They Say I Can Curse People (End)

Chapter 52

Chang Fang had no idea her grandmother had arrived. She was still at the pharmacy. The older woman who usually helped out had gone back to her parents’ home to visit relatives today; word was her sister-in-law had just given birth.

With her gone, Chang Fang became the primary assistant.

Another worker from the brick factory came in today, taking advantage of the lunch break to get his stomach checked. He said it had been hurting severely since the middle of the night.

Chang Fang kept a mental note of his symptoms and followed Doctor Tang closely, watching as he took the man’s pulse.

After checking the pulse, Doctor Tang said, “There is cold trapped in your stomach. Have you been drinking a lot of cold water these past few days?”

“We’re laborers. If we don’t drink water, we can’t keep going,” the man replied. At the brick factory, you spent every shift drenched in sweat.

“Don’t drink cold water for a while. Go buy a thermos and keep it with you. I’ll prescribe some herbal medicine, and you’ll be fine once you’ve taken it.”

“Doctor Tang, are you sure it’s just because I drank cold water? I was a little worried it might be from that time I ate those poisonous mushrooms.”

Chang Fang was surprised to hear about poisonous mushrooms. Living in the mountains, they all loved foraging for mushrooms, but everyone only ate the ones they recognized. They never touched the unknown varieties, so she had never encountered a case of poisoning in all her years growing up.

“That’s part of the reason,” Doctor Tang said as he wrote out the prescription. He looked up and asked, “How many days do you want? Three, five, or seven?”

“Five days should do it.”

Doctor Tang nodded and finished the slip. Chang Fang came over to take it, holding an abacus¹ in her other hand to start calculating the bill.

The benefits of her previous experience in the medicinal herb trade were showing. she remembered the prices of the herbs perfectly and was excellent at mental math. She had picked up the apprentice work very quickly.

“That will be eight yuan in total.”

The man took out the money, and once Chang Fang had collected it, she began weighing the herbs.

“Did you eat a mushroom you didn’t recognize?” Chang Fang chatted with the patient while she worked. She truly couldn’t understand how anyone could get poisoned by eating mushrooms.

“It’s infuriating just talking about it. If we didn’t recognize them, we wouldn’t have picked them! It’s because that poisonous mushroom looks exactly like the Lime Mushroom. That’s why we ate it.”

Chang Fang was stunned. She remembered picking many Lime Mushrooms herself. “There’s a poisonous mushroom that looks exactly like a Lime Mushroom?” In Chang Fang’s mind, the Lime Mushroom was a very reliable, honest sort of fungus.

“It’s a Japanese mushroom. Looks identical to the Lime Mushroom, but it turns out it’s toxic.”

Doctor Tang, who was reading a book nearby, found the name “Japanese mushroom” amusing and explained, “The scientific name is Japanese Red Mushroom. It contains toxins that cause gastroenteritis. It’s a good thing you were all young men at the time, or it could have been much worse.”

“Speaking of which, we were the idiots,” the man said. “The mushrooms were just sitting there in plain sight on both sides of the path. We couldn’t believe no one had picked them.”

Chang Fang thought of the mushrooms she had picked on Maotou Mountain. They had also been growing in large clusters, and no one else had touched them.

“Where did you pick them?”

“Up on Maotou Mountain. We were actually up there looking for money, but we didn’t find any cash. Instead, we found a bunch of poisonous mushrooms and brought them down. They took out our whole group.”

Chang Fang’s eyes widened. Maotou Mountain?

Wait! Chang Fang remembered that she had also picked a lot of “Lime Mushrooms” on Maotou Mountain. She had given all of them to the old lady on the mountain.

She recalled passing their house later and seeing Lime Mushrooms drying on a bamboo tray outside. They hadn’t eaten them fresh; they had dried them.

Oh no!

“Doctor Tang! I have to go out for a moment. Can you finish weighing these herbs?”

Doctor Tang: “…Are you giving me orders now?”

“I gave someone Lime Mushrooms.”

“…Who?”

“The old lady on Maotou Mountain. She didn’t eat them then; she dried them. I’m panicking.” Actually, since so much time had passed, a few more minutes probably wouldn’t matter, but Chang Fang felt a knot of dread in her chest.

“Go, quickly. If you catch them while they’re eating, induce vomiting. Make them drink water and induce vomiting.” Logically, if they hadn’t eaten them after all this time, it should be fine, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Chang Fang nodded and scrambled out the door, running toward the mountain.

On the other side, the elderly couple had just returned from gathering firewood.

“Let’s just have some noodles for lunch.”

“I’ll cut some cured meat, then.”

“Sounds good.”

The couple planned to have a simple meal of noodles with cured meat and water spinach.

But as they sat by the fire pit and sliced off a piece of cured meat, they felt that plain meat noodles were a bit of a waste.

“Do we still have those dried daylilies? Let’s boil some of those too.”

The old lady went to rummage through the cupboard. The dried daylilies were gone, but there was still a bag of dried mushrooms. They would be delicious once soaked.

All along the way, Chang Fang kept reassuring herself. They hadn’t eaten them for so long, they certainly wouldn’t be eating them now. Yes, definitely not.

By the time she reached Maotou Mountain, she was completely out of breath.

“Grandma!” She pushed open the door to find the old lady holding a pot, about to pour out the noodles.

“Chang Fang is here! Just in time. We’re having cured meat and dried mushroom noodles today. They’re very tasty.”

Chang Fang’s heart skipped a beat, and she was nearly scared to death. Then she noticed that both bowls were full, the old man wasn’t in the room yet, and the old lady was still holding the pot. They hadn’t eaten yet. They definitely hadn’t started.

She let out a sigh of relief and shouted, “Don’t eat! The mushrooms are poisonous!”

She rushed closer as she spoke. “Thank goodness you haven’t eaten them yet.”

The old lady paused, looking confused. “But we’ve already eaten them.”

They had eaten some a while back.

Chang Fang was stunned, thinking the woman meant they had already eaten today’s batch. She rushed to fetch water. “Quick, drink water! Throw it up, hurry! These mushrooms are poisonous! You’re elderly, this is bad, this is so bad…”

The old lady was startled by her reaction. “Wait, are we going to die?”

But she quickly realized what was happening and said, “They aren’t poisonous. We’ve eaten them several times already.”

Chang Fang blinked. Only then did she realize that what they had been eating were Sanba Mushrooms.

The couple had picked two entire buckets of them before, and they had dried everything they couldn’t finish fresh.

Chang Fang felt as though she had fallen from a great height only to land softly on her feet.

She still needed to look at the dried mushrooms in the noodles to be certain there were no issues.

Once torn into strips and dried, Lime Mushrooms and Sanba Mushrooms looked somewhat similar, but a careful examination could still reveal the differences.

It was indeed Sanba Mushrooms, which the people in town called Jizong².

Chang Fang let out a long sigh of relief.

“The mushrooms I gave you before might be poisonous. Do you still have them? I need to throw them away. Next time I come, I’ll bring you some Astragalus³.”

The Old Lady found it a bit strange that they were suddenly considered poisonous, but since Chang Fang said so, she went to the cabinet and brought them out.

Chang Fang took the toxic mushrooms and bid the elderly woman farewell. She didn’t dare toss them aside carelessly for fear that someone else might pick them up and eat them, so she dug a hole on the slope at the foot of the mountain and buried them.

After burying the potentially lethal mushrooms, she continued down the mountain. When she passed the forest where she had previously found the money and the mushrooms, she felt as if a lifetime had passed.

She remembered thinking back then that this mountain received no sun at all and felt gloomy, but now she felt the cool mountain breeze blowing up was quite comfortable.

Still, she kept walking down. She had to get to town. She still wanted to study medicine and become a doctor.

When Chang Fang arrived home, Tang Chao came out first. “Wait a second, don’t go in yet.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your grandmother is here.”

“…Is she here to cause trouble for me?” Chang Fang knew her grandmother very well.

“In a way, but it’s fine. Sister Yun is chatting with her. I expect Sister Yun will be able to send her back in a little while.” Among the three of them, Yun Song was the most suited to handle this kind of situation.

Yun Song had just sent Tang Chao out to warn Chang Fang.

There was no need for them to cross paths.

If those two met, both sides would end up angry, and neither would ever be able to convince the other of anything.

Even the police couldn’t talk sense into this Old Lady.

In the first few days, they had felt that because they were educated and professionally trained, they would be able to persuade the elderly folk in the village.

Now they knew the reality of the situation and had learned how to smooth things over with compromise.

Yun Song came out soon after. Seeing that the police wouldn’t budge and her granddaughter wasn’t coming back, the Old Lady realized she had to return to her farm work. Naturally, she couldn’t wait there forever.

“I’ll walk her back to the village. It just so happens I have business there anyway,” Yun Song said.

Tong Jin added, “I’ll go with you.”

Tang Chao stayed behind to watch over the town office.

On the way back, the old woman talked the entire time. First, she spoke of how unfilial her third daughter was and complained about her bad temper. The hatred in her tone made one feel that if her third daughter were standing there, she would certainly have struck her.

Yun Song offered her usual consolation: “She might not have meant it that way. Perhaps she just wanted you to be more comfortable.”

The old woman grew even angrier. “You city people don’t understand these things.”

Only then did Yun Song notice that the old woman seemed unable to tolerate anyone questioning her words.

The Old Lady was angry and refused to speak further.

And so, no one spoke. There was no wind in the woods, and even the mountains of Tonglin Town seemed silent.

They walked all the way up and finally returned to the village. Yun Song and Tong Jin watched as the old woman returned to her earthen house in a huff and slammed the door.

No one could predict what the future held for this Old Lady.

Perhaps she would eventually come to understand why her life had been so bitter, and why, despite having so many sons, her life remained filled with resentment.

Or perhaps she would never understand, and would simply continue blindly hating her daughter while blindly chasing after more grandsons.

A month later, the children born outside the quota in the village were gradually being registered in the Hukou. For those who still refused to register, Yun Song took notes, waiting for the comrades from the court to come and handle it, which would also serve as a chance to spread legal awareness.

As for Chang Fang’s mother, she gave birth one evening. It was a son, reportedly weighing seven pounds.

Everyone in their family finally had someone to rely on. Their faces glowed with pride, their spirits were lifted, and naturally, they stopped coming to town to look for Chang Fang.

Yun Song thought that perhaps back then, every time Chang Fang’s grandmother gave birth to a son, she had been just as happy, feeling that her life finally had something to look forward to, a sense of hope.

Chang Fang successfully became an apprentice at the pharmacy. She had already begun learning how to take pulses⁴. She truly loved the work and would take their pulses whenever she had a free moment.

It seemed… everyone had gotten what they wanted.

If fate truly existed, it seemed particularly merciful at this moment, unable to bear seeing people’s desires go unfulfilled, and so it had distributed to everyone the thing they wanted most.

As for the future, no one knew.

Translator’s Notes