"Non-fiction" story.
When I saw this topic, I suddenly had such an urge to write about my own life after this most extraordinary marriage. It's mostly messy and unpleasant, but fortunately I'm an optimist by nature, and even at the bottom, I never forget to smile desperately.
I am a college student who married naked in the countryside.
Every time, when people around me ask me what I do for a living, I say, I do self-publishing, in case you don't know. In layman's terms, that means I'm an online writer.
Most of the time they don't believe me, because they think a college student, or a college student who can write, why would she marry in the countryside and live in such a "poor" life?
Sometimes I don't understand why I stayed in the countryside for three years so willingly. In the beginning, I said, "It's because of love."
Married to Mr., who was very poor and had no house or car, the only thing he had was a four-room bungalow in the countryside, and we got married in that house, which then became our new home.
After marriage, we worked together in Beijing, which many people love. When I was in college, I always thought of Beijing as the place I most longed for. But when I actually lived in Beijing for five years, I realized there was no way I could fall in love with it. I have despised myself countless times for not being able to love such a big city. As I write these words now, I already know how many people will scold me for my lack of ambition.
I've been living in Beijing for five years, and even with my husband by my side, I couldn't resist the urge to run away from it. I couldn't afford a house there, I didn't have family there, and I couldn't find the kind of people I wanted there.
You may not be able to imagine that when I was crammed into the crowded subway, so seasick that I could hardly pass out, what popped into my head was Tao Yuanming's poem: "Young and unsuited to the common rhymes, the nature of the love of the hills."
I don't like the fast-paced life of the big city. Just like I don't like the king of flowers, the peony. I like those unknown wild flowers and weeds.
Countless young people have flocked to Beijing, and they are living in a very small area of the city, just as I did, and they have been in the same mess that I was in, but they haven't given up on their dreams.
But what if my dream is very, very small, just to have a "relatively stable" life?
When he showed me the four cottages in the countryside, he was very apprehensive. He was afraid that when I saw it, I would turn around and leave. After all, too much love has lost out to reality. I turned around there and surprisingly liked it. The house was surrounded by a large wooded area, and 100 meters away was a very wide river.
I looked at Mr. and said, "I like sycamore trees, if you plant them, I'll marry you."
The gentleman was overjoyed, and he said, "On our side of the family, the last thing we need is sycamores. I'll plant them for you right away."
You see, I am the kind of girl who has no great ambition, in my eyes, those caravans and money, can not match those two sycamore trees and a man who really loves your heart.
But love has to face reality, which is why I later wrote an emotional story, countless times to persuade all the girls to be careful when marrying naked. Because the woman who married naked, want to live a good life, it is necessary to pay the strength and time. And many times, the years you want to have a good life, you need to have financial support.
Then, I didn't know what self-publishing was. I could have nestled in this little corner of the world, writing to make some money, but Mr. studied design, in the countryside, or in small cities simply can not find work.
And that's part of the truth I've since learned about fleeing the north. It's not that many people don't want to go back to the countryside or small towns, but when they do, they don't have more employment opportunities.
Even today, most of the men in my rural area go out to work to earn money. They don't come home for years, and they only bother to come back once for the New Year.
After we got married, and in our second year of working in Beijing, I got pregnant. I wanted to stick to my job, but my husband began to worry: "You squeeze the subway and the bus, what if I squeeze my stomach? You are on the computer all day long, what about the radiation to the child? What if you get carsick and pass out?"
Faced with the arrival of the child, we were at a loss, and finally I had to quit my job and rest assured that I would be able to raise my child in a rented room. The vomiting came on ferociously, and in the end, even Mr. couldn't work properly, and at that time, he had just been promoted to manager and resigned. We were in Beijing, two young people settled down for three months, no one to earn money, every day is a person faint and vomit, a person over there cooking, care, and have to face my emotional breakdown.
Three months later, I finally stopped throwing up, but had lost less than 80 pounds. I suddenly realized at that time that we could not afford to spend time in a big city like Beijing, and I told my husband to go to work by himself. I stayed at my parents' house for a few months, and then went back to our four-room bungalow.
I was in that house for three years. My mother-in-law stayed there with me for three years. In fact, their house was very close to ours, but my mother-in-law still chose to stay with me every night at my place because I was afraid to live alone.
Those three years, my husband and I were long-distance. During those three years, we were financially deprived, but I never lacked love. Three years, Mr. with great perseverance, managed to come back to see me and my children once a month, and after each return, he would help me do the housework, and before he left, he must have wiped all the floors of the house clean.
For three years, we videoed almost every day. He tolerated all kinds of my bad temper, but also endured all kinds of his own love for his wife and children.
For three years, I basically never cooked for myself and always followed my in-laws for meals. After my children were older, I began to engage in self-media, and wrote all kinds of rural stories at home every day. And my mother-in-law helped me with the kids.
Most of those three years, I was in a sorry state, not wearing any nice clothes, not going out to eat a few times. Luckily, when I got married, my in-laws bought me a big row of bookshelves filled with books, so I dove headfirst into them. For those three years, reading every day was my norm, I wrote tons of book reviews and words, and I finally had a place in self-publishing.
I started earning money, and my husband worked his butt off in Beijing, and we had the money to buy a house and a car in our fourth year of marriage. We could have bought a house in the city, but Mr. Wu was so attached to his family, and I was so attached to the countryside where I had lived for three years, that we chose a small town not far from home.
This is our life now, Mr. quit his job and came home to start engaging in self-publishing, and we live in this small city every day with our children and live in peace. Every weekend we take the kid home to see his grandparents, and I walk around looking for some rural material stories.
I still get asked, "Why did you marry in the countryside and stay in such a small place."
I no longer say it was because of love; I say it was because I had the right to choose the life I wanted. I can pursue my favorite career in a small town.
When I went to Chengdu this month to attend a Baidu summit, a friend said, "If it weren't for the self-publishing media, how could these little people in the countryside have a chance to turn their lives around."
"Yes, because of the self-media, we, the little people in the countryside, really have their own stage and life, do not have to leave their homes, you can keep your family, and fight for their own a career."