1. The autumn of childhood ---- the delicate flower opened its bud and cried, “Dear world, please don’t fade.”
The north wind of autumn blew into a hard shower, and puffed away a lot of leaves. The falling leaves and the fading flowers of autumn were caught in the rapid whirls of the eddy whose wider circles moved quickly along the ground.
I pillowed my head on my mother’s bosom. I was not only enjoying the rhythms of her breathing, I also appreciated the stories she was telling me. She described how a clever child dealt with the virulent Gu-Po Hu; how a chaste woman Bao-Chuan Wang waited for her husband for eighteen long years… I wasn’t bored, even after hearing these stories many times. I wonder whether I was attracted by the interesting stories or if I merely enjoyed snuggling close to my mother when she had leisure time.
Living with her extended family, my mother had a lot of housework to do every day. She was always busy. Thus I often went to the countryside with my playmates to play, such as pursuing fireflies, keeping silence to grasp dragonflies, or playing hide-and-seek…But my favourite activity was following my brothers to play with glass balls. Under the sunlight, the colorful glass balls were gorgeous. I especially desired the clear and crisp sound of those glass balls colliding with each other. Longing for the sound of melody, I wonder if I was already expressing my love for music.
However, when I trailed excitedly behind my brothers to watch their game of glass balls, I heard their playmates complaining to my brother about me.
“Please ask your younger sister not to come here. Her behavior is upsetting our game.”
Unfortunately, even though I was extremely careful, my feet often blocked their shooting. I always explained that the speed of the running balls was too fast for me to move in time. I became the focal point of their complaints. If my brothers blamed me for the mistake, I would act like it was the end of the world and run home crying to Mother. The more loudly my brothers yelled at me, the more loudly I cried. The sound of my weeping gradually disappeared as my Mother scolded my brothers for neglecting to look after me. Certainly, this was the purpose of my crying; it was the best weapon I had. Thus I could follow my brothers and their playmates wherever they played their game.
Generally, the boys either played the game of glass balls or took their slingshots to shoot at birds. When they narrowed their eyes in deep concentration, held their breath, focused on the game fowl, I would yell delightedly as I pointed out the bird to them. Although I couldn’t join their group to hunt the bird, I had good vision and a strong voice to alert them when I saw a bird flying in the sky. But, despite my good intentions, they were always scolding me. “Keeping your big mouth shut, the birds are all frightened by you.”
I was greatly insulted but I obediently sat under the shade of big banyan tree. While I was having a good time watching how funny they looked as they crouched low before they tried to shoot quickly moving birds, I was suddenly hit by a rock, and then I felt a stabbing pain at the top of my head. My hands instinctively touched the painful place. When I saw my bloody hands, I cried loudly. The boys ran quickly toward me. My brother grasped my body and looked angrily at his playmates who caused the accident. For the first time I was treated as a princess. Moreover, one boy pulled out many colorful glass balls, which were my favorite from his pocket to give to me. An autumn breeze was puffing away the dark clouds. I stopped weeping and accepted their warm friendship. The boys had always called me a crybaby and a pest. But now I was praised as a courageous girl. Bravely enduring my pain, I promised my brother not to tell our Mother. Even though my head bled profusely, I said there was really no pain at all. However, this “no pain” wound in my head left a big scar forever.
Usually, after doing housework all day long, my Mother lay down on the bed because she ached all over, especially when summer changed to autumn. Then she asked me to massage her legs by pounding them with my fists. If I was in a good mood, I would do it so that it was her happy time. Not only was I very much pleased with what I had done, but also I prided myself on being an obedient girl to show up my brothers. However, if I was playing excitingly with my playmates and I was compelled to do so, I bargained with my mother over the price.
“500 times,” she asked for me.
“300 times,” I figured that 500 times needed ten minutes. It was too long to stop playing with my playmates.
“For every 100 times you do it I will give you 10 cents,” she weakly encouraged me.
“Ok.” Looking at money, I did my best. But in order to finish quickly, I counted faster than I actually pounded my fists.
Finally, I heard my Mother said fragilely, “Enough…” and then I was running away as soon as possible to my favorite place. There was a small pond made from a bomb dropped by the U.S.A. during World War Two.
The bomb made it a pool of misery, but for me it was a happy pond just in front of my home. There was a row of tall bamboo fluttering in the wind, a lot of colorful wild flowers lying-low on the ground, and a swarm of ducks drawing out many ripples on the surface of the water. If I vanished from my parents’ sight, I was found there, a skinny girl in pigtails, who was busy either digging the soil to pick the wild flowers or walking with light steps to chase the dragonflies.
When I was found by my Mom at this place that I called a “Holy Land,” my body was totally covered in mud. Even though my Mother blamed me incessantly, she carefully helped me take off my completely dirty clothes. While I was bathing, I shivered and murmured, “I am chilly.” I didn’t know if I was really cold or if I just wanted to stop her scolding words.
“Yes, fall is coming in,” she said, as she gave me more clothes to wear. I felt warm as toast.
The autumn of childhood, is like sunlight dancing on the waves of the pond; restless shuttles weaving a golden age. Therefore, I had colourful dreams. I wanted to become a glass ball to make a sound of delightful melody; I wanted to become a dragonfly that couldn’t be seized by people; I wanted to become a wild duck to swim in the bamboo grove and water.
2. The autumn of youth hood ---- colorful dreams were destroyed by the world of wild storms.
One summer day Mother suddenly ended her own life. The sunny sky was darkened by the violent storm; the glass balls were broken to pieces in the dark morass; the wild duck was suffocated in the dead water. The God of death pulled off my ruby chain that I had been prepared to wear my whole life. Let it be cracked under the wheel and left to bleed like a broken heart in the dust. Lacking my Mother’s pulse, what on earth can breathe in this world?
My Mother’s funeral procession carried me into a flame of sorrow. A crazed daughter grasped the coffin as if it were really her Mother’s body as she tried to stop people from pushing her dear Mom into the grave. It was the day of thunder and lightning. How was such a slender weak girl able to resist the tradition, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes.”
Gradually, I woke up from my grievous suffering to face Mother’s death. It was undoubtedly true that my Mother was dead. My Father had promised to build a hut for me beside my Mother’s grave. But it was impossible – living people could not live near graves. However, when I recovered my consciousness, the miserable autumn was starting. My subconscious was always affected by the fallen flowers of the season.
If fire is a symbol of suffering, the raging fire is absolutely more powerful than gentle heat. Until one day at midnight, I was startled to hear Father crying his grief out as he crouched in a corner of our house. The sound of sorrow was a shock to me that made me to realize that I must move from the indulgences of childhood; I also should face the future.
Finally, I passed the employee test of the telecommunication company. Now that I had other things to focus on, my youthful energy was gradually aroused. I wore a black outfit into the first job of my life. In this mourning dress I stepped into my future.
Reeds grew in clusters all along the railway track; the acacias flowers of Taiwan unfolded along the path as if to woo and flatter the scenery. Unconsciously, this became a love garden as I strolled through it. Surely, I could inflame some one’s passion.
Once I was a bridesmaid at my girlfriend’s wedding. I was not only without common sense at this time, but I also had no idea how far it was between Kaohsiuing and Tainan. Therefore, I felt free to promise a date with Chu in the evening at 6 pm. However, not only did I mistake the travel time, but the wedding dinner was delayed a long time. I didn’t finish my duties as a bridesmaid until two o’clock in the morning.
I thought it was impossible that he could wait in a field with mosquitoes all around in the dark night for eight hours. Annoyed with heartless time, I was disappointed that happiness would always be far away from me.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by a strong light, and then I heard a motorcycle engine starting. His hair was messed up by the autumn wind. A row of white teeth shone a bright welcome to me. Like a guard he had come to protect me. The next day, he showed me what was left of the sugar cane that he gnawed on to kill the time while he waited for me. Through Chu, I was carried out of my failed world into a new world where I could flourish. The song of my first love was like birds in flowering groves.
The next year on the mid-autumn festival night, he said passionately, “we should go to Mother’s place to be with her, let the three of us together cheer the holiday under the moon.” He really understood my mind, but I wondered whether it would be very difficult to climb the wild hill in the dark night.
“Don’t hesitate about that. Do it at once.” He was wild about it. “Hurry up, Mother is waiting for us to eat the moon cake and the shaddock.”
Talking about my Mother, my tears flowed like a broken river. He not only joined me in my weeping, but also sorrowed deeply about my mourning. Suddenly, he kneeled down to pray and swore an oath in front of my Mother’s yard. “I will look after your daughter forever. Her sadness is my gloom. Her happiness is my satisfaction as well. I promise.”
The moonlight was a memory mirror. Leaves fell from the trees to cover everything. The birds were hopping about on their perches and twittering. Was this called the pledge of marriage?
However, what was this pledge? It turned out to be a pledge that was easily broken when he was threatened by his mother who wanted him to marry another girl. Not much later, he and his bride, who was his mother’s preference, had their wedding dinner near my office. Was this deliberate or neglectful on his part to let me look at this happy picture that did not include me? Moreover, after his wedding, he still sent me these honeyed words, “whether I am near or far away, I will be with you forever.”
My dear God! Could you please tell me what kind of love this was?
People always say that youth is beauty, but I only felt the dark of autumn. It could have been a little more beautiful, but ultimately it would still be sorrowful.
3. The autumn of adulthood ---- even after the fruit left the tree, the tree persisted in her undertaking to stand erect between the sunlight and the moonlight.
In Taiwan, it is traditional for the bride to “marry out”, which means she is expected to live with her husband’s family. The groom is expected to “marry in”, which means he stays with his parents’ family. The wedding custom of Taiwan is so different for daughters and sons that I had some words to say at my daughter’s wedding. “Today my daughter is not to marry off and my son-in-law is not to marry in as well. They are both consummating a marriage, mutually unifying into one happy family.”
Even though both daughters and sons have the same genes, the same flesh and blood, they are a division between off and in when they marry. Sometimes custom is a tyrant. Human history has been tied up by too much etiquette. Why shouldn’t we live more simply? Therefore, I placed more emphasis on the “marry off and marry in” issue in my speech. Of course, I also thanked my son-in-law’s parents for raising such an outstanding son. As a result, my daughter got a happy family.
However, although we lived in an infinite world, when we marry off our daughters they have no space to make a turn. Like flowers in full bloom with honeybees bustling busily and then dashing into each other, many couples run into trouble that shouldn’t be their problem. In the new family there is a crowd of people in front of the couple wanting to show their power and just making the couple unhappy. For example, there was my story. I was anti-traditional. I couldn’t stand all the bad behaviors in my new family. In order to keep my marriage I considered giving credit to their so-called useless brother. Every one has absolutely the same problem in their own life when they married.
O poor human, why should you have personal experiences and then you don’t raise your consciousness? How many times have you made the same mistakes over and over again in your limited life? My way of trying to prevent my daughter from having the same unreasonable rules was to cautiously protect her.
My daughter moved from the south of Taiwan (Kaohsiung) to the middle of Taiwan (Taichung) after she married. We also prepared a house in Kaogsiung for them if she needed to come back to her former nest. After she became the mother of two children, we had no time to reunite with each other even to celebrate special events, such as our birthdays.
Finally, I concluded that she was really married off and my son-in-law was married in. Thus she couldn’t go back to her original family whenever she was missing us. In fact, she not only had been hobbled by her children and her job, but also she had been obstructed by something unpleasant. To offer an illustration, one autumn, my son-in-law had secretly arranged for his wife and children to go to Kaohsiung to have a comforting visit with me and my husband. However, he paid a steep price for this trip because his father was furious at being kept in the dark. My daughter had come to Kaohsiung in search of her roots. Nevertheless, her missing roots had to face the thorns that formed her father-in-law’s inhumanity.
With his bright clear eyes, my clever grandson was playing with a colorful triangular prism; all human beings are capable of such behavior, but the process of becoming an adult often causes us to be in a state of chaos. Is it the changes outside the prism – all over the earth- that changes us, or is it the moving colourful flower on the inside of the prism of ourselves that changes us?
The feeling of autumn following a life of change has a different style; like a rolling triangular prism, there are varyingly appearances. The autumn of adulthood is a time of maturing, no longer like the delicate flower of spring and the brilliance of summer. It is the readiness of an autumnal harvest.
The song of daytime has been sung. Let the peaceful melody of Bachr surround my literary life in the evening. As I turn on my night light, I am looking for a true, good and beautiful mind to accompany my future.
Surely, days come and ages pass, and autumn moves my heart in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow.
