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Chinese View on Family
Special> Chinese View on Family
UPDATED: February 23, 2009 NO. 8 FEB. 26, 2009
Love Will Keep Us Together
During the romantic spirit that permeates the senses around Valentine's Day, Beijing Review takes a look at the different roles marriage and family play in Chinese life
 
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Living Her Own Life

By LI LI

Fifty-two-year-old Liu Xingfen's two-story house in a mountainous village of southwest China's Yunnan Province welcomed a new occupant last year. Her boyfriend has lived with her since September.

Liu's husband died from a stroke nine years ago. Her four children having moved to big cities, she lived with only her 92-year-old mother-in-law. The two quarreled for the first time in years after Liu broke the news that a man was going to live with them.

"My son was so unlucky," said the elderly woman, who clings to the old-fashioned tenets of maintaining a woman's virtue in society. When she was young, it was inconceivable for a woman to remarry.

Liu, though, is uncompromising. She never liked the idea of living with her children and becoming a burden.

But just six months after moving in, her boyfriend has earned the trust of her mother-in-law, who obediently calls her mom and does all the housework.

Liu married her husband when she was 20 years old. Like most single women in her village, she got to know him through a matchmaker-a friend to both families. The husband was handsome and was given a house by his parents. She was satisfied with the marriage, although the trip to her future home took a three-hour walk on bumpy mountainous paths that made cycling too dangerous.

In 1978, the year after she got married, she gave birth to her first child-a son. The same year witnessed China's adoption of reform and opening-up policy. During the next seven years, she bore two more sons and a daughter, despite of the enactment of China's family planning policy in 1980, which restricted rural families to produce no more than two children.

As a woman who received only a five-year primary school education, Liu could barely read. She believed in the old saying, "More sons, more blessings."

And she tried to pass this idea on to the next generation. When Liu's son brought his wife for their first visit home, she gave the couple a piece of advice, "Money deposits are useless. More children are much more useful."

Liu's husband was the head of a local coalmine employing over 500 workers, so she felt lucky that her family did not have the financial worries of supporting their education like other families in the village. After her husband's death, she worked extra hard to pay school and university tuitions for her children, shouldering the family's major financial burdens alone. To keep her eldest son from worrying about tuition, she hid the news of his father's death for half a year. The hard labor never upset her, she said, not even when carrying baskets of potatoes weighing almost as much as her.

Never ceasing to admire her husband, she has told her sons many times, "I would be more than satisfied if you could be only half as capable and farsighted as your dad."

She is very satisfied with her life. "You have your lives, I have my own," she tells her children. "As long as I can take care of myself, you will have a home to come back to."

                                   

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