Since I turned sixty, many voices have begun to urge me to write an autobiography. I hate this suggestion. Too many autobiographies in the world are full of false narcissism and self-pity. The ups and downs of personal life should always be kept private, so Each time I chose to refuse.
Until my old friend Anna suddenly found me, and she gave me a reason that I couldn't refuse: Your life is not just your personal life. If you are willing to write it down, people in the future will definitely find something useful for them. things used.
So I started writing. Although I spent most of my time recovering from illness during this period, writing was not difficult for me. Before I was transferred to Core City for surgery, I gave the first draft to the editor. After reading it, she asked me, Why are your stories from 4614 to 4630 only recorded here?
I answer: Because my whole life started after I retired from AHgAs, the battle stories of the Mercury Needles will always be the same, and you won't be interested.
The editor asked again, who are the five women you thank on the title page? If it is convenient to disclose, we would like to make a note under their names.
I asked her to guess, and she guessed many answers. My comrades, my friends, my teachers, my students... unfortunately, none of them.
They are my maternal relatives.
Janice Garvey is my mother, Mallowan is my grandmother, Adeline is my grandmother's mother... Going back so far, Simon Amber is the oldest elder I can find.
I could understand why the young woman couldn't guess the answer because each of them had a different last name - their husband's last name. Even though we are so close by blood, when our names are put together, no one recognizes that we are a family.
A woman's life of displacement happens to be a whole history of women's disintegration.
The editor was a little sad after hearing this. She hoped that I would write more about their stories. I happened to still owe a preface, so I will tell about my grandmother: Mallowan Clarissa in this preface.
Ms. Mallowan was born in the Blanc Plains in the north of the 14th arrondissement, where water and grass are abundant and the folk customs are fierce. Shortly after she was born, her father gave her to relatives in another town for adoption. Her mother, Adeline Virginia Kukaski, walked 30 miles barefoot and took her back. Home.
Ms. Mallowan was born with martial virtues. When she was nine years old, a widower next door dragged her into a haystack and wanted to insult her. She raised a sickle and chopped off half of the widower's brain; when she was twelve years old, her father One month after his death, the clan members wanted to divide their family's land. She called her sister to dig out her father's half-rotten body from the ground and dragged it back to the town on an ox cart. Early the next morning, she died alone. They knocked on the doors of those houses and asked whether their consciences had been eaten by dogs.
When she was fourteen years old, someone in the town used a sheep to betrothal her. She didn't want to, so the people in the town framed her, saying that she had received the betrothal money, and forced her mother to pay for twenty-four lambs. The next year, she Her mother passed away due to overwork, and since then Ms. Mallowan has become the backbone of the family, taking care of the food, clothing, and daily life of her two younger sisters.
At the age of seventeen, Ms. Mallowan suddenly rose to prominence and began smuggling arms. I asked her many times how she started this deadly business, but she never wanted to tell me. She worked this dangerous job for a total of ten months, and before things got worse, she took her two sisters and ran away with the money.
After that, she worked as a midwife, a dairy worker, and an accountant in a pawn shop... At the age of nineteen, she married her first husband. Before marrying him, she knew that they were There is no emotion between them, but Ms. Mallowan knows better that it is impossible to live without men in the wasteland, because here, a rotten male corpse is better than four living women.
Her greatest luck was that she hid her money tightly, so when she had two teeth knocked out by her first husband, she got divorced.
Her second husband was a shoemaker. This marriage lasted for three years. According to Ms. Mallowan, this was the happiest and happiest time in her life. However, the good times did not last long. The shoemaker died of pneumonia.
Then she married her third husband and gave birth to my mother. Her third husband was a declining farmer who also secretly sold some illegal drugs. Ms. Mallowan had never done such a thing, but she was always familiar with smuggling, so she quickly took over her husband's underground business. , relying on her husband's family, no one dared to come and cause trouble for her again.
Therefore, when I was born, our family was already a well-known and wealthy family.
I have grown up in the care of Ms. Mallowan since I was a child. I am her most beloved child. She loves me even more than her daughter. She always takes me with her. Whenever she talks about her to others, Grandchild, she will pat me on the shoulder proudly and say, look at this child, she is who I was back then.
That was also the happiest time in my life. During that period, I thought that if I worked hard enough, maybe I could become someone like Ms. Mallowan in the future.
Then I started going to school. Things in school are too simple and I always skip classes. I had a wild personality but good grades, and the teachers had nothing to do with me. This kind of free life lasted until my younger brother Barr also started going to school. During the first week, he followed suit, and then I saw Ms. Mallowan's rage.
She hit him and broke three thorns as thick as her thumb. This was just because Baal skipped class all afternoon.
While teaching him a lesson, I heard Ms. Mallowan say: If you skip class at a young age, what can you be expected to do when you grow up?
I was standing upstairs watching, very shocked - because she had never asked me such a question.
I have told her about my skipping classes and even provoking teachers, so she knows it. Every time I tell her this, she always giggles. I don’t understand why the same thing changes completely when the same thing happens to my brother. Looks like.
I asked her why, and she held me in her arms and told me, "Bar's situation is different from yours. He is a boy and he has to know some rules."
"Don't I need to know?"
"Of course you need to know it too, but the rules you need to understand are different... When you are older, you will understand."
Later, I learned the real answer from my father: Baal, my younger brother, he will be the ultimate heir of this family, and the family has high hopes for him. As for me, as Lady Mallowan's favorite child, I will never be treated badly - when I grow up, my family will prepare a very generous dowry for me, rich enough to make my husband feel shocked, so , my husband and the family behind him would never dare to look down upon me in the slightest.
For the first time I felt like I was experiencing a huge deception, and I hated them all for it. No matter how they treated me, I was never close to them.
When I was eleven years old, Ms. Mallowan fell downstairs and fell seriously ill. Six months later she entered a dying state, and my mother cared for her day and night.
One night I heard Ms. Mallowan crying, so heart-wrenchingly that it broke my heart, so I ran to her room and heard her talking to my mother. That night, Ms. Mallowan was very conscious. She told my mother about all the regrets in her life. She said so sadly that she was a miserable woman: she had been alone all her life and could only work hard on her own. She hated it. It seems that her half-life business is precisely because of this shrewdness, and she will never have the chance to get the kind of happiness that belongs to an ordinary woman. Amidst all the turmoil, the only thing that comforted her was that her children - like my mother, like me - would no longer have to work as hard as she did. As for herself, she resigned herself to her fate.
I listened to all this outside the door with tears streaming down my face. I never knew that Ms. Mallowan viewed herself this way. In my mind, she was so brave and resolute. Not only did she have a vision far beyond ordinary people, Moreover, she is naturally intelligent, and she can handle every dangerous thing with ease... Why do all these advantages seem to her to be the most insignificant things? I don't know who put these painful thoughts into her mind, making her hate her wonderful destiny.
Not long after that, chelation disease came to the town where I lived. It killed everyone regardless of rich or poor, turning every corner into a hell on earth, and all the land, property, and houses were turned into Ashes, there is nothing left to inherit... All these past events have become my own memories. Now that I am Ms. Mallowan's age, I begin to understand the fears she faced at the end of her life. If I could have understood earlier why this happened, maybe I should stand with her, or at least My admiration and attachment to her tell her, because I know clearly that she loves me, and even though my hatred for her stems from this love, I still understand that she loves me far more than anyone else.
Ms. Mallowan had done her best, she had done all she could, and I set off resenting her, and the same thing seemed to be going on...but instead I felt a wave of genuine joy about it. , through this similar fate, I saw that an invisible tie is firmly connecting us, and no one can cut it off.
No generation can rest. Later people, I also wish you well. Maybe when there are no more bloody villages in this world, our souls will reunite under the same sky.
