Dear jeannie,
I feel great sorrow after reading your Parents’ Love. Instead of being moved by the heart-warming parental care for kids, I taste the bitterness of life and the coldness of those college kids who pretend to be coming from a “middle class” family in order to please the acceptance of their peers and avoid the family burden and responsibilities that are solely imposed upon their parents. This is a conspiracy of whole society against those poor parents and an ugly ridicule towards their well-meaning love: if the college education is the only way out of poverty and shame, then now it is creating them.
Chinese parents do pin their hopes and dreams onto their children a lot, perhaps too much. And they always hold the belief that no matter how hard a life they are living, it is going to be worth it as long as their kids can, someday of the unpredictable future, succeed in passing those unintelligible college tests and bringing honor to the whole family through finding a decent sedentary office or “white-collared” job after graduation, therefore escaping the “shameful” circle of having to do the labor work at the bottom of the invisible social classification. Such parents are living only in dreams, or even I call it a parental fantasy that they could, sooner or later, transcend their mortal lives through the hypocritical success or the selfish happiness of their seemingly filial children! They do not know that they have fallen victims to an evil conspiracy---let those uneducated be the social scavengers and cheap labors of this developing country, willingly and whole-heartedly.
If you think I have been going too far to talk about a one-sided personal, maybe wrongfully conceived social idea, then please look back at our college youngsters and the true meaning of our education. The kids you talked about in your article, who are trying blindly their so very best to win the acceptance of their empty-headed peers by having the same fancy stuff produced by a foamy modern culture, are betraying their parents and treat them as their slaves and pay no respect for them. Their parents are ignored by their kids and they do not know it. Their beautiful dreams mostly turn out to be the same spoiled and selfish and self-conceited “little emperors” like those ones from a rich family. Those parents are blinded by their wishful thinking and buried among the other poor parents who are collecting garbage, doing hard labor, living on a minimum portion of their income and saving the rest for their kids studying in a faraway place with a faraway dream.
My family is not a rich one. My father has to wake up at 5 before dawn to work and my mother, before her retirement, used to be working 12 hours a day in order to supplement the family income. Way before I was sent to college, I had already acquired the most clever way of saving one’s money for the best use and be thrifty with everything I owned. My parents taught me this and I really appreciate their successful efforts of bringing me up as a reasonable person towards life, a young man who is willing to share the family burden or at least not to add any, a son that respects remembers whatever his parents have ever done for him thought actual deeds and by no means empty words sealed up by a sweet coat.
I have been staying at a college for 7 years, 4 years of studying and 3 of teaching. All these years I have spent in growing up from a “college kid” to a “college young man”. Looking back there is more shame than honor and more regrets than refinements. Maybe that’s how I was growing up and getting close to the real understanding of life---to share, be it a poor family or a wonderful future, to make life beautiful, be it from without or within. I think I am really lucky to have realized my noble aim of getting educated in a college while others or the lately comers are still wondering what, for themselves, counts as a perfect college life.
Give our parents their own life and their own dreams! I pray to God, if there is one.
[此贴子已经被作者于2006-5-9 13:37:38编辑过]
