This is the second part of the story. The first part is here.
It turns out that Alotus’ father died two weeks ago and she just came back from attending the funeral overseas. She describes her journey and I express my condolences. Then as we walk, we veer towards meaningless pleasantries and mutual congratulations on achievements of family members. Even if we have very different views and have nothing to say to each other, we talk and talk like intimate sisters.
I am not really close to Alotus and don’t know her very well. However just through the gossip I heard, I know that she is the luckiest woman alive as far as husband and family are concerned. I am not jealous, but I do feel that the luckiest woman can be very conservative and can insist on living in the most conservative way possible since it has never been necessary for her to do anything or to think about anything in a non-conservative way. For example, her cooking duty and child-rearing duty are shared by her mother-in-law. It would never occur to her to ask her husband to do any house chores. Actually in her mind, it is very likely that she thinks men should not do any house chores at all since she can live very well without men’s help in the house.
Also her husband Daneu is a skilled mathematician who has always had a good job. Alotus never has to worry about money. Other women’s fight to bring more money home will be treated by her as an act of selfishness and greediness.
In addition, Daneu is so good tempered and so un-fussy about food that she doesn’t really have to cook very well. Her mother-in-law is in charge of cooking Daneu’s favorite dishes and Alotus only need to be a cooking assistant. There is no pressure on her. Whenever she hears other women complain about the heavy cooking duty they have to carry out each day, she can very well feel that these women are whiners and they don’t want to serve their family or they serve their family grudgingly.
And finally, Daneu is not interested in beauty standard for women. His aesthetics are all targeted at mathematics. If he talks about figures or models, it is always about math figures or math models. For this reason, Alotus is unsympathetic to other women who have to save money to do some facial procedures. Alotus might very well feel that these women are fake and inferior.
I might be biased. I am not close to her, but I have already had a pile of pre-conceptions of her. Anyway, we talk and talk, and we walk for two hours around the park’s little hills and little streams. Our topics veer from our childhood to our family to our job. Actually I just don’t understand why there are so many women who are considered shy and silent, or having a reputation of being very shy and silent. I think the society (or the community) is very much mistaken. Among all the women I have been in contact with, there is not even one woman who is silent. Women love to talk and can talk profusely about anything or nothing. And two women can talk endlessly, like me and Alotus, even if we don’t like each other very much and don’t have much to talk about.
When I come back home, I continue to think about our conversation. Since I don’t know how to present the conversation in a non-ranting way, I have to summarize what we said.
My summary is that Alotus is deeply unhappy. She didn’t say that with the exact words, but she implied it in many different ways. Alotus still thinks her husband is great and has no fault, no malice, no indifference. He has done what he can as a man and a husband. Other men cannot have achieved what her husband has achieved, and cannot give her the stability like what he gives her.
Still she is so unhappy. And she is very confused and doesn’t know what to do. She should be happy but she is not.
(To Be Continued Here)
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Image by bridgesward from Pixabay
Haoyan Do 
In Semitic and not-religious-hardliner families the core power was and still is hold with the mother (grandmothers consequently moreso, though they usually their grandkids to those one’s own mothers). On the outside, sometimes, the facade is reversed, but it rarely is uphold for longer than barely needed. I would add onto your theme of narcissism here, since the way the younger family is treated in each generation, nurturing that ressentiment, could as well be associated with it, but to quote the great Asimov’s anecdote at a restaurant, where he listened in on an Indian talking about his own mother and after being asked whether his family was, in fact, Jewish, replied: “My friend, all mothers are Jewish.”
Also, regarding STEM/MINT heads (profs, chair leaders, etc.) that Blackthornmentioned up there: These people rarely ever get to do actual research sadly, since the biggest part of their job has become “go beg for grants for the chair/projects/positions”, unless they completely sacrifice either their lecturing and chair duties, their personal life (the stronger work-focused ones I know actually don’t have a family of their own in fact), or their health and life schedule. And considering a staggering amount of people who go into our fields are neurodivergent in one way or in many, many of these people are not very…confident, neither in general social activities nor in relationships. Adding to this the fact that at least in some (predominantly Western) places being not good at math and physics somehow is socially a sign of virtue…
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I think this is the case for many married people especially married women. At some point they wake up and find themselves unhappy even when they have a seemingly perfect marriage.
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Of course appearance is a huge thing for teenagers and women in the public eye – and I imagine the pressure is greater now than it ever was in the past. I was just talking about demands within marriage.
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When you describe the demands that Asian men make on their wives it’s tempting to say that you are describing the way life was in the UK (say) two generations ago. But I don’t think even that is true – not even among the less educated classes (like my own grandparents) – and certainly not among the educated. I think UK working class society was more matriarchal for a start. There are some very old comic memes of working class men demanding their dinner – but “dinner” would have been something pretty basic. The emphasis on food is completely different. Many western working class women were deskilled food-wise as a result of transferring from a rural to an urban community during the Industrial Revolution.
In terms of expecting their wife to “look nice” that might have been more of a thing in the West in the past. You only have to listen to old popular songs like “Keep young and beautiful” etc. In some ways I suspect it is still a thing – but it is unspoken. It’s not the done thing to mention it.
I have known a few maths-types, having done a degree in physics. The sad thing is that their social status is not nearly as high in Western society. If they are self-aware (and not all are) they will try to make a virtue of it by playing up to their nerd image!
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So sad that so many people in our world who should be happy are not happy.
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Very nice
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