They Say I Can Curse People (14)

Chapter 45

Chang Fang’s parents truly did not understand, nor did they feel there was anything wrong with not registering a Hukou for their second or eldest daughters.

In particular, they would think to themselves that since the two sisters were staying at their aunts’ houses, they weren’t with strangers. The couple reasoned that they hadn’t abandoned the children or given them away. One had to realize that in this world, there were people so extreme they would actually throw their children away or give them to strangers.

Every time they thought this way, they felt there was nothing wrong with them.

Since even they thought like this, the people in the village who raised their children in their own homes found it even harder to understand.

The kids were in their own houses! So what if the kids couldn’t call them Mom and Dad and had to use “Aunt” and “Uncle” or “Great-Aunt” and “Great-Uncle” instead? They still felt they loved their children. After all, they hadn’t sent them off to be raised by relatives. You had to know, some people who didn’t care about their kids would send them straight to a relative’s house to be raised; that was what you called a hard life.

They just hadn’t registered a Hukou, that was all. How did it result in the police showing up?

In the past, the police only arrested people for murder or theft. Why were they meddling in this sort of thing now?

There were also some people in the village who had also exceeded the birth quota, but they had registered Hukou for all their children. Seeing the situation in the village now, they spent the first two days just watching the excitement. After all, it wasn’t happening to them, so of course it was a spectacle.

Later on, these people began to feel a sense of responsibility, as if they needed to come out and speak a word of reason.

“Officer, you’re all so anxious your mouths are breaking out in blisters.” When the woman came over to talk, she even brought a pot of honeysuckle tea for the three officers to drink, trying to build some rapport first.

Yun Song knew this woman, as she had been in the village for several days now.

The woman lived next to the village school. Her family ran a small convenience store, and she had three daughters, all of whom had Hukou.

Tong Jin knew her too and thought she was there to help, so she said, “Of course we’re anxious. If we resolve this this year, the children who need to go to school can do so properly.”

The woman said, “Actually, you don’t need to worry about that. You don’t need a Hukou to study at the village school. As long as you give a little money, you can attend.”

“It’s just that you need a Hukou if you want to attend middle school later. But in our village, no child ever tests into middle school.”

Yun Song said, “If they had Hukou, out of so many children, one of them would surely pass. There’s a Sanli Village nearby where an only daughter tested into middle school this year. She’s already studying there now, and I heard her grades are quite good.”

Tong Jin added, “Exactly. It’s thanks to her being an only daughter. With only one child in the house, they don’t make her do heavy labor every day, so she has time to study more.”

Hearing this, the woman only shook her head and said, “How can that be okay? Only one daughter, what will they do in the future?”

Even though she didn’t have a son herself, she had her own calculations. She said, “My three daughters are a bit better. When the time comes, I’ll see which of the three is willing to stay and take in a live-in husband. That way, it’s about the same as raising a son. With only one daughter, even if she’s good at studying, what happens when she marries out? After raising a child for twenty years, once she leaves, the house is empty and you have nothing left. Sigh.”

Yun Song didn’t offer a rebuttal. Growing up here, these people must have seen such things happen.

Perhaps because they didn’t argue, the woman felt she could say more, so she continued.

“There’s just no other way. You’re city people, you don’t know that in the village, it won’t do without a son. It’s not just that you need a son, but having too few sons won’t do either. You have to have several.”

She began to give examples: “If your family has no sons, there are people who will specifically come to seize your land. Besides, now that the fields have been allocated, even though girls can get a share, once they marry, that land has to be returned. Sigh…”

Yun Song thought of Changgui’s family and remembered how their daughter had kept her Hukou at her parents’ house when she married, ultimately refusing to give back the land.

Tong Jin couldn’t help but say, “Then is having children purely for the sake of profit?”

“Raising sons to guard against old age and storing grain to guard against famine¹; those are old sayings. When you have a child, you definitely still want them to see you off at your funeral.”

None of the three officers had grown up in such an environment. It was a bit difficult for them to fully understand how this mindset could override the parent-child relationship they had known since childhood.

So, the woman began to brainwash the three police officers.

“Besides, the kids these days are truly happy.”

Every generation that has suffered feels they had it the hardest, and they feel the next generation is ungrateful for having it so good.

“These kids now, whether they have a Hukou or not, they all have enough to eat. Take my three kids; just this morning they were complaining that potato rice² doesn’t taste good. Heavens, if we had potato rice to eat when we were little, we would have been so happy.”

Most parents of this generation were born in the sixties or seventies, and they felt their childhood was the truly bitter one.

“Back then, the adults in the house had to go to the collective production teams³. We had to start fires before we were even as tall as the stove. We had to feed the pigs and cows and chop firewood. At such a young age, our hands were covered in calluses.”

“Back then, we couldn’t even dream of books. At most, we learned to recognize a few characters.”

Children now were much luckier; they could even go to the village school.

After she said all that, Yun Song couldn’t help but ask, “Why did you register Hukou for all three of your children back then?”

Speaking of this, the woman looked a bit proud. She said, “This village school was built seven or eight years ago. It was built on my family’s land. At the time, it was our ancestral grave site. My grandmother and grandfather are buried right here at the village school. Other people have ‘ancestral graves emitting purple smoke⁴‘ as a sign of luck; my ancestral graves emitted a school! So my children must definitely produce a college student!”

That was a reason that couldn’t be replicated.

They couldn’t exactly turn every family’s ancestral grave into a school, could they?

Over there, a child came over and shouted to her, “Boss! I want to buy something!”

The woman hurried back, saying as she walked, “Don’t you worry either. Whether they have a Hukou or not, it’s actually about the same.”

After she left, Tang Chao couldn’t help but say, “This is all a problem with their mindset. Can’t we just kill a chicken to warn the monkeys⁵? If we just arrest one extreme case, the others will definitely get scared.”

They were police officers, after all. If they truly wanted to handle this issue, it really shouldn’t be that difficult. How had they let themselves be stymied to this extent by this matter?

Yun Song said, “Because we have no way to change their mindset in a short amount of time. We could take a harsher approach to solve this problem right now.”

For instance, regarding the issue of vaccinations, it was absolutely possible to figure out exactly how many children were unregistered.

If they only looked at the results, there were only a few villages in total. Children were sent back and forth between these same villages; they couldn’t be hidden forever.

However, once they did that, the villagers’ mindset would remain unchanged. They would still insist on having sons, and as a result, the treatment of the daughters born to them would decline even further. If the authorities used vaccination records this time, these parents would learn their “lesson,” and none of the subsequent over-quota children would ever be taken for vaccinations again.

“If we make an example of someone now, the villagers might not be able to deal with us, but can’t they deal with the children in their own homes? Not even speaking of something as extreme as killing them, they could just take a child to Xiangjin Town and abandon them, or leave them by the river to fend for themselves, or take them to the edge of a cliff. The consequences of that are not something we can bear.”

After Yun Song finished speaking, they continued to the next house to keep grinding away at the problem.

In this household, the eldest daughter was ten, the second daughter was six, and the third child, a son, was three. The second child had no Hukou, while the eldest and the third had been registered directly. Because they complied with the policy, there had been no fines. When the officers had questioned them previously, this family had also claimed the child belonged to a relative.

Now, as soon as the officers arrived, they heard the person say, “A child? What child? My house has only ever had two children. Did you all remember it wrong?”

Translator’s Notes