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Chapter 529: Chapter 519: If you play your tricks on the first, I’ll return the favor on the fifteenth.
Gaijiatun, Uncle Shen’s household.
After Uncle Shen read his daughter’s letter to his wife, he was so angry that he threw the letter on the ground and pointed at it, cursing, "How did I end up raising such a crooked-minded beast? She didn’t learn anything good from going to the Capital, just picked up these sneaky little tricks. Day in, day out, she looks down on Yunfang, criticizing this and that about her. With her own mindset, who could she possibly appreciate? And now she even wants to stir us up into doing such unscrupulous things for her. She really has grown bold."
Uncle Shen grew angrier as he spoke until his hands started to tremble.
"Oh, can you keep it down? Afraid no one will hear you?" Auntie Shen got up from the kang and bent over to pick up the letter, brushing the dust off it and said, "Don’t talk like that. There’s some truth to what Yunxiu has said."
Uncle Shen’s eyes bulged with anger, "What nonsense are you spouting? Yunxiu is thoughtless, but how can you, at your age, still be so thoughtless?"
Auntie Shen did not take kindly to her husband’s scolding and replied with a forced smile, "Oh dear, you’re unhappy because I said something about your precious niece. Yunfang has you as her doting uncle, can’t I, as her mother, say a few fair words for my own daughter?"
"I think you’ve been twiddling your thumbs at home too long and now you’re just stirring things up," Uncle Shen retorted angrily. He turned and left the house; if he stayed, they were sure to argue. Why was it so hard to have a few quiet days?
"Look at you, if you have something to say, just say it. Why the rush to leave?" Auntie Shen wasn’t bothered by this; she simply thought her husband was out of arguments and that’s why he didn’t want to talk and was running off.
Uncle Shen had reached the door when he remembered to turn back and warn, "I’m telling you, you’re not to spread around what Yunxiu said in her letter, got it?"
"Alright, alright, lord of the house, you have so many things to manage every day. Go wherever you need to go; I understand these things," Auntie Shen said impatiently, waving her hand.
Only then did Uncle Shen walk out relieved, "As long as you know. I can’t control Yunxiu anymore, but Yunfang doesn’t owe us anything. We can’t be so heartless as to trouble that child."
Uncle Shen was a reasonable man when he was calm.
Auntie Shen rolled her eyes behind his back and muttered only after he had left, "Who’s lost their conscience? Who’s lost their conscience? Shen Yunfang has eaten my food, drank my water, and now she treats my daughter like this. Who has really lost their conscience? She thinks she’s settled everything by giving that hundred yuan, like we’re some beggars."
Auntie Shen was not exactly a selfless person. Between her own daughter and a niece who had no blood relation, she would naturally favor her own daughter. Her thoughts and considerations were always centered around her own daughter.
When they lived in Taoshu Village, the narrow scope of life there never bothered her, but ever since she visited her daughter and saw the vast difference between her and her niece’s lives, Auntie Shen felt uneasy in her role as a mother. After returning, she would lie awake at night turning this over in her mind.
Her own daughter was not inferior, so why should Yunfang, who had two children, be able to study in the Capital and even buy two houses there, while her own daughter had to cram into her mother-in-law’s house, unappreciated and idling at home?
Where could she even go to talk about such injustices?
Tortured by these thoughts, Auntie Shen could no longer see the good in others; she was fixated on why her own child’s life couldn’t be as good as someone else’s.
Muttering to herself, Auntie Shen recounted all the ways Shen Yunfang had wronged her and her husband, and how she had wronged their daughter Yunxiu. Looking at the letter in her hand again, her heart was even more convinced that what her daughter wrote was right. Why should Shen Yunfang be able to make money in the Capital without involving her own family, Yunxiu?
If we’re talking about kinship, my Yunxiu is also related to Shen Yunfang by blood, right? Surely closer than Wang Dashuan’s family is. So why did Shen Yunfang invite Wang Dashuan’s family (the letter only mentioned Dashuan and his wife, but Auntie Shen knew the whole family went together; connecting the dots from what happened before and after, she figured out where they all went), and yet, she didn’t invite my Yunxiu?
As for holding grudges, the animosity between Shen Yunfang and her in-laws couldn’t have been greater. It started even before she got married, with countless incidents piled up over time. The little mistakes made by my Yunxiu can’t even compare to those of her in-laws. So why would she have something good and not call her own daughter, but instead invite her elder niece?
Auntie Shen remembered the last time Shen Yunfang came back, how she acted as if she were dead at her place, and left her own daughter unattended at home. She, as an aunt, didn’t even bother to visit, to support her niece. Even when I begged her to go, she wouldn’t agree.
Whenever Auntie Shen thought about these things, she felt angry. Wasn’t this mistreatment? Taking advantage of the fact that us old folks aren’t literate, thinking that her daughter is easy to bully, and so on. Humph, if Shen Yunfang could play her tricks on the first of the month, then don’t blame me for playing mine on the fifteenth.
Once she had decided, Auntie Shen took advantage of her husband’s absence, put on her shoes, and stepped out to gossip with the neighbors.
It took only a few days for the news that Auntie Shen deliberately let slip to spread to Taoshu Village.
"What? What did you say?" Qiu Shuping widened her eyes in disbelief.
"Oh dear, I just heard it from someone else. Anyway, I’ve got things to do at home, so I’ll be off for now. I’ll drop by another day." Seeing that she might have said too much, the neighbor quickly made an excuse and left.
"Mom, I think what Mrs. Lv said might be true," Li Hongqi stepped into the room only after the others had left.
"I was wondering why your elder sister didn’t come home to see us during the New Year. It turns out she went to your second brother’s place over in the Capital," mused Qiu Shuping.
There was so much going on at home this year. Right before the New Year, her younger daughter-in-law found out she was pregnant. Qiu Shuping served her with the utmost care, saying that she was even more attentive than serving an ancestor. But still, the daughter-in-law began to bleed before the year was out. The family rushed her to the hospital where the doctor stated it was a threatened miscarriage and that she needed to be hospitalized for observation.
As a result, the family’s New Year was ruined, with constant trips to the county hospital. Not to mention the tiring travel, they were now completely out of money. Her son had tearfully asked her to think of something. What could she possibly do? In the end, she had no choice but to borrow money from others again.
There’s a saying that borrowing and returning leads to further borrowing without difficulty, but she hadn’t even paid back the two hundred and fifty bucks she borrowed earlier. Now, going out to borrow again, never mind whether she had the face to ask, people were simply not willing to lend her more.
She had to sweet-talk so many people before she finally managed to borrow fifty bucks, which was just enough to help pay the hospital fees for now.
When she went to the hospital yesterday to take over from her daughter-in-law’s family, they mentioned the hospital was pressing for payment, and the fifty bucks were almost gone.
Today, her younger son didn’t go to the hospital after getting off work to take care of his wife. Instead, he came home to try to figure out how to get some money.
"Mom, I’m not trying to be critical, but what the second sister-in-law did wasn’t exactly right. Such a big matter, how could she not even give you or dad a heads up? She’s asking someone to go to the Capital, where they’ll need to be provided with food and lodging, and working for her surely deserves some compensation. She gives that money to outsiders, but why doesn’t she think of her own family?" Li Hongqi narrowed her eyes, already cooking up some malicious plots.
