Some time ago, before Mass at St. Paul, one of the two parishes that have been entrusted to us in Taipei, I met a parishioner who I had not seen in a while. She had invited me over a number of times but I was never able to find the time to be with her. As soon as we greeted one another, she reminded me that I owed her a meal, and so we decided to eat breakfast together after Mass.
The lady’s name is Immacolata; she’s 94 years old and lives on the street of the parish; two of her children live in apartments not far from her. While we eat, she tells me her life story.
“I got married very young and came here to Taipei with my husband and a small son,” she began. Immacolata is originally from Hunan, a region of China; like many others, she escaped from the mainland during the period of the civil war. “In Taiwan, I had another son and a daughter,” she continued to tell me. As a girl – she tells me – they told her that she was not beautiful and her husband did not even consider her attractive. “When I was 18, my husband brought home a military colleague with whom he would play basketball, a young man who was very tall and handsome. I remember that he complimented me but I, who was already married, told him: ‘Consider me like an older sister; you should also get married and have children.’ When he later got married, he did not invite us but sent us a photograph of the wedding.”
Some time later, that same young military man arrived at Immacolata’s house. It was lunchtime, her husband was away on business, and she was alone. “I was wearing a beautiful Western dress, a gift from the Americans. I’ve always been small and thin, and that dress looked good on me. Out of politeness, since it was lunchtime, I cooked him pasta in broth and two eggs. You must understand, Father, that no one had ever considered me beautiful; this boy seemed interested in me, and I began to be attracted to him. Knowing, however, that he was also married, I immediately decided never to meet him again. I walked him to the door and followed him with my eyes as he walked away along a bridge.” He, Immacolota recounts, also turned several times to look at her. In that moment, she understood that she would love him forever, even if she could never live with him.
She stopped him with these surprising words: “Love is sacrifice, not possession”.
As she was telling me all this, I felt like I was watching a scene from a film by the great director Zhang Yimou. She was only 55 years old when her husband died. The man sought her out to meet her, and she accepted. By now they had both aged. He told her that he had had three daughters and began to complain about his wife. “For the first time I gave him my hand,” Immacolota recalls, “and I felt his skin full of calluses.” She felt a rush of tenderness for this now much-aged man, but when he informed her of his intention to take her to a hotel room to do “certain things,” she stopped him with these surprising words: “Love is sacrifice, not possession.” Equally unexpected was his response, “Now I respect you even more than before.”
At the end of the story, Immacolota informed me that there is a character in her Chinese name that means faithful, and she was keen to point out that she has remained so. I was able to rediscover, through the life experience of this 94-year-old woman, the truth of the words that Giussani had addressed to us so many times and on which I had decided to base my life. After breakfast, we walked back to her home. While I said farewell on the stoop of her house, she thanked me. I also thanked her and it was sincere: I would never have imagined to hear such a beautiful and moving story and I promised her that we would be seeing each other again. At the end, she told me: “In life, there are two important things: yuanfen and mingyun”. These expressions can both be translated with the word “destiny.” When a person encounters another to whom they will remain connected, it is said that it is a question of yuanfen. It is as if that meeting had already been written, prepared by destiny. For this reason, I think that we can also translate this word with “providence,” because we are not led by chance but there is a Father who loves us and accompanies us towards our good destiny.
