Luo Xiaoman: A Life of Fighting for Love

Author: Zhang Hongping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: Love is one of the greatest facts in life. How can one be without a whole; one must replace the whole with the whole; the whole dissolves into the whole, like sugar dissolving in water, that is the ideal career. With that day, this life will have an explanation— Xu Zhimo to Lu Xiaoman
Lu Xiaoman, a painter, the wife of the famous poet Xu Zhimo, and a controversial and dazzling figure of the 1920s. Lu Xiaoman was beautiful and talented. In the 1920s, when women were just beginning to gain social attention, she was indeed an outstanding woman. She was proficient in two foreign languages, wrote elegant and vigorous calligraphy, understood painting, read poetry, and was skilled in music and dance. She also studied Peking Opera and Kunqu Opera. She was warm, generous, sincere, and open-minded; she had a distinct personality, did things her own way; she was clever and perceptive. In that era, women were expected to endure and follow conventions, but she broke through the barriers of propriety, defied public opinion, and escaped family constraints to pursue genuine love. She divorced her famous husband and married the poet she loved—Xu Zhimo—becoming a major event that shook Beijing and even the entire nation. Despite being a beautiful and charming woman, she possessed the courage and boldness that ordinary people lacked. She lived her life true to her own nature, refusing to conform to the gender roles prescribed for women by society and not settling for the traditional role of a "good wife and mother." She was a new woman who transcended her time, a true woman. As Mr. Hu Shi said, "Lu Xiaoman is a must-see sight in Beijing."