Before my father, Zhao Yong’an, left to join the army, he said that if he died out there, my mother was allowed to remarry the village hunter.
But though the hunter had a crippled leg, he was the fiercest man around. They said he could kill a tiger with a single punch, and that he had even beaten his previous wife to death.
If my mother married him, it would be no different from sending her to her death.
Three years later, sure enough, news came that Father had died.
Grandmother and the clan elders took twenty taels of silver from the hunter and forced my mother to be sold off to him.