My junior high school political science teacher. She was around 30 years old and was the backbone of the business in the school. She didn’t need to read the book, she casually asked students to turn to a certain page and line, and recapped the text word for word, so she should be able to recite it backwards. That school is a key high school, and she specializes in taking graduation classes, and takes three graduation classes at the same time, and is also the teacher of one of them.
She was very confident in the classroom. I was short and sat in the first row. I fondly remember the way she tilted her head, flowed like a waterfall, and said many words loudly.
She was also very fashionable in her dress. The school environment was so plain that the students would talk about which teacher had her eyebrows trimmed and which teacher’s dress was a little see-through today. But she didn’t seem to be shy about it, she always kept her perm in good condition, and she was always the first to wear a dress when summer came. All the other teachers rode black permanent mopeds, a few rode colorful women’s bikes, and she rode a mountain bike. In the small town, only the hippest punks on the street rode mountain bikes at that time. When she got on that bike, she would nod her head with extra spirit if she called out “hello teacher” and seemed to like her bike.
Her son, who was five or six years old at the time, was sometimes brought to the office to play, and we could see that the teachers liked to tease him, and he was very lively. I heard that her husband was a captain in the criminal police brigade. At that time, although I was very young, I could feel that their family life was very happy.
After about 3 years, I went back home and saw her on the street. She was walking alone on the road, her hair was gray and shaggy, her eyes were straight, and her back was hunched. I called out to her, and she just looked at me and mouthed an ahem. But I knew she didn’t think anything of it. I tried to exchange a few more pleasantries with her, but she walked away, not only without manners, but not even with much liveliness.
I thought it was strange and even wondered if I had mistaken her for someone else. When I visited another teacher two days later and casually mentioned the incident, he surprised me by telling me that something had happened to her family: her husband had been hacked to death by a triad.
She broke down and started talking to herself, ranting or crying in the air.
It’s been two years since the incident, the murderer can’t be found, and no one cares about it anymore. But none of the letters have any response.
The teacher said that it should have been cut off at the post office in the county. The child was taken away by the grandmother. Her position had been transferred from teaching to the library – in fact, I didn’t even know my high school had a library.
I went back and asked my parents and they all knew about it, the whole town knew about it.
I was shocked, so I asked: Is that it? Is that all there is to their family, and no one can do anything about it? Mom and Dad said to me, you don’t know, there are a lot of things like this, and if people are already crazy, others are less likely to help.
Some years later, I heard my mother say that a single woman in the old country, her son was killed by a young gangster at school, the killer is at large, she wants to get a statement. The child’s father died a long time ago, she raised this son alone, and there is an old man at home is the child’s grandfather.
It took three years of begging for justice, but decided to take her own life to get attention.
Here is a detail, she and the old man discussed, in the end, who is going to die. Finally she decided that she would go by herself. She went to the provincial capital and died in the underground parking lot of the provincial government.
One of those three years of petitioning went like this: She heard that the county education committee was meeting in the government guest house next door to the government, so she went there and checked outside the fence to see if the small gate into the courtyard was locked. At that moment she was caught by a woman passing by and stomped on her head with her high heels by the roadside until she cried, and until she couldn’t cry.
The woman who stomped on her head was a sister I grew up with and thought she was pretty when I was a kid. She beat that woman severely, not because she was doing interception work. She was just an unrelated person who happened to meet her, knew about her, and wanted to bully her.
I never saw her again after I heard about this incident, and I couldn’t imagine that pretty sister stomping on people anyway, nor could I imagine how people could be bad for no reason, nor could I accept the reality that “yes, that’s what happens”. And this happened in my hometown, which seemed just as superficial and quiet as anywhere else.
Then a relative had cancer, and his wife went to be with him. She came back from forty days in the hospital, and surprisingly, she had gained some weight. She said she didn’t sleep much, but she ate all the leftovers, and when she couldn’t stand it, she went to the toilet and cried. She said: it’s not easy to go crazy? If I go crazy, who else can take care of him like this, how about the two children.
After two more years, her husband finally died of cancer. While her relatives were still in mourning clothes, she could already tell jokes. She made it a rule to cry for an hour every day and to pull herself together the rest of the time, because her two children were still young and she couldn’t fall.
Then I got a little older, and I often read online about people resisting evictions and setting themselves on fire on their houses. Some time ago, there was an online story about a mother who was arrested and sentenced to reeducation through labor because her young daughter had been gang-raped and had been petitioning against the trial. Many people on the Internet appealed and were released, but she didn’t give up and petitioned again. Her home is full of law-related books, which she has been studying and reading, and she speaks with a clear mind, not crazy, not suicidal, with a heart as heavy as iron.
I have posted this article in other places before, and I have been scolded by many people. I said I am pretentious, as if nothing to others to be strong is completely stupid behavior. In fact, because there were so many acquaintances at that station, I didn’t mention that the wife who made herself cry for an hour a day after her husband died was my mother.
I also didn’t mention that a year after my dad died, I had only just gotten into college when I became seriously ill and bedridden, not knowing at the time if I would still be well, possibly paralyzed or dead. My mother went to Beijing to take care of me again. When she saw me lying in bed, not only unable to turn over or raise my head by myself, but even unable to hold a glass of water, she went out to an open space and cried alone. It was a year after my father’s death, and the family had not recovered from that shock at all, and then there was a catastrophe.
After three months of treatment in Beijing, I felt that there was no hope, and the doctors didn’t even care about me anymore, saying that there was no point in being hospitalized. Then she traveled 2000 km from Beijing and carried me home one foot at a time. She searched everywhere for strange prescriptions and treatments, carried me to all kinds of strange places for treatment, and studied medical books, tested and prescribed her own medicine, tried needles on herself, and gave me injections herself. After six months, she cured me.
What kind of a woman is this?
I think suffering is definitely not something that should be praised and worshiped. If you suffer, you can only live like steel. You can’t break down, you can’t go crazy, you can’t die. The more unfortunate you are, the less unfortunate you can go on, because misfortune itself is useless. You have to live like steel, because there is no other choice.
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