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News reports out of China seem to fall into two or three basic categories. There’s the “Oh, look at the exotic festival/gigantic statues/strange fossil discovery” story, redolent with the spiced aromas of the etc. etc. There’s the “Goodness, they certainly *are* a capitalist powerhouse now” story, which is almost always tinged with the same undercurrent of paranoia I remember from similar reports about Japan from the 1980s. And then there’s the story that just brings out the fear and plops it right into the lead paragraph, like this one.
Xinhuanet.com reports on the tragic case of Huang Peishu.
BEIJING, Dec. 26 — Huang Peishu, who was abducted, sold into marriage and lost her only son, found a way to forget all these tragedies living in a cave for 21 years.
Taken out of the Chinese setting, the story reads like a gothic novel. Clever, literate woman disappears, assumed to have run away, turns out to have been sold to a foreigner, driven mad and living in a cave. Very “Yellow Wallpaper.”
I have trouble wrapping my head around the details.
From the report:
The woman, now 58 years old, disappeared from her home village in Zhongjiang County in the spring of 1982 after two unhappy marriages. Her family tried in vain to look for her and finally thought that she might be dead somewhere.
But they never imagined she had been abducted to Inner Mongolia and sold to a local, Sun Runshan, becoming his wife in Sanjuyao Village of Helin County in Hohhot.
In 1982, human smugglers from Sichuan took Huang Peishu, then 35, to the village where Sun, then 45, was attending a funeral.
The smugglers allegedly claimed Huang was their younger sister, and that their family was so poor they wanted to find a husband for Huang in the village.
The illiterate Sun, who had never been married because of poverty, paid the couple 1,000 yuan (US$124) and took Huang home.
The next year, Sun and Huang had a son. Thanks to the birth of the child, Huang, who was not used to lifestyle in Inner Mongolia, decided to settle there. But the unexpected death of the son half a year later brought her back to a chasm of misery.
That’s all the dramatic stuff — the hype it’s easy for us to digest here in the West, since we already know the scary-scary wife-smuggling stories from China. But the thing I find most interesting is this part:
Sun, who said he loved Huang, sent her meals every day and raised hens in the cave so that Huang had live eggs to eat. As the temperature of the cave was -20 C in winter, Sun sent quilts made of sheep hides to the cave.
“Villagers thought she would only live for one or two years in the cave as it was so cold. I had made a coffin for her in advance. But she is still alive,” Sun said.
What a strange thing it must be to have bought a spouse, then to have fallen in love, and then to wind up sending meals to her cave every day. And tending chickens there. Once she was discovered by a press photographer, local villagers wound up raising over 10 times her bride-price to cover the cost of psychiatric treatment.
Is there a moral to this story? It’s easy to think, “Oh, how monstrous,” but it’s obviously far more complicated than that. What’s your take?
Ohmygoshisthisforreal?
I’ll have to digest this….,,,,,