Chapter 3

I reached a small county town I’d never seen before, very, very far from home.

It was lucky I’d been added to the household register during the census a few years earlier. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have had an identity card. I could never have come so far.

That was also when my father had somehow managed to get a marriage certificate for himself and my mother.

They’d become a legally recognized married couple.

Now that my mother had been taken away, I wondered whether they counted as divorced.

I put the money in the bank. I couldn’t bear to spend a single unnecessary penny.

Then I found work sewing buttons onto clothes in a garment factory.

I’d never been to school and had no qualifications. All I could do was this kind of labor.

0.03 yuan a button. I didn’t mind hard work or getting tired. I could sew on ten thousand a day.

I ate and slept at the factory and worked overtime whenever I could. Watching the money in my account grow made me so happy.

That was when Li Dazhuang, who hauled goods at the same factory, took a fancy to me.

We soon got together. People in town called it dating.

Some of my coworkers asked what I saw in him.

They didn’t understand.

Li Dazhuang was more than ten years older than me, uneducated, not tall, and not good-looking.

But he cared about me. Every day he asked how I was doing, and he bought me malatang soup that cost over ten yuan.

Even his bottled water was the two-yuan Nongfu Spring kind. He always let me have the first drink before he drank the rest.

I started liking milk tea too. He was even willing to buy me milk tea at six yuan a cup.

Nobody else understood just how rare a man like that was.

I’d never met such a good man. Nobody had ever treated me so well.

Other people might not think much of it, but for me, that kind of warmth didn’t come along often in a lifetime.

And he never hit me. So even though he earned less than I did, I married him happily.

In our village, never mind drinking milk tea. If a woman so much as looked at something like that, the men would call her a gold digger, a wife who’d ruin a family.

Li Dazhuang had no father. His father had worked himself into an early grave more than ten years ago.

So after we married, we lived with his mother in their home in the county town.

He didn’t give me a bride price, but he bought a car before the wedding. We went to work together and came home together. I was living a happy life I would never once have dared imagine.

I soon got pregnant. Once my belly grew big, I quit my job at the factory.

My boss hated to see me go. She said I was quick with my hands, willing to work hard, and did the work of three people.

She hoped I’d come back after having the baby.

I said I probably could. After all, my mother-in-law could look after the child.

But I never imagined that after I gave birth, my mother-in-law would show a different face.

Before, she’d always been smiling and easy to get along with. She rushed to do the housework and didn’t pick at every little thing I did.

Now she couldn’t stand the sight of me.

One minute she’d say I ate and drank at her son’s expense. The next she’d say I’d married far above myself.

But I had plenty of money in my account.

The fifty thousand I’d brought with me, plus another hundred thousand or so I’d saved while working.

Her son might not even have as much money as I did.

Maybe having money gave me courage. One day, when she started scolding me again, I suddenly didn’t feel like putting up with it. I talked back.

As luck would have it, Li Dazhuang had just come home and heard me.

He charged over and slapped me, then pointed in my face and swore at me.

“Don’t think you’re something special just because you’ve got a bit of money! You think this is only about money? You owe our family a life!”

I was stunned. I’d given him a child. How did I still owe his family a life?

Seeing that I didn’t understand made him furious.

“My father worked himself to death so I could get a wife! Tell me you don’t owe our family a life!”