Two hundred years of an ordinary marriage

Shen Fu was a minor clerk in the Qing who never passed the higher exams and never became important. He wrote a memoir in six parts about his life with his wife, Chen Yun, who was his cousin, and who died young.

The book is famous for being unusual. Most memoirs of that era are about careers, travels, or moral achievements. Shen Fu wrote about a small apartment, arranging flowers on a table, walking with his wife to see the moon, arguing about how to brew tea, stealing a day to sit by a lake.

Yun was clever and funny and practical. They had almost no money. They lived for a while in a tiny rooms behind their rule. He records her dressing up as a man so she could go out to the lantern festival with him, and how much they laughed.

Then the book turns. They were driven out of the family, lost a child, and Yun became ill and died. He wrote the account of her death in the same patient voice he'd used for the flowers.

The memoir survived because he wrote about ordinary things with the same attention he paid to grief.

The last thing I want to say with this hundredth piece is the reason it exists. Almost nothing that changed my own life was dramatic. It was a person asking a question at the right moment, a book opened by accident, an ordinary conversation on a walk.

Those are the materials. They're available this week, at no cost, in a room you already live in.

MOJOWAY exists to make a place for that kind of record: unimpressive, dated, specific, kept for years. A mirror, not an oracle.