She Gave Her Life to Others

This is a documentary novel written in the first person of a daughter, recording the ordinary but tenacious life of a typical Chinese woman born in the 1960s - a mother, a wife, a grandmother. Coming out of a small town in DZ, Henan, she has experienced the cold and heat of marriage and the bitterness and sweetness of life with her stubbornness and tenacity. In that era when sons were valued over daughters, she not only shouldered the prejudices and shackles left by her mother's generation, but also tried her best to give her children more love through reflection and struggle. She got married at the age of twenty and moved from the east end of the village to the west end of the village. When she was young, she joined the factory with her husband and became a female worker in an oil factory. She worked hard and supported her family of four. When the wave of layoffs came, she resolutely took up the family's livelihood and returned to the countryside to farm land, raise rabbits, and contract idle land. She tried her best to ensure that her children could continue to study. She endured her husband's laziness and irresponsibility, but never gave up her family responsibilities; she loved her children, but she inevitably revealed the shadow of "patriarchal preference" in the details; she had to swallow her grievances in the face of daily necessities, but also maintain a smile over the long years. As the years passed, she gradually became the real "backbone" of the family. She is not only the mother that her daughter relies on, but also the confidence for her son to move forward, and she is also the grandmother that her grandchildren cannot live without. In an inarticulate way, she wrote her forbearance and tenderness into her three meals a day, her needlework and her sleepless nights. This book is not a legend, but a microcosm of thousands of ordinary mothers. They have never shaken the world, but in ordinary days, they use the most flexible strength to lift a home.