Chapter 118

Love and marriage, men and women, this is probably an eternal topic.

Two days had passed, and Yang Yuyan and Yang Yucan were still discussing the significance of the different depictions of men and women in both Chinese and Western literature.

As it happened, Shi Wuwei had to bring Prof. Dai’s cordial greetings every few days to meet Yang Yuyan, his little sister.

Although Yang Yuyan could not go to school now due to a matter, Prof. Dai did not relax her education.

So Shi Wuwei came.

The Zhu family’s atmosphere of learning was very thick, surrounded by Ms. Zhu, Dai Yang students and Su Chunjun, Prof. Dai didn’t worry about Yang Yuyan being lazy and not studying, he just wanted to care about his student and know what she was interested in lately.

Shi Wuwei was also relaxed when he arrived, as he didn’t bring any homework or assignments with him, he would only bring a book for Yang Yuyan or bring out the content of Prof. Dai’s recent lessons to discuss with the Yang sisters.

Zhang Ma was very much in favor of these three people gathering to study, because this was the scene she used to see in Zhu Jia Lou, the master and the young lady studying together with a group of students, and she couldn’t understand a word of what they were talking about, but she just liked it.

Now Zhu Yanshu still goes to play cards every day, but she can’t help but ask when she gets home, “What did the two sisters talk about today? How long did they talk?”

Perhaps before long, Zhu Yanshu wouldn’t have to go to the poker table to find happiness.

Zhang Ma served them a very sumptuous snack and then went out with the vegetable basket.

She said, “You guys take your time chatting, I’ll go buy the groceries. Mr. Shi, let’s eat today before we leave.”

After Zhang Ma went out, Shi Wuwei’s eyes were much more relaxed. He glanced at the cookies on the plate that were so delicate that people didn’t dare to move them and said, “This is a Western snack, right? I’ve tasted it at Professor Dai’s place. This one is called a cookie.”

Yang Yuyan took a cookie and gave it to him, saying, “Eat it,eat it, it’s all bought from the cake house. Recently, only the cake houses run by foreigners can still buy dim sum.” The Chinese-owned dim sum stores have long since closed down.

The various charges are also depending on the person, it is the yellow hair and white skin of the foreigner’s store, there is no one will not open their eyes to charge. Because those foreign ambassadors will immediately rise this matter to the height of the international incident to go, the Bureau are very shrewd, peeling and plucking hair only to find the Chinese, because there will not be a Chinese ambassador to protest.

Shi Wuwei tasted a piece of cookie and asked Yang Yuyan: “Are you guys still watching Anna recently?”

Yang Yuyan nodded: “Watched it along with Water Margin.”

Yang Yu Cicada: “It’s not just those two, we both have been reading Chinese and foreign storybooks lately.”

The two sisters brought out what they had been discussing recently, and Shi Wuwei was quick to get involved, it was also a topic that was often talked about in school.

After all, women needed liberation too, and most liberation was directed at women.

Shi Wuwei said, “Even the newspapers could argue for three or four years about whether sleeves should be an inch longer or shorter.”

It’s a famous joke.

Whether women had long or short hair, wore pants or not, whether sleeves were short or long, whether skirts were high or low, and so on …… were always the favorite topics of the literati in the newspapers, and the newspapers loved to publish such topics, which caused a sensation every time.

It seems that everyone cares about women.

So there are some people who satirize this phenomenon.

There is a little more discussion in schools than in the newspapers, and the right to marry is one of the very hot topics. In fact the call for women to come out of the house, now under the slogan of emancipation of husband’s right and patriarchal right, is a product of the pairing of freedom of love and freedom of marriage.

Whenever the freedom of marriage is brought up, it is impossible not to talk about patriarchy and husband’s rights.

This is one of the reasons why many even educated female students in schools find it difficult to escape the trap of love. Because it’s a circle of logic that seems so right, it’s perfect and explains each other.

Women have always been oppressed by male power, which manifests itself in patriarchal and husbandly power. When a father gives his daughter to her husband, it is a marriage, which is a marriage between parents and a matchmaker. Women have been oppressed and deprived all their lives by male power as represented by patriarchal and husband power.

So, in order to rebel against male power, one must first rebel against patriarchal power, so young girls, run away from the family!

And in order to rebel against patriarchy, young wives, be free to fall in love!

As to whether older women need to also rebel against male power and escape from the oppression of husband’s power, no one cares about that.

The women who escaped from the newspapers and rumors were the young ones, and the old ones were the ones who unfortunately died, and they usually played the opposite role of being stubborn and old-fashioned, too timid and fearful to run away.

This made the young girls, after seeing this horrible example, in order to avoid becoming as miserable as them, they all bravely escaped from their families.

Regarding this, Yang Yuyan’s understanding was that the current rhetoric didn’t seem wrong, but it was only right in theory, but not enforceable.

“It doesn’t create an environment for women to live on safely. It’s like the emancipation of the black slaves in the U.S. Emancipating the black slaves was simple, abolishing slavery and ordering the farmers to give up their black slaves, but how are these freed black slaves going to live? Are there so many jobs on the market? What about their source of livelihood?” Yang Yuyan said, “A one-sided look at the emancipation of the black slaves is not that simple; it was in fact a political struggle between two camps for cheap labor after the American Civil War.”

So the freed black slaves were taken away by the other side that was running short of labor, and for these black slaves who lost their means of subsistence, the labor they put in and the pay they got back were still not equal, they just jumped from one pit to another that seemed to be padded with a layer of straw.

“And the emancipation of women now is the failure to prepare the right environment for women. And it is not their labor that is needed to liberate them, but excuses. If men’s rights are not well touched, let’s start with women’s rights. If you want to test whether the western social system works here, take women’s rights first to test the water. The more miserable these women are after leaving their families, the greater the social sensationalism they cause, the more satisfied these people watching from behind will be.”

Shi Wuwei shut up when the topic ran to the American Negro Movement.

For although he knew English and had read many American and British writings, whether of the fictional or social science type, he had read quite a lot.

But he had never been to the United States, and all he knew about that country across the ocean was only on paper.

What he had learned on paper was not as good as what he had learned on paper.

So he didn’t dare to speak. You can’t speak about things you don’t understand.

Moreover, he was unable to connect the women’s liberation movement that took place around him with the black slave movement in the United States, and he was unable to express the same empathy as Yang Yuyan.

When Yang Yuyan brought up the American Negro Slave Movement, he turned it around in his mind for a moment before remembering that he had indeed read such a book, but he just read it and put it down. She brought up the Civil War again, and he too was remembering that there was such a thing. But ask him to string the Civil War together with the Negro emancipation movement and women’s liberation over here in an instant and he couldn’t do it.

It was a rare occurrence in class discussions; he hardly ever encountered it.

He began to recall that in the past, Prof. Dai hadn’t talked a lot about foreign countries, things that happened when he was studying abroad, but why was it that when Prof. Dai talked about it he could understand it, but when Yang Yuyan talked about it he couldn’t?

It was definitely not that Yang Yuyan was wrong.

Yang Yu Cicada also thought for a while before picking up the strings and following Yang Yu Yan’s thoughts, but after she did, she couldn’t refute it, instead she felt that what Yang Yu Yan said made sense.

Although she also didn’t feel that treating the black slave movement as the same thing as women’s emancipation in her own country, it didn’t stop her from understanding Yang Yuyan’s meaning.

She just sighed and said, ”What you said is too radical. I think …… those who take freedom of marriage and freedom of love to speak out and want to break the blockade of the old order are there, but they won’t be like what you said is to purposely allow women to sacrifice their lives.”

Yang Yuyan: “But that’s just the way it is. If they argue in the newspaper, they always take women’s stories to attract attention. Those in favor of women going out of the house say that there is a new trend of thinking, that women should go out of the house to get an education, that they should be in charge of their own destiny, and then they give an example of an old-fashioned woman who died to prove how the old-fashionedness cripples human nature; while those on the other side of the argument against it give an example of the opposite. In all their examples, the fate of the women who are the examples is tragic.”

Because people love to read this, they produce it.

Women are just tools to attract attention, and their tragic stories are the most popular things.

Yang Yuyan: “They think women’s sacrifices in this are acceptable sacrifices.” They’re not the ones who die anyway.

In the evening, Su Chunjun returns and is immediately pulled into this discussion as well.

He smiled and asked Yang Yuyan, “So what do you think? What is the difference that plays a decisive role in the two stories from China and the West?”

Yang Yuyan had been talking all day, and while her mouth was dry, her mind was greatly activated. Her mind was now full of active thought factors, giving her endless words.

She said, “I think, in the process of western civilization, both men and women are slaves, and in the eyes of the slave masters, they don’t have a very clear distinction between the genders, and there is no obvious division of labor between the genders. Whereas in ancient China, only men were slaves, and women were not slaves. They were slaves of slaves, tools.”

Therefore, the description of female characters such as Pan Jinlian in Water Margin is actually a description of a slave. Slaves are not allowed to betray their masters, and certainly not to run away. Slaves also don’t have to have a mind of their own, as long as they follow their master’s orders.

In Anna, on the other hand, the heroine, Anna Karenina, is already a human being, so she has some equality with her husband in terms of her right to life and person. Although her dowry went at the disposal of her husband or other male relatives, and she had no property rights, her husband did not hold her right to life either.

Su Chunjun nodded, ”I agree with what you said. This actually has to do with the theocratic regimes in western countries. Their divine right is greater than the king’s right.” Even the appointment and dismissal of the kings had to look at the face of the gods, the land, the property, the lives of the people, of course the theocracy had to intervene.

And in China this was not the case; the power of the monarch was above all. And the result of the decentralization of monarchical power is the expansion of patriarchal power and husband’s power.

The result of all this is the different histories of the two continents, which create customs and habits, and customs and habits create different social patterns.

So–

Yang Yuyan concludes, “It is impossible for China to copy the West to save itself, because their history is completely different from ours.”

She dismissed all current attempts at a Western system, whether it was already practiced by the government or discussed passionately in the newspapers and by various prominent figures.

Su Chunjun smiled, holding her hand and saying, “You have a point.” He turned his head to look at Shi Wuwei, “Big Head, what do you think?”

Shi Wuwei was amazingly silent today, his complicated gaze fixed on Yang Yuyan’s petite figure and shook his head, “I have nothing to say. What little Yang student said today, I …… don t understand it too well, and I don t dare to jump to conclusions easily.”

Yang Yucan was afraid that he would be angry with Yang Yuyan and destroy the classmate’s feelings, said, “This is just an ordinary discussion, Yan Yan’s words are too full, this point is not good, it needs to be changed.”

Yang Yuyan refused to modify her words, she felt that what she had said was not grievous at all, it was clearly the truth, it’s just that the group of mortals in front of her all didn’t understand it yet.

Su Chunjun sent Shi Wuwei downstairs and pressed his shoulder, saying, “Struck by a classmate a few years younger than you? Stimulated?”

Shi Wuwei sighed, “I’m embarrassed to admit it.”

Su Chunjun had suffered a lot of setbacks from Shi Wuwei before, and for the first time, he raised his eyebrows and was refreshed.

He smiled and said, “It’s alright, I was also often dumbfounded by Yan Yan, it’s good to get used to it. You’re still really angry with little sister.”

Shi Wuwei shook his head, “It’s not anger. Rather …… do you think I should really go to study abroad?”

Su Chunjun: “Haven’t you never wanted to go?”

Shi Wuwei: “I do think it’s unnecessary, I’ve studied enough.”

Su Chunjun: “Then why did you change your mind today?”

Shi Wuwei: “Little Mr. Yang said today ……”

Su Chunjun: “Just call Yan Yan, no need to be so polite.”

Shi Wuwei: “I don’t understand what Yan Yan said. The reason I don’t understand is not that I don’t know these things, but that I just read the books but have no way to make sense of them.”

Was this because he hadn’t gone to study abroad? Although he knew Spanish and had read a lot of books in Spanish, they were like a walk in the park, they didn’t turn into flesh and blood.

He had read for five years and was just a book basket case.

Shi Wuwei kept thinking on his way back to school.

He had been reading for five years, was it all in vain?

Was he going to be a book basket that only talked on paper?