The Good Women Of China by Xinran

Author:Xinran [Xinran]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Group Limited
Published: 2002-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Woman Who Waited Forty-five Years

It is characteristic of the modern Chinese to have either a family with no feelings or feelings but no family. Living conditions force young people to make jobs and housing the pre-eminent conditions for their marriages. Their parents, living amid the upheaval of political change, made security and reliability the basis on which to build a family. For both generations, practical arrangements have always come first and any family feeling there is has developed later. What most women are searching and yearning for is a family that grows out of feeling. This is why you can read about so many tragic love stories in Chinese history – stories which bore neither flower nor fruit.

In 1994, my father went to a celebration marking the eighty-third anniversary of Qinghua University – one of the best universities in China. When he came back, he told me about the reunion of two of his former classmates, Jingyi and Gu Da, who had been in love with each other as students. After university, they had been posted to different parts of China to fulfil ‘the needs of the Revolution’, and had lost touch during the decade-long nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, which had prevented any communication. The woman, Jingyi, had waited and searched for her beloved for forty-five years. At this university reunion they met again for the first time, but Jingyi was not able to throw herself into her lover’s arms: his wife was standing beside him. Jingyi had forced herself to smile, shake hands and greet them civilly, but she was obviously deeply shaken, since she had left the reunion early.

The other former classmates who witnessed this painful meeting had felt their eyes reddening and noses smarting with emotion. Jingyi and Gu Da had been the great love story of their class; everybody knew that they had loved each other deeply for four years at university. They recalled how Gu Da had found her candied haws in the middle of a Beijing snowstorm, and how she had forgone sleep to nurse him for ten nights when he had had pneumonia. My father was melancholic as he recounted this, and sighed over fate and the passing of time.

I asked my father if Jingyi had married. He told me that she had not, but had waited for her lover throughout. Some former classmates had said that she was foolish to be so infatuated with her past love: how could anyone have nurtured such hope through the years of violent political upheaval? In the face of their incredulity, she had just smiled and remained silent. I said to my father that she sounded like a water lily, rising pure out of the mire. Listening from the sidelines, my mother pitched in with a comment that a water lily withered more quickly than any other flower once broken. I wanted very much to know if Jingyi had been broken.

I found Jingyi’s work unit and address in my father’s list of university classmates, but no home telephone number or address.

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