Last month, my computer suddenly popped up a piece of news, "Famous Indian movie star Hiri Daiyu drowned in a hotel in Dubai". I searched the Internet, and the whole screen was full of this news. Friends who don’t know Indian movies may not know about Shili Daiyu, but if you pay a little attention to Indian movies, you will know that she is indeed a shining star in the Indian film industry. express sadness.
Ciri Daiyu was born in a poor family and a child star. She has acted in 236 Bollywood movies. She is a national treasure actress in India. She has won four Filmfare Awards for best actress and a special award in her career and is known as the Queen of Bollywood. , In front of her, Aishwarya and Madhuri are just juniors. After she got married, she retired from filming and returned to the film industry with "Indian English" in 2012. Today I want to talk about her work before her death.
The female protagonist Shahi is a middle-class housewife in Indian society. She lives well and comfortably. She has a decent husband and a pair of young children who go to private schools. On the surface, she should be very content with her own happy life. . However, as the film unfolds, we find that it is not always the case. The husband and wife lack a common language, and they always inadvertently expose their contempt for traditional Indian women like Shahi. The daughter who is excellent in learning makes no secret of her disdain for her mother who does not understand English. She felt contempt for her mother and felt that she had lost face in front of her friends, parents and teachers. Shahi is often dejected, sacrificing everything for her family without the respect of her husband and daughter.
By chance, a relative far away in New York, USA sent an invitation, hoping that Shaxi would come a month in advance to help prepare for the wedding, but Shaxi had never traveled far, and only a few English words could be thrown out in the communication, but The husband kept urging Shahi to come and help. In the end, Shahi complied with her husband's decision and boarded the plane to the United States alone. In Manhattan, Shaxi is like coming to a whole new world. The prosperity of the whole world suddenly crowded in front of her eyes, stimulating the vision of this woman who stays at home, allowing Shaxi to breathe the freedom she has never enjoyed before. breath.
Yet even after being out of the disrespectful family environment, and even with the best kindness shown to her by her sister's family, when everyone communicated with her niece's fiancé in English and turned to Shahi in Hindi, Shahi still felt Even when you are out of place, your inferiority complex is still with you.
On the way home with her niece, Shahi saw an advertisement for a "Four-week English Crash Course" on the bus, and she was determined to spend a month improving her English. She met classmates from different countries and races. She was no longer denied, and gradually revealed her inner spiritual abundance and tolerance. She really liked this small group full of equality and warmth. In a few weeks, her English has improved significantly, and she can order food in fluent English in a time of anger. On the streets of New York, she replaced the sari she had been wearing with a trench coat, her face full of confidence.
The husband and children arrived in New York early and brought Shahi back to the real world. The daughter still yelled at her mother and lost her temper. The husband still thought he was humorously belittling his wife's cooking skills. When her younger son was injured in an accident, Shahi was not present for class. She deeply blamed herself and felt that she had betrayed her mother's responsibilities, and her husband also clearly felt that she was unwilling to do so.
The niece's wedding was arranged on the same day as the exam, and Shahi decided not to take any classes or take the exam, but her caring niece finally invited her classmates and teachers from the English class to the wedding scene. When it was Shahi's turn to speak, the husband seemed to be considerately helping her reject the opportunity, but the hostess stopped her husband's hand, and she expressed her blessings to the newlyweds in less fluent but accurate English, as well as to the husband and wife The understanding of how to get along and the affirmation of the bond between family members. During the conversation, the husband and daughter both bowed their heads, while the people in the study class cheered.
In the heroine Shaxi, I see the shadows of many mothers in China. They do their best to manage the housework, dedicate everything to the family, give up their self-pursuit, suppress their self-needs, and in return are the indifference of their husbands and children. My husband thinks that I have provided you with adequate living conditions, so you should not be dissatisfied and pursue spiritual independence. Children also feel that pursuit and progress belong to young people. Mothers only need to drink tea and chat with their peers. It is enough to dance the square dance and prepare for the old age. Before all this, we also forgot that mothers had the most beautiful times when they were young, and had their own careers and love like their daughters. However, when they got older, their sacrifices became a matter of course. Their regrets have become trivial matters, and no one can patiently listen to their inner demands.
Even the post-90s generation who advertises themselves as democratic and progressive may not be able to do better than the daughter in the movie. We define ourselves as democratic and progressive, but leave the term of backwardness and conservatism to mothers who cannot keep up with the times. And once a mother, such as Shahi, is determined to do something, we may not put a look of unbelief on our faces, but we silently express our doubts about the mother's ability with our words and deeds.
As a post-90s generation, I will also be a new mother this year. For a while, I didn't know if it was due to fluctuating hormone levels, and I was also full of self-doubt. I doubt whether I can balance work and family, whether I will neglect my responsibility to my children because of my busy work, and whether I will finally give up my career pursuit because of a sense of family responsibility. This sense of oppression from life was something I never had in my teenage years.
In my subconscious mind, I found that a woman's charge in her career before she has no family and children is very affirmed by the society, and once she has a family and children, the society defaults that women should return to the family. There are often gossips about the divorce of strong women among the neighbors. Naturally, we don’t take it to heart, but after listening to more, I often wonder why the whole society has such huge expectations for unmarried women and married women. difference.
The traditional culture of our country has always attached great importance to the family. It is not individual people but families that make up the country. We have entered the industrial age, but the thinking of the whole society still retains the closedness of the agricultural age, and the most basic traditional model is that the male leads the outside and the female leads the inside.
China has never had such a large-scale bottom-up feminist movement as the West. In the late 1950s, more and more Western men chose to return to the family and share family responsibilities equally, but the initiative of "men returning to the family" has never been heard in China. In Chinese families, if some men are willing to wave their brooms and hug their children after returning home from get off work, they are already considered "good men".
The predicament of Chinese women is that we already have an economic status that is close to that of Western women, but we have not yet obtained a social status that matches it. The whole society still acquiesce in that it is the exclusive domain of women to manage housework and take care of the elderly. China's unique human relationship, social morality and public opinion have been crushed by thousands of years of tradition. And what makes me most sad is that the biggest enemy of women is still women, and many of them are young women. These refined egoists arm themselves with new ideas, but use old morality to measure others.
For some time, I paid close attention to the posts of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in Tianya community. Especially in 2008-09, the battle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in Tianya was overwhelming. The whole screen was filled with complaints from daughter-in-law to mother-in-law. With grandchildren, I was still in college at that time, and I was ignorant about these family chores. But now that I have reached the age of being a mother, I can't help but ask those young daughters-in-law, is it a woman who has reached the age of being a mother-in-law, dedicated the first half of her life to her husband, and is still obliged to spend the second half of her life for her sons and grandchildren? Is a woman's value in being a free babysitter, and it's better to serve another woman comfortably as a princess and then as a queen? When I read the post again recently, I found that the mother-in-law of Tianya community launched a counterattack. Maybe because we're getting old too, many of us have sons, and we're trying to think from a mother-in-law's point of view, so the war between the two generations of women is increasingly even.
Zhihu has a very good answer to the question about dealing with parents' urging marriage: "You should get married when you are old, so should you die when you are old?" To give up the right to pursue freedom and happiness, what is the difference between that and death?
I always believe that life has not reached the end, and our desire for happiness and self-pursuit will also have no end, no matter if we are a young girl in our youth or an old woman who is about to grow old.
This is how a woman's life should be spent.
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An old article.
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