Listener

For all the women who wake up alone in the middle of the night When marriage is nothing but an empty shell, when dedication is reduced to a joke, when oneself is lost in the roles of "wife" and "mother" - who has ever seriously listened to the tsunami in your heart? 38-Year-old Lin Hongxuan caught her cheating husband and his mistress on their wedding bed on their wedding anniversary. Fifteen years of marriage shattered overnight. After she left home, she took her 12-year-old daughter and squeezed into a 40-square-meter rental house in the old city. Her ex-husband threw her last sentence of judgment: "You are too strong and make me less like a man." A betrayal tore away the disguise of a perfect housewife and revealed the many holes behind the glamor of urban women. In order to save herself, and to save women who were suffocating in silence like her, Lin Hongxuan, who only had a high school education, opened a listening studio called "Tree Hole" in her scarred heart after countless late nights of reading books until dawn. Here, she is not a savior, just a lamp-bearer. She listens: - Suman, a 39-year-old foreign company executive, and her husband lived apart from each other for three years. The video went from once a day to "talk to me when I have something to do" until I found out that he already had a new "wife" and family thousands of miles away. - Wang Meiling, 40-year-old self-employed, started a business with her husband from scratch for 18 years. After forgiving the cheating, she once again saw the unsavory chat records on her husband's mobile phone. I can't afford to leave, and I can't live with it. - Chen Yutong, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mother. After her husband died unexpectedly, her parents-in-law, who held pensions, took her to court on the grounds that "a woman cannot raise children well" and vowed to take away her children. - There are also civil servants who are stuck in a sexless marriage, female doctors who are torn between career and family, and single mothers who are struggling with their adolescent daughter and her cold ex-husband... "It's not that we don't want to divorce, we just can't afford it. Mortgage, children, parents, face... None of them are more important than our own feelings." "The scariest thing about marriage is not the quarrels, but the loss of the desire to quarrel." "After becoming a mother, even crying has to take time. You can only cry when the child is asleep, and you can't make a sound when crying." Every word of confiding is a footnote to the collective life of post-80s women. While listening to their pain, Lin Hongxuan was also struggling to suture his own wounds: facing her ex-husband's persistent requests for compounding, dealing with her daughter's sensitive and rebellious adolescence, and struggling to balance between survival pressure and career ideals. It wasn't until the "Yanshen Study" next door, which always smelled of tea and the owner had warm eyes, quietly opened that she realized that listening and being listened to, healing and being healed, were always a two-way street. "The Listener" is more than a story about marriage, betrayal and growing up. It is a mirror that reflects the tenacity and hesitation of a generation of women in the cracks of the times; it is an echo that tells you that I understand all those unspeakable grievances; and it is a glimmer of light that illuminates the possibility of letting go of the past, finding oneself, and bravely regenerating. Our generation may never learn to live perfectly. But we can learn to live authentically. If you are 30-45 years old, have chewed the astringency of life alone late at night, lost yourself in multiple identities, and felt suffocated in the siege of reality - then this story is for you. Pushing open the door of "Tree Hole", someone will say: "Speak slowly, I'm listening." Intention: I have chewed the astringent taste of life alone late at night, lost myself in multiple identities, and felt suffocated in the siege of reality - then this story is written for you.