The helplessness and sorrow of women in the 1970s: Ever since Ma Lanhua’s own father had forced her to marry Wang Zhishu by swinging a shoulder pole at her, Wang Zhishu had spent his days drinking and raising fighting birds, content with the easy life. He was lazy and gluttonous, and even seduced another man’s wife, fooling around with her in a cornfield. Ma Lanhua could only clench her fists and put up with it. Later, when they fled to another province to make a living because they had too many children, she thought Wang Zhishu would finally shape up without the support of his father and brothers. After he put in some effort to support the family, however, he soon fell back into his old ways. If she left, the children would have an even harder life, but all her patient endurance got her was drunken domestic abuse from Wang Zhishu.
She endured for more than a decade, every year worse than death. The children had not yet grown up when Wang Zhishu died of alcohol poisoning after drinking too much. Even as he lay dying, he kept talking about the thrush he had loved most back then. Ma Lanhua simply wiped his face in silence. It didn’t rain on the day of the funeral. Standing before his grave, she didn’t shed a single tear. All she felt was that the boulder that had weighed on her for decades had finally shattered.
I just want to write down the life of a miserable woman in that era