out. I went to a small startup looking for personal value that wasn’t tied to any system.
When I announced my decision to my family, my parents were terrified that I was going to deprive them of their only honor in front of their family and friends back home. They wanted to come to Beijing and stop me. I said that the system once gave me a sense of security, but when he took it back, it was ten times more brutal. I can’t predict the future, but I want to be at least one who has struggled.
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