Love Must Not Be Forgotten

Love Must Not Be Forgotten

Love is one of the feelings that have a lot of controversy around them for there are few people that have not experienced it. Love cannot be categorized because it does not refer to a single type, as there can be as many kinds of love as people on earth. Since the early times people have felt the need to use the subject as the main theme in poems, films, novels. They used many other methods of describing the feeling. In "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" by Zhang Jie, love is presented from two different points-of-view, as the book portrays two different love stories.

The main topic which Zhang Jie wishes to emphasize is the issue of true love in the present Chinese society. What is most intriguing about the stories is that they reveal the fact that marriages in the former Chinese society were very different from ordinary modern marriages. The difference between the two types of ceremonies is that the old-fashioned one is based on a strict traditional program which tends to influence the marrying couple.

Shanshan, the daughter, discovers her mother's journal and realizes that the latter had lost the chance of staying with the man that she once loved. In contrast to her mother, Shanshan was now certain that she had the right to choose as a partner whomever she wanted.

Zhang Jie presents the love stories of a mother that has lost her love and of her daughter that had been searching for her love. At first, young Shanshan tries to make up her mind concerning whether or not she has feelings for the boy that wants to become her boyfriend. Furthermore, she contemplates their condition in case that they would become lovers and later marry.

Shanshan's mother did never open about her feelings to her daughter, but, despite that, Shanshan had found out about her mother's secret passion after having read the journal. As Shanshan recounted, the writings in the journal had a deep effect on any reader.

Shanshan's thinking is significant due to the reason that it expresses the change that took place in the Chinese culture. During the last decades, people began to crave for independence as each person had wanted to express more freely and independently.

Shanshan and her mother, Zhong Yu, had both hoped true love would come find them, but each refrained from acting in order to attain it. In addition to that, both Shanshan and her mother had been accustomed to dodging any chance to true love that they got. In their opinion, love had almost been a wonderful dream which could not become true for them. A reason for their fear of being in love might be that they had been in fact afraid from making a change in their lives. The respective change would not be an ordinary one, but it would be a remarkable one. It would outreach far beyond the two women's souls, it would prove to be a step forward concerning the modernization of the whole Chinese culture at the time.