Chapter 1

Not long after my nineteenth birthday, Mom called me home from the factory.

She got straight to the point. “The older of your two brothers is about to start high school. We need to pay a fee to get him into a better one.”

“We don’t have that kind of money. We’ve found you a husband whose family will pay a bride price of a hundred and twenty thousand yuan.”

“You’ll get married before New Year.”

I was stunned.

When I had passed the high school entrance exam, the county’s No. 1 High School had offered to cover all my tuition and living expenses.

But my parents had wanted me earning money as soon as possible. They wouldn’t let me go.

Since when did getting into high school cost extra?

Then Mom produced my brother’s report card.

Oh. I understood.

The entrance exam was marked out of 670.

He’d scored 300 on the mock.

Sigh.

With grades like that, was there any point keeping him in school?

I didn’t want to get married.

But I didn’t get a say.

Mom snatched my bag. My youngest brother gleefully rummaged through it for pocket money and chocolate.

Dad held me down and told the older of my two younger brothers to get a rope and tie me up.

“Behave.”

He warned me,

“They’re coming to inspect the goods tomorrow.”

He waved a fist to make himself more convincing.

I remembered being tied to the millstone and beaten as a child. I behaved.

That evening, Mom came to reason with me again.

“I’m your mother. I carried you for ten months. Would I ever hurt you?”

“He’s changed. He doesn’t gamble anymore. He’s working in the city now.”

“If he’s willing to pay a hundred and twenty thousand to marry you, he must value you.”

“Give him a son as soon as you can. Things will be easier after that.”

She said a great deal. I didn’t answer once.

In the darkness, the eyes she fixed on me looked like two faint, ghostly flames.

There wasn’t much to say.

The man was an aging thug with dyed blond hair.

Well into his thirties.

He loafed around, drank, and gambled.

His mother was paralyzed, in a wheelchair. She needed someone to deal with her piss and shit.

No family in the village that considered its daughter a human being would have considered him.

Luckily for him, mine didn’t.

So he got himself a wife.

On the night of the wedding feast,

he tried for over half an hour and couldn’t get it up.

Humiliated, he beat me.

Then he stalked out.

Before he left, I heard him complaining to his mother.

“Useless bitch. Not even as good as the whores in the city!”

“I’m going back there tomorrow!”

My mother-in-law wheeled herself into the bedroom and gave me another tongue-lashing.

“What’s the point of a pretty face if you can’t even please a man?”

Before dawn the next morning, she woke me.

“Your husband’s going to the city for work. Get up and cook him a meal.”

Once he’d eaten, my husband set off.

His mother then ordered me to hand-wash the dirty clothes her son had let pile up for over two weeks.

Halfway through the laundry,

the hospital called.

My husband had been walking down the street when a falling billboard broke his neck.

His head had come clean off.

There hadn’t even been any point trying to save him. They’d taken him straight to the morgue.

They were arranging cremation.

My mother-in-law let out a howl and fainted.

I looked down at the filthy clothes in my hands.

And thought:

So that breakfast had been his last meal before the execution.