Chapter 3: Record of Moving to the City in the 90s (3)

It was a rare occasion for the whole family to gather for a meal, and Jiang Chunhua made both scrambled eggs and stir-fried cured meat¹.

Su Dakui kept piling the eggs and cured meat from the plates into the bowls of Su Huandan and her two sisters, not taking a single bite for himself.

He never deprived himself of food while working away from home. People who went out to earn money and do labor, as long as things at home were not too hard, did not dare be too stingy with food no matter how frugal they were. Without a good body, nothing could be done. These days, going out to work meant doing manual labor. If your health was poor, no one would hire you.

Su Dakui truly was not greedy for food, but he knew that at home, most of the time, they could not bear to eat well.

“Chunhua, I’ve only got these three daughters. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have a son. Daughters can support us in our old age just the same. But you always make my girls suffer for the sake of your parents’ family, and that’s not right. If you want to be filial to your parents, I won’t interfere. That’s what you should do. But why should my daughters slave away for your parents’ family?” It was rare for Su Dakui to speak to her like this in front of the children.

Jiang Chunhua’s tears immediately came pouring down.

She set her bowl and chopsticks on the table. “I haven’t given them a single cent of the family’s money. Usually I just send over some vegetables we grow at home, and during holidays I buy some eggs and meat to take over. Is that really going too far?”

Jiang Chunhua truly did not think she was the kind of person who only cared about her parents’ family and not her own.

Su Dakui raised his brows. “Don’t give me that runaround. Is that what I was talking about? What I’m asking is, what gives you the right to make my daughters go work for your parents’ family? Did your parents ever hold the three of them when they were little, or look after them for even a single day? When you gave birth to the third one, you had a difficult labor. There was no one at home to watch the kids, so they were sent to your parents’ place. And what happened? You were in the hospital for three days, and the eldest and second were left hungry at your parents’ home for three whole days. How hard-hearted do they have to be? The two kids were so little then, how much food could they possibly have eaten?”

Su Huandan knew about this too, but only later, when Jiang Chunhua completely fell out with her maternal family and cried about it in public. But that was six years later.

It was also then that Jiang Chunhua completely cut ties with her parents’ family, and only after that did their own family live in harmony for many years.

Only then did Jiang Chunhua fall silent.

What was there left to say?

What he meant was that from now on, she was not allowed to send the girls to work for her parents’ family, right?

Su Dakui could not bear it, while she… well, she really did think that doing a little work did not count as suffering a loss.

Jiang Chunhua actually did not understand why Su Dakui was making such a big deal out of it. Doing a little work did not cost them any money, so how exactly was that suffering a loss?

But she knew the man of the house was the pillar² holding everything up. Whatever Su Dakui said, went.

Before, Su Dakui had kept quiet because the girls had never complained. But today, hadn’t the youngest finally spoken up?

Jiang Chunhua irritably picked up a huge chopstick-full of cured meat and dropped it into Su Huandan’s bowl. “Eat. It’s all because I’m your mother and I’ve wronged you.”

Su Huandan did not care whether her mother was implying something with those words. She picked it up and ate it.

If she did not want to go, then she did not want to go. Was she not even allowed to say so?

Su Dakui tapped the edge of his bowl with his chopsticks. “If you’re going to talk, then talk properly. What’s with the sarcasm? Your younger brother’s son can be kept at home and doted on, but our daughters are just born to suffer? They can’t live unless they go work in the fields, is that it?”

Those words completely shut Jiang Chunhua up, and the whole family ate even faster after that.

They had only just finished eating when her younger maternal uncle³ started shouting from outside the gate.

“Look at you three nieces. How old are you now, and you’re still sleeping in? Not going to do the work in the fields?” The most annoying thing about him was this, he never came inside to speak. He always started yelling from the front gate first.

He always only blamed the three sisters, and often stood from Jiang Chunhua’s side to lecture them. He truly did not care whether there were outsiders present or not. He just loved putting the three sisters down.

He trampled on his nieces just to show off the authority of being their maternal uncle. In that respect, he was every bit as irritating as Old Man Mu when he cursed his own granddaughters.

It was not as if Jiang Chunhua had never argued back, but she was not as sharp-tongued as her younger brother. After a few exchanges, she would be talked down, and eventually she stopped arguing.

Hearing what his brother-in-law said, Su Dakui was so angry he laughed. He pointed at Jiang Chunhua. “So when I’m not home, this is how your family bullies my daughters? Jiang Chunhua, let me make this clear. Either you cut ties with your parents’ family, or we divorce and you can get out and go back to them.”

He said it cleanly and decisively. Not only was Jiang Chunhua stunned, even Su Huandan was dumbfounded.

It was only when she heard her younger maternal uncle crying and shouting outside, along with the sound of slaps, that Su Huandan came back to herself.

If this had happened in her previous life, if she had complained then, would they have cut ties with the Jiang Family sooner?

If they had cut ties, would the man her eldest sister chose herself not have been driven away by their cousin until they broke up?

Su Huandan glanced at her two sisters, who were pressed against the window watching the commotion outside, then at her mother, who still had not come back to her senses, and sighed.

“Mom, you know better than we do what Grandma and Grandpa are like. Dad can’t take it, and neither can the three of us sisters. We really can’t stand them coming here and making trouble anymore.” Su Huandan added another push.

Jiang Chunhua shot to her feet, covered her mouth, and rushed into the east room⁴.

The east room was her parents’ bedroom. The west room was the bedroom shared by Su Huandan and her two sisters, with the main room in between. In winter, when it snowed, the main room also served as the kitchen.

Only after driving off his brother-in-law did Su Dakui leisurely carry a cleaver to the backyard to kill a chicken.

The eldest sister went into the east room, probably to comfort their mother again. The second sister went to the kitchen to boil water, getting ready to scald the chicken feathers later.

Su Huandan went to the backyard to watch her father kill the chicken, and at the same time look for a place to hide gold.

This time, her father had come back to get money. He had already picked out a courtyard house on the outskirts of the city.

That area later became an urban village⁵. It was never demolished, but just living off the rent from the houses brought in quite a lot, because in 1995, a Film and Television City was built there.

In her previous life, after her father bought the courtyard, he took all the family’s savings and used them to build a new house.

The new house was nice to look at and comfortable to live in, but it really was not as good as keeping that money and buying two more plots of Homestead Land⁶.

One plot of Homestead Land cost two thousand yuan, and the family’s money was enough to buy three. Back in 1990, many families in that area were selling Homestead Land.

If they bought Homestead Land, they could buy an apartment to live in.

In those times, if a family had an apartment, even if they lived in cramped quarters, it was still something very respectable. It would even help their children match with good families when discussing marriage.

But in 1995, after the film base began construction, the families who had sold off their Homestead Land in that area back in the early years regretted it so much they could have slammed their heads against a wall.

With the film base right there, all you had to do was throw up a row of houses and rent them out, and the money would come pouring in.

At least by the time Su Huandan died, the private homes over there were doing even better business than the hotels. Maybe they had not all gotten rich off the Film and Television City, but not a single household was short on money, and life was getting better and better.

The moment she thought of that Homestead Land, Su Huandan grew anxious and hurried to find a place to bury the gold. Then she could buy a few more lots, and when the time came, build neat rows of self-built houses. Her whole family would never have to struggle again.

After looking around, she actually found one.

Behind the kitchen in her family’s courtyard, there was actually a cellar.

No one in the family knew about this cellar either. It was only two years later, when the family was planning to sell this old house and came back to pack things up, that they discovered it by accident.

There was nothing especially valuable in the cellar, just a large earthen jar about half a person’s height, and inside it were thirteen Yuan Datou⁷ silver dollars.

Translator’s Notes