Love Story of Aunt Yuzhen
In a picture taken in the late summer of 1997, two women were leaning on a bridge: one is my mom, who is shorter, more schoolgirl-like, smiling a sweet smile; the other is her older sister, my aunt Yuzhen, who was wearing leopard-print pants, slimmer than my mom, with her newborn child in her arms.
The next year, she got divorced—divorced with the man who she used to love so passionately insofar she defied her parents openly only to be together with her love. The man betrayed her, and her fight for true love turned out to be paralysingly painful. She then became a single mom when her son turned one year old.
I never know how this man looks like—my aunt cut all his pictures. On occasions when his name was mentioned in family chit-chat, it is always followed by the word "bastard". I believe he is a bastard, because my mom once told me that on a summer night in 1998, when she was pregnant with me and my sister therefore couldn't accompany my aunt to sleep, this man broke into his ex-wife's apartment and tried to murder my aunt with a knife. I guess it is from then on that aunt Yuzhen has become a really tough woman, as I always believe she is.
A failure in marriage did not discourage aunt Yuzhen's pursuit for true love, and indeed she made a second try, though this time she did not get spliced again—well, she could, but she literally CANNOT—because this time she falls in love with her cousin, who she grew up with, and whose ex-wife commited suicide right after giving birth to her second child.
Maybe it was the tragedy they both experienced in marriage, the shared we-are-just-two-lost-souls-swimming-in-a-fish-bowl-year-after-year kind of feeling, and the similar family background that got them profoundly connected in the first place, but what exists between them after years is beyond compassion. My aunt loves this man, her man, the man she is never supposed to develop a relationship with. But aunt just doesn't give a fuck.
Before my aunt retired last year, she didn't see her love very often—they worked in different cities and lived different lives. But at least once a year they saw each other for a while, often for a short period, and only in this way they kept alive the ember of their love, which, by the time my aunt got retired, was eventually fanned into fire. Despite all the bad talkings behind her, aunt Yuzhen moved to her "boyfriend"'s city and started living together with the man—she made dinners for him and waited for him to come back home, she helped him with work, and she talked with him night after night, sitting in their little yard, away from a world where their love is not admitted. Aunt Yuzhen once told us that she feels so happy when she's living with the man she loves, so happy that she can no longer feel the pain caused by her chronic illness.
Once when we were taking a walk in the night, aunt Yuzhen told me stories of her past: when she was a teenager, she would lie on a mount all night in the Gobi desert, looking up into the dark sky, and she would simply lie there, in search of no meaning.
I assume this is also how she perceives and lives her life. She wants no meaning, no rules—all she looks for is a little bit of love, some light from another celestial body that is as lonely as she is in the vast universe.
