189 | Liao Weitang: Du Fu and I are both father poets
Text / Lin Tingwei (Contributing Writer) (Original post published on August 6, 2022)
Liao Weitang, 46, a poet, has a 10-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. He used to live in Hong Kong and now lives in New Taipei City.
My wife has a full-time job, and I am at home a lot, so basically I take care of the children. In the morning, I make breakfast and wake them up. When I usually go to school, I will ride my two children to school on an electric bike. Unless the weather is bad, I will ask my wife to drive us to school. After sending it back, I started to do my own thing, usually writing for the media, and also teaching writing classes in the university.
About 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I went to pick them up. Every night, I was in charge of coaxing the children to sleep, and I usually stayed in their bed for about half an hour. At night, when everyone is asleep and no one disturbs me, it is almost past 10 o'clock, and I can concentrate on literary creation.
I think the stereotype of "male masters outside and female masters outside" is really more serious than Hong Kong. In Taiwan, almost all the mothers who go to the school parent meeting, maybe only two or three male parents, will be a little embarrassed. In Hong Kong, the ratio of father and mother may be 4 to 6, or at most 3 to 7, but in Taiwan it is almost 1 to 9. They (Taiwanese parents) will be very curious and say, hey, don't you have to go to work to make money?
Our own division of labor is like this: Mom will take care of their "intelligence" things, study, games, in short, the spirit is almost involved with the mother, and I will take care of their eating and bathing, and the physical things are basically I'll be in charge. Of course, I also have to help with the spiritual part. For example, my daughter is very young, so we will tell each other stories. I just told her that last night I saw a big whale flying outside our window. Have you seen it? Are you there?
For the sake of our children, we chose not to be free for the first time
Many families are like this. After having children, husbands and wives live for their children. Many choices in life will take children as the first consideration.
In a partnership between two people, always remind yourself that we are not a working partner. Sometimes we joke that we become like working in this house, you are the driver and I am the housekeeper, so funny! We have to remind ourselves from time to time that we are not just living for them. In fact, my mother's spirit of sacrifice is greater than mine, but I often remind her, hey, don't forget, you are a poet, don't just think about them, but about ourselves.
My father is an ocean-going sailor, and sometimes it may take me half a year to see my father, so my father's role has been absent since I was a child. He is a more introverted person than me and doesn't communicate well. The advantage is that he really doesn't care about me. When I go to write, he never says "go to study medicine and make more money", but when I have feelings The parents of the previous generation are unlikely to communicate with me, and they have to solve it by themselves.
It still has an impact on me - my wife thinks it's a bad influence and thinks that I don't have a "how to be a dad" reference; but I also think, then I will wholeheartedly learn to be a dad from scratch, that way It's good, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I learned to be a father, really by my own heart. As a poet, I attach great importance to "childlike innocence". I always adhere to the innocence to communicate with children. When she is 5 years old, I may use 5-year-old thinking to chat with her. When he is 10 years old, I will put myself back into a To communicate with him in the position of a teenager, I think this is the most effective.
Sometimes I still have a little wayward thought in my heart: I am still a child, I also want my parents to take care of me, but I have to take care of you. I remember one time, I really wanted to walk away, bought a plane ticket and wanted to leave for a short distance. I went to the airport, my son called me and cried and told me to go home, I was about to board the plane and come back from the airport.
Of course, my heart is still quite painful. I remembered when my son was born, I wrote a sentence, I said that this is the first time that your mother and I "choose not to be free" ─ we are all people who yearn for freedom, for the sake of Free to give, anything is possible, but for the sake of children, for the first time, we choose not to be free.
Be a father in these times of collapse
Before my father, I was a pessimist. I'm very cynical about the world -- of course, I'm very cynical now (laughs), but I'm more optimistic now, maybe I'm forcing myself to be optimistic. When I didn’t have children before, I thought that this world is so rotten, there’s no way to save it, and it’s okay to die together; now I think, although I don’t care about myself, I still want to leave some hope for the children.
I think a writer who has had children and a writer who has been single all his life has a completely different view of the world and literature. I admired the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu very much, but felt very far away from him, until after I had a child, I finally found the only thing I had in common with Du Fu: we are both father poets.
In ancient times, few people wrote poems about their children, but I found that a person would write his love for children in his poems in the Tang Dynasty, more than 1,000 years ago. When he was writing about his children, I thought he was China's first humanitarian poet.
What is the meaning of fatherhood? I've been trying to answer this question myself. Every poem I write to my children is actually written to myself. I want to experiment and find the answer to the question you said: What does it mean to be a father in this broken era, in such a bad world?
I feel that there is no answer to this question, or that the answer will take a lifetime to answer and find. If there is any meaning, it is that people should achieve each other. For example, between husband and wife, between friends, between you and your child, if you give something to him, he is also there at the same time. Gives back a lot of things you didn't realize you had. (Finish)
[For the full text of this article, see "Walk the World": Liao Weitang: Du Fu and I are both father poets ]
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