I don’t know how to write about her. I’m not sure how to write about her. My mother came from a family of ladies, went to college, couldn’t do housework, always walked down the street with her chest up, ate at all the restaurants in Beijing when she was young, played in all the parks in Beijing, and there weren’t many women like her in that generation of women. I am proud to have a mother like her, but is she proud to have a daughter like me?
I was born in the south, and when I first arrived in Beijing, I was often bullied because of my accent and my small size. In the first few months, there wasn’t a day that I didn’t come home from school in tears. One time, I was sobbing at the dinner table, and my grandmother, distressed, said to my mother, “You have to take care of this and go find the principal or the parents of the other children.” My mother glanced at me and asked, “Why are those kids only bullying you but not others?”
From then on, no matter what I was wronged or how unfairly I was treated, I would always ask myself first: Why you and not others? Is there something wrong with you?
Mothers insist on not giving their children illusions they can rely on, but telling them the truth: you’re not the best, you’re not the best, there are people in the world who are better than you. You want to live a better life, you have to earn it yourself, and even as your mother, you are not obligated to provide you with everything you want. If you have what it takes, earn it yourself; if you don’t, don’t complain.
Fate gave me this kind of mother, and she made me a unique personality. It’s not that she wouldn’t make sacrifices for me; she just wouldn’t make unnecessary sacrifices for me.
Late one night in 2003, I was rushed to the hospital in an emergency, while my mother was in charge of the Baosteel project. When she arrived at the hospital, the doctor said my condition was serious and could not be delayed, requiring immediate chemotherapy. She immediately decided to take retirement, and for six months from then on, she was up and down, coming in the wind and going in the rain. She even told her relatives, “If you can trade one life for another, let me trade her.”
I often wondered why my mother was willing to trade lives, but refused to give me a little dependence or illusion. The first time I saw the film, I was able to see it. She told me straightforwardly: the disease you have is called malignant trophoblastic tumor, if you do not have chemotherapy, you will not live more than six months; if you have chemotherapy, you have a 50% chance of winning. Even if the chemotherapy is over, you can’t live your life as before, you must go to the hospital often for checkups to prevent recurrence. In the records of Concordia Hospital, there have been patients who have relapsed after 18 years.
I was almost crazy. I told her that my life is my own, I’m not going to treat it, I’m going to spend my last days traveling around the world.
She calmly told me: first, this is not the last time; second, your life is not entirely yours; I gave you this life, and you have to live it for me.
Would I be the person I am today if my mother had not been such a mother? Would I still be alive to write these words? She helped me discover another meaning in life, she let me be myself, but then taught me that my life is not capriciously my own. It’s not just that life is valuable because it comes only once to each person, but also because of its breadth and thickness.
As my mother said to me, if the only reason you refuse chemotherapy is because you are afraid of pain, can you be truly happy by going around the world? She taught me that life itself contains suffering. Years ago, if she had refused to go through suffering, I would not have lived; years later, if I had refused to undergo chemotherapy, I would not have lived. The first thing I did was to ask myself if I could be happy.