Pain at the Threshold of Love: A Book Written by 10 Women with Different Experiences for Other Women

Author: He Jingcong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Please allow me to dedicate this book to all my loved ones—because of your presence, my heart’s various beautiful emotions of love are able to unfold and express themselves, making me feel that I am so fortunate to live in such a happy world! Please allow me to dedicate this book to all those who love in their hearts—because of your love, the flow of time becomes so passionate and wonderful; it allows me to realize that the beautiful flower of life is so diverse! I wish to communicate with you with all my sincerity and passion, hoping that in the blink of an eye, we might collide and resonate with each other’s heartbeats; and I also hope that such sincerity and passion can, at least partially, compensate for my shallow knowledge and clumsy skills, allowing us to transcend them and hear the voice that flows naturally from the depths of our hearts.
On a weekend evening, I was restless, anxiously waiting for an unknown phone call, unable to let go of any excuses. Just then, at the author’s invitation, I read a book that was still on her laptop at the time. I came across a story about "unfinished,"—the story of a woman who prepared countless excuses for her loved one and continued her dream happily. I was infected by her happiness and saw my own happiness reflected in her. In happiness, I was no longer alone. When our hearts are filled with happiness, loneliness becomes a kind of beauty. The desire for love is instinctive, and so is loneliness. We instinctively feel lonely and instinctively long to be loved. Because of the fear of loneliness and the desire for love, we hide our stories, never mentioning certain details—details in which I am unlucky, greedy, dirty, cowardly, cruel, how I am, foolish, immoral—details that would make my family dislike me, my loved ones resent me, my friends distance themselves from me, my colleagues criticize me, and passersby mock me—people would no longer love me as they do now, and I would be alone—so, we must hide ourselves.
Hiding our stories, we read others’, sitting comfortably in front of books, newspapers, the internet, screens, and curtains, judging every character in every scene of the stories, loving them, hating them, admiring them, resenting them. No matter whether we ultimately rate the story as excellent, good, average, poor, or failing, we cannot deny that at least for a few minutes, we feel: "Here, it seems familiar, as if I have been somewhere before, as if I have met someone before, as if I have said something before or hesitated to say it, as if someone has once done something to me or something I have never received." I believe that if a story touches you, it is your emotional memory that is being touched. What moves people is not "what has never existed," but "what has once existed."