Su Mingyu's path to healing
In Anai's writing, Su Mingyu is modern enough. She is both a "disciple of Yi Shu" and a master of business warfare who uses "The Selected Works of Mao" as a guide. In short, she is a cunning and strong person. Such a person suffers at every turn in his own family, and is hard to reconcile with all kinds of worries. She regards the Su family as a demonic barrier that she cannot separate, break away from, or run away from. As the story unfolds, her feelings for the Su family gradually change. The advantage of the novel version is that it directly writes the psychology of the characters and shows the mental journey in detail:
In the first stage, hatred, anger, fear and helplessness coexist. Especially as the mystery of her life experience was revealed, she learned that her birth was just a tool in exchange for urban household registration, and she felt a sense of shame.
In the second stage, she began to realize that hatred was gnawing at her: "All the darkness must stop. Even though she still has a lot of hatred that has not been settled, it still has to stop. Otherwise, she will have to live with her for the rest of her life. Go in." She would rather forget that experience than forgive it. Note that forgetting does not mean forgiving.
In the third stage, she found that she had become an absolute strong person, especially after her mother had passed away. After her understanding of Su Mingcheng deepened: "She seemed to have lost the target of hatred again," and her enemies "suddenly It seems to have softened.”
In the final stage, as a strong person, she finally understood what to do. "She now has the confidence to face the past and face everyone she doesn't like in two. She knows that she is healing." For her, the most important thing is not revenge and venting hatred, but healing herself. She finally faced her pain and turned it into strength. At the end of the novel, Mingyu, Shi Tiandong and Su's father celebrate the New Year together. She finally finds the "appropriate distance" between herself and her original family: family ties can never be regained, so let's just interact lightly. She doesn't have high hopes, nor does she She hated her so much that she could do whatever she wanted, as long as she and Shi Tiandong were happy. She seemed to be confused to the end.
The so-called "confusion to the end" comes precisely from complete sobriety. You cannot choose your birth, and it is difficult for others to change. The only one who can change is yourself. First of all, you can only say "I am fine". Establishing a "light as water" family connection is based on her active choice, not cynical submission. The book "Original Family: How to Repair Your Own Character Flaws" writes: "We try our best to fight this kind of struggle, hoping that our parents can be more loving and tolerant to us. But this kind of struggle will drain our energy and make us Our lives are full of chaos and pain, and the only way to win is to give up the fight. "Giving up the fight does not mean being passive, but it means completely abandoning the wrong family model and relying on your own strength to create a new life. At this point, Su Mingyu can apply "Selected Works of Mao Zedong" to life, look at people he doesn't like "in two", and reason can overcome emotions.
After "I'm fine"
How to understand and reconstruct today's family
We cannot stay at the "ideal type" of personal healing; The bet is on serial coincidences. After all, Su Mingyu is in the minority, and there are more people who may not even be as good as Fan Shengmei. As Lu Xun revealed, the "I am fine" of a small family is very fragile, and its long-term stability cannot be separated from the improvement of the external environment. So, is there a more reliable and radical path to change? Can it provide the necessary social environment, cultural education and conceptual support for a more ideal family relationship? Of course, this is a long process, but whether we have such awareness may lead to different directions in reality. If our thinking can be more fundamental and pragmatic, and we can say no to happy endings, we will be able to speak loudly.
If we don’t stop at general topics such as family of origin, son preference, mother’s baby, nibbling on the elderly, etc., we can completely expand our thinking based on our own experience and knowledge and go deep into the texture of life.
Otherwise, we can only passively accept the hot spots and let others control our emotions without knowing it. We may laugh and curse seemingly cleverly, but in fact we have lost the ability to judge and think deeply. Although "Everything Is Fine" has many unsatisfactory aspects, as mentioned above, it puts many issues on the table and summons the experiences of people of different geographical strata and ages to re-examine them in the sun. This is an opportunity to form a fair discussion. In this sense, "Everything is Good" contains too many topics worth thinking about.
For example, how to solve violence and inequality within families. The scene that impressed everyone most was Su Mingcheng beating his own sister. Su Mingyu insisted on going through legal procedures to defend her rights, but was not understood by everyone. Even her confidant Liu Qing advised her: "You will not be able to escape the backlash from public opinion and the backlash from your own heart in the future." "The victim is accused of committing violence." "Can harm from relatives be exempted from liability? Obvious harm can be pursued, but how should psychological harm be measured? Violence does not necessarily come from the strong, it may also come from the weak like Su's father. Anai wrote: "In this world, people only see the surface, so they condone the so-called weak but well-developed scoundrels." Su's father's long-term inaction has actually become an accomplice of patriarchal preference. It is difficult to even find evidence for pursuing someone who is doing evil under the guise of protection.
For example, if violence and autocracy are undesirable, will democracy definitely work? Anai also wrote: "When exercising democracy, you sometimes have to consider who is on the other side." "Raising a childish adult will only lead to despair." Democracy can only develop among equal individuals. But the complexity of family relationships is that intergenerational relationships are always in a state of unequal strength. At a certain stage, one party always depends on and needs the other. Su Mingyu said: "My sadness is that I have no choice. I have been distorted when I was powerless. I can only bear it and be distorted." How to deal with unequal relationships is particularly worth thinking about.
Another example is the relationship between money and family affection. Su’s father’s ledgers are equally impressive. It is generally believed that in Chinese culture, talking about money hurts feelings. But it was Su's father's account books that revealed the truth about the uneven distribution of family resources. The passage in the novel describing Su Li's flipping through the ledger is very exciting: "She is a person who relies on numbers for her livelihood. The numbers on this ledger allow her to see a completely different world through the warm and warm scenes of the Su family in the past. Mother-in-law, father-in-law, and husband. "Their wealth was plundered by her and Mingcheng in the name of love." The relationship between the two generations is described as a relationship of exploitation and exploitation, a relationship of equal exchange. Money can clarify the weight of responsibilities and obligations. However, when people criticize Su Mingcheng for chewing on his old age, have you ever thought about how many young people under heavy pressure are doing so-called "gnawing at their old age"? Some sociological surveys show that many parents in Chinese families are willing to invest in buying houses for their children, viewing it as a kind of participation in their children's lives and enhancing intimacy in negotiating family affairs; parents also expect material feedback from their children, viewing it as Confirmation of good family relationships. From this point of view, money has the function of communicating emotions. But Su Mingcheng's doubt is that money is important, but what is the company of his parents?
Today, how to be parents, how to be children, and what kind of family we need all need to be rethought. Marx's famous sayings are still inspiring. What is important is to transform the world. Raising more detailed and in-depth issues will not directly change the world, but by breaking the rigid ideological imprints, observing and caring for ongoing experiences, and raising awareness of unreasonable family phenomena, it will help to change reality. improve. In the final analysis, saying no to happy endings is to force us to step outside the boundaries of our imagination and find a new way to change reality. All our efforts are just to make "everything is good" worthy of its name.