读 "A Charming Face Among Peach Blossoms" 的中文故事

By Juliana White 

During Tang Dynasty in Chinese Bao Lin City, there lived a young nobleman named Cui Hu who was renown for his literal talents. 

One year, he went to Chang An, the capital of Tang, to participate in the imperial examination, but the result was quite disappointing: he failed to pass it, which made him very depressed. To alleviate boredom, he went to the suburbs for an outing on the following Pure Bright Festival. 

In early spring, the scenery of the countryside was beautiful, but Cui Hu was not in the mood to appreciate it, and just followed his nose, wandering around. A few hours later, he found himself in front of a yard located at the edge of a small and quiet village. The gate was closed; near it was a peach trees in full bloom, and the pink flowers  stood out brightly, set against the white yard wall. 

Being tired and thirsty, Cui Hu knocked at the gate, which was opened after a little while, and a girl came forth. Although plainly dressed, she was as pretty as a flower. Cui Hu, shocked by her beauty, was at a loss for words for a moment. Being amused by his silly look, the girl, smiling, asked Cui Hu how she could help him. 

Cui Hu, in fact, was good at speaking and extremely wanted to talk with the girl, but at that time he was so nervous that he only said he wanted some water. The girl walked back to the yard and returned with a big bowl full of water. 

Cui Hu, took the the bowl and gulped down the water which immediately quench his thirst, but he could not tear himself from the pretty girl and thus asked for another, which he gulped down as well. Unfortunately, he could not yet work out how to start a talk with her, so he had to ask for the third. 

After stuffing himself with it, Cui Hu had neither any room for more water nor any excuse to stay longer. The breeze was playing on the peach flowers, and a petal fluttered onto his shoulder, seeming to remind him that it was time to leave. As he was walking away from the small village, he felt something lost to him and could not help looking back, seeing the girl still standing under the blooming peach flowers with the empty bowl in her both hands. 

After encountering the girl, Cui Hu soon went back to his home town and began to prepare for the next imperial examination. He thought that he would forget the girl just as quickly as he did others who he met by chance. He was wrong, however, and instead he got lovesick for the girl who he met only once. Finally, he made up his mind to tell his parents the story and that he would go to the small village and offer marriage to the village girl. Seeing their son was pining away for love, his parents gave him their permission. 

When he agitatedly came to the village again, it was a whole year later. The peach tree was still in full bloom with beautiful pink flowers fluttering in the spring breeze. He knocked at the gate thousands of times, but no one answered. A villager told him that the girl had married and her family had moved. 

Cui Hu felt that his heart had disappeared and left a hole, and with no tears, he just impassively stood under the peach tree gazing at the flowers for hours until a petal drifted down to his face. Taking out his writing-brush, he wrote a poem on the yard wall and then left with immeasurable melancholy and loneliness. 

His poem read: 

Today of last year, I met you in this gate,
Your face was extremely charming against the flowers' beauties.
Now you are no longer here in this gate,
Only the peach flowers smiling in gentle breeze.

FROM: Chinese Story Online
PHOTO: The peach tree in my yard in bloom by Scott 

Annabel Lee

by Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Return to Paradise

by Eliza Riley

Lisa gazed out over the Caribbean Sea, feeling the faint breeze against her face - eyes shut, the white sand warm between her bare toes. The place was beautiful beyond belief, but it was still unable to ease the grief she felt as she remembered the last time she had been here. 

     She had married James right here on this spot three years ago to the day. Dressed in a simple white shift dress, miniature white roses attempting to tame her long dark curls, Lisa had been happier than she had ever thought possible. James was even less formal but utterly irresistible in creased summer trousers and a loose white cotton shirt. His dark hair slightly ruffled and his eyes full of adoration as his looked at his bride to be. The justice of the peace had read their vows as they held hands and laughed at the sheer joy of being young, in love and staying in a five star resort on the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic. They had seen the years blissfully stretching ahead of them, together forever. They planned their children, two she said, he said four so they compromised on three (two girls and a boy of course); where they would live, the travelling they would do together - it was all certain, so they had thought then. 

     But that seemed such a long time ago now. A lot can change in just a few years - a lot of heartache can change a person and drive a wedge through the strongest ties, break even the deepest love. Three years to the day and they had returned, though this time not for the beachside marriages the island was famous for but for one of its equally popular quickie divorces. 

     Lisa let out a sigh that was filled with pain and regret. What could she do but move on, find a new life and new dreams? - the old one was beyond repair. How could this beautiful place, with its lush green coastline, eternity of azure blue sea and endless sands be a place for the agony she felt now?

     The man stood watching from the edge of the palm trees. He couldn't take his eyes off the dark-haired woman he saw standing at the water's edge, gazing out to sea as though she was waiting for something - or someone. She was beautiful, with her slim figure dressed in a loose flowing cotton dress, her crazy hair and bright blue eyes not far off the colour of the sea itself. It wasn't her looks that attracted him though; he came across many beautiful women in his work as a freelance photographer. It was her loneliness and intensity that lured him. Even at some distance he was aware that she was different from any other woman he could meet.

    Lisa sensed the man approaching even before she turned around. She had been aware of him standing there staring at her and had felt strangely calm about being observed. She looked at him and felt the instant spark of connection she had only experienced once before. He walked slowly towards her and they held each other's gaze. It felt like meeting a long lost friend - not a stranger on a strange beach.

     Later, sitting at one of the many bars on the resort, sipping the local cocktails they began to talk.  First pleasantries, their hotels, the quality of the food and friendliness of the locals. Their conversation was strangely hesitant considering the naturalness and confidence of their earlier meeting. Onlookers, however, would have detected the subtle flirtation as they mirrored each other's actions and spoke directly into each other's eyes. Only later, after the alcohol had had its loosening effect, did the conversation deepen. They talked of why they were here and finally, against her judgement, Lisa opened up about her heartache of the past year and how events had led her back to the place where she had married the only man she believed she could ever love. She told him of things that had been locked deep inside her, able to tell no one. She told him how she had felt after she had lost her baby.

  

   She was six months pregnant and the happiest she had ever been when the pains had started. She was staying with her mother as James was working out of town. He hadn't made it back in time. The doctor had said it was just one of those things, that they could try again. But how could she when she couldn't even look James in the eye. She hated him then, for not being there, for not hurting as much as her but most of all for looking so much like the tiny baby boy that she held for just three hours before the took him away. All through the following months she had withdrawn from her husband, family, friends. Not wanting to recover form the pain she felt - that would have been a betrayal of her son. At the funeral she had refused to stand next to her husband and the next day she had left him.

    Looking up, Lisa could see her pain reflected in the man's eyes. For the first time in months she didn't feel alone, she felt the unbearable burden begin to lift from her, only a bit but it was a start. She began to believe that maybe she had a future after all and maybe it could be with this man, with his kind hazel eyes, wet with their shared tears.

     They had come here to dissolve their marriage but maybe there was hope. Lisa stood up and took James by the hand and led him away from the bar towards the beech where they had made their vows to each other three years ago. Tomorrow she would cancel the divorce; tonight they would work on renewing their promises.

Free love: Love without responsibility

By Brian Alexander

Nascent feminists in cities across the country saw how males dominated both the political “New Left” and hippie culture (the two were often at odds) and began to protest. 

“Women discovered, to our surprise and dismay, that despite the New Left change in head, shape, hip action and buttons — most of all buttons — that the position of women was no less foul, no less repressive, no less unliberated, than it had ever been,” wrote three early Chicago-based feminists in a famous 1967 essay titled “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” 

For many of the guys, free love really meant free sex.

“I think there was a general feeling that the whole idea of free love was a very attractive idea to men because it meant love without responsibility,” Evelyn Goldfield, one of the essay’s authors, recalls.

So women decided they were going to have to mount their own revolution. Modern-day feminism took to the streets and helped raise a generation of assertive women who not only agitated for political parity, but erotic parity as well. 

“The long-lasting reaction was to create the conditions for a vision of sexual liberation that includes women, and if anything, allows women to take the lead” in sex, suggests Ellen Du Bois, feminist history professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

The age’s radical feminist notion of eliminating marriage never materialized, but demand from 40 years ago to have “the freedom to love, to chose whom to love and how to love,” written by Goldfield and her essay collaborators Sue Munaker and Naomi Weisstein, is taken for granted by the young women — and men — of the MySpace generation.

Goldfield now is a prominent university chemistry professor with children and grandchildren. Though she now seems somewhat chagrined at some of her theatrical language, the key word in that essay is “freedom.” 

The Summer of Love helped contribute to today's cultural freedoms, from dirty dancing teens to talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible before the 1960s. 

Freedom is the true legacy of the Summer of Love era, according to Eli Coleman, Director of the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota and editor of the International Journal of Sexual Health.

“They made sex a central focus of their lives,” and popularized the idea “of sex as fun” that has now become a mantra of the younger generation, Coleman says. 

From the excesses of the free-love movement came a less self-destructive, yet more open-minded approach to relationships, both for the baby boomers and their children.

“Some [people] are monogamous, but they are choosing to be, rather than following some script. Maybe they are not having sex with 10 people at a time, but now they are following their own script,” says Coleman. 

Studies support his assertion. Among women born between between 1933 and 1942, 93 percent had their first union with a man when they married, according to the University of Chicago's landmark 1994 study of American sex by professor of sociology Edward O. Laumann and his colleagues. Among those born between 1963 and 1974, only 36 percent did, meaning that 64 percent formed a non-marital cohabitation unit before marriage. 

Though the Summer of Love collapsed on itself by Labor Day of 1967, leaving many damaged people in its wake, its lingering contribution has been the freedom to choose one’s own sexual path through life, with all the possible pitfalls and joys that freedom suggests. 

Baby boomers are chucking down Viagra and sticking on hormone patches so they can still enjoy sex, Coleman says. And their children — in some cases, their grandchildren — are dirty dancing in school gyms, making pornography as a statement of feminist power, using condoms at increasing rates and most of all, talking about sex in ways that were virtually impossible before the 1960s. 

NOTE:  The author is MSNBC.com's Sexploration columnist and a contributing editor to Glamour magazine. His latest book, America Unzipped: In  Search of Sex and Satisfaction, will be published by Harmony Books in January.

Free love: Not a smooth ride

By Brian Alexander

The Summer of Love may be remembered for its rejection of middle-class morality, but the hippies trekking into San Francisco didn’t create the concept of free love. It’s an idea that traces back to the 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, up through the suffragettes and the American jazz age of the early 1900s. Post-World War II social changes further hastened the liberalization of sex in the United States, along with the Beat poets, the coffeehouse scene and the comedian Lenny Bruce, who helped heat up the sexual conversation in America. 
 

Sexual culture was already in flux before the first tie-dyed teenage runaway hitched a ride to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Playboy’s first issue had arrived 14 years earlier in December of 1953. The birth control pill became widely available in 1960. Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson published “Human Sexual Response,” the best-selling masterpiece of human physiology and anatomy, in 1966. In May of 1967, a Michigan youth commission recommended sex education be introduced into the schools. Throughout the year, formerly single-sex colleges announced they were going co-ed.

Nevertheless, many of the “love the one you’re with” enthusiasts of the 1960s were about to discover that the free-love train was not going to be a smooth ride. 

It didn’t take long for many women to realize that the sexual freedoms associated with the hippie era didn't necessarily change their role in mainstream America — they just wore different costumes. 

As black activist Stokely Carmichael famously put it, “The only position for women in the movement is prone.” He may have been talking about the civil rights struggle, but many of the scruffy Summer of Love scenesters viewed women in a similar way.

Money was looked down upon by many hippies, but women sometimes served as a replacement currency.

“Women were used as an inducement to get new members into a commune or crash pad,” Smith recalls. “If you joined, you got to have sex with the girls.”

The girls were young, cute and free, an irresistible combination for both hippies and non-hippies.

“We would go collect free food from the San Francisco produce market a couple of days per week,” recalls Susan Keese, who journeyed from Ohio to join up with The Diggers, the anarchist group comprised mainly of artists and actors who helped create the original Council for the Summer of Love. “The guys at the market would give us food because of how we looked. We traded on that.”

Hippie women were expected to be just as available to the men in their own crowd.

“There was this ethic that it was good for you to have as much sex as possible ... and you were uptight and hung up if you did not,” says Keese, who was 20 years old and living in San Francisco during the summer of ‘67, and later in the Black Bear commune further north. “Some women seemed to be comfortable with that, but I was not. Years later I found out many of the other women did not want to do it, either. We felt like we had to work on ourselves if we didn’t like it.”

Free love: Echoes of the sexual stew

By Brian Alexander

The repercussions of women’s burgeoning sexual freedom and the rise of venereal diseases during the late 1960s still echo politically today. 

When former speaker of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay stated in 2003 that, “For the last 40 years, the anti-Christian left in America has waged a sustained attack against ... traditional moral norms,” he was referring to the sexual stew that boiled over during the Summer of Love.

Today, abstinence-only sex education advocates blame the excesses of the 1960s for the rise of new kinds of STDs such as AIDS and herpes. They commonly assert that syphilis and gonorrhea were the only two STDs in existence until the 1960s, but that dozens have emerged since. 

Of course, that wasn’t true. The hippies may have spread a lot of nasty bugs amongst themselves, but they didn’t create the STD epidemic. Other STDs, such as human papillomavirus , existed long before, but were as yet unidentified. Rates of syphilis and gonorrhea were so bad during World War I that the government had to mount a nationwide campaign against them or face a shortage of soldiers. 

Abortion was another issue that erupted during Summer of Love.  By the end of the summer many women, some of them young teenagers, needed treatment for botched abortions. Though then-governor Ronald Reagan signed a liberalized abortion law in June of 1967, trips to Tijuana, Mexico, for back-alley procedures were common. Smith’s clinic even treated Big Brother and the Holding Company singer Janis Joplin for a mishandled Mexican abortion. She became a benefactor of the clinic. 

Such experiences with abortions gone bad helped lead some states to further liberalize their abortion laws until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, a ruling that still divides Americans.

Wedding Anniversary

By Vikram Karve

For those who have been lucky to have a love marriage, there is an important day to celebrate called wedding anniversary.

For me and my wife, surviving one of those quintessential arranged marriages, our wedding anniversary is just another day.

That is why, instead of romancing each other over candlelight dinner, my wife and I are browsing books at the bookstore.

Suddenly my wife says to me, “Arun, look...!”

“Where?” I ask.

“There, near the window – look at the woman in the red dress,” my wife says, pointing her hand.

I look at the woman in the red dress.

“Don’t you know who she is?” my wife asks excitedly.

“No,” I say.

“She is Nisha – the famous romantic author,” my wife says ardently.

“I’ve never heard of her,” I say nonchalantly.

“You come with me,” my wife says and I follow her towards the bestseller rack near the entrance, where she pulls out a paperback from the shelf and shows me the photo of the woman in the red dress on the back-cover.

“Yes, it is her,” I say, “let’s go home.”

“Come, Arun, let’s meet her and get her autograph on this book…” my wife says.

“No…” I interrupt, “she’s browsing…she won’t like to be disturbed…let’s go…” I say and I turn towards the exit.

“Please…”

“No…don’t give these authors too much importance…let’s go home…” I say irritably, motioning my wife with my eyes.

“You go. I’m going to get her autograph on this book,” my wife says, and she starts walking towards the woman in red who is still absorbed nose deep into browsing the book in her hand.

I turn and quietly walk into the philosophy section and browse books.

After a while my wife comes and says, “She wants to meet you…”

“Who?”

“Nisha – the author…”

“But I don’t want to…”

“Hi Arun, remember me?” says the woman in the red dress suddenly appearing in front of me.

I am struck dumb.

“Arun and me had a real good time together in college,” the woman in the red dress says to my wife, then looks at me and says, “You remember what all we did, don’t you, Arun?”

I avert my eyes and I wish the earth below me would split and swallow me up.

“Hey Arun darling, you’ve told her all about us, haven’t you?” the woman in the red dress says loudly, digging her fangs into me like a snake, and seeing the horror-struck expression on my face the woman turns and speaks to my wife, “I am really sorry, but I thought there was no place for secrets between husband and wife….”

“Of course Arun has told me everything about you Nisha. Everything, he has told me every single thing,” my wife says emphatically to the woman in the red dress looking her in the eye, and then turns to me and says, “shall we go home, Arun ?”

Mesmerized, awestruck, I look at my wife and for the first time in my life I feel a flood of love for her.

That was the moment I fell in love with my wife.

FROM: Academic & Creative Writing Journal

Free love: From idealism to despair

By Brian Alexander

Many problems have been glossed over in the psychedelic, Jefferson Airplane, “make love, not war” sheen the era has received, not least of which was the soaring rate of sexually transmitted diseases. There was a price for all that free love. From 1964 through 1968, the rates of syphilis and gonorrhea in California rose 165 percent, according to published reports. 

“There was a lot of drug use, group sex, communal sex,” says Dr. David Smith, who founded the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic with $500 of his own money. “It would be an understatement to say there was a spike in STDs. That’s like saying a hurricane is a strong wind.” 

Clinic doctors would regularly visit local communes to track sexual partners of infected people.

 “Well, Bill had sex with John, and John had sex with Cindy,” explains Smith. “So we often said, ‘Well, let’s just bring in a gallon of penicillin and inject everybody.’” 

Smith sums up his feelings about how the scene degenerated from carefree experimentation into a disease-ridden mess: “We went from idealism to despair.”

Free love: Was there a price to pay?

By Brian Alexander

To hear the ex-hippies and Summer of Love enthusiasts tell it, the spring and summer of 1967 in San Francisco changed everything, especially sex. 

At first, this sounds like more of the same generational hagiography from baby boomers that we’ve been subjected to for several decades now. But there is no question that we are still living with the “free love” fallout. 

Everything from the rise of Viagra to “Girls Gone Wild” and feminist porn, to the sex education debate and the Christian fundamentalist backlash, bears the mark of that bohemian sexual revolution.

The lingering image of the Summer of Love has been one of bare-breasted flower children making love in patchouli-scented crash pads, sharing their food, their money and their partners.

The real story is more complex.