retour à la mère

It’s not often I read the French media, only occasionally, but I remember reading a few months back about a Chinese women who threw herself out of a window in Paris to avoid a police raid that had nothing to do with her, only to fall to her death, and now I read in Libé that her son has gone to Paris to collect her remains for the return to Fushun. But there’s one paragraph in this article that really stands out:

Sa mère l’appelait chaque semaine, mais elle ne confiait rien de sa vie. Elle avait choisi de partir gagner de l’argent pour offrir à son fils un mariage digne et un endroit décent où vivre avec une épouse. A Fushun, Yuxiao a toujours vécu dans l’appartement familial. «Trente mètres carrés à partager avec les beaux-parents, ça n’intéresse aucune femme chinoise !»

And my rough-as-guts translation:

His mother called him every week, but she said nothing about her live. She chose to leave to earn money to offer her son a worthy marriage and a decent place to live with his wife. In Fushun, Yuxiao had always live in the family apartment. “Thirty square metres to share with the in-laws, no Chinese woman would be interested in that!”

I don’t think I need to add anything to that.

About the Author

wangbo

A Kiwi teaching English to oil workers in Beijing, studying Chinese in my spare time, married to a beautiful Beijing lass, consuming vast quantities of green tea (usually Xihu Longjing/西湖龙井, if that means anything to you), eating good food (except for when I cook), missing good Kiwi ale, breathing smog, generally living as best I can outside Godzone and having a good time of it.

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