The annual Spring Festival conference is like an annual family meeting, and there are certain KPIs to be completed.
It is better to say that it is a New Year's talk, but it is better to say that it is a large-scale crisis show. Age anxiety, marital anxiety, work anxiety, savings anxiety ......In fact, the back of it is not a duel between young people and elders, but a complex struggle for the right to speak between traditional and modern value systems, old and new rules of survival, the older generation and the younger generation, and the identities of parents and children.
Du Sujuan, a professor of literature at East China University of Political Science and Law, once described it as a "dangerous moment" to return home, and if there is still a difference between winning and losing in ordinary duels, then in this battlefield of ideological generations, whoever seems to be winning is actually the loser - those who take a step back may just swallow their anger, and the side that wins on the surface may not be truly convincing. It may even be fruitless.
As for the problem of the generation gap, Professor Du Sujuan gave the answer of "unsolvable", but she still put forward some small suggestions, that is, to minimize the desire to justify. It seems that the helpless choice of "self-surrender" may also be one of the reasons why the new generation of young people are not so willing to go home, not "not wanting to go back", but "not daring to go back".
But there are still countless young people who offer their own solutions: for example, eagerly waiting for a discourse debate.
In the first Spring Festival after the resumption of daily life, the editorial department invited female reporters, editors, and authors to anonymously chat about their stories and the reasons why they "don't want to go home". When they return home, they unconsciously make miniature observations of their native environment, and these situations may be shared by different women.
Feel free to share your observations and stories in the comments section.
Written |Editorial Department of New Weekly.
Edit| felicia
My cousin, who wants to divorce again, always urges me to get married
Alice, editor of daily low back pain, post-90s
I want to break my soul during the festive season. To resist all sorts of stares from relatives, I decided to look at them in reverse. Unscrupulously deconstructing them in my heart is the way to prevent me from being suffocated by oblivion and to regain my mental space.
Every year on the first day of the New Year, my cousin L looked at me very strangely, she always squinted her eyes, and the corners of her mouth rose slightly and asked, "What about this year, is there any?" When she says "no", of course, she refers to the object. Then there was compassion in her eyes, as if there was something wrong with me in her eyes, I must be lonely, right?
on call 36 hours 2
For L, love is a cool girl's program of action, and getting married and having children is the most important destination for a mature woman, which is why L casts a compassionate look at me.
When I was a child, I was often put at my aunt's house by my mother, and I enjoyed playing with my older siblings. l is cool in my eyes, when she was in elementary school, she was different from girls her age, she played Barbie, jump rope, and toy guns. She has some charlatanism, and often fights for others, leading a group of boys and girls to look for fruit in the fields, lighting firecrackers and fireworks, and she is ahead of the curve. This cool girl trait gives her some prestige among the kids, and I admire her a little.
As she went to junior high school, her Jianghu atmosphere was mixed with some shyness, her body began to develop, from a thin bamboo pole to a slightly fat little radish, she took me to buy clothes, looked at her legs in front of the mirror, sighed, "radish legs".
She's in love. I saw her write love letters to the boys she liked on letterhead, folded them into a heart shape and put them in her pockets, she skipped school, rode a motorcycle and dated boys, and her charlatan made her always go to the soup in love. She went on a rampage, just like the heroine in the idol drama I watched when I was a kid.
Adella's Extraordinary Adventures
Maybe it was because her family conditions were relatively good at that time, and she almost didn't want to study hard to "change her fate", and the results of the high school entrance examination were expected, so she went to secondary school. Her vigorous first love was well known, but because the man's economic conditions were too poor, this relationship was stopped by the whole family. At that time, she almost jumped off the building, one leg was stepped out, and she was pulled back by her relatives. Two years later, I came home from winter break to find that she had a new boyfriend, and this time, everyone in the family was satisfied. At the age of 23, my cousin got married.
This cousin-in-law is very good-looking, shy and silent, and is the only male in their family. My cousin soon became pregnant and gave birth to her eldest daughter, and when I came home for the Spring Festival, I saw my cousin-in-law, who was fighting fiercely at the card table, and my cousin asked him to take a look at the child and did not respond.
A few years later, another Spring Festival returned, and she had already given birth to her second child. Maybe at that time, the marriage was on the verge of falling apart, and it was the instinct of many women to continue to have children in helplessness, thinking that they could bridge the conflict. They divorced when their youngest daughter was two years old. The eldest daughter followed her ex-husband, and the younger daughter followed her.
Gone Girl
The hidden financial crisis emerged, and when she divorced, she suddenly thought that she could only repay the hundreds of thousands of loans she used her ID card to help her husband, and she handed over the child to her mother and ran Didi by herself.
At that time, I found out that my cousin's WeChat name had become "silly woman". She is still very charismatic, but she seems to have changed from "little radish" back to "bamboo pole", her body is getting thinner and thinner, and her cheeks are sunken because there is no meat.
I'm not an opponent of "love brains", but my experience makes me think that the love script in a small town is somehow at the cost of women's taming and self-folding, and the so-called "harmonious" marriage is even more so. It tests the ability of men to be cold and violent, and tests the scale of women's sacrifice.
A few years after the divorce, my cousin fell in love again, this time a heroic man with a lot of words, with a gold chain around his neck, broad and mighty, extremely generous to relatives and friends, and seemed to love his sister very much. During the New Year's holidays, he always likes to invite all our relatives to play, charter a car to eat, go to KTV to drink, go to a restaurant to eat game, and the relatives are so happy. Generosity is enough for a man, and he is also kind and generous to his cousin and ex-husband's children, and he seems to be impeccable. But the crisis of machismo is already lurking. Generosity and righteousness require capital. He barely had a formal income, so he went astray and went to prison.
Two years after his return, he had nothing, his machismo turned him into a fragile and sensitive beast, he often went crazy and felt that my cousin looked down on him, and the couple's quarrels escalated from time to time. Now, the cousin seems to be tired, she wants to leave, but all the relatives persuade her to endure it, and the husband and wife quarrel at the end of the bed.
My cousin is old and has children, and in their eyes, they can only suffer from divorce.
The Reason Why I Can't Be in Love".
I'm married and have children, and I want to rebel again
Xenos, a reporter codenamed "Honest and Good Man", born in the 90s
It is said that the taste of the New Year has faded now, and most of the reasons may be concentrated in the discomfort of being scrutinized by family and relatives, as if everyone wants to do a good job of expression management in their happy dinner, accept the scrutiny and interrogation from parents and relatives, and have a year-end life KPI summary - have you completed the task this year?
To me, I may be the epitome of unresponsiveness and late maturity. In the past, there was a slight feeling that such inquiries might be out of concern, but now I feel more and more that the air on this occasion exudes a certain embarrassment, which is suffocating, as if the task has not been completed, and this year will be in vain.
I chose not to get married
Marriage and childbearing are clearly the focus. The inertia of the mind that has been examined may have been hidden in my heart for a long time. Before getting married, I fell in love without telling my parents, and the most suffocating thing about every time I went home for the New Year was to be overly cared for, and even gave you a plan and asked a good introduction partner. When it is clear that you are in a relationship, they will check whether the conditions for marriage are sufficient as if they were investigating the household registration. After getting married, there is no transition period for the task, and it jumps directly to the next stage, which is "birth".
Most of my peers and relatives are not surprised by this process, and even they have completed the tasks assigned by the elders early, and after completing them, they will stand in the same position as the elders and examine you in the same posture, with a certain sense of luck, and some have even become participants in this "game". The female friends around me are so tired of "urging marriage" and "giving birth" that they are even numb, and the New Year seems to have the meaning of "catastrophe".
For me, the stress and anxiety of "giving birth" is obviously stronger than "urging marriage". My family belongs to a small town on the 18th side, so this pressure from tradition is not limited to relatives and family, but surrounds the atmosphere of the whole town. My friends and I are "good girls" who follow the rules, and we obviously haven't done anything cool, some of us are on track early, and some of us are still struggling under pressure, but the resistance is still conservative and fragile.
Those who do not enter the traditional narrative of marriage and love, there are very few examples around us, and some will even be used as a different kind of talking point. In recent years, when my mother talked about it in front of me, I couldn't help but look at the other, and I would be very disgusted, but I knew that she still wouldn't change easily. I was a little sad and powerless.
In such a small town, it is like a golden bell jar shrouded in a traditional concept, from the time I have a childhood memory, to the present, there has been no loosening, and it is still so hard and difficult to overcome.
After I got through these two phases, it was clear that the cycle of tasks would continue. I may gradually become numb to such eyes and inquiries (although I am still sensitive), but I firmly want to respect my own wishes, not to be a "good girl" in their eyes anymore, and may we all be brave and usher in our rebellious period sooner.
A Year Without a Job".
Growing up in the city, I also thought about whether to "break off".
Peppa Pig, an editor who hesitates to cut her hair, post-90s
I was mentally prepared to "break off" a few years ago. When I talk to friends who don't grow up in the city, they always think that their relatives in the city should know how to "feel distance", but this is not the case in my experience. Relatives are always spreading their ideas about life, whether rich or poor, there are always some relatives who are eager to get some kind of mainstream value confirmation through socialization.
I lived on the edge of the city when I was a child, and when I grew up, I grew up in sync with the development of the city, and I witnessed some of my relatives around me become the richest people, and the real estate agent would affectionately call her "aunt" and ask her if she had a fancy for a house recently. And some relatives are as poor as they were 30 years ago, the family is crammed into a cramped old house, there is not much private space, after giving birth to children, they work morning and evening jobs to make a living, and they have no time to educate. Our family had its ups and downs in the waves, and finally settled in a more comfortable and surplus position, which my parents had to work hard for in their early years, and of course relied on many lucky and turning choices.
People Who Live Alone
This experience gave me a perspective on my surroundings, and I was able to touch the anxieties of both the rich and the poor. How the rich generation, who do not have a stable culture and power capital, regard their children's marriage as a means to maintain their class, and their anxiety about their children's marriage is also a reflection of their own class anxiety. They used to be poor, and it is not impossible for them to become poor again in the last decade.
Among my relatives, my cousin, who is most enthusiastic about being a matchmaker for others and finding a match for her daughter, is my cousin in her forties. She is the kind of "strong woman" who has great work and social skills, and is quite rich, but she is the most enthusiastic about making the right people together. Every time she introduces a person, she will reduce people to conditions and numbers, and give both parties a detailed reference, which she enjoys and has a strong sense of urgency.
Maybe her actions are making up for her past one by one when she was young, she chose a very good-looking man to be her husband, I don't know if she would call it love, but after marriage, the man never worked, never earned a penny, and did not participate in housework and childcare. Their marriage has continued to this day, and the cousin has become a woman who does not complain but "holds everything up". Although she never mentioned this suffering, when I was a child, I played at her house and often listened to her daughter holding grievances for her mother. In my cousin's story of rising class, her partner didn't help her.
And another female relative in her fifties always feels that young people nowadays are too selfish, marrying late and having children later, and having AA after getting married, and having to listen to her "criticize" young people's values every time they have dinner. But for so many years, I have watched her shackle up her unhappy marriage, almost suffocating. The couple lived in the same home, but they didn't even say a word to each other, and after the child left home, the only person she communicated with was the stray dog she adopted. Her excuse for her fear of divorce was that "divorce is a selfish act."
Continued penultimate love".
It was many years before I learned how to interpret them. The words they express strongly are all related to each person's situation, their fears, and their sense of identity with themselves. She or he may not care about my fate as one of the tiny members of many relatives, but they care very much about their own rightness, whether they have a recognized value in their lives. I don't have a sense of urgency to get married, and I doubt the value of the traditional way of life, which may prove that the choice they made to "keep the marriage" may be wrong. Only my parents could literally visualize their worries about aging.
For several years, I didn't spend the New Year at home, I just didn't want to explain to my relatives, and if I argued with them, maybe the other party would be hurt, and I didn't celebrate the New Year with my relatives, but to some extent, it was really for the good of my relatives.
I even talked to my parents about "severing" with relatives. My parents were very traditional-minded people, but over the years, they were forced to be baptized by my "thinking ahead". When I gave them a sense of certainty that I could be self-responsible and support myself, my parents started talking to me about things they wouldn't talk about before, such as the difficulties they had had that I couldn't imagine.
My overly "self-determined" remarks caused a lot of arguments at first, and they are still worried after a few quarrels. They also have a variety of grievances with their relatives, but in the ups and downs of the decades, they are very sure that it is impossible for people to live on their own, and people will encounter more or less accidents that are "gifted" by fate. And this kind of miniature world built by relatives is the "neighborhood" that my parents care about, and it is also the safety net of my parents. So, the peace I maintain now is probably to maintain the "neighborhood" of my parents.
Ode to JoyWhen I came home, I didn't have a room of my own
Chen Debang, "No Time to Play" Selected Editor of the Year (self-styled).Post-95
When I grew up and watched "Hong Kong Love Story", to be honest, what touched me the most was not the love of social animals, but the helplessness of Chen Ziting, the "subdivided room girl". The family of four lives in a house of less than 20 square meters, and each person can only get a one-meter-wide bed.
It's actually a microcosm of my entire childhood and adolescence. If you have to say a reason why you don't want to go home for the New Year, the parents' marriage urging cross talk can still see tricks, but the constantly blurred sense of boundary brought by "no independent room" is more abrasive.
Hong Kong Love Story".
The density between people is infinitely closer here, but sometimes it brings chaos and distress instead of warmth. When I was studying, I always lived in the same room with my mother, because the cramped house needed to accommodate four people, and the space placement could be described as an inch of land.
It is not allowed to be locked, and each room is automatically divided into "common areas", crammed with different kinds of household items, and everyone has the right to come and go freely. There is no separate room, which brings the convenience of collective life, but on the other hand, the space of privacy is constantly cut.
Sometimes my aunts, grandmothers, and grandmothers would judge whether I had "spent too much money" and "bought things that were useless" through the objects I had nowhere to hide.
Perhaps because of this, I learned to "break away" earlier than my peers, and I learned to destroy physical evidence of those slightly novel clothes and girly comic books before they were discovered by my elders. After all, I can't guarantee that one day they'll be in someone else's hands.
Psychologically, privacy is actually the foundation on which a person's "self" foundation is built. The concession of the border means the delivery of "control". Having grown up with a private room, it took courage to re-enter a space where there were no secrets at all, and to endure the "passive self-dissolution" again.
There is no separate room, and it is not a microcosm of me alone. In a city where land is at a premium, this may be the experience of most girls who grow up in materially poor families. Sometimes, the absence of a separate room also means that the space that carries emotional freedom is infinitely lost.
My friend Mei Ting often uses the word "depressed" to describe the gray of that adolescence. Because of sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother, the emotional breakdown of falling out of love, the sadness of failing to get good grades, and the anger after arguing with her parents have all become habits that she internalized into self-suppression during her growth. After all, in the eyes of elders, happiness may not need a reason, but "unhappiness" does.
Dog Thirteen" Actually, I can understand the different understandings of female elders about "girls have a private room", they are not indifferent to needs, but "never got", so it is natural to think that "no" is a very normal thing. They hadn't read Woolf's manifesto of women's rooms, and they might have longed for their own room, but the barren era, from sisters to husbands, seemed to have become a more internalized concept for the older generation of rural women.
Perhaps, it is only when one day, when I can also contribute a separate room to my mother, that she will be able to better understand the spiritual metaphor and importance of an independent space for me.
In the small town, you can't hide from the anxiety
If you want to be a vulgar girl, you need to save the editor of the neck, post-95
My hometown is located in a small town in the east of Guangdong, which can be walked around in less than half a day. I don't have too many memories of this place. When I was in elementary school, my parents and I went to live in another city, and since then, the town has been a special and contradictory existence for me.
It turned out that I couldn't explain it clearly, and it wasn't until I finished reading "Past Life" last year that I seemed to find a clearer explanation. The town is to me what Korea is to the heroine, there is a kind of genetic and blood connection between you and it, but if you have a choice, you don't want to go back to that culture.
I have a cousin who was born in 87 and has been a fashionable sister in my eyes since she was a child. Every time I see the Y2K millennial look, I can remember her in my impression, with long black hair, baggy jeans, and shiny lip gloss.
The freedom I envied at the beginning was also ** for her, when she was admitted to college, she was far away from her parents, and she lived a long time by herself. When she was my age, I often heard about where she had traveled again.
Women don't have to be mothers at the age of 24, I know from her. Before she wanted to get married, it was useless for her relatives and friends to bombard her. I think this may be one of the reasons why I'm quite immune to urging marriage these days, as you already know that words can be ignored in the face of a sufficiently certain personal will.
I thought that if I could, my cousin wouldn't want to go back to the culture of the town, after all, she tried so hard to escape. For several New Year's holidays, she deliberately chose the time with the highest density of relatives to travel. She was the oldest child of our generation, and at that time, almost everyone stared at her emotional condition, and urged her bitterly.
"Past Life" later heard that she didn't plan to drift and decided to go back to her hometown. I didn't specifically ask why, but I seem to understand quite a bit over the years that women's escape is a more laborious thing than I thought. Even if you believe in yourself and are independent, the desire to "not want to rely on others" and the feeling of suspension "feeling unsupported" are two completely different things that coexist at the same time.
If you don't want to drift, the only way for my cousin to retreat is the small town. Her parents have lived in a small town all their lives.
After getting married and having children, my cousin didn't avoid crowded dinners like before, she opened her own yoga studio and bought her own house in her hometown. Nowadays, relatives no longer use her as a negative teaching material for the family, on the contrary, she is a successful woman who every relative praises. But that still doesn't add to my beautiful view of the town, and at the end of the day, they're celebrating the same set of standards.
And older single women like me, who are still working, are still the focus of education in their eyes.
Tokyo Daydream Girl