The Household COO

I received this tale of a remarkable love story through email and decided that I just had to post about it.  We all know, since I came out of the closet, that I’m such a sucker for these stories.  However, this is a change from the usual Hollywood romance scene - it is the real McCoy.  I hope it serves as a source of inspiration in a society that is now too quick to file for a divorce and discredit the whole sanctity of marriage. 

An incredible love story has come out of China recently and managed to touch the world.

It is a story of a man and an older woman who ran off to live and love each other in peace for over half a century.

The 70-year-old Chinese man who hand-carved over 6,000 stairs up a mountain for his 80-year-old wife has passed away in the cave which has been the couple’s home for the last 50 years.

Over 50 years ago, Liu Guojiang a 19 year-old boy, fell in love with a 29 year-old widowed mother named Xu Chaoqin.

In a twist worthy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, friends and relatives criticized the relationship because of the age difference and the fact that Xu already had children.

At that time, it was unacceptable and immoral for a young man to love an older woman.. To avoid the market gossip and the scorn of their communities, the couple decided to elope and lived in a cave in Jiangjin County in Southern ChongQing Municipality.

In the beginning, life was harsh as hey had nothing, no electricity or even food. They had to eat grass and roots they found in the mountain, and Liu made a kerosene lamp that they used to light up their lives.

Xu felt that she had tied Liu down and repeatedly asked him, ‘Are you regretful? Liu always replied, ‘As long as we are industrious, life will improve.’

In the second year of living in the mountain, Liu began and continued for over 50 years, to hand-carve the steps so that his wife could get down the mountain easily.

Half a century later in 2001, a group of adventurers were exploring the forest and were surprised to find the elderly couple and the over 6,000 hand-carved steps. Liu MingSheng, one of their seven children said, ‘My parents loved each other so much, they have lived in seclusion for over 50 years and never been apart a single day. He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.’

The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms. So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.

‘You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?’

Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.

In 2006, their story became one of the top 10 love stories from China, collected by the Chinese Women Weekly. The local government has decided to preserve the love ladder and the place they lived as a museum, so this love story can live forever.

Here’s the link to the news story.

What can I say?  I’m a sucker for romances.  Yeah, I’ll admit it - I enjoy a nice romantic comedy, even if I used to be a closet romantic.  In the past I would have rather hang by my thumbs and let vultures feed off me than admit that I really wanted to watch that new romantic comedy that just hit the big screens.  Rather than suggest to watch a romantic comedy when friends would ask what movie to watch, I would rent the video or buy the VCD/DVD to watch the movie in secret.

So when did I finally come out into the open and actually admit to myself that I’m a bigger sucker for this stuff than I would normally have admitted?  When I caught myself wearing a silly grin at the end of watching “27 Dresses“.

Although the title didn’t really inspire me, I was keen to watch it because it starred Katherine Heigl, the gorgeous blond from Grey’s Anatomy - yeah, I watch that one, too, so shoot me.  James Marsden (Cyclops from “The X-Men”) seems to be doing a lot of these romantic flicks of late as he was in “Enchanted” (yep, I watched that one, too, so I guess it pretty much confirms my status of “hopeless romantic”, no?).  Needless to say, I enjoyed the movie so thoroughly that I watched it twice and have filed away the DVD as something to watch again in future!

Good grief, I think I shall go hide myself in the closet.  Strangely, being branded as a sci-fi geek was never quite as embarassing as this.

Here are a few other favourites on my list of romantic comedies and chick flicks that I highly recommend and wouldn’t mind watching again:

• While You Were Sleeping (an oldie but a goodie)
• Star Dust
• Music and Lyrics
• Kate and Leopold
• Just Like Heaven

A friend once told me that “The opposite of love is not hate - it is indifference”.  So long as there is still emotion in a relationship, it is worth fighting for.  So when do you decide that there is too much emotion to keep it going?  When there is a possibility that you might end up killing each other?

Okay, so Sunday didn’t really go at all like I was hoping so I’m struggling a little to think about the things that I am happy and grateful about.  So here’s what I managed to come up with…

I’m happy and grateful:

• that my Dad will be back to Malaysia for a holiday/errands because it means Gavin gets to see his grandpa.
• that I’ll be having lunch with grandpa on Tuesday.
• that the hubby has finally decided he doesn’t enjoy getting drunk any more.  I’m sure we all enjoyed getting a little tipsy in our Uni days (myself included) but being a Mum calls for a lot more responsibility, now.
• that Gavin got to spend at least Sunday night with his Dad (since Daddy was recovering most of Sunday from his night out on Saturday)
• that I took so many photos of Gavin when he was little.  I love looking back at his old photos.  Below is one of my all-time favourite photos that the hubby took of Gavin when he was just over a month old.  He looks so adorable and it was the first real smile I received from him - made my heart melt.

After reading PL’s post on “On Love After Three Years“, I was inspired to write my story.

On Love After One and  a Half Years

When we first met, we barely noticed each other. He thought I was rude and I saw another non-climber that I wasn’t interested in. Our circles collided ever so briefly only because we had one common friend - one of his drinking buddies, one of my climbing buddies.

We met on and off for a year with little more than a polite “hello” and “goodbye”. We were acquaintances more than friends until the fateful night when we were thrown into each other’s company by accident or perhaps by our mutual friend’s cunning. The three of us talked our way into the night and I discovered an entertaining conversationalist. He was not at all like I had assumed and I am sure I was also not quite what he had expected.

In retrospect, he was a perfect match for the old me – the hopeful, idealistic teenager – a person I was convinced I could never be again. The person he met was carefree and uncontrolled - a vagrant, drifting rock climber that made it her sole purpose in life not to care about anyone or anything. A friend once told me that that had been a period of my life where I was trying to relive the years of a missed “teenage rebellion”.

Always the well-behaved daughter, I never knew what it was like to let my hair down, to go wild, to throw all responsibility to the winds and to let people dislike me. It was always about straight A’s, my reputation, the perfect daughter and what other people would think. To be finally free of the brand that marked everything that I never wanted to be was a heady and intoxicating feeling. Drunk and hell-bent on being reckless, I chased the bohemian lifestyle, promising myself that I would never again be controlled as I was, and that meant never letting anyone matter to me. This was me, warts and all, and it was this or the high road.

Personally, I felt that it was a phase of my life I went through because I was lost. A culmination of experiences led me onto the road to nowhere. I didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted out of life. I was purposeless and life was meaningless.  Yet I was forced to continue the drudgery of life with haunted eyes. I shunned all the people who might have cared for me because relationships were a complex matter I didn’t want to deal with. In a strange paradoxical way, I enjoyed the monotony of my uncomplicated life even as I was intensely bored of it.

I would walk into relationships looking for the back door until I grew tired of the games. I decided that isolation was better than the stress of putting on the shackles of a relationship so that I could find a way to be emancipated again. I told myself that I could do without the company of a man and so I lived until the loneliness became too much to bear and I yearned for companionship in spite of myself.

On the suggestion of a friend I decided to try a fling – a concept that I had never believed in because I felt that it hurt people. Whether fate intended it that way or not, it had been the moment when I decided to entertain a casual relationship that I met him again on that fateful night. Everything I knew about him told me that this man was “for keeps”, he was the wrong material for a fling, but I went ahead with the relationship intending to end it well before the six month mark.

When I look back, I often wonder why he didn’t walk away. I was, as the character Meredith from Grey’s Anatomy described it, broken and damaged. I think that is why I find the series so captivating – not because it is set in a hospital but because of the manner in which they explore human relationships. It is because the character Christina reminds me of the “me” I had been when I first started dating my husband.

But I digress… I asked him once what was it he saw in me that prompted him to give “us” a chance and his reply was, “I saw a flower but I didn’t know whether it was blooming or dying and I wanted to see which it was.” To this day, I think he believes that he saw a flower that was blooming. The truth is the flower was dying but he brought a watering can and sunlight.

It hasn’t always been a garden of sweet smelling roses. Some days it feels like we have a one-way ticket headed for a disaster. I often wonder how I could marry a person who makes me so mad until the blood in my veins is broiling. Then I remember what a friend once told me – that “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”. That he can make me feel such powerful emotions, albeit negative ones, is not a sign that we are over. The day it is over is the day that I feel nothing.

Another friend once said something along these lines, “true happiness comes when you accept suffering,” although I think he stole this wise adage from Buddha. I guess in order to know the times when you are truly happy, you need to be aware of all the times when you are deeply unhappy because the presence of a negative helps us to recognise the positive. Yes, in an uncanny way, it is like saying good cannot survive without evil.

What was true of me, which I think is true of many people is that we go through this world living like we don’t deserve happiness and so we shun it every time it comes knocking on our door. I guess I was lucky that it came banging on my door this time around.

Sad to say, I don’t know who wrote this. It’s one of those beautiful pieces of writing that gets passed along through email that I happened to save. While cleaning out my hard drive, I came across it. I felt that the words captured here are too precious to keep to myself, so I’m posting this out.

I’ve known too many couples who were perfect for each other but failed in their relationships because they left everything up to chance. They failed to make that choice. So here it is…

When we meet the right person to love when we’re at the right place at the right time. That’s chance. When you meet someone you you’re attracted to, that’s not a choice. That’s chance. Being caught up in a moment (and there’s a lot of couples who get together because of this) is not a choice. That’s also a chance.

The difference is what happens afterward. When will you take that infatuation, that crush, that mind-blowing attraction to the next level? That’s when all sanity goes back, you sit down and contemplate whether you want to make this into a concrete relationship or just a fling.

If you decide to love a person, even with his faults, that’s not a chance. That’s choice. When you choose to be with a person, no matter what, that’s choice. Even if you know there are many people out there who are more attractive, smarter, and richer than your mate, and yet, you decide to love your mate just the same, that’s choice.

Infatuation, crushes, attraction comes to us by chance. But true love that lasts is truly a choice. A choice that we make.

Regarding soulmates, there’s a beautiful movie quote that I believe is so true about this: “Fate brings you together, but it’s still up to you to make it happen.”

I do believe that soulmates do exist. That there is truly someone made for you. But it’s still up to you to make the choice if you’re going to do something about it or not. We may meet our soulmates by chance, but loving and staying with our soulmate is still a choice we have to make.

Sometime back I was wondering through a bookstore in Penang with the hubby (who wasn’t my hubby at the time). I came across a book that discussed the various different languages of love and how understanding this concept could help improve your relationships with loved ones.

For instance, they gave an example how an audio-oriented person may need to hear “I love you” to feel loved, while for another person, receiving small gifts, flowers and notes is that person’s language of love. A husband who expresses his love through action, like doing the laundry or washing the dishes, may still be inadequately expressing his love to his wife if she is an audio-oriented person who needs to be told she is loved in order to feel loved. By understanding this fundamental concept and recognising the specific language our partners or family members utilise, we are then better able to express love and receive love.

Recently, I had forgotten that my mother speaks a very different language of love from me. She hardly ever says, “I love you,” and when you hug her, it is like hugging a plank of wood and you will never feel her arms around you. Forget about getting kisses, unless you’re adorably cute and still a toddler. She is also a rather sedate person. Compare her response to my announcement that I was pregnant against my Dad’s. My Dad had been nothing short of ectatic when he heard the news, while my mother’s response had merely been, “Mmm… okay.” She might as well have been replying to a comment I’d made about the weather.

Since I had gotten pregnant, I have often been queried as to why my mother had never bothered to visit me. I thought very little of it at first because this is quite the norm for my mother. After a while, I started to wonder if perhaps she was somehow annoyed me for some past grievance I had caused her. I’ll attribute this temporary case of delusional paranoia to the abundance of raging pregnant hormones circulating my body. It might also partially be due to the fact that I have been acclimatising to the very articulate expressions of love from the hubby’s family.

My mother is actually very easy to read. Upon meeting her for the first time, most people often find her reserved and cold, and they often misinterpret this as an indication of her dislike towards them. Well, let’s just say that if my mother had taken a dislike towards someone, there is never any mistake about it. If you walk into the room, she’ll walk out of it. If you greet her, she’ll simply ignore you. If she buys anything for you at all, no matter how small the gift, it is a sign as bright as the sun that you are close to her heart.

My mother is not the sort of person to waste her time on little niceties just to remain in someone’s good books. She doesn’t care whose toes she steps on or who gets offended by her actions. In her own quiet way, she is a very frank person, who is so unpretentious that you can read the signs of her happy reactions by her lack of negative emotions.

So when my mother started sending over presents for baby Gavin, I knew that inside her heart, she cares. Her love is not expressed by her presence or her words, it is expressed through her actions.