Family ties and expectations are the path to the growth of a rural girl.
My name is Hui Ting, I was born in rural Hunan, and I have experienced the constraints of my family since I was a child. I have two older sisters and a younger brother, and in order to improve the family's financial situation, my sisters went out to work after graduating from junior high school. In this environment, I started my university life.
College days are full of hard work. In order not to burden my family, I worked several part-time jobs to save my college tuition fees. This experience of self-reliance has made me develop the quality of perseverance and hard work since I was a child.
When I was in college, I met Du Ming, a boy who had a similar experience to me. Our relationship heated up quickly, and Du Ming's diligence and hard work also made me feel his sense of responsibility for the future. So, we decided to spend the rest of our lives together.
Faced with the palace of marriage, we have encountered an unprecedented predicament. The resistance of the family, especially the insistence of the parents on the high bride price, made us feel the weight of the marriage. It's a choice between reality and ideals, and the tangled debate has left us in an inextricable impasse.
After a fierce argument with our parents, we chose to stay away from our hometown and came to Dongguan. The beginning was not easy, and despite being freed from the shackles of family, we found new troubles. In Dongguan, we are strangers and need to re-adapt to the new environment.
On Chinese New Year's Eve, we decided to go back to our parents' house to visit our parents. Back home, we find ourselves unwanted. In the living room, relatives chatted enthusiastically, while we were arranged in the kitchen, almost ignored. This family indifference embarrassed us, and loss became the leitmotif of this moment of reunion.
After fed up with the indifference of our family, we made the decision to leave. The night back in Dongguan is a distant vision of the future under the stars. At this moment, we begin to rethink the meaning of family and our expectations of family affection.
With the stability of work, our lives are slowly getting better. In Dongguan, we have found our place, and our work, family, and relationships are all on the right track. Parents' expectations still seem to be an insurmountable chasm, and we try to make them aware of them, but we don't get the point.
Perhaps family is an unavoidable responsibility after all. In our eyes, family is a symbol of warmth, and in reality, it can become complex and elusive. After going through so many twists and turns, we began to think that maybe family is not as good as we imagined.
When we try to reconcile with our families, we find ourselves caught in a conflict that we can't unravel. We are adults and have our own lives, but we are still children to our parents. Such a contradiction may never be resolved.
Everyone has their own opinion on this. Family is a responsibility, a bond, and an emotional sustenance. We strive to live the life we want, but at the same time, the expectations of our families remain with us. Perhaps family is not something we can choose, but a proposition we must face, and there is no standard answer to this question, and perhaps only after experiencing more storms can we better understand the true meaning of family.