Chapter 205

The production team at Guagua Video certainly knew how to generate buzz.

Wei Sheng had only offered a few small suggestions, but they had managed to pack this pilot episode with several hot-button social issues that were guaranteed to make viewers explode with rage while simultaneously reaching for their keyboards to vent.

The story began with a cattle-herding boy from Wenhua Township in Nine Streams County.

The boy’s surname was Wen, and his name was Wen Zhuangcai. It was clear that when he was born, his parents had placed great hopes on him, wishing for him to grow up and become a man of scholarship—a “Zhuangyuan^[1]” talent.

Unfortunately, from the moment this teenage boy was born until now, every good thing in his life had been snatched away or encroached upon.

When Wen Zhuangcai was five years old, his father died in a car accident. One would have thought that with the insurance payout and some funeral expenses, the mother and son could have managed to get by. However, Wen Zhuangcai’s grandmother used the excuse that her youngest son needed to get married to borrow the Bride Price money from her daughter-in-law.

Once that money was lent out, it was like a stone sinking into the ocean; the mother-in-law never mentioned repaying it again.

Wen Zhuangcai’s mother went to ask his grandmother for the money twice. At first, the old woman cried poverty. Later, she simply acted shamelessly, claiming that her son’s money belonged to her. Not only did she refuse to pay it back, but she also claimed that Wen Zhuangcai’s mother couldn’t farm so much land alone and demanded she give half the family’s fields to the younger brother’s family to cultivate.

Wen Zhuangcai’s mother was a weak-willed person with a bit of a martyr complex. Even though the mother-in-law and brother-in-law were being so excessive, and even though her own son urged her to find a village official to seek justice, she actually ended up scolding her son through her tears.

She said things like, “She is your father’s own mother. Now that your father is gone, we should be the ones fulfilling his duty of filial piety to your grandmother.” These words left the young Wen Zhuangcai feeling stifled, causing him to turn dark and rebellious at a tender age.

With half their land seized by his grandmother and uncle, the remaining portion was barely enough to keep him and his mother fed. Wen’s mother could no longer afford to send her son to school, so Wen Zhuangcai sought help from his teachers and applied for a poverty student subsidy.

Yet, even this small subsidy caught the grandmother’s eye. Since she couldn’t get the money from the school, she went after her daughter-in-law with an utterly absurd reason: the wife her youngest son married had a fierce personality and treated her poorly. Therefore, the old lady decided she was moving in to live with her eldest daughter-in-law.

Naturally, the eldest daughter-in-law would now be responsible for her every basic need.

Wen Zhuangcai’s household was already short on food because of the lost land. One day, after coming home from school, he caught his grandmother sneaking a large basket of potatoes out of their house to give to his uncle’s family while his mother was away…

The last bit of food in the house was nearly cleared out by his grandmother. While Wen Zhuangcai could get one full meal at school, he could only have wild herb and potato soup at home. After starving like this for two months, and after his grandmother caused another scene claiming she wanted to go to the county seat to see a doctor—demanding his mother sell the newly harvested corn to buy her medicine—Wen Zhuangcai ran away from home in a fit of rage.

The irony was that after leaving home, Wen Zhuangcai actually started living “Good Days” where he was well-fed and warmly clothed.

A child of his age wouldn’t be hired for actual work, but luckily, Wen Zhuangcai had good fortune and met a kind uncle. The man told him that the night markets in the Provincial Capital were packed with tourists and suggested he go there to collect recyclables.

Wen Zhuangcai was very clever. Knowing it was dangerous to sleep outside alone, he slept inside the high-speed rail station during the day and collected scraps at the night market at night. To his surprise, what that uncle said was true! In one month, he earned over two thousand yuan just by collecting trash, which was more than his mother made farming in the village.

However, this time, he wouldn’t be foolish enough to bring the money home.

He knew that with his mother’s personality, she wouldn’t be able to keep the money safe.

Having solved his basic survival needs, Wen Zhuangcai began to ponder his future.

Initially, he wanted to “expand his business” by buying a second-hand tricycle so he could collect more at the night market. He also thought about renting a room so he could sleep in the morning and go out in the afternoon to scavenge through trash cans along the streets to earn even more.

But one day, after waking up at the station, he suddenly saw two people nearby watching an audition recruitment video for the show “The Way of Shennong.” He heard that the program only accepted children from impoverished families and that if selected, they would not only receive a scholarship but might even be chosen by a mentor to learn a trade to earn a living.

Wen Zhuangcai immediately pulled out the second-hand phone he had bought for four hundred yuan, found the show’s official social media account, and signed up.

Since he couldn’t rely on anyone else, he would work hard to rely on himself!

Compared to Wen Zhuangcai, the second contestant to appear might be someone many viewers from rural backgrounds could relate to even more.

Yan Xingxing’s family was a typical and common family of four. There were no “villainous” relatives in the household; her parents worked hard at manual labor to save money for their two children’s education. Most remarkably, neither Yan Xingxing’s grandmother nor her parents favored boys over girls.

Logically, such a united and harmonious family should have been able to achieve a good life eventually, right?

In reality, they hadn’t.

Yan’s father had no specialized skills and could only work as a laborer hauling bricks in the city. Yan’s mother worked as a nanny, actually earning a bit more than her husband each month.

But no matter how much they saved, after subtracting the family’s annual living expenses and the children’s school fees, the money they set aside could never keep up with the rising price of housing.

Seeing that their daughter was about to enter middle school, they knew that if they couldn’t buy a house in the county seat, she would be stuck in a rural township middle school with poor teaching conditions.

The couple knew that for a child like their daughter, who wasn’t exceptionally gifted academically, it would be very difficult to get into a university without a good school. Forget university—hardly anyone from their township middle school made it into the two key high schools^[2] in the county each year.

If she didn’t get into a key high school, university would be out of reach. Gritting their teeth, the couple borrowed from every relative and friend they had. They finally scraped together enough for a down payment on a school-district apartment^[3] in the county seat. Unexpectedly, just as their eldest daughter started middle school, property prices in the county plummeted!

The housing prices dropped, but the monthly mortgage payments and interest remained the same. To make matters worse, due to the economic downturn, the construction site where Yan’s father worked became an unfinished project^[4] and went bankrupt. After working hard for over half a year, he didn’t receive a single cent in wages.

With Yan Xingxing’s mother working alone as a nanny, her meager monthly salary was barely enough to cover the mortgage, leaving nothing to support the family.

Her father lacked any specialized skills. He was timid and slow-spoken. He had tried to follow the trend of becoming a food delivery driver or a courier, but after two months of struggling, he hadn’t earned a cent. Instead, he had lost several thousand yuan in the process. In the end, he had no choice but to apply for a job as a courier sorter. Although the work was bitter and exhausting and the pay was low, at least the money arrived on time every month.

Yan Xingxing’s entire family worked incredibly hard to improve their lives, but for some reason, every time they managed to save a bit of money, life’s expenses would immediately increase.

They could never save anything. They were forever paying off the mortgage or dealing with whatever unexpected emergency cropped up in the household.

Finally, when the school once again hinted that she should participate in a “Summer Intensive Camp,” Yan Xingxing stared at the 4,998 yuan price tag on the notice and decided she could no longer be such a burden to her parents.

Middle school tuition was not high, but the various hidden costs amounting to ten or twenty thousand yuan a year were not something a family like theirs could easily bear.

It was just as CEO Yao had said during the group meeting: sometimes it wasn’t that children from wealthy families intentionally seized resources from poor children, but rather that these resources came with inherent thresholds. Some required “pay-to-win^[5]” financial investment, while others were only open to specific social circles. Children from poor families couldn’t even reach the threshold to begin with.

Was it unfair? Not necessarily. After all, the various privileges those people enjoyed today were the result of the hard work and struggle of their ancestors and parents.

Yan Xingxing hadn’t thought about such deep social causes. Her logic was simple: since going to university and learning a trade both resulted in working for someone else after graduation, why couldn’t she go out and work to earn money earlier? That way, the family would have one less burden, and she could even earn money to help her parents reduce the pressure of living.

But her parents absolutely refused to agree. They had suffered enough from the hardships of manual labor and did not want their daughter to endure the same bitterness.

In their plan, their daughter should go to university. Even if she couldn’t get into a government office, she should be like the white-collar workers on TV – dressed cleanly and beautifully, sitting in an office using a computer and drinking coffee. That was the kind of decent job suitable for a girl.

Yan Xingxing couldn’t find a way to convince her parents. Just then, she heard that someone at school had signed up for a variety show called The Way of Shennong.

She heard that if one participated in this show and was lucky enough to be taken in as an apprentice by a mentor from a medical school, they could get a job at a pharmaceutical factory without even having to take the medical school entrance exams. Yan Xingxing signed up without hesitation.

This time she was clever. She didn’t dare tell her parents it was a variety show, instead claiming it was a knowledge competition. She wasn’t technically lying, as the elimination method for the show tested the contestants’ ability to recite and memorize knowledge about Traditional Chinese Medicinal Herbs.

Hearing that their daughter was going to participate in a knowledge competition held by a TV station, her parents were finally happy. They even scraped together a thousand yuan from their meager savings for her, telling her not to skimp on money during the competition. Food outside was indeed more expensive than the school canteen, but she shouldn’t skip meals just to save money.

Afraid her parents would worry, Yan Xingxing thought about it and accepted the money.

She heard that as long as she could make it to the top thirty-two, the production team would not only cover room and board but also provide an additional five thousand yuan in prize money. The further she went, the higher the prize money became. It was said that the grand champion would not only study under a mentor but also receive a scholarship worth five hundred thousand yuan.

Yan Xingxing had never been more grateful for her academic imbalance^[6] than she was now: she wasn’t good at other things, but she was the best in her entire grade at memorization.

However, she heard the show was currently extremely popular with a huge number of applicants. Yan Xingxing couldn’t guarantee she would win the championship, but she intended to give it her all. Even if she didn’t get first place, second or third wouldn’t be bad. The top three would receive a scholarship of at least two hundred thousand yuan.

With that two hundred thousand, their family’s mortgage and the tuition for her and her younger brother would no longer be problems.

This pilot episode on Guagua Video didn’t intentionally try to sell misery^[7] or act overly sentimental, yet every detail felt as real as if it were happening to everyone.

These details were like strands of thin hemp rope. At first glance, they seemed insignificant and easy to deal with. But when the ropes were tightened around a person one by one, they could quickly strangle a person or a family until they couldn’t breathe.

Is a hundred yuan a lot? Most people would think it’s not worth mentioning. Even a food delivery driver or a courier could earn a hundred yuan in a day, right?

But there were still families where a husband and wife would have a massive fight just over whether to give a child a hundred yuan for school workbooks or magazines, while the child could only stand aside helplessly, wiping away tears.

Is a bag of corn expensive? Even if it’s threshed and sold, it’s only worth a few dozen yuan. But just to rush one more bag of corn inside during a rainstorm, a father slipped down a muddy mountain path, and three children lost their father just like that…

Can you say it wasn’t worth losing a life for a bag of corn? But in such a family, under the pressure of survival, many people cannot see the danger. Or rather, they are willing to take the risk just to earn a tiny bit more money to improve their lives.

Netizens watched the young Wen Zhuangcai weaving through the night market in tattered clothes to pick up discarded bottles, squatting by late-night food stalls and salivating wildly while waiting for others to finish their drinks.

They watched Yan Xingxing’s parents take on the bitter and exhausting work of cleaning a construction site, performing the initial deep clean^[8] for a newly renovated house, crawling on the floor to scrape off mud spots from tiles bit by bit, all just to earn an extra thousand yuan so their daughter could go to the TV competition…

Clearly, there wasn’t a single sentimental line in the entire video, only a messy background noise filled with the atmosphere of everyday life. But as they watched, the netizens’ tears suddenly became uncontrollable.

(End of Chapter)