Chapter 4

Some people tried looking farther afield for suitable girls to marry.

“There are plenty of girls out there. We don’t have to find them locally!”

But at some point, a news story called “The Cursed Villages and Towns” quietly began to circulate online.

“One county has recorded an abnormal ratio of male to female births for many years. In certain villages and towns, males account for more than ninety percent of the population under twenty.”

Most girls who had been dazzled by the high bride prices refused to come after seeing that report.

“Nothing but men! Who’d dare go there? It’d be like walking into a tiger’s den!”

When the villagers saw that honest methods wouldn’t work, they began considering dishonest ones.

Buy wives!

But human trafficking was a crime.

Big Knife Liu from Hedong Village bought a wife for his son and was arrested and sentenced to three years.

Carpenter Li from Hexi Village had barely brought the woman he bought home—the door wasn’t even properly shut—when the police swooped in and arrested the lot of them.

The same happened to the Guos, who sold liquor in Linchuan Town, and the Suns, who ran a pharmacy in Guoyuan Township.

Had the police put this whole area under surveillance?

People grew frightened again.

Hardly anyone remained willing to try buying a wife.

The quicker thinkers began considering something else.

“Why don’t we hurry up and have a few daughters? Marry them off at thirteen or fourteen, and we could get hundreds of thousands in bride prices!”

From then on, pregnant women rarely came to have me touch their bellies.

My business collapsed.

Even among those who still came, eight or nine out of ten said they wanted daughters.

I tried placing my hands on their bellies.

But some invisible force seemed to resist me, leaving me unable to concentrate my will.

There was nothing I could do.

Strangely, eight or nine out of every ten children born after that were boys anyway.

Even the occasional girl was either stillborn or born with a disability.

People asked around the neighboring villages. It was the same everywhere.

Now they began to panic.

This was far from normal!

They had become pregnant in the hope of having daughters, only to produce another large crop of sons.

There were already so many boys they had become a calamity. People were miserable enough as it was.

Looking at their plump baby boys, wailing at the top of their lungs, the parents couldn’t find the slightest joy.

The ultrasound rooms in the town’s small clinics grew busy again.

Overnight, advertisements for painless abortions filled the streets.

Suddenly, there were many more women in the village resting after abortions.

After more than a decade of silence, babies cried in Hundred Flowers Ravine again.

Only this time, they were boys.

I stood at the edge of the ravine, looking coldly down at a baby whose cries were fading.

I could only shake my head and walk away.

I could not save them.