Chapter 181: Hometown Xiao Zhu Kills the Chicken and Spares the Chicken

The Spring Festival in her first year of high school left a deep psychological shadow on Zhu Yingning, causing her not to go home during her second and third years of high school. It was not until she went to college and was sure that she had grown up enough to face the negative energy brought to her by her family that she dared to go home alone for the New Year.

It was Spring Festival, her freshman year. After two years, her hometown had undergone some significant changes. Fiber-to-the-home access had also benefited this small mountain village. Almost every household had an internet-connected TV, and cell phones and cars were no longer uncommon. While most villagers still had little money, occasionally a successful young person would return home in a Volkswagen worth hundreds of thousands of yuan.

In contrast to these thriving changes, she discovered that her mother was aging at a speed visible to the naked eye, going against the trend of the times.

The first time she met Liu Guifang, she noticed a new layer of gray on her temples. If the gray hair two years ago was a speck of first snow, two years later it was a heavy snowfall, blanketing the black grass in silver. She felt her mother's aging most profoundly when they were cooking together in the kitchen. Liu Guifang fished a handful of washed vegetables from the sink, and in the reflection of the water, Zhu Yingning noticed scattered light brown age spots on the back of her hands.

It was also from that moment that she decided to go home for the Spring Festival every year.

Four years of university, from 2014 to 2018, were enough time for her village to be transformed thanks to poverty alleviation programs. Their dilapidated house was demolished and rebuilt, and the dreaded dry toilet was replaced with a squat toilet and a toilet. Initially, Liu Guifang hadn't wanted a toilet, saying she'd been squatting for decades and couldn't sit down to use the restroom. It was Zhu Yingning who insisted, telling her that everyone would eventually grow old, and if she ever became too old to squat, she'd realize the benefits of a toilet.

The biggest change was the construction of the high-speed rail station. Previously, their county had no station, so anyone who wanted to take the high-speed rail had to travel to another county. Later, higher-ups decided that their city was too large to accommodate just one station, so they built a high-speed rail station in their county.

Unlike the endless queues of online ride-hailing vehicles outside high-speed rail stations in big cities, the people waiting at the exit of the high-speed rail station here are not online ride-hailing drivers, but motorcycle drivers.

Zhu Yingning got off the bus with her backpack, and immediately countless middle-aged men with local accents swarmed over like ants seeing candy, vying to ask her where she was going.

She randomly picked a car owner who looked honest, sat in the back seat of his car, and told him the address of her village.

Whistling all the way away.

It was already evening when she arrived at her home. Liu Guifang was sitting on a big rock at the entrance of the village, chatting with relatives from the same village while waiting for her. When she saw her, she stood up and said that the meat and vegetables in the kitchen were ready, and they just needed to fry two plates of vegetables before they could have the New Year's Eve dinner.

A relative from the same village smiled and patted Zhu Yingning's shoulder and schoolbag: "Where did you work after graduation, Ningning? I asked your mom, but she wouldn't tell me. She's such a stingy person!"

She smiled and replied, "Working in a village in the next city is not very successful."

There was a reason why Liu Guifang refused to elaborate on Zhu Yingning's work. This matter had to start with Zhu Jixiang's work.

After graduating from the college entrance examination, Zhu Jixiang scored a rather awkward score, somewhere between a second-tier university and a junior college. If he had set his sights on studying outside the province, he would likely have only been able to get into a junior college. To ensure he could get into a university in his own province, he chose a university in his own province.

As graduation approached, Liu Guifang often called Zhu Yingning, believing that she had studied and lived in a big city for many years and must have connections, and hoped that she could arrange a job for Zhu Jixiang.

Zhu Yingning didn't know what to think of her shallow understanding of the job. Not to mention that she was busy preparing for her graduation thesis and the selection examination at the time, and she could barely take care of herself. Even if she was not busy with these things, as a newly graduated college student, she was not a management figure with weight of words. How could she introduce someone to another newly graduated college student?

However, it was not easy to explain these principles to Liu Guifang. She had gradually figured out the tricks during her long time with Liu Guifang.

People like her mother's, whose mindsets have been shaped by their upbringing, find it incredibly difficult to change their minds or force them to accept new things. Rather than pinning her hopes on change, she might as well just agree to it. When the time comes, whether to do it or not, and how to do it, isn't it up to her? This saves her from arguments, conserves her energy and focus, and also prevents Liu Guifang's subsequent chatter, making everyone happy.

Shortly after she agreed, Zhu Jixiang contacted her and mentioned the phone call that Liu Guifang had told her in both explicit and implicit ways.

She naturally wouldn't treat Zhu Jixiang the same way she treated Liu Guifang. Zhu Yingning told him clearly that she could only provide him with opportunities—such as telling him about information gaps that ordinary people didn't know about, telling him where good positions were recruiting, and where interviews were held—but she couldn't directly offer him a job.

"The opportunity is given to you, whether you can seize it depends on your own ability," she said.

Zhu Jixiang was feeling incredibly hopeful. He'd set his sights on Beijing, and only asked Zhu Yingning to recommend him jobs there. He looked down on the low-paying jobs and didn't want to work on the grueling workload. Ultimately, he only found two or three that suited his tastes. He submitted his resume, but none of them were accepted.

In the end, he had to settle for the next best thing and set his sights on the capital of Province G, where his university was located. Unexpectedly, finding a job there wasn't much either. He did get a few approvals, but when it came to the interviews, he found himself in a tough spot, even competing with graduate students from a top-tier university like 985.

After a series of setbacks, Zhu Jixiang was depressed for a long time until one of his roommates said he wanted to start a business and invited him to help.

Starting a business sounded much more respectable than working for someone else, so Zhu Jixiang readily agreed. They were indeed lucky to make money, mainly because his roommate had a keen eye for business and had already made his first fortune before even graduating.

When people succeed, they tend to become complacent. When Zhu Jixiang returned home, he exaggerated the story. Liu Guifang was very happy and went from street to street acting as a loudspeaker. The mother and son spread the news from one end of the village to the other. In just one night, everyone in the surrounding villages knew about Zhu Jixiang's successful business venture.

This is great. The first person who wants to borrow money came early the next morning.

After that, people came to borrow money one after another, including all kinds of distant relatives and friends. Some claimed to be "your cousin", some claimed to be "the class next to yours in elementary school, I lent you two pieces of toilet paper when I went to the bathroom, you must not have forgotten", some said that their children also wanted to start a business but lacked start-up capital, some said that their elderly family members were sick and needed medical treatment, and some even said that their family was building a new house and they could not afford the decoration costs, so they hoped that he could help to cover the expenses.

Zhu Jixiang was completely overwhelmed. How could he possibly lend them money? Liu Guifang was terrified and found all sorts of excuses to get these relatives and friends out of the house.

Now things were good again. Seeing that Zhu Jixiang and Liu Guifang were determined not to lend them money, those who failed to borrow money began to spread bad words about them, saying that they were heartless ungrateful people who did not remember the kindness of their neighbors even after making money.

Liu Guifang fell flat on her face over this incident, and from then on, she learned not to show off her wealth. When asked about Zhu Yingning's current job, she would always shake her head and wave her hands, making a bitter and resentful expression: "This kid won't even tell me! I don't know, I don't know. I guess she has an ordinary job and doesn't want to tell me."

The mysterious Liu Guifang took Zhu Yingning home.

Zhu Jixiang was cooking in the kitchen. He said he had been waiting for her for a long time and was hungry, so he thought of cooking the dishes first so that the whole family could eat directly after she arrived.

Zhu Yingning went over to help serve the rice, Liu Guifang made the soup, and the family of five - actually three, as Zhu Dashan and grandma were lying in bed - sat around the dining table and ate the New Year's Eve dinner, with the Spring Festival Gala playing in the background.

New Year’s Eve in 2019 is no different from previous years.

**

After the New Year's Eve, since she and Zhu Jixiang had both gone out to work, they had to consider giving out red envelopes. On the morning of the first day of the new year, the two of them sat at the dining table to reconcile the accounts, checking one by one which relative's child to give the red envelope to and how much the amount should be.

"It's so annoying," Zhu Jixiang said. "When we were in elementary school, the red envelopes we got were either one or two yuan. It wasn't until middle school that we could get red envelopes of ten or twenty yuan. Now we have to give them red envelopes of one hundred or two hundred yuan. There's no way in the world that this is possible."

"There's nothing I can do. Life is better now," Liu Guifang sighed. "If I don't give it, the villagers will gossip about me. I have to give it."

"Let them say whatever they want, I don't care."

"Come on, if you don't care, why would you be angry for so long about not borrowing money and being criticized before?" Liu Guifang exposed.

Zhu Yingning stuffed the last hundred-yuan note into the red envelope and sealed it: "Give it when it's due, it's nothing."

It wasn't because she had any deep feelings for these relatives' children, but because Liu Guifang would be living in this village for the rest of her life. If she got into trouble with her relatives and friends over such a small sum of money, her future would be extremely miserable. Villages are different from cities, where neighbors can be rude and ignore each other, or file complaints with specialized departments. In villages, however, clan ties and neighborhood ties run deeper. If you offend a few people, you risk being isolated by everyone.

After wrapping the red envelopes, people came to their house one after another. Liu Guifang hurriedly stood up and greeted them warmly, without any sign of worry or concern.

On the first and second days of the New Year, they basically spent their time in the tedious New Year's greetings activities, either taking the initiative to go to a relative's house or waiting for relatives to come to their house.

After two days of New Year's greetings, Zhu Yingning inexplicably felt more exhausted than working. Fortunately, the New Year's greetings died down a bit on the third and fourth days of the Lunar New Year. She planned to bring a chicken and a large pork leg to visit Chen Bin on the morning of the fifth day.

Two years ago, Chen Bin married a female teacher who also taught here. She recently became pregnant and was very hard-pressed; she reportedly lost ten pounds. Although she had never been directly taught by this teacher, they attended the same school, which was quite small, and they often bumped into each other in the office during their school years, so they weren't completely unfamiliar with each other.

The pig's front legs had been bought long ago, but the chicken had to be slaughtered right away.

On the evening of the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, she grabbed an old hen from the chicken coop with one hand and sat on a small stool at the door, intending to take care of it right there. Just as she was plucking the feathers from the front of the chicken's neck, she heard a familiar voice exclaim, "Oh... Yingning! What are you doing?"

She was holding the chicken wings and neck in her left hand, and plucking a handful of chicken feathers with her right hand. When she heard that, her eyes widened, she looked up suddenly, and looked forward in disbelief.

"Auntie Zhou??"

Zhou Tianlan stood before her in an expensive wool coat, his hands in his pockets, examining the flapping chicken in her hands with great interest. "You can actually kill a chicken! You're so brave!"

Not far behind her, Xu Sirui followed with bags of gifts.