They Say I Can Curse People (17)

Chapter 48

While the police were busy with their own matters, Chang Fang continued to busy herself with hers.

She and her sister lived in the junior high school dormitory. Her sister spent the day at the kindergarten, and when Chang Fang returned from the mountains in the afternoon, she would pick her up. During the two days of the weekend, she took her sister up the mountain and left her at the home of an old woman on Maotou Mountain. The old woman acted as a temporary substitute for the kindergarten teacher.

Chang Fang herself was only seventeen years old. Her life experience came from the relatives she had lived with and the people in the village. She had no experience in learning how to do business.

Thus, in the beginning, she simply identified which medicinal herbs were expensive and which were plentiful. Once she recognized them at the town’s pharmacy, she returned to the village to teach the local children, telling them to go out and dig them up quickly.

Normally, everyone went up the mountains and down to the rivers to dig soil or chop wood. Any of those tasks was similar to digging for herbs.

At that time, she didn’t think too much about it. After all, in the environment she grew up in, the concept of danger didn’t exist.

Her Eldest Aunt, Second Aunt, and Third Aunt lived in three different villages. When she was ten years old, she had to move between them by herself. Back then, traveling from Eldest Aunt’s house required crossing a mountain with a cliff. She had loved standing on the edge of that cliff to look at a wild lily growing on the precipice.

In her mind, it didn’t feel dangerous. On the contrary, she felt thrilled and happy every time. It wasn’t until the day before yesterday, when she went up with the police, that her perspective shifted. A large group of children from the village had been trying to gather Bayan Ginger on the cliffside. At that moment, she had sensed a sharp feeling that something was wrong and quickly announced that she was no longer buying Bayan Ginger.

She had been constantly watching the police, worried that they would look down on her because of this business. Instead, she noticed that the three officers’ faces remained deathly pale.

Chang Fang could tell they were genuinely terrified. These police officers, who usually feared nothing, had turned pale with fright because a group of children was trying to dig for herbs on the edge of a cliff.

It was only then that Chang Fang slowly began to understand.

It turned out that such an environment was dangerous. It turned out that adults were supposed to worry about children in that way.

She couldn’t help but think of her own past and the adults who had appeared in her life.

In the past, she had always felt that her Second Aunt, who had a good temper and spoke gently, was the best to her. Her Eldest Aunt and Third Aunt both liked to scold her and were unkind.

But now, she remembered more things.

In reality, Third Aunt, who loved to scold her the most-scolding her mother, her father, and her grandmother without leaving out a single family member-might have been the one who treated her best.

Third Aunt had always hated her grandparents and her parents, yet she was the one who took her in when both Eldest Aunt and Second Aunt didn’t want her.

As for schooling, it was Third Aunt who had endured her husband’s shouting to send Chang Fang to the village school.

Later, when she had to return to Eldest Aunt’s house, Third Aunt had escorted her there.

Eldest Aunt had raised her for the longest time. No matter what, she deserved credit for the hard work, even if there was no special affection.

As for Second Aunt, Chang Fang understood now. Even if she hadn’t gone to Second Aunt’s house back then, the eldest son would have still taken the younger son to the pond to catch snails, and the boy still would have died. At that time, the village would surely have said the eldest son killed his younger brother. Now that she had taken the blame for her Eldest Cousin, she no longer wanted to be kind to Second Aunt.

This belated realization made her heart long to treat Third Aunt a little better. She wanted Third Aunt to understand that being good to her brought rewards, to make her glad she had been kind back then. Faintly, she also harbored a sense of revenge, wanting the people who had been unkind to her to regret it-to regret not treating her well.

Chang Fang didn’t hold onto her money tightly. Just like the first time she earned money, she used it to put her sister in kindergarten, and she even gave her sister ten cents of pocket money every day.

So, the next time she went up the mountain, Chang Fang carried a piece of pork belly for both Eldest Aunt’s and Third Aunt’s families. It was pork cut with a heavy cleaver, thick with fat and skin.

“Third Aunt!” Chang Fang arrived just before noon, and Third Aunt had just returned from the hillside.

Third Aunt’s temper had improved lately. Perhaps the hatred in her heart had finally found a true outlet. When she had confronted her mother with the words buried in her heart, her resentment had been vented, so she no longer took her anger out on her own children.

She had slowly begun to realize that her past complaints and her dislike of Chang Fang stemmed from her hatred for her brother and sister-in-law.

But people had to maintain appearances and couldn’t cut ties completely, so her dissatisfaction with them had been suppressed, only to be dumped entirely onto Chang Fang.

Once she realized this, she had gone back to her parents’ home and given her brother a thorough scolding. Her heart felt much lighter after that.

Seeing Chang Fang now, she was indeed much more peaceful and no longer felt uncomfortable.

In the past, no matter how many times she scolded Chang Fang, it never had this effect. In fact, the more and harsher she scolded back then, the more anger seemed to build in her heart.

“Third Aunt, I brought you some meat,” Chang Fang said as she set down her basket. “Today was market day¹, and the butcher happened to be slaughtering.”

Like an adult, she began to manage her interpersonal relationships. Although she was still a bit unpracticed, it made her feel very comfortable.

A neighbor was watching from nearby, staring at the girl who had been taken away by the police.

Several children in this village provided herbs to Chang Fang, but the adults here knew nothing about it. They only knew that Chang Fang often followed the police to various villages, and they had no idea what she was actually doing.

No one really expected her to be capable of much. After all, in everyone’s impression, she was still that pitiful girl sent away by her parents to live in rotation at her relatives’ houses.

Seeing Chang Fang back now, it seemed the girl had changed quite a bit.

“What did your niece come for?”

“To bring me some pork.”

“Goodness, such a large piece of pork must have cost a lot. Where did she get the money?”

“She doesn’t have any real money. It’s just kids playing house, she earned a little bit. I’ll smoke this meat for her and give it back to her later.”

The neighbor clicked her tongue in surprise. It was hard to believe. When Chang Fang lived here before, she was as silent as a mute gourd. Now, she actually had money to buy meat.

How strange!

On the other side, Yun Song and her group were holding another three person meeting.

“Hua Jing was right. Since people haven’t seen her, her story might not be very effective in Tonglin Town,” Tong Jin said.

“Tonglin Town has its own pool of talent. Should we just pick someone from here?”

They couldn’t afford to take risks without a guaranteed result.

Tang Chao said, “Actually, we have a very good candidate.”

She didn’t say the name directly, but Yun Song knew she was referring to Chang Fang.

Chang Fang had no Hukou, but she was earning money now, had sent her younger sister to kindergarten, and had grown up in the villages of Tonglin Town.

Yun Song shook her head. “Spreading Chang Fang’s story on a large scale wouldn’t be good for her.”

After some consideration, Yun Song decided to stick with promoting the figure from Yulan Town. She would downplay the more complex parts of the story, such as the school related details, and emphasize the parts that everyone was familiar with.

For example, the teachers and the principal going to a student’s home to pick them up.

One had to understand that the junior high school in Tonglin Town used to be shared by Yulan Town, Tonglin Town, and the neighboring Baihe Town. This gave the school immense authority. Furthermore, there was a period when the principal cared deeply about graduation rates. To make the numbers look good, many students at the bottom of the class were forced to take leaves of absence, transfer, or repeat a grade. Many parents in Tonglin Town had suffered through that hardship.

In the storytelling, they placed the part about the teachers and principal coming to the house to fetch the child for school at the very beginning to grab people’s attention.

The subsequent focus was on how much the family benefited from producing a university student.

Naturally, they didn’t go to the countryside to promote this themselves. The various villages were currently too hostile toward them. If they went to speak, people would be too guarded to take them seriously.

Right now, there wasn’t much work to do in the fields; it was the slack season². During this time, everyone went into the mountains to gather firewood in preparation for winter.

Usually, the women would go in groups, gathering wood while chatting about the latest news.

These stories were perfect for such occasions.

Before long, several villages had heard about the girl from Yulan Town who had changed her family’s life.

Yun Song had originally been thinking about how to integrate the story of a stranger from a neighboring town into everyone’s lives.

To her surprise, once they made the start, the village naturally began to take it in a new direction.

Not everyone in the village was obsessed with having sons. Some people stopped having children after two girls, or had four or five daughters and didn’t want any more.

For this group, such a story was inherently comforting.

And so, those whose daughters could study would tell this story to others.

Those whose children weren’t good at school felt a sense of indignation. Why was the whole village starting to have these beautiful dreams, while they were left out?

That wouldn’t do.

It was at this time that Chang Fang happened to bring pork to her Third Aunt. Everyone suddenly realized that Chang Fang… this girl was quite something.

No one had ever seen that girl from Yulan Town, but Chang Fang was different. This child had been famous since she was little. She spent her childhood moving between the homes of her Eldest Aunt, Second Aunt, and Third Aunt. Back then, some busybodies in the village would deliberately ask her, “Who are your mom and dad?”

The child was small then. When asked, she would say foolishly, “I can’t say. My mom said not to tell anyone, or else I’ll be carried away by a tiger. You shouldn’t talk about it either.”

Later, when she grew up, people only saw her working with her head down. They heard that even at her age, she still had no Hukou and was waiting to find a husband’s family to register her.

On the surface, no one said anything, but privately they pitied her. No one expected this girl to actually go into business, and a successful one at that.

Thus, those whose children were poor students had a new benchmark.

“Studying isn’t the only way. That Chang Fang from the Zhang family doesn’t have a Hukou and hasn’t had much schooling, but now she’s in business. Not only did she send her sister to the town kindergarten, she even bought pork for her aunts.”

“Speaking of which, it seems she only gave pork to her Third Aunt and Eldest Aunt, right?”

“You can only blame her parents for not acting like human beings. If a good girl like that had been raised properly, she might have turned out just like that girl from Yulan Town.”

These words, circulated among the adults while gathering firewood or making broad bean chili paste, were also overheard by the children.

Consequently, the girls in Tonglin Town who didn’t have a Hukou now had a new way to lash out during arguments:

“Just you wait! When I have money, I won’t give you a single cent!”

Just like Chang Fang!

Translator’s Notes