Who Stole My Pressure Cooker (Finale)

Chapter 31

Liao Shanchun used the pressure cooker to stew pig’s feet. This was a promise she had made to her daughter. The pressure cooker hissed and whistled, filling the entire house with the rich aroma of cured pig’s feet.

Yes, her pressure cooker had returned two days ago.

Officer Yun Song had brought it back, explaining that it had originally been taken by the Sun family’s eldest grandson.

“It was actually their family! Like father, like son, truly a crooked tree brings forth crooked fruit!” Liao Shanchun cursed with righteous indignation.

“The Sun family’s eldest son is willing to compensate you twenty yuan and offer his apologies. He hopes you won’t spread word of this matter.”

When Yun Song discovered the pressure cooker, she hadn’t confronted Mother Sun directly. Considering Mother Sun’s current state, she found a moment to speak with the eldest son of the Sun family instead.

Yun Song had worried that he might not take the matter seriously, but to her surprise, the middle-aged man immediately asked, “Is it from the Liao family? Liao Shanchun’s pressure cooker? Are you sure?”

“Your eldest son secretly took it, and your mother hid it away.”

The Sun family’s eldest son said instantly, “He must have just made a mistake in a moment of weakness, a lapse in judgment. Officer, look, he’s still young. We were all children once. Kids don’t understand things, they don’t know what they’re doing. I’ll educate him properly from now on; he’ll never steal again. Officer, could you please talk to Liao Shanchun for me? I can give her ten yuan… no, twenty yuan, as long as she agrees not to let this get out.”

Liao Shanchun was notorious for being unable to keep a secret. When the pressure cooker first went missing, she had made sure the whole village knew. Now that it was found, wouldn’t she tell everyone that his son was a thief?

The mere thought of it terrified him.

Perhaps fearing that Yun Song wouldn’t agree, he added, “Officer, you don’t know how small this place is. If he gets branded as a thief, he’ll have no choice but to be a thief for the rest of his life, just like my second brother.”

“My second brother’s life was ruined by things like this. If my dad hadn’t beaten him in front of so many people at the start, if he hadn’t shamed him by saying he stole money in front of everyone and let them laugh at him, maybe my brother wouldn’t have ended up this way. Even if he stole a little money as a kid because he didn’t know better, he definitely would have stopped once he grew up.”

Yun Song’s professional instincts told her his reaction was a bit off, but perhaps it was the death of his own brother who loved to steal, combined with finding out his son had the same habit, that caused such agitation.

Yun Song naturally wouldn’t refuse this kind of negotiation; it mostly depended on Liao Shanchun.

A minute ago, Liao Shanchun had wanted everyone to know about it to get revenge for the theft. But now, hearing “twenty yuan” and “tell no one”? Fine! Twenty yuan was worth keeping quiet for!

One had to realize that two years ago, when the Village Chief built a new house, people who hauled sand or cut and carried timber from dawn to dusk only earned ten yuan a day.

Now, she was being given twenty yuan all at once.

Liao Shanchun agreed immediately.

Thus, she received the twenty yuan. She even swore an oath before the Sun family’s eldest son that she wouldn’t speak of it.

To her, the matter of the pressure cooker was over. The cooker was back, and this overachieving appliance had even brought twenty yuan back with it.

In the evening, as the Liao family sat around the fire pit, Liao Shanchun still found herself thinking about Changgui’s family.

Changgui’s entire family had left the village just like that, and Liao Shanchun felt uneasy about it.

Especially the fact that Changgui’s family had surrendered all their fields. How could they just give up their land?

Liao Shanchun still remembered how Changgui’s family had clashed with the village just to keep Chunfeng’s field.

At the time, she had thought that if a few more people stood up like that, her own daughter could do the same in the future.

She never expected that after so little time, they would give all the land back.

Whenever Liao Shanchun thought about this, she felt worried for them. What would they do without fields and land?

Although their son had a factory job and their son-in-law was a school teacher, Changgui and her husband still needed a way to survive.

“Sigh, they really should have kept the fields. They could have let us farm them, and we could have given them some rice every year,” Liao Shanchun couldn’t help but say.

There were people in the village who rented others’ fields, paying not with money but with a portion of the harvest each year.

The Old Lady of the house added wood to the fire pit and said, “Changgui thought it through clearly. She didn’t keep the fields because she didn’t want the trouble.”

If the fields were kept, there would be too many complications to argue over.

First was the public grain tax¹. If the land is in your name, you are responsible for the tax.

If you aren’t farming it yourself, you have to let someone else do it. If the other person is willing to pay the tax, that’s fine. But what if they agree at first, and then when the time comes, they suddenly say the harvest was bad and refuse to pay? What do you do then?

Furthermore, the people willing to rent others’ fields nowadays are mostly the elderly. The younger generation of laborers are more willing to go to the city to work. If the elderly rent it and farm for a year then pass away, the issues with the land become even harder to untangle.

In the end, you don’t get much grain, but you get a mountain of trouble.

Not to mention the Sun family was always watching.

The Old Lady explained all the twists and turns clearly.

“So, it was better to just surrender the fields.”

Liao Shanchun thought to herself that the Sun family surely wouldn’t be that ruthless.

The next day, just as dawn broke, Mother Sun appeared at the Village Chief’s door to talk about Lier Field.

Her grief was real, but her desire for the land was also real.

“Chief, I’ve come to talk to you about Changgui’s fields.”

“This will follow the established rotation,” the Chief replied.

“How can that be?”

“Otherwise, you can all draw lots together. Whoever draws it, gets it.”

Hearing this, Mother Sun was instantly enraged. She began cursing him up and down. “Don’t you put on that official act in front of me! If it weren’t for people like you, my second son wouldn’t be dead!”

“Sister Cao, it is fine if you want to say I act like some big official. You can say whatever you like about that. But you cannot go around talking nonsense about people causing deaths.”

Mother Sun began to wail.

“Then I will tell it to you straight, and everyone else can judge for themselves! Let’s see if I am talking nonsense or not.”

The onlookers listened, knowing full well in their hearts that the Sun family was only being difficult because they wanted the land, but they found it hard to interject.

“My second son was killed because of Chunfeng. Chunfeng kept coming back here every few days only because she still had fields in this village!”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You still claim it has nothing to do with you? Chunfeng was already married off; the land should have been taken back long ago. I want to ask all of you, if the land had been taken back then, would Chunfeng still have kept running back here? If she hadn’t come, wouldn’t my son still be alive! Tell me, isn’t it you people who killed my son!”

Standing in the crowd and watching Mother Sun’s unreasonable behavior, Liao Shanchun suddenly felt that perhaps Changgui was right to cut ties with this place completely.

In the end, the Sun family still got the Lier Field.

Ever since experiencing that incident, Liao Shanchun found she no longer had much desire to brag about the things she knew.

Liao Shanchun had always felt that the Sun family having so much land was a stroke of good luck.

This was especially true a few years later when the government notice came down stating that they would no longer have to pay the agricultural tax. Liao Shanchun felt it was a pity that Changgui’s family missed out on such a good time.

By then, Changgui’s family had moved to the city. Because Chunfeng’s actions were ruled as Justifiable Defense and she was not prosecuted, and because Changgui’s family was doing quite well selling popcorn in town, the Sun family was resentful. They often went to the school to cause trouble, so Changgui’s family eventually moved to the city.

People in the village thought that city folk would never enjoy things like popcorn. Everyone assumed city people would look down on it and that Changgui’s family would surely have a hard life there.

Changgui’s family never returned, so no one knew how they were actually doing.

That was until Liao Shanchun’s eldest daughter insisted on resigning, saying she was unhappy at the school and no longer wanted to teach. That was a teaching job, a “iron rice bowl²” career!

Liao Shanchun thought it was a reckless move. Mother and daughter had a very unpleasant argument over the phone about it, so Liao Shanchun decided to bring some vegetables and a local chicken to see what was going on with her daughter.

It was in Pingcheng that she ran into Changgui, who was running a hotpot restaurant.

Only then did she learn that Changgui’s family was doing very well. They owned a hotpot restaurant that had apparently been open for ten years, and business had always been good. Changgui mentioned that business had been a bit harder the last couple of years, mainly due to the poor overall economic climate.

Hearing this made Liao Shanchun even more convinced that her daughter should hold onto her stable teaching job. However, when she arrived at the school, her daughter had already resigned.

The two of them had another fight over the phone.

Liao Shanchun returned to the town. She had a house there and usually lived in town now.

Over the weekend, Liao Shanchun received a notice from the village chief saying that her old house in the countryside was now a dangerous structure. They asked if she wanted it leveled; if she did, the state would provide a subsidy of fifty thousand yuan.

Though she felt a sense of loss, she chose to have it demolished.

When she went back, there were hardly any people left in the village. The younger generation of the Sun family lived in town, and Mother Sun had already passed away.

Some said she was provoked to death by the Sun family’s eldest grandson, while others said she died of exhaustion.

Back then, for the sake of twenty yuan, Liao Shanchun had never revealed who stole the Pressure Cooker. However, the Sun family’s eldest grandson had been sent to prison two years ago for stealing cars in the city.

The Old Lady of the Sun family had become senile by then. When she heard the news, she believed there was something wrong with the ancestral graves³.

Consequently, the Old Lady moved all the ancestral graves by herself. She ended up exhausting herself and passed away just a few days later.

And so, Liao Shanchun stood alone on the old grain-drying ground. Before her, the fields that should have been planted with grain had turned into bamboo groves. Down the slope, the Lier Field that the Sun family had fought so hard for no longer looked anything like it used to.

Liao Shanchun sat there for a long time, reminiscing about the past. She thought of Changgui’s family, who had never once returned; she thought of the Sun family, who thought they could be triumphant for a lifetime just by snatching some land; and she thought of her past self.

Finally, she sent a message to Dayan.

There are no true “iron rice bowls” in this world. If you truly feel you cannot go on, then change your surroundings and keep living. That works too. A person cannot allow themselves to be trapped to death.

Translator’s Notes