The Story I Mentioned Last Time

The story is about an interview of an ordinary man who married a rich businesswoman. It is sort of a distorted love. Although living in a huge room together, they seem to lead complete separate lives. The wife is invariably busy managing her business, while the husband, without having to work, leads a despairingly vacant life. He usually stays at bars and other entertaining places until two o’clock in the morning. He wears extremely expensive shirts. He would pay bills for others just to let them accompany him for another hour. The only time he and his wife get together is every Sunday. Their different financial status and background becomes an insurmountable communication barrier. The husband does not understand most part of his wife’s life, and nor does she understand his. The only way for her to show her love is to spend extravagantly for him. Her success has become a stigma of his self-respect. She has tried to give a new business to his husband, but because he does not know how to manage a business, it only becomes a reminder of their difference. He resents their fortune, envies ordinary couples, but at the same time the money is the sole connection that binds them together.

Comments on a Weird Story

This guy has entered the wrong class. He inherently belongs to the middle class. With such a big fortune, he doesn't seem to know what to do with his life. Without a higher life goal, he wears super-expensive shirts and linger at entertainment places just to kill time, longing to lead a' normal life'. Before the big fortune of his wife, he loses his life's directions.

Their relationship also has serious problems. The wife fails to realize his other needs but financial ones. She does not understand his husband. The only way she shows her love is through buying him extremely expensive things. But nor does he understand her. They seem to live in two separate universes until every Sunday, when they temporarily get together. Money, although disparaged in the article, is actually the only connection that tires them together. Such a relationship is pathetic.

I believe that both husband and wife should take the reasonability to make their family better, both financially and emotionally. They should also have common and practical goals to do so. It is common that fortune changes: Today's millionaire can be tomorrow's pauper and vice versa. But a stable relationship does not change. In good times, both think how to make their fortune last longer instead of spending extravagantly; in bad times, both try their best to open a new road to the further instead of losing hope; and in middle times, both think to move ahead but not become contented. Aware of their responsibilities to each other, they can never lose direction. With their common goals, they should always be pleased by their contributions to their goals. Based on common goals and responsibilities and immune to the change of the environment, such relationship can last forever.

Weekend

On Saturday I didn’t wake up until noon. After working intensely for a week, I felt physically and emotionally drained. I took a glance outside the window. The weather was excellent. The sun was shining and the sky was clear. Staring at the ceiling, I planned the day for half an hour and then got up.

I took a train south to Chinatown to get my empty stomach filled. The food was enjoyable, partly because I hadn’t eaten any Chinese food for the whole week and was craving for it, and partly because I was starved half to death.

After lunch, I went out to photograph Chicago. I had bought the digital camera half a month before but hadn’t had a chance to take a single picture. This camera was featured in Time a few months ago and is obviously gaining heat. It is of the size of a cigarette box. Although the technical parameters are not so high for the so-called ‘professionals,’ the camera is fully automatic – the right type for me. My experience with cameras has been limited to fully automatic cameras and disposable cameras.

I have taken pictures of Phoenix and Las Vegas, but I have never taken pictures of Chicago, the city in which I have been living for three years. I had also taken almost no picture of Shanghai, the city in which I lived for over twenty years. Chicago and Shanghai seem surprisingly similar: Both are huge cities with endless numbers of skyscrapers; both have congested streets stuffed perpetually with cars and buses; and both had countless shops filled with ads and people. So it became even more challenging to catch something different enough to be displayed on pictures.

I had always liked Lake Michigan, so I decided to photograph it. It looks great when it is not icy and when the sky is clear, when the water is blue and stretches to infinity, and when a few yachts occasionally sail on the lake. I enjoy a strong wind puff my face and blow all the fatigues of work away with it. Every time I walked along the lake bank, I felt the tininess of human beings and the greatness of the nature. Shanghai has a big river, too. But the water is yellow because of the soil in it, and there were no yachts on the river but rather large ships coming from and going to the sea. I thought that this would be worth taking a picture. So I found a place where I could see the lake bank stretched out and curled back as it extended near the skyscrapers in downtown. I took the shot.

It was near twilight and everything was covered by a beautiful golden light. I randomly took a few pictures of the yachts, the grasslands, and the buildings, and decided to capture the sunset. I sat on a small hill covered with grasses and waited for the sun to set. The weather had turned cold – the temperature had dropped to under 40 degrees. But I waited and waited, and the sun just wouldn’t set. After waiting for an hour and being practically frozen, I decided to abandon the idea. As I was leaving, however, the sun began to submerge. I ran back hastily to the hill and took the picture of the sunset.

On my way home with five pictures in my camera, I knew that my photographing of Chicago had just begun.

My Little Room

When I was in my teens, my family used to live on the third floor of a Japanese-style house, with my uncle’s family. There were three rooms on that floor. Mother and father lived in the room on the east side; uncle Y and aunt A lived in the room on the west side; and aunt A-bao and I shared the middle one. Our room had been one large room. But we had to make it into two rooms. To do this, we put up a wall. However, because the window was on the left hand side of the room we had to put the wall up at an angle so that each half got natural light. On one side of the large room were two doors. The window was on the facing wall. The wall we built started between the doors and continued at an angle toward the left-hand side of the room, until it met the window. My room was shape like a triangle with the top cut off. But at least I got sunlight! Aunt used her half as her workroom and the other half was my little living room. The board wasn’t sound proof. At night I could hear the monotonous sound of sewing that lulled me to sleep.

In this little room, I enjoyed many activities. I raised two turtles in a basin room for six years until we moved. One turtle was a bigger and had black shell. The other had brown shell. They always looked docile except when they were eating. Whenever people approached, they would hide their heads in their shells. Despite their quite appearances, they were pretty aggressive meat-eating animals. Their usual food was frozen pig meat and fish sausage. Everyday when I came by, they would always look at me expectantly for food. I would give them a few small blocks of meat or slices of sausage, and they would rush to eat them. They would act decisively and promptly when they saw their targets. Once we put a live shrimp in their basin, hoping that they would live happily together. Almost immediately, the turtle began to nimbly chase the shrimp, and before too long it became their meal. As time went by, the black turtle seemed to get progressively nearsighted. Her eyes looked like two drops of oil. She would examine closely at the food for a few minutes before she decided to eat. I gathered that it was one of the resignations of a turtle’s life.

I planted quite a lot of cacti in the room, too. I told myself that I liked cacti because I liked their ability to live in extremely adverse environments. But a more practical reason was that everything else I planted died quickly. As a test of my rudimentary chemistry knowledge, I managed to make my own chemical fertilizer for the cacti. I was proud of the fertilizer and advertised it a lot in my school. They worked well on my cacti, although one of my classmates claimed that my fertilizer killed his granny’s expensive flower.

My little room shared so much joy and sadness of my childhood with me. Every time I think of my childhood, my little room will appear before my eyes.