Love on the Dirt Ground

Today is the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. By Chinese folk legend, on the night of Qixi the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl meet again in the sky, so Qixi is China's Valentine's Day. The seventh day of the seventh lunar month is also my mother's birthday; the date on which she was born chanced to be bound up with affection and loyalty, and her own life was indeed a life of deep feeling and loyalty. Though she and my father were married through a matchmaker's introduction, over a lifetime together they came to love each other. Their experience taught me that love is not only of the free-choice kind; couples matched by a traditional matchmaker can also build love.

In the last ten-plus years of my mother's life, my father was never apart from her. After she fell ill, he cared for her with the utmost devotion. My mother was deeply moved and no longer held against him some hurts he had caused her when they were young. In her last rally before death, the last words she spoke were three syllables: "Old man"—that was how she addressed my father in her later years. That single address held a thousand words: reluctance to part, and also concern and worry.

My mother worried that after she was gone my father would not maintain good relations with the children. In fact, after she died my father got on very well with us. The instant my mother passed away, our family became utterly united. Knowing that she was gone, we had to unite beneath her love and not let her leave with worry; we knew we must look after one another so that she could rest easy in the netherworld.

After my mother died, my father sank into deep grief, weeping involuntarily dozens of times a day; any object that reminded him of her would plunge him into sorrow. By our custom, from the first seven-day memorial on, the deceased's belongings were to be burned, a portion at each seven-day rite, all finished by the forty-ninth day. Before, I did not understand the purpose of this custom; after my mother died I felt for myself how great its effect is. It is meant to reduce how often the living see an object and think of the person. Every detail of folk custom actually has its social function.

After she died, my father several times said to me: Son, your mother has come back. I asked how he knew; he said: I smelled her scent. As he said it, tears flowed. Two people who have loved to the depths can truly perceive one another's scent, though it is not scientific.

During that period, my father often wandered by the doorway, eagerly looking out, hoping my mother would return, carefully scenting the air. Though he knew she had died, he still hoped to smell her scent again, if only to comfort himself. After losing the person one loves most, a person is extremely sensitive; the faintest perception could bring my father to tears.

For the first two years we urged my father to find another companion; nearly every relative and friend around us urged him. He was only in his early sixties then, but he refused. We thought perhaps he needed time to forget my mother and find another partner. But more than ten years passed, and he never again had any thought of remarrying; he only often wiped my mother's portrait spotlessly clean—it was the anchor of his emotions.

My parents had no soul-stirring love story to sing of. At the age when "a man should marry and a woman wed," they were brought together by a matchmaker, raised children together, and worked from sunrise to sunset. They did quarrel sometimes, quite fiercely at times. But in middle and old age their feelings for each other grew deeper. After all, they had gone through many hardships together.

Now I think my mother's family may carry a "love gene."

On the day my aunt (uncle's wife) died, she was still working in the fields with my uncle when she suddenly coughed up blood; by the time she reached the hospital she could not be saved. Before dying, she said to my uncle: "Guangbao, I do not regret having spent this life with you; in the next life I will be your wife again." My uncle was poor and down-and-out all his life, and with him my aunt had really never known easy days. But she had been frail and sickly since youth, and my uncle cared for her with every attention, so she wanted nothing more; she felt that even eating chaff and swallowing greens with him was happiness.

Uncle and aunt are said to have married for love when young. At the time the family strongly opposed it because of her poor health, but my uncle, against the family's opposition, still married her; a man like him is truly a romantic at heart.

Love stories in romance novels are soul-stirring and leave one's heart racing. But I always feel they are not quite real. The love I saw in the countryside, on this dirt ground, though it has fewer soul-stirring episodes, is a lifetime of companionship, sharing hardship together, not forgetting one another to the last moment; such love feels more real to me.

After my aunt died, my uncle likewise never found another partner. In the countryside there are actually quite a few widowed elderly; many pair up to live together and start autumn-of-life romances. But my father and uncle, all their lives, remembered only their own spouses. Their hearts could hold no other woman, so they had no desire for a new partner and simply devoted their energy to their children.

Love as written by men of letters takes many forms, but all inevitably carry some surreal fantasy. I am forty-four this year; the true love I can grasp is the kind that has shared hardship together. This love looks plain and unremarkable, but it lets us know the other truly wants to be with us, because they are not afraid to go through hardship with us.

I rather doubt whether, after getting past the hardest period, a person can still meet true love. That fantasized love, never washed by reality, does not count. In real life, poverty and adversity test a person's sincerity most of all. If someone stays by our side in our difficult times, walking with us hand in hand, that person is worth loving and cherishing for a lifetime. Though in reality a few people do betray their original heart and abandon the spouse who shared their hardship, the great majority do not.

A lifetime is long; sometimes, because life is too plain, we doubt whether we still love the person beside us. But that is only because the moments of parting for death have not yet come. When they truly come, we will know that love has not vanished; it is only covered over by daily life, no longer conspicuous. Wipe it off, and that love shines all the brighter. So I myself cherish this love on the dirt ground and never fantasize about surreal love. Love on the dirt ground, though plain, is real and warm.