WORDS IN SPRING Jiang Jin
[English Version]	Congratulations Grandma! My daughter, Shan Shan was born late at night on the threshold of a new age, the new millenium. A blanket of snow covered the road, the trees outside the window and the rivers and streams. My daughter is fragile and pretty just like a flower about to bloom. It´s as if I can smell the scent of life in my daughter´s enchanting dimples and it makes me tremble like I am intoxicated.... Yes, dimples like a flower, innocence like a flower, living like a flower, hope like a flower. Daughter mine! You are the most precious thing in your mother´s life; I shall protect you with all my love in the years ahead. But Grandma, you sighed long and hard, as if in a trance, when I rang to tell you about the greatest joy of my life. I could sense you felt a great burden. Grandma, did the birth of my daughter bring to mind the heavy crosses you had to carry in your life? Your mother was otherwise a flexible woman, found it difficult to lift her head in public because she had only given birth to girls/daughtes. She was a victim of her husband´s and her mother-in-law´s hatred and ill-treatment. As a girl yourself, a bad investment so to speak, your father and grandmother never bothered to look your way. Every day you had chores to do that were not suited to your age: mind the cows, cut the grass, spread manure, chop wood........you didn´t get enough to eat and had to get by on wood bark and hay from the pigs. Then there was that time when your mother managed to get you a bowl of white rice; you were starving and your mouth was watering but you were too scared to eat in case of what might happen. All of a sudden the door pushed open, the wintry air blended with the stench of whiskey, your father found out what you were up to and took a stick. It was as if the sky fell on top of you, it grew dark all around you and you collapsed on the bed. You have had a scar shaped like a bowl on your body ever since. Grandma, that is a wound that will never heal. I feel the tragedy, the disappointment and the pain every time I see that wound, it´s like an arrow penetrating my heart and the tears come flooding. Was it really just because you were a girl, Grandma ? Just because, as a girl you were unable to carry on the family name ? How sad to think that you were subjected to this kind of unjustice. Your father got tuberculosis some time later and after having sold the land to pay for the medical fees, you became fatherless at the age of 6 and your mother, a widow before she was 30. Your uncle got the house so the two of you had to live in a little hovel on your mother´s meagre earnings as an odd-job-woman. During a heavy storm one cold winter´s night, the hut blew down and you had to seek shelter in the woods like wild animals. That was the night you lost all your faith in people. You grew up, got married and hoped that your hardened heart might soften up with tender loving care.You gave birth to your first-born within a year, a girl, then another girl. You also had two sons but they both died at childbirth. It was rumoured in the village that this was Heaven´s way of punishing you, that you more than likely had done some bad deeds in an earlier life and now you had to pay for them. According to the rumours, you did something once in despair and you came to regret it for the rest of your life. You didn´t marry off your daughter, you found a suitable son-in-law, the son of a poor family and he moved in with you and your daughter instead. In the light of the old superstition that the fate of the family lies in the family name, you adopted your son-in-law´s name in an attempt to break the spell. That is how it came about that my dear hard-working mother got married to my greedy, lazy and hot-tempered father. My father was 37 then, my mother, only 23. Needless to say, my mother´s marriage wasn´t a happy one. When I was born and I turned out to be a girl, you let me call you Grandma(as if you were my father´s mother), because my mother payed a high price for this term/title. She offered her life, her happiness and that´s why I had such an unhappy childhood. Until this day, both my parents have lived under the same roof, each to his/her own thoughts, each to his/her own desires, like two complete strangers. You regret it all in the end Grandma and then you mutter: My cruel fate, it is I who have put you in this predicament. Lord, if anyone should be punished, let it be me! Grandma, if you can bear to look back at all the heartache and hardship you endured, you will see that your experiences have also made you doubt and deny your own self-esteem. You grew up in the shadow of male-chauvinisme and female hostility and this feudal attitude has affected your way of thinking. This is yet another scar from having lived in the 'olde worlde'. Fotunately, when the sun rises in the new millenium, we will have experienced a thousand years of development and there is a new age on the horizon, where the two sexes are equal, where a self-awareness is dawning on women and where womens´rights will be top of the agenda.  Grandma, let me reiterate that the birth of a daughter is an all-round joy, for her father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles and aunts, I accept your sincerest congratulations, one and all. How else could the written word be transformed into living reality ? Night is falling, my daughter has fallen asleep. It is Spring and it is also the Spring of life. Sssh!.... I can almost hear the the grass grow outside my window; my daughter shall grow up surrounded by love and have her a life of her own. Grandma, the past is history. Deep down, I believe in the future and I believe that we should focus our eyes on tomorrow rather than on yesterday. Translated from danish to english by Maureen Eriksen
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