It's International Women's Day again.
Last week, we launched a call for stories under the theme of "Women Influence Women", asking you to talk about one or more women who have had the most impact on you, and we received many submissions from friends.
In these stories, some people tell about the love and care of their mothers and grandmothers, some people count the help of female teachers or female leaders for their growth path, and some people share their thoughts from women's variety shows and women's sports.
Although individual experiences vary, we found that women who are admired by women and who can empower others are usually brave, resilient, and warm, and they always have an upward belief in their hearts, no matter what age they are, what kind of profession they are engaged in, whether they are in good times or bad.
And the connection between women is far deeper than we think. Even if they have never met, even if they have only met for a short time, the inspiration that one woman brings to another woman will take root like a seed and affect the trajectory of a person's life for a long time.
The beauty and strength of women are always appreciated by women. The person who can inspire one woman is often the other woman.
On the eve of Women's Day, we are sending these stories to all female readers, and may we go hand in hand, become each other's trees, and live more abundantly and freely in the days to come.
Without my grandmother, there would be no me
Yuanzhi. My grandmother is an old lady with bound feet, and she is 85 years old this year.
She has a pair of misshapen feet and always walks in excruciating pain. In my memory, the most she said to me was, "Yunyun, you wait for me, my feet hurt."
Because I was a girl, I was left by my parents at my grandmother's house and stayed with my grandmother for ten years in time for the strict family planning inspection. When my parents didn't come to see me, the children in the village scolded me for being a "wild seed", and my grandmother became the most powerful "shrew" in the village.
When I was ignorant, I also hated my grandmother's little feet and temper tantrum. Later, I learned that if it weren't for my grandmother who had a big fight with my parents with a kitchen knife, my parents wouldn't even want to give me a household registration.
When I was in junior high school, I dropped out of school to work in other places because of my family's financial difficulties. My grandmother inquired about where I was working and sent me a big package with many layers of rotten clothes and torn socks, and my roommates laughed at me when they saw it. I dismantled it layer by layer to the end, and found that the innermost part was a broken tattered money, wrapped in a clean handkerchief, a total of 2,000, which was the money that my grandmother had to save for a year and a half by selling side dishes without eating or drinking.
In the past two years, I have started to submit articles and publish articles in addition to my part-time job, and my grandmother is the happiest person. She never asked me if I could make money writing articles, she would only say, "Yunyun, you have to be full, and when you are full, you can have the strength to work!" "I gave myself a pen name called "Yuanzhi", in fact, "Yuanzhi" is my grandmother's name.
Now, my grandmother can't walk anymore, and her eyes can't see clearly. But she walked with me and never said that I should wait for her anymore, she always said now: "Yunyun, don't wait for me, you go forward first." ”
Whenever I think of my grandmother, I always think of the sentence in "Chen Qing Table": "If there is no grandmother, there is no way to this day, and if there is no grandmother, there is no way to live for the rest of the year". My grandmother was the brightest moonlight in my life.
Grandma's handmade braised eggs |Source: Interviewee.
Writer Ai Ling. I want to tell the story of me and my mother, Jiang Shumei.
In 2013, after the release of my mother's first book "Troubled Times, Poor Times", Jiang Shumei, a "legendary grandmother" who learned to read and write at the age of 60 and wrote at the age of 75, became famous overnight and gained thousands of fans.
Combing through my experience over the years, I was surprised to find that the "teaching" and "learning" between my mother and me have always been two-way. What I taught my mother was writing skills, and what my mother taught me was great wisdom in life.
When she was young, she was uneducated, and when she began to learn to write in her old age, her life became busy. When she was busiest, her mother only slept 4 hours a day, writing, drawing, exercising, practicing calligraphy, and was very busy every day.
In the eyes of others, it seems that the "legendary grandmother" has no time to grow old. When my mother heard this, she smiled: How can you not be old? It's useless to be afraid. People of my age are like ripe melons, which fall when they say they fall. When it will fall, it is the business of Lord Yama; How to live when it falls, we have the final say.
In my mother, I saw the open growth of an old man. She is open to the whole world and does not pass up the opportunity to learn from anyone. My mother's curiosity about the world, my mother's rich schedule, my mother's loud laughter and her view of life and death gradually eliminated my fear of the twilight of my life. I thought more than once that in my eighties, I should be like my mother.
After teaching my mother to write, she often called me "Teacher Zhang".
I never called her "Teacher Jiang", but her life class was open to me anytime and anywhere, in the past few years, she learned how to behave in the world, and in recent years, she has learned how to continue to grow and how to enjoy her old age. My mother's education and influence on me have never stopped.
Ai Ling and her mother Jiang Shumei |Source: Interviewee.
Fire. About five or six years ago, when I was still in college, one day I was scrolling through Weibo, and under the Weibo of the blogger @走饭 who died of depression, I saw a highly praised comment, to the effect that I couldn't hold on anymore and had a hard time.
I clicked into the other party's homepage along the comments, and found that it was a woman of the same age as me, very beautiful, delicate writing, studying at a good university, interning at a well-known **, and coincidentally, our real names are still partially similar.
I spent an afternoon slowly reading her Weibo and clicked on it. Now that I think about it, it may be out of instinctive curiosity, why would a girl who looks good and will be loved by many people be troubled by emotional problems?
Over the years, I have been silently following her Weibo, watching her graduate, work, change cities, fall in love and break up.
Thanks to her candid sharing and expression, I have witnessed every major change in her life, and I have also read her thoughts on life at different stages. I can clearly see how she has grown from a little fragile little girl to a more resilient and strong woman – she is still drawn into a whirlpool of negative emotions from time to time, but she has learned to use reading, writing, and yoga to save herself. She has been living her life well and seriously.
Influenced by her, I also started to practice yoga, read the feminist books she shared, and gained a long peace of mind, and realized that there are one or two things in life that I can do forever, and it's good.
A few days ago, she posted on Weibo to share the good news, saying that her **work** was about to be published. Those good and bad experiences in the past have finally become the source of her creation.
I left her a message for the first time and wrote a paragraph to congratulate her, and she quickly replied and replied to her friend. We had never met, but we encouraged each other to "keep writing." At that moment, I felt some kind of precious energy flowing between us.
Source: American drama "My Genius Girlfriend".
Update. She was my university class teacher and my master's supervisor.
Let's call her Lady Little Sparrow, because she has a lively, warm and friendly personality, and I often feel like a little sparrow jumping in the golden sun, telling her companions that she has picked up a lot of ears of wheat today.
When I first met her, I was just a freshman in college, and she was excited to share with us the latest things about her life on her podium, such as interesting stories in rural practice, troubles when stir-frying, or complaining about a certain professional term in a textbook. We don't have much contact, but she will always respond carefully when there is something.
Later, something bad happened to her, her baby was seriously ill, and she accompanied the baby back and forth between Beijing and Jiangcheng. Even so, when I tried to contact her, she would take the time to patiently explain to me how to improve the topic; When I had difficulty choosing a school for graduate school, I would be carefully analyzed with me how to choose a school.
Later, I was fortunate enough to become her master, and we became more acquainted.
When I was interning at the local area, I stood in the small village square with square dancing at night, and I told her that I didn't want to intern at this site she recommended, and she said softly, then come back; When I was writing a report and scratching the wall, she would tell me to go to the movies; When staying up late to do homework was more painful than the college entrance examination, she would take me to eat delicious fried chicken legs.
Ten years have passed. Last spring, I went to see her with pink flowers. As we walked under the cherry blossom trees, she happily talked about her recent life, the interesting things she encountered in grading homework, and how she had a lunch with her children. She's still so relaxed and happy.
Maybe there is no vigorous event between us, but her vividness and vividness have made me confused and filled my life with sunshine.
Photo source movie "July and Ansheng".
Liu Xiaoyun. In 2018, I just started in real estate finance**, and she is my editor-in-chief. In fact, she is only one year older than me, but she has strong business ability, and her personality has a chivalrous temperament and boldness.
At that time, I had little professional knowledge, and asked her how to be as good as her, she pointed to the hundreds of local production books in the company's library corner and said, "After reading these, I will get started."
She is very hard-working, she learns day and night every day, writes after learning, 365 days a year, and updates 360 days. We belong to a small self-made start-up, and the hundreds of thousands of fans accumulated in the ** field are attracted by her articles.
Later, I learned that she was born into a Chaoshan family with many children and a serious patriarchal attitude. This is one of the reasons why she works so hard. She often encouraged us girls to be self-reliant, since we are in this business, we must buy our own house, do not rely on anyone, "women live in a house with their own name written on it, and even menstrual pain feels good."
After a few years of work, I felt more and more that I didn't like boring real estate, so I quit my job and became a non-fiction writer, writing stories about people. After she found out, she was sorry at first, and sincerely wished me that I could make achievements in the things I liked.
One day, she saw the story I wrote in the widely ** link in the circle of friends, although she signed a new name, but she knew it was me at a glance, and sent me a WeChat message to encourage me.
I was very happy and told her that under her influence, I really saved all the money from my part-time job to buy a house, "I have my own house, and I haven't lived in it yet, and my menstrual cramps are very cool." We laughed together.
The source of the TV series "The Golden Years".
Pompey. One of the women who had the deepest influence on me was the writer Chi Zijian.
More than ten years ago, in a high school Chinese class, I read Chi Zijian's "Singing Stove", and was moved by her Daxing'an Mountains: It turned out that in the northernmost part of the motherland, there was such a pure and beautiful deep mountain and snow field.
In the years that followed, I read her "Top of the Mountains", "Snow Crow", "The Right Bank of the Ergun River", "Fairy Tale of the Arctic Village" and ......Her words are gentle and desolate, delicate and powerful, like the heavy snow in the Xing'an Mountains.
Fate was unfair to Chi Zijian, so that she suffered the pain of losing her father and husband one after another, but she said that suffering was a wrinkle in literature, and she created "The Right Bank of the Ergun River" in grief.
Under her influence, I fell in love with literature and now become a writer and book blogger, doing my best to convey the power of literature. In the face of data pressure, I would always open the "Berry Picker" she wrote and tell myself that it doesn't hurt to be stupid and not to be clever. Walking your own path is more important than anything else.
Always sincere, brave and grateful, is the spiritual strength that Chi Zijian has brought to me.
Chi Zijian was interviewed |Image source network.
Joanna. I want to nominate a female variety show, "The Call of the Siren".
Last summer, I swiped the Douban group and saw a lot of discussions and recommendations from Douban friends, so I opened the first episode curiously, and since then it has been out of control, and I have completely brushed it five times so far.
This is a female survival variety show, with women as producers, inviting 24 female contestants whose professions are firefighters, athletes, soldiers, policemen, security guards, and stuntmen to start a bloody showdown on a lonely island.
Most of the films and literature I saw as a child were male: politicians who strategized, soldiers who fought bravely, doctors who saved lives, and policemen ......who sacrificed themselves for othersAnd women are always the foilers, the caregivers, and the people behind the successful ones. It seems that in people's traditional concept, women should be weak, virtuous, and protected by men.
The Call of the Siren" turned my perception upside down. In the show, the alarm sounds, the battle begins, and the female contestants crawl through the swamp and mud, carry water pipes in the raging fire, raid in the rain of lightning and thunder, eat meat after success, and cheer each other on when they fail.
None of them meet the mainstream aesthetic standard of "white, young and thin", but it is precisely their strong arms, abundant wilderness survival skills, ambition and strategy, and sympathetic female friendship that allow them to survive on a cruel desert island.
For the first time, I felt on the screen that women can be so strong, combative, and ambitious.
After watching this variety show, I changed my laziness in the past and was enthusiastic about sports. When I sweated on the green field on a summer night, and when I was panting and lifting iron in the gym, my mind was full of Kang Tingyu who was digging a pit with his bare hands, Jung Min-seon who had finished chopping firewood by himself, Kim Eun-bie who suppressed the other party 1v1 on the roof, and Kim Hyun-e who fell from a tree but still kept going.
I think that if I and thousands of women grew up watching such female elders grow up when I was a child, we must be undomesticated, full of power and wildness, so that the definition of "beauty" or women will be more diverse, and perhaps "health and power" will eventually become the mainstream standard for praising women.
I am blessed to see that there are so many wonderful women in this world. Because they have shown me that I have the power to destroy, the power to rebuild, and the power to dominate the world.
variety show "The Call of the Siren"|Image source network.
Star. I have a lot of wonderful female friends around me, but if I talk about the big shock, it should be an event created by a group of women.
It was 2016, I had just entered college, and I began to indulge in Korean Kpop culture, and I had my favorite men's and women's groups, and I also started to pay attention to some Korean current affairs news.
That year, something big happened in South Korea. The president of Ewha Womans University decided to adopt a policy implemented by the Ministry of Education called "Single University for Lifelong Education", which has high tuition fees but low requirements, and can be enrolled by working people or people over the age of 30. There is no need to go through a university entrance examination to get to the entrance examination, and the course is very simple.
The essence of this policy was that Zheng Weiluo, the daughter of South Korea's ** Park Geun-hye's best friend at that time, could successfully prepare for school. After Zheng Weiluo was enrolled, Ewha Girls' University got a research project that could get the national budget, even if Zheng Weiluo almost never went to school, he could get a full A transcript, like a win-win deal.
But the female students refused to let the Ewha Women's University degree be used as a tool for the university to make money. The students raised **, the school refused to communicate, the students marched on campus to remove the college, and the school mobilized thousands of security guards to stop it. Violent clashes arose between the two sides.
Not long after, in solidarity with the students who confronted the school, thousands of graduating seniors rushed back to the school from all directions, holding banners that read "Don't be afraid, my sister is coming" and telling them, "I will stand with you."
The sisters "sang the debut song of the girl group Girls' Generation, "The World Reunion Again", and even sang and cried about the policemen who maintained order-
The sorrow of this world is repeated over and over again.
It won't be repeated now.
In the midst of countless unknown paths.
I walked towards the faint light.
We will be together forever.
We are meeting again.
After a long struggle, the victory belongs to the girls. The president resigned, the college was dissolved, and the relationship between Park Geun-hye and her best friend was also deeply explored by the South Korean people, which indirectly led to many political events later.
Touching others and empowering oneself is one such word.
It was 2016, and "girls help girls" hadn't become an internet buzzword. I also went to see a lot of interviews with them, and one graduate said, "I came to Ewha by accident just as I became a woman by accident." In this sense, "My Sister is Coming" is a feminist enlightenment for me, about dissatisfaction, resistance, rebirth, and freedom.
Ewha Girls' University's school logo brought back from a trip to Seoul |Later, when I saw many moderate or radical feminist views, when the students of Ewha Girls' University sang "The World of Reunion" for makeup freedom, abortion rights, anti-**, anti-domestic violence, and the Nth room incident, I could finally recognize that there was a common experience that belonged to us
It is first and foremost empathy and mutual assistance as a woman; Then it's about caring for other people as you care about your peers. Women standing together doesn't mean victory, but it means that fear hasn't swallowed everything and we always have each other.