Table of Contents

PART ONE Six Years of Marriage
PART TWO The Seven—Year Itch
PART THREE The Age of Being Single

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They talked about the seven-year itch. I’ve always thought, “So what about the sixth year?” Now I know: in the sixth year, we were both wondering if we’d itch by the seventh.
If the itch was light, we could just scratch. If it was strong, we could rub each other. If it was unbearable, we’d just slip off our
shoes. Who was it that said spouses are like shoes? I never thought that six years would go by this quickly. I ought to write something as a record of our ordinary married life. It’s because of its ordinariness that it deserves to be recorded. Neither of us like sturm und drang. Neither of us like crucibles, or gauntlets.
Time makes us grow into each other like tumors. Separation means mutilation. Halves of lives are lost. And so we’ve chosen to stay together; we both love life. If we stay together till our hair goes white, this writing will become a milestone. If not, it will become the epitaph for our graves.
On a wet and clammy night, there was not a sound other than the music from inside the car. “What if we don’t make it to the seventh year?” I asked my pig of a husband. “I can de_x0012_ nitely make it,” Pig said, glancing over at me. “Whatever it takes?” I shot back. “Whatever it takes!” replied Pig. I’m apt to neither overlook nor spare. “What if we are both weak and fatigued, and just could not make it?” I asked. Pig responded in the same way every time I became unreasonable. ……
This is my husband. I call him “Pig.”Everything on earth, once it entered his brain, became simplified into a single, plain reason: money.
He firmly believed that the base determined the superstructure. I really admired him for this. When it comes to money, I spend
it like it’s water. As for earning money, I cherish each cent as if it’s gold. I think Pig admired me, too. He would often wonder how strange it was that the total of my bank account would go unchanged for a whole year, unable to accumulate a single, additional penny.
I said to him, “Pig, sometimes I am really thankful to you, sometimes I really adore you, sometimes I really despise you, sometimes I really hate you, sometimes I really trust you, sometimes I really want to know how my life would be different if I hadn’t met you. Sometimes I am really panic-stricken, thinking of enduring a life without you.”
That’s a lot of ‘really’in a row,” he said. “You’re going to be this bipolar till you get old.”I sighed. I have no choice. If I can’t change my husband, and my husband won’t change himself, then I have to change.
This is how disagreeable of a woman I am — a fortune telling website once gave me the prediction, “Your body is at rest, but your mind is unsettled.” To put it more academically, “Life fills you with dissatisfaction and the future……
I often assisted Pig in lamenting his bad luck. He married me like a chivalrous knight in a moment of blind devotion, and from
that moment he has had to face my tortuous inquisitions, full of extreme questions regarding life, death, love and hate.