(425) One old lady 3

Mary Po Po has a younger sister. Whenever I visited and found the former out, I had to leave a message with the latter. Prior to this, I had little contact with a recovered mental sufferer. Slowly, I found that she was normal but could be slighted easily. In other words, she had to be handled with the due care given to a spoilt twelve year old.

Apparently thirty years ago she was happily married to the only son of a merchant in a small town. Unfortunately, after fifteen years of marriage, she was barren. Her father and mother-in-law held the family purse string tightly. They decided that her husband should marry a younger woman to sire an heir. In those days, Chinese marriages were by tea ceremony (all relatives drink tea offered by both the bride and groom). Divorce was by a letter written by the husband or the father-in-law. In this case, the husband refused to sign. But he was not financially independent and was a coward. The mother-in-law threw the barren woman out of the house.

Ordinarily, a rejected barren woman would return to her parents' home. By the time this poor woman was driven from her marital home, her parents were dead. I seemed to remember that the father died from a stroke and the mother died of TB. Her few brothers were either too poor or too unkind to take her in. In the end she lived with a distant relative and lived on whatever little she could earn by finding odd jobs in an agricultural community. Years of neglect, out right rejection, sexual harassment from any lecherous man intent on evil and the hopelessness drove her to the asylum.

While all these fateful events were played out, Mary Po Po was facing her own struggles. Her husband died young. In order to survive, Mary Po Po boarded her two young children with her aunt and she worked as a cook for the German engineers in a hydroelectric project in a distant town. Apart from brief meetings and a little allowance that a poor widow could spare for her youngest sister, there was little else she could do.

It was a tragedy! Yet all these happened and there was no happy ending. The cowardly husband who could not stand up to his tyrants took two wives (subsequent to the kicking out of the first one), one after the other. The second wife run away. The third one stayed but all the days of his life, there was no children. I can't help but wonder if he was the sterile one. Three women's lives were ruined because of this one spineless  man and his parents' desire to have heirs. sad, isn't it?