It tells the story of three women who each struggled to escape their fate during the decline of the Wen silk family in Jiangcheng, the south.
The Wen family lives in the ancestral private garden "Jinyuan". They started their business with silk and are a time-honored brand in Jiangcheng. After the old lady passed away, an old trust unexpectedly surfaced - the beneficiary of a valuable piece of land in the south of the city turned out to be the old lady's granddaughter Su Wantang. This young woman, whose surname is not Wen, has lived in Jinyuan in silence for nine years, passing her days by painting with pens and fine brushwork.
The three brothers turned against each other over the sale of land, the group collapsed, and Jinyuan was eventually demolished. In this disintegration, the three women faced their fate with completely different attitudes: Su Wantang was like a thread, silent but full of resilience; the second daughter-in-law Gu Mingyao wrapped herself in a cocoon and maintained her dignity with restraint; and Zhong Rui, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Wen's eldest daughter, was like a broken needle, writing a diary in a green notebook every night that no one would read.
A woman's place in the old family is not up to her - but the way she leaves is up to her.
Concept: "Taking Silk" is about how people in the old structure face the fact of "dispersion".
The collapse of the Wen family was not a sudden collapse overnight, but like a thread being pulled out one by one. One thread was broken today and another thread was pulled out tomorrow. When you look back, you find that the thread has long been out of shape. In this process, no one wins. The brothers turned against each other over money, the wife swallowed silently, and the younger generation grew his own bones in the cracks.
But what I really want to write about is women. Not the kind of women who stand at the forefront of the storm and shout loudly, but those women who have been assigned a position, assigned a role, and acquiesced in their destiny in the old family structure. Most of them will not resist, because the word resist is too big, they just remain silent. Silence itself is not weakness - there is patience, observation, and a little bit of sobriety in silence.
Su Wantang was silent. She has been painting meticulous paintings for nine years, tracing embroidery patterns one stroke at a time, hiding everything she wants to say in the painting. Gu Mingyao is also silent. She rides a motorcycle to manage the group and plays the role of a decent second daughter-in-law in front of everyone. No one knows what she swallowed alone. Zhong Rui's silence is the sharpest. She keeps a diary and writes down the faces of everyone in the Wen family. Those words are more deadly than the report letters.
What these three women have in common is this: they are trapped. The difference is how you leave. Some people walk very slowly, like silkworms spinning silk, pulling themselves out of their cocoons bit by bit; some people walk very decisively, burning out all escape routes; and some people walk without even knowing that they have left, and only when they look back do they realize that the road behind them has been cut off.
"Silk-drawing" is not only a craft, but also an attitude - without tearing or shouting, one by one, pull out the silk that binds you cleanly. The movement was slow and painful, but in the end, nothing was left on my hands.