Chapter 46 – Scammer Decides to Be a Good Person 21: We’re Putting Up the Money for the Village

Because of the difference in height, even if Second Brother and Second Sister-in-law standing by the water vat below looked up, they still wouldn’t be able to see the two people upstairs who were being forced to eavesdrop.

Shi Lan bit into her Dried Sweet Potato, unable to understand where Second Sister-in-law’s hostility toward her came from.

Compared with Eldest Sister-in-law, who was openly at odds with her, Second Sister-in-law’s habit of tripping people up behind their backs made her even more guarded.

Second Sister-in-law said, “What’s so bad about Du Heng marrying Niu Jinghua? . Does Shi Lan look like someone who can actually live a real life?”

Second Brother said, “Don’t make it sound so nice. If you really thought that way, I wouldn’t have argued with you. Who Third Brother wants to spend his life with is his business. If, as his sister-in-law, you didn’t approve, couldn’t you have talked to Mom and Dad? Why did you have to pull dirty tricks and sabotage things? What good did it do you to break them up?”

“What good? Fine, no good at all.” Second Sister-in-law’s face was utterly indifferent. “I just can’t stand seeing other people living better than us, okay?”

Du Liang was trembling with rage. “You… you…”

Second Sister-in-law said, “All three brothers scrape a living out of the dirt, so why does Du Heng get to latch onto some city girl and go to the city, leaving you two behind? Everyone ought to rot in this mountain hollow.”

“If Third Brother’s life gets better, wouldn’t he help out us brothers too?” Du Liang had never known that this was how his wife thought. It was simply beyond reason.

“You’ve got a nice fantasy.” Second Sister-in-law shot him down on the spot, mocking him. “That single-story house next door was built with money he sent back, right? Did we get a share? Don’t make yourself sound so noble. You couldn’t even protect Er Ya¹. Who am I supposed to count on? What good days could I possibly still have in this life?”

After saying that, Second Sister-in-law stopped talking. She filled her water, bumped into the stunned Du Liang, and went back to the kitchen.

As one of the two main targets being insulted and attacked, Shi Lan didn’t feel much. Deep down, everything in Shujia Village had nothing to do with her. She would never live here, nor would she live alongside these people.

But Du Heng was different. This was the place where he had grown up. The people here were kin bound to him by blood, ties he could never sever.

Du Heng took away the unfinished candied dried sweet potato from Shi Lan’s hand.

“That’s enough. Stop eating, or you’ll be too full again in a bit.”

Seeing him pretend as though nothing had happened, Shi Lan didn’t even know how to begin comforting him.

So the two of them simply sat there in silence. Du Heng seemed to be lost in thought, and Shi Lan stayed with him quietly.

After a long while, Du Heng suddenly said, “Do you know why I never went to college?”

Shi Lan knew that. Because there was no money. It had been written in the book, and Du Heng had mentioned it himself before.

“When I got the admission letter, my parents worried themselves sick, borrowing money everywhere. Nobody was having an easy time. Later, my uncle’s family agreed to lend it to us for a year. It was money they had originally planned to use to build a house. My aunt felt that school was more important than a house, and that the house could wait.

“Second Brother said it wouldn’t be right to delay Uncle’s family from building their house, so he’d lend the money to me instead. That was when the family found out that Second Brother had been making and selling tung oil² with someone and had earned quite a bit. We had never heard a word about it before.

“Since it was naturally better if the debt could be handled within the family, I wrote Second Brother an IOU, and Uncle’s family’s house also started going up. Half a month before registration, I went to get the money from Second Brother. He told Second Sister-in-law to give it to me, but she kept dragging it out. One day she said chopping firewood wasn’t convenient without the right grip in her hand. The next day she said she’d wait until market day and withdraw the money along with other things. She always had all sorts of excuses.

“Then, two days before I had to report in, she told me someone in her natal family was sick and she’d lent the money to them, so she couldn’t lend it to me.

“The family had several huge fights during that time. They even called in people from Second Sister-in-law’s family to confront them, and her family swore they’d never seen any money. Only then did she finally admit the truth, that she simply refused to lend it to me. By then, Uncle’s family’s money had already been spent. Registration was right there, and we still couldn’t scrape the money together. I didn’t want my parents to suffer over it, so I decided to give up. I packed up and went off with some people to work odd jobs, and I’ve spent these past few years drifting around construction sites.”

Shi Lan said, “She… did it on purpose?”

“I have no standing to judge Second Sister-in-law.” Du Heng smiled bitterly. “Tell me, what kind of thing is it for a grown man like me to go to school by forcing a woman to pay my tuition?”

Anger rose in Shi Lan. At the time, Du Heng had only been eighteen.

If she hadn’t wanted to lend the money, then fine, she should have said so from the beginning. But agreeing out loud, then stalling until the very last chance was gone… that kind of method could only be called vicious.

Just because she couldn’t stand seeing her younger brother-in-law doing better than her own household? Wasn’t that a little too destructive, hurting others without benefiting herself?

As if he knew what she was thinking, Du Heng brought up something else.

Something that had nothing to do with the matter at all.

“Do you remember Chen Yu, the girl who came by this morning?”

Shi Lan said, “That hardworking little girl?”

Du Heng dropped a bombshell. “She’s Second Brother and Second Sister-in-law’s child.”

!!!

Thinking back on it now, that little girl’s facial features really did resemble Second Brother’s a little.

“Was she given away to be raised by someone else? Because of family planning³?”

Du Heng nodded. “Half right, but not entirely because of family planning. Our county is an autonomous county for ethnic minorities⁴. These days it’s been assimilated so much that it’s practically no different from Han areas, but there are still some policy benefits. According to policy, if either parent is an ethnic minority, they can have two children without it counting as an overbirth⁵. You’ve seen it too, Second Brother’s eldest child, Da Ya, is a girl. If they wanted another child without paying the overbirth fine, then the second-child slot in the family had to be left open. Chen Yu was sent away just a few days after she was born.”

Shi Lan felt the hairs all over her body stand on end.

“Whose idea was it?”

Du Heng said, “I was at school at the time, so I don’t know exactly what it was like then. By the time I came home on break, Chen Yu’s household registration in the Chen family had already been completed. I originally thought it had been decided by Second Brother and Second Sister-in-law together with Mom and Dad. But judging from what Second Sister-in-law just said, it sounds like Mom and Dad were the ones who pushed it through, Second Brother did nothing, and she opposed it but couldn’t stop it.”

He let out a long sigh.

“My mom always liked Eldest Sister-in-law, so Second Sister-in-law didn’t have an easy life in this family. I used to wonder why, with Chen Yu already five years old, Second Brother and Second Sister-in-law still hadn’t had another child if they wanted a son… It wasn’t until I heard what Second Sister-in-law said today that I remembered. Before I went off to work, she actually had been pregnant once. One day she went to fetch water, and it started raining on the way. Second Sister-in-law slipped and miscarried…”

Du Heng left the rest unsaid, but Shi Lan could guess what he meant.

“She…” Shi Lan had wanted to ask, if that was the case, then why hadn’t Second Sister-in-law gotten a divorce? But before the words could leave her mouth, she already had the answer herself. In an environment like this, what would divorce accomplish? Find another family and go through the exact same suffering all over again?

At the Du family home, at least she still had her eldest daughter to depend on and cling to.

She thought of Mother Du, smiling all the while without saying a single harsh word, yet arranging a feast of fish and meat and even making local specialty snacks for her. She thought of Father Du, taciturn, yet willing to walk more than forty minutes along a narrow path to someone else’s house just to beg for a few winter dates for her. She thought of Second Brother Du Liang, who had shown goodwill from the moment they met, and Eldest Sister-in-law, always stirring up trouble yet bursting with life…

One face after another flashed through Shi Lan’s mind. Then suddenly they turned into strange, terrifying versions she didn’t recognize, their eyes fixed on her without blinking.

From the second floor, Shi Lan looked out. To the left was a stretch of mountains, and to the right she could see most of the village. This little village, which had once seemed peaceful and far removed from the world, where even the sounds of chickens and dogs carried from house to house, now lay under a post-rain veil of gray mist that made it feel gloomy and twisted. The damp, dense woods seemed to be waiting, as though they wanted to swallow something whole.

Those things were not social news stories recited by a TV announcer. They were family stories told by her boyfriend, and she was even sitting inside the very house where those things had happened.

Shi Lan felt cold all over, gripped by the feeling of one creature mourning another of its kind.

Wrapping her arms around herself to preserve what warmth remained in her body, she even felt a little sick at that moment.

“Lanlan?”

Du Heng reached a hand toward her, wanting to touch her, but she brushed it aside. Shi Lan shrank back against the wooden pillar.

Shi Lan looked at Du Heng and met his eyes directly. “What about you? How do you see the matter of children?”

Du Heng leaned back, keeping a certain distance between them.

He met her gaze openly. “I’ve actually thought about that before.”

“How so?”

Du Heng said, “If I didn’t have the ability to break free from this little mountain village and had to spend my whole life here, then if I had children, I’d hope they were all boys.”

Without waiting for Shi Lan to react, he went on seriously, “In a place like this, a woman’s life is just too hard. A lot of people don’t even realize how hard it is, muddling through in a daze, and then they drag the next generation into the same suffering, one by one, as if that alone proves their own lives weren’t wasted. If I couldn’t be my child’s support and let her live the way she wanted, then I’d rather they were a boy. At least in this world, men are treated far better.”

He smiled at Shi Lan and continued, “But if I could put down roots in a big city, then whether it’s a boy or a girl, or even whether we have children at all, wouldn’t matter that much.”

The answer was unexpected, and yet deeply sincere.

Shi Lan asked, “You really think that? It’d be fine not to have kids at all?”

“Shujia Village is too small, and a lifetime is too long. People here need something to look forward to in order to keep going, and children are the biggest hope they have. But some people don’t need that.”

Du Heng told her about what he’d seen on set. “I mentioned that elderly actress from the theater troupe, the one with the highest pay in the whole production. She and her husband never had children their entire lives. But she left behind countless stunning performances in theaters all over the country, and on screen she gave audiences many classic roles. Her husband wrote many excellent scripts and taught screenwriting at a university. A lot of the screenwriters with real names in the industry were once his students.

“They don’t have children, that’s true, but they’ve gone to many places together. They understand and admire each other, they know each other’s goals and ideals, and they’ve supported one another in striving for them. Their lives are vast. A life like that doesn’t need some false hope to prop it up. Even if one day they leave this world, unlike children, there will still be people who remember them. In their time here, they left behind traces that belonged to them…”

What had been weighing on her heart a moment ago vanished all at once. Shi Lan forced out a smile uglier than crying, then simply broke down and cried for real.

Only then did Du Heng slowly move closer and open his arms.

Shi Lan threw herself at him and hugged him tightly. “I’m sorry…”

Du Heng stroked her hair. “Did that scare you just now?”

She shifted awkwardly. “Not really…”

He kept patting her gently as he soothed her. “Don’t worry. That won’t happen to us.”

“I believe you.”

When she had to face the Du family again, they treated her exactly as they always had, but Shi Lan still couldn’t shake the images in her mind.

What left her feeling helpless was that she couldn’t change what had already happened, couldn’t change their way of thinking or their beliefs, couldn’t resolve their suffering, and would never become one of them. Because of that, Shi Lan felt even less able to stand on any moral high ground and judge them.

Aside from the times when they had to eat together, she spent most of her time hiding outside.

The village was spacious, and if she tucked herself away somewhere at random, it was hard for anyone to find her.

Shi Lan saw a brother and sister on the hillside cutting pig grass. The brother was eleven or twelve, and the sister seven or eight.

When they reached the field, the brother cut a bit here and picked a bit there, spending most of his time fooling around. The sister worked seriously, cutting grass nonstop until she’d piled up a heap three times her own size.

Before they headed back, the brother naturally came over and scooped up the grass his sister had cut, stuffing it into his own basket. The girl didn’t say a word. She just followed after him, swaying as she walked home.

Shi Lan went back to find Du Heng. “I have an idea.”

“About what? Tell me.”

“I can’t change everything that already happened here, and I can’t carry the fate of these girls for them.”

Du Heng prompted her encouragingly, “But?”

“But the future can still become anything. I want to do something for that possible future. So…” Shi Lan said solemnly, “Let’s pay to build a road for the village. From here to the place where we got off when we arrived. It doesn’t need to be wide, just enough for vehicles to pass. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just level and durable.”

Build a road, so more people could go out, and so more people could go out more easily.

In the short term, a road would make it easier for fertilizer, agricultural products, news, and people to come and go, and that could improve living conditions in the village.

It would also make it easier for the children to go to school.

In the long run, even if only one person’s way of thinking changed in the process, that could become a spark that starts a prairie fire. The fate of the girls in the village might then be changed.

And if there were a few determined girls who could see, or become, “people who made it out” as examples, only then could others follow in their footsteps and carry things forward.

Translator’s Notes