Our society is driven by the most basic gears.
Didi drivers, take-away riders, express delivery staff, cleaning staff, small vendors-these workers’ faces are the people we deal with the most every day.
Submerged in these faces are silent working women.
They are traditional women in China, who swallow the greatest amount of suffering in one gulp and maintain thousands of small families in the wind, frost, rain and snow. They have been given too many roles and heavy labels, but they have never complained about resistance or questioned.
This is the third report in the series "Invisible She: Portrait of Female Laborers", and we have entered the life of rural women.
Produced by Tiger Sniffing Youth Culture Group
Author | Cucumber soda
Edit | Zhazha County
This article first appeared in WeChat official account’s "That Ng" (ID: Huxiu4Youth), a young content of Tiger Sniffing. Here, we present the faces, stories and attitudes of young people today.
There is a kind of woman who is becoming the object of internet onlookers.
Most of them come from the countryside and have given birth to more than one child. Their only daily life is to take care of the life of the whole family and have an automatic invisible husband.
They are not very old, some of them were born in 1999, and the oldest is born in 1985. They come from underdeveloped areas, such as Northwest China and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.
With the popularity of smart phones, they recorded their daily life and sent it to Tik Tok, who was called "Bitter Melon Brigade" by netizens. Some people use their lives to warn girls not to fall in love with their brains, while others advise them to leave toxic marriages and families.
At first, people just had fun. But in the end, you will find that these "pleasures" are all made up of suffering.
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There is a popular saying among young people: the most vicious curse to a person is to make him a cow of Xiaoying’s family in the next life.
Who is Xiaoying?
She is probably the hottest rural woman in Tik Tok at present, with 2.01 million fans.
Her daily life consists of a few fixed things: cleaning a house that can never be cleaned, feeding a few scrawny scalpers forever, pulling two sallow and emaciated daughters, and taking care of a useless husband who has been "confinement" all the year round.
According to a few words in Xiaoying’s live broadcast, we can know that she was born in 1996, a Yi nationality in Yunnan. At the age of 17, she fell in love with her brain and married her current husband Wang Shifu. Her husband has a more famous name, called "Shanglaru", which means "handsome man" in Yunnan dialect. But reality is like a joke. Her husband, Lalu, is not only a handsome man, but also an ordinary man who drinks too much, is unkempt and has a bad face.
Xiaoying’s more than 500 video works, if you brush them from the beginning, you will find that her life is like a Chaplin black comedy with dubbing.
Her movements are original without thinking, and sometimes there are some funny and playful eggs.
At the beginning of each video, Xiaoying will say "mei ga", which is a modal particle in Yunnan dialect. Next, like reading a running account, she will describe the contents of the video screen, which is nothing more than what farm work she did and what she cooked today.
I don’t know if it’s because of unskilled technology, or Xiaoying doesn’t care at all. The sound and pictures of each of her videos are out of sync. The dubbing is still picking potatoes in the mountains, and the picture has been fried with shredded potatoes in the pot; The dubbing is still thawing the fish, and the fish in the picture is already burning in the pot.
?Famous picture: Xiaoying plays the disc
Her accent is pure Yunnan Mandarin, and the pronunciation of every word is unexpected. For example, pronounce "go" as "gram", "potato" as "gum" and "comb your hair" as "dredge".
The finishing touch is the soundtrack of voiceover. Either the bgm of the weather forecast or bgm’s "Going Home" after class bell has a strange and awkward black humor.
But it is precisely because of this shoddy impression that her comment area has become a paradise for college students. Netizens will also "persuade to escape" at first, but when they find that they can’t persuade them, they begin to tease her and make her into a hot stalk.
Some people also want to play "Xiaoying" in the glory of the king. On some university campuses, there are even leaflets printed with Xiaoying expression packs.
In Xiaoying, there is a sense of absurdity that "all efforts are in vain".
Garbage is like a resurrection point that automatically refreshes every day. Xiaoying bends over to clean the room every day, but the next day, a new dirty room appears automatically. Like rice that chickens can’t eat and noodles that dogs can’t lick, Xiaoying is always trapped in a desperate cycle of cleaning garbage.
Xiaoying loves cleanliness, but she doesn’t know which link has gone wrong. Xiaoying is very diligent and keeps the house in a mess every day.
Netizens have summed up that Xiaoying’s family is most tired of three things: washing machine, oil pollution net and Xiaoying himself.
The old double-drum washing machine is always working in pants, and there are sheets and quilts that can’t be washed at home, but they are always dark and can’t be washed clean; A bottle of greasy dirt can be used by Xiaoying to spray everything, but after wiping it, the home is still greasy; The concrete floor in the house is always dirt and garbage, which is cleaned with a wet mop and turned into clear water and mud.
For the first time, you will see the suffering of the countryside from her; The second time you look at it, you will be amused by Xiaoying’s clumsiness and nonsense; Seeing more and more, you will find that Xiaoying’s life is too abstract, and after people laugh, there are pains from it.
Xiaoying is very kind to her two daughters and cooks almost every day.
Unfortunately, her cooking skills are tricky, and she often makes cooking moves that ordinary people can’t understand.
She brushed the ribs with washing powder, and the sewage from the brush was directly fed to the cows. Live fish can be cooked directly without scaling and viscera removal; Stir-fried pig liver chewed by mice; Every time you boil lettuce, put several pieces of ginger in it; Even eagle-eyed netizens saw the crawling bugs when Xiaoying cut bacon.
Xiaoying’s two children are the least picky eaters in the world. Under Xiaoying’s feeding, she was sallow and emaciated all the year round and suffered from malnutrition.
Xiaoying’s cattle are the worst.
Xiaoying feeds the cow on time every day, even several times, but the old cow looks thinner and thinner, leaving only a skeleton. You can see the expression on the cow’s face. Netizens can’t stand it anymore, and even want animal protection organizations to save Xiaoying’s cattle.
Hungry and not dying, eating and not eating enough-this is the real torture. Cows that have lost their right-angled shoulders, when they wake up every day, are probably thinking "Why am I still alive?".
Xiaoying doesn’t feed the cows with fresh forage, but only some paste made of miscellaneous bran and corn flour. Internet users from all corners of the country are anxious to make suggestions: my family raises cattle, and I will teach you to raise them in this way, and the cows will certainly get fat.
Worst of all, the cow dung in the cowshed is half a meter high, and Xiaoying will trample it down. She did this because she thought it would be warmer for cows to sleep with cow dung on the ground. The netizens who were anxious all over the world taught her: "Cow dung must be shoveled every day. Which animal wants to sleep on its own excrement?"
I can’t imagine how much attention can be paid to such a home if it is handed over to Sister Northeast Rain.
Behind the ironic video, people can’t bear to accuse Xiaoying of not doing housework and farm work well.
In the video, she seldom sits down to rest. She can carry straw and hay several times larger than her body, shovel cow dung from a whole cowshed, and tie her children to her back all the year round when picking potatoes on the mountain. Once she weighed herself, and the number displayed on the scale was 36.8 kg. Netizens commented that this number was only available on the thermometer.
So where’s her husband?
If there is a dress in Shangla, it says such a low-level yellow joke as "recycling girls at a high price".
He spent all day in confinement, restoring a pure image of a lazy man in China. At home, he didn’t lift a finger, playing games with his mobile phone, and he was as calm as a mountain. Even if he occasionally appears in the farmland, he also looks at Xiaoying’s back basket and his hands are empty.
Local netizens in Yunnan often witness Lalu eating and drinking in restaurants on the street, and beer never leaves his hand. On the other hand, Xiaoying’s mother and daughter are three, and several dishes on the dinner table are sparse, and they are sallow and emaciated all day.
People want Xiaoying to earn money and hope that she can escape from this family; People also don’t want Xiaoying to make money, and they are afraid that Lalu will take away her income. However, Xiaoying’s reply makes people laugh and cry even more: if Shanglaru is raising a mistress outside, call her back and do housework with her.
Left: Pull-up with empty hands.
Right: Xiaoying’s injured hand doing farm work.
To what extent do the people hate pulling up?
Pull up like drinking all day, and finally drank himself into pancreatitis, lying in a hospital bed with unbearable pain. Everyone smiled and their mouths were like honey-
"Is there any risk of recovery from this disease?" I hope that pancreatitis can be defeated at an early date.
Some people advised advertisers not to send anything to Xiaoying in the past two months, so that she could not afford to treat Lalu. Some people even want to transfer money to local netizens in Yunnan, so that people can help themselves go to the hospital and pull it up like a big fight. Shangraru’s hospital bed has become a punching point for netizens in Yunnan.
Of course, malice doesn’t happen for no reason. Xiaoying once injured her arm when she was doing farm work. She went to the hospital for treatment alone, only one arm could be used, and she had to look after the children. Now that Lalu is in hospital, Xiaoying has to take care of her children and her grandchildren. Xiaoying, who weighs less than 80 pounds, has only a light bone left.
Perhaps only when Lala is gone will Xiaoying’s life have new possibilities.
If a lover is like watering a flower, then pulling it up is like a bottle of paraquat.
Xiaoying was actually a beautiful Yi girl before she married Shanglaru. When she was 17 years old, she fell in love with her brain. She chose to marry Shanglaru. Now 28 years old, she said in the live broadcast room that two children trapped her and she couldn’t leave the house.
She even wrote and sang a folk song:
"At the beginning, Lalu chased me and said that I would not work, and that I would be supported in my life. Now I can’t finish my work every day."
The bitter life has not changed Xiaoying, who is still kind in essence.
When a fan finds a village to help her work, she cooks a table of food. Although it’s not delicious, it’s a piece of mind that she can take out. There are also netizens who want to let the "explosive makeup artist rabbit" who is very popular recently "explode" Xiaoying, but she also refused, because she felt that this trip was a long way and could not bring any practical benefits to the other party.
In fact, she listened to what the netizen advised her.
She pulled down the asbestos shingles in the old house. Learn to shovel cow dung, re-feed the cows, and feed the cows with brown sugar water. The room for the eldest daughter is the cleanest place in the whole family. She always buys new skirts and headdresses for her two daughters, and even buys a brand-new set for the children to go to bed and get off the table, which is a dream gift for many children.
When she was sitting on the desk, she couldn’t help being in a trance: if Xiaoying had been sitting on the desk at that time, maybe she wouldn’t be living like this now.
She hasn’t been to any school, nor has she been to the outside world. She entered a marriage without any life guidance. Even when helping the eldest daughter with her homework, she almost mispronounced all the pinyin.
Netizens hate iron and steel, and advised her to leave the mountain and take her two daughters to study in the county.
But some situations are not as simple as you and I imagined in big cities. Apart from making videos, Xiaoying may not even have the skills to make a living.
She is optimistic, and at the same time she is a little sober and crazy.
On one occasion, a netizen asked her what the benefits of getting married were in the live broadcast room. She smiled bitterly and replied, "The benefits of marriage are only known to happy people."
On another occasion, she drank too much sweet rice wine and fell asleep in the field. This scene has also become Xiaoying’s famous scene, and many people even took this picture as an expression pack.
In the mountains where she can’t escape, the young girl can only continue to shoot videos, at least this is the fastest way to improve her life.
Now Xiaoying still maintains the habit of loving beauty and is a person who loves life. Her optimism in poverty has a cruel impression.
When moving crops in the field, she will specially stop to compare with the camera; A brand-new mirror is installed at home, and she will smile at herself in the mirror and turn around.
In addition to vlog, Xiaoying will also shoot some videos of herself wearing makeup, wearing skirts and dancing with flowers. Behind them are the mountains and sunshine in Yunnan, which is the most desirable place for the urban middle class and the place where Xiaoying has been trapped for 28 years.
Although the ultraviolet rays on the plateau tanned her and her face was covered with wrinkles because of doing farm work, it can still be seen that Xiaoying is a girl with beautiful facial features.
At this time, everyone realized that Xiaoying was only in her twenties.
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Another 97-year-old girl named Daru lived in a village in Gansu, and netizens joked that she lived a life of "Xin Zhe Ku" (Xin Zhe Ku: the place where guilty slaves served hard labor in Qing Dynasty dramas).
Her life vlog is similar to Xiaoying’s. She has three children and is a full-time housewife. But unlike Xiaoying, her family has strict rules and dogmas and needs to serve her parents-in-law.
At four o’clock every morning, when the northwest sky is still dark, it is as big as getting up.
"As soon as I open my eyes, there are countless things waiting for me"-this is the prologue of one of her videos.
She first added a new charcoal block to the stove, then put on a headscarf and a down jacket, cleaned the fallen leaves in the yard in the night, and then filled them into the kang hole to burn.
Back in the house, it was as big as starting to cook breakfast for the whole family. My parents-in-law want to eat steamed buns and cakes baked every day, so she starts to mix flour, bake cakes, cook porridge and stir-fry every morning, and nothing can go wrong-if she is late for breakfast, "my father-in-law will be angry". My husband’s family will be unhappy if the bun for breakfast remains the same.
As big as living in a separate room with children, it is also a kitchen. At four o’clock in the morning, she rolled noodles on the kang and then cooked with a charcoal stove. And her parents-in-law sleep in another spacious and bright main room with much better conditions. Three meals a day should be prepared in your own room, taken to your in-laws’ room, and then returned to the kitchen to eat with the children.
Left: In-laws’ room
Right: as big as a room with children.
Besides cooking, washing clothes and cleaning, I have to go to the hillside to fill the kang hole with fallen leaves in my back basket, and then make lunch before my father-in-law comes home from worship. The video was speeded up by her, showing only a few seconds. In fact, it took her several hours to sweep the fallen leaves together.
Like Xiaoying’s washing machine, Da Rujia also uses a pair of washing machines with pants. Soak the clothes in water, wash them, spin them dry, and dry them in the air-these actions are repeated constantly, as big as washing them from noon until dark, and taking time to make a lunch for my father-in-law in the middle.
The sun and sky in the northwest are pale, surrounded by dry and yellow, and there is no life for girls standing in it.
When I go back to my parents’ house, Dairu usually smiles. She is the youngest daughter, with her brother, sister-in-law and sister taking care of her, and she can play the coquetry with her parents. But when I get to my husband’s house, it’s as if I’m smiling only when I’m with my children, and she’s just working at other times. Before she got married, she couldn’t cook either, and she was scolded by her husband’s family in the process of learning to cook.
At first, netizens complained about her in the comment area, and some people advised her to escape and live on the pancake craft. Later, when everyone got tired of reading it, they began to leave messages. This is called "Marry a XX man and enjoy the life of a lover". "Before you got married, didn’t their families eat?"
But she seldom complains, because here,All daughter-in-law lead a similar life.
In the video, she said, "In fact, happiness and unhappiness depend on who you meet. As long as the person you are looking for loves you enough and has you in his heart, he will give you enough preferences and exceptions."
Obviously, I didn’t enjoy this preference and exception.
She told in the video that she and her husband got married only once, and the two sides didn’t understand at all. Now that they have been married for several years, their likes and dislikes for each other are still blank, like strangers under the same roof, "because there is no time to sit together and get to know each other."
Even so, they gave birth to two children.
Gansu netizens in the comment area said that in some areas with strict rules, young people are so combined at the request of their parents.
The most frightening thing is not the life as big as a big one, but that her two daughters may repeat her mistakes, from generation to generation, and they will not see the morning sun.
Two months ago, I tried to contact Daru, hoping to visit her home, but she refused me twice in a row.
For the first time, she was afraid that her parents-in-law would be angry if they knew. She said: "I didn’t let my in-laws know that I made the video. My father-in-law has a bad temper. When he says he will turn his face, he thinks it is a shameful thing to make the video, and he is very opposed."
The second time, she was afraid that her identity would cause controversy: "I am afraid that my story will be used by others to attack us. I’m afraid that my life like this is rare, and many people don’t understand it and think it may be a specific constraint. "
Many netizens found that compared with incoherent Xiaoying, Da Ru’s Mandarin was more fluent, his writing level was better, and even the video was cut well. Soon, she received some cooperation orders for domestic skin care products and small household appliances.
Perhaps because she earned money with goods, Dairu’s family status has also improved a little, and she has gained a little freedom in this yard. In the video of the last two months, even the invisible husband appeared, and he occasionally helped Daru do some heavy farm work.
Below one of her hottest videos, she wrote a copy like this:
"The schoolbag is heavy, but it is as light as a feather compared with your future, and the hardships of study and life are always the same."
In the era of short video, these women who were trapped in the mountains and caves all their lives finally tore a tiny hole.
They can see the outside world, and the outside world can see them.
howeverSurvivors in the city, however, covered their heads with a light sentence "Your cognition is worthy of your suffering".
Why didn’t you resist?
Why don’t you get a divorce?
Why didn’t you run away?
Why don’t you study hard?
……
Lu Xun has given the answer. After Nora left, she either degenerated or came back. Because they need money, they need to be able to afford the economic conditions to support 2-3 children. Can they find a job to support their children in today’s society without receiving higher education?
The most painful thing in life is that there is no way to go after waking up. Happy is the dreamer; If you don’t see the way to go, the most important thing is not to wake him.
However, since Nora woke up, it was not easy to return to her dream, so she had to go; But after leaving, sometimes it is inevitable to fall or come back. Otherwise, we have to ask: what did she bring besides her awakened heart? If there is only a scarf with a purple velvet rope like the gentlemen, it is completely useless no matter how wide it is two or three feet. She needs to be richer, and she has something in her bag. To put it bluntly, she needs money.
Dreams are good; Otherwise, money matters.
The word money is ugly, or it will be laughed at by noble gentlemen, but I always feel that people’s comments are not only yesterday and today, but also before and after meals. Anyone who admits that food needs money to buy, but regards money as despicable, if he can press his stomach, he is afraid that there will always be fish in it that has not been digested, and he will have to starve him for a day and then listen to his comments.
Man is the product of the environment.
The suffering of grassroots women is not determined by "cognition", but an objective reality that is hard to change under the shadow of huge structural injustice and historical inheritance discrimination.
They have no chance to form a so-called "cognition" from a feminist perspective. Their economic conditions are not enough for them to form the so-called "subjectivity of female individuals".
Xiaoying and Daru, nicknamed "Bitter Melon Brigade" and "Army of Innovators", share a similar set of lives-
They are "not expected" from birth. Due to the tradition of land distribution, women are "landless" people, and instinct drives generations to fight for a male offspring. Coupled with the ancestral temple system, women are the gender excluded from genealogy and ancestral temples. They have been digesting this intergenerational discrimination since childhood.
Under the lack of education system, they only have basic general education level. It is difficult for them to continue their education, because the opportunity of education will be transferred to the male brothers at home with great probability. At the age when their values have not been established, their parents are the masters and are pushed into the whirlpool of marriage in exchange for bride price and other funds. They give birth prematurely, and they are trapped in the cocoon room between parenting and housework.
Accidentally looking up between heavy work, let them seize the last straw of the short video era, and improve their family’s economic situation by filming their daily lives in exchange for some opportunities to bring goods and broadcast live-and economic behavior is the only way to improve their situation.
Visible to the naked eye, after these rural women have fans on the Internet, the attitudes of their husbands and in-laws have obviously improved, and they have empowered themselves through the Internet to some extent.
Just like her once mysterious husband and husband’s family, in recent videos, she will also help her share the housework actively. Xiaoying’s family’s Lalu has also converged a lot and will go home to help Xiaoying do some work.
Over the years, feminism has become a fashionable luxury among the urban middle class.
However, the threshold for talking about feminism is to go out of second-and third-tier cities, receive higher education, receive logical thinking training, read the Second Sex and more documents, and participate in the discussion of feminist topics.
Some women will use theories and big words to criticize these women who stay in the mountain village and criticize their lack of courage to change their lives.
However, for the parties trapped in the mountain village, theory is the most meaningless thing, which is not as important as two or two rapeseed oils for dinner.
They can only extract feminism from their own lives. Perhaps for them, making more money, giving their children a better life and sending them out to read more books are their feminism.
In the famous documentary "The Way Out", the director spent six years recording children from three classes.
Yuan Hanhan, a Beijing child, can drop out of school at any time, study art, talk about philosophy, study abroad in Europe, practice in Shanghai’s top art galleries, and then start his own art investment company.
Ma Baijuan from Gansu, however, has no teachers who can speak Mandarin. At the age of 12, her biggest dream was to "go to Beijing to go to college when she grows up, then work, earn 1000 yuan every month and buy noodles for her family".
She dropped out of school at the age of 15 because her family thought it useless for girls to study. At the age of 16, she married a distant cousin and compared the size of her pregnant belly with other sisters.
At the end of the scene about her, the elders at home threatened the film crew that if they didn’t pay 20 thousand yuan, they wouldn’t be allowed to follow her again.
Having a daughter means getting married and relying on a son-in-law, which is such a way out-this is still the end faced by most grassroots women in this vast land.
Urban and rural areas are folded too fast, and people blindly accuse them of narrowness, ignorance and weakness. The divided world has been forgotten by too many people, and there are still thousands of women trapped in backward areas, who have no gender awareness, lack of sex education and have little knowledge of fertility.
Xiaoying, dancing with her daughter in the mountain village, has only a washing machine, a few cows and endless weeds and straws in her life. But under the street lamp at night, she is also creating her own tiny freedom.
Below her video comment area, a netizen’s words were sandwiched between thousands of jokes about stalks-
"I dare not laugh at Xiaoying, because that’s how my mother came."
