They Say I Can Curse People (9)

Chapter 40

Yun Song’s new day began with her usual morning run. When she returned from her jog, she saw the two sisters, Chang Fang and Huanhuan, already exploring the school.

A strong wind had blown through the previous night, leaving the school playground covered in leaves. The two sisters were busy sweeping them up.

Yun Song was about to go over and speak with them when someone outside began calling out for justice.

“Officer! Officer!”

The people here were mostly familiar with how government officials handled cases through traditional opera plays. Although they were very adept at navigating social relationships and could communicate effortlessly with aunts, cousins, or even random passersby, they still lacked a proper way to communicate when facing the police.

Every time Yun Song heard this, she felt a pang of sadness at the collision between the old society and the new era.

The two sisters heard it too. Unlike Yun Song, Chang Fang immediately recognized the voice as her Third Aunt’s.

She stood frozen in place, unwilling to go over.

A woman who usually looked bitter and resentful was now forcing a smile. When someone who habitually wore a scowl tried to smile, the wrinkles on her face seemed to fight one another.

“Officer, you just got back from the mountains, right? I have something to ask you, if it’s convenient.”

“You can just call me Yun Song. If you’re not comfortable using my name, you can call me Comrade Police.”

Yun Song had no memory of her. When she had visited the family before, she had only gone to the homes of the Eldest Aunt and Second Aunt, so she naturally didn’t know this was Chang Fang’s Third Aunt.

Hearing it was her Third Aunt, Chang Fang grabbed her younger sister and quickly hid.

“Sister, it’s Third Aunt.”

“Shh, don’t say a word, okay?”

Third Aunt peered inside, and seeing no one else, she said to Yun Song, “I’m Chang Fang’s Third Aunt. I heard from my family last night that Chang Fang and Huanhuan were taken away. I came to ask about the situation.”

Although she didn’t say it outright, she felt in her heart that no decent police officer would just take someone’s children away.

Yun Song observed her expression and said, “There was no other way. According to the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Household Registration, registering a child’s Hukou is an obligation parents must fulfill. It establishes the child’s social and legal identity. However, Li Dongxiu refuses to acknowledge that these are her children and refuses to register their Hukou. To resolve the matter properly, we had to bring the children back here first.”

Li Dongxiu? Third Aunt paused for a moment before realizing that was her sister-in-law’s name.

“Then… what if they never acknowledge them? You can’t just let the children be homeless, can you?”

As Third Aunt spoke of this, her heart felt as though it were being clawed by a cat.

She had wanted to slap herself twice when she left the house today. How could she be such a servant to them! Here she was again, meddling in that family’s business.

Back when she lived with her parents, no one treated her like a human being. Her mother had two sons before her and another son after her. She was the third child and the only girl in the family, but she remembered from a young age that her mother hated her. If the slightest thing went wrong, her mother would beat her with a stick. She wasn’t allowed to cry; if she did, she would be beaten even harder. She remembered one time she was beaten until she was hiccuping from sobbing, and her mother wouldn’t even allow her to hiccup. She nearly suffocated that time.

When she got married, she was the one who spoke the harshest words, saying she wouldn’t even visit if the Zhang family all died out.

Chang Fang was her brother’s daughter. Her heartless brother and sister-in-law didn’t treat the girl like a human, so why was she involving herself in this mess? The thought that she was helping them clean up this disaster, only for Chang Fang to grow up and likely go back to support that family anyway, made her heart ache.

Her life! The more she thought about it, the angrier she became.

She had slapped herself twice and started walking up the mountain with her hoe. But as she walked, she thought of how pitiful Chang Fang was, unloved by her father and unwanted by her mother, just like her own childhood. The feeling in her heart grew even more painful, and in the end, she had come to the town anyway.

On the other side, Chang Fang’s heart was in a knot.

She originally didn’t want Third Aunt to come. For one thing, Third Aunt had a terrible temper; since she had made this trip, she would likely scold Chang Fang for a long time afterward.

On the other hand, it was useless for Third Aunt to come. Third Aunt couldn’t possibly register her Hukou for her.

However, when she saw Third Aunt forcing a smile to talk to the police and asking about her, Chang Fang couldn’t help but let the corners of her mouth turn up. Third Aunt… Third Aunt usually liked to scold her, but when something really happened, Third Aunt was still good to her.

Yun Song, for her part, had finally encountered someone she could actually communicate with.

She valued this person’s presence and invited her into the office.

Yun Song’s office was located right in her dormitory. There was no helping it; conditions were poor at the moment.

Yun Song poured a cup of tea for her and said, “I don’t quite understand the situation with Chang Fang. I’d like to ask for your insight.”

“Go ahead.”

“What exactly is going on with Chang Fang’s family?”

“What do you mean, what’s going on?”

Yun Song said, “How can the preference for sons over daughters be so extreme there?”

Compared to Pingcheng, Tonglin Town did indeed favor boys, but there was usually a limit. Yun Song had figured out how people here operated over the past few days.

Despite the one-child policy, there were pitifully few only children in the entire Tonglin Town. So far, Yun Song only knew of Mei Yue being an only daughter.

In other families, they started with at least two children.

Usually, if the first child was a son, they would still have another, hoping for two sons. But if the second was a daughter, they wouldn’t do anything drastic.

If the first was a daughter, that daughter was usually registered for a Hukou. If the second was a son, they likely wouldn’t have a third. If the second was also a daughter, they would keep trying for a son until one was born. In such cases, the middle daughters might not be registered for a Hukou.

Today, Tang Chao and Tong Jin were planning to go out and pressure these people to register their children’s Hukou and demand that parents send school-aged children to school.

But Chang Fang’s family was the only one who hadn’t even registered their first daughter.

Third Aunt was already angry, and usually had nowhere to vent. Now that a police officer was here expressing confusion about her family’s actions, she felt a sense of relief. Regardless of family shame, she spoke directly: “That matter!”

She wanted to name a culprit, but then she realized— “The whole Zhang family is out of their minds!”

After saying it, Third Aunt felt it wasn’t quite right, so she added: “Well, not all of them. My grandmother was okay. When I was little and my mother beat me, my grandmother would pull her away and stop her. She’d say there were already three boys in the house and only one girl, so why beat her? But good people don’t live long. My grandmother only lived to eighty before she passed away. Otherwise, she might have been able to keep those people in check.”

Yun Song followed with a sigh.

Third Aunt continued, “My father and mother, the two of them were like people possessed from morning till night, insisted on having a son. My father felt that only a son could truly be counted as his child. My mother… I don’t know what she was thinking, but to her, a son was a treasure, while a girl… she especially hated girls. When I was little, she beat and scolded me constantly. Not registering Chang Fang’s Hukou was also due to her superstition. She said Chang Fang’s fate was too ‘noble,’ and that as long as she was in the Zhang family, no noble male fate would ever reincarnate into the family. So, Chang Fang had to be raised outside.”

Yun Song felt a sense of curiosity and asked, “Did your mother have any siblings?”

Third Aunt recalled an incident from the past. It was when she was very young. One day, during a heavy rain, her father had gone to check on the paddy fields. Her mother sat by the fire pit with her older brothers, and for the first time in her life, her mother mentioned their grandmother.

“Your grandmother was a woman of bitter fate. She never gave birth to a son. As a result, as soon as your grandfather died, she was forced to remarry to bring in a sum of money for the clan. I had nowhere to go, so I could only be sent away as a child bride¹.”

Her mother, who was Chang Fang’s grandmother, grew red-eyed as she spoke. Even now, Third Aunt wanted to slap herself because she remembered how, at that moment, she had felt so sorry for her mother that she tried to bring her a piece of cloth to wipe her tears. Instead, her mother turned around and lectured her, “You are the lucky one, having two older brothers and a younger brother. You must be good to your brothers in the future.”

She didn’t understand back then how things had turned out this way.

Now, as she told this to the police, she suddenly understood the answer. “My mother felt that the reason my grandmother had to remarry back then was because she was a daughter. If she had been a boy, she wouldn’t have had to remarry.”

As Yun Song wrote down the family’s history, she could roughly imagine how difficult everything must have been for a girl who lost her mother and was forced to become a child bride.

Perhaps during that time, the young girl concluded that her mother’s departure was because she wasn’t a son.

Consequently, after she grew up, she needed to constantly give birth to sons to soothe her own emotions.

Yun Song felt that if this were the case, then having sons was like drinking poison to quench a thirst².

The problem with the Old Lady was that when she was a daughter, her mother was forced to remarry because she wasn’t a son.

The core of this problem was “she was not a man.”

No matter how many sons she birthed, she herself was still not a man. The more the sons she bore oppressed her daughters, the more it proved that daughters were useless, which only repeated the events of the past. But she didn’t know what the fundamental issue behind her internal fear was, so in the end, her fear transformed into an extreme obsession with having grandsons.

This extreme pursuit led to further oppression of the daughters and granddaughters within her own family. When these girls were further oppressed, their helplessness as children facing adults only reinforced the helplessness she had once felt as a daughter.

Yun Song was only making a rough estimation; the specific details still required more exploration.

Meanwhile, Chang Fang was crouching outside the dormitory with her younger sister, eavesdropping on their conversation.

In the past, Chang Fang would never have done such a thing. But now, she was simply too afraid that others would decide her future destination without her knowing. Compared to that fear, eavesdropping was nothing to her.

She heard about her grandmother’s past. Chang Fang thought of how her grandmother looked now, and then she imagined her grandmother as a child.

Was her head filled only with thoughts of having sons back then? Did she ever, like herself, imagine going to see the town or the city?

When did she change later on?

For no reason at all, she thought of the cicada larvae in the ground. Silently, suddenly, they just changed.

Translator’s Notes