It got dark.
Han Family Village.
The baby girl kept crying.
As soon as Han Zhiyuan got home, he heard his youngest daughter crying.
The house was dark, so he guessed that his mother must have gone to play cards again and hadn't come back yet.
He took out the key he had in his pocket and opened the door, and was hit by a pungent stench of feces and urine.
"Da Bao?"
The two sons inside the house burst into tears upon hearing their father's voice.
Han Zhiyuan turned on the gas light bulb in the main room, and his two sons, covered in dirt, ran towards him crying.
He picked up his eldest son, kissed him, and asked about the family's situation with concern.
Children's ability to express themselves is not as good as that of adults.
However, Han Zhiyuan still learned from his three-year-old son's hesitant explanation that his biological mother had left home in the morning, fed his younger daughter some formula before leaving, and then locked them in the house. She hasn't returned since.
Several flatbreads were placed in the main room for them to eat.
Han Zhiyuan saw several pancakes lying haphazardly on the ground. Some had been bitten a couple of times, some were half-eaten, and one was lying next to a pile of child poop.
Han Zhiyuan wished he could just faint on the spot to get away from this dire predicament.
He was afraid of facing this situation when he got home, so he would delay going home as much as possible at the factory, waiting for his mother to put the children to sleep and take care of his sick father before returning.
But in the end, his own mother was even more good at stalling than he was.
These days have been agonizing for him, like he's been walking through hell. He never thought his family was this difficult to manage, not even in his past life.
Han Zhiyuan carried his eldest son into his father's room, turned on the light, and glanced inside.
It would have been better if he hadn't looked; once he did, he almost flew into a rage.
The old father lay on the ground, with the spittoon rolling to one side, its contents spilling onto the ground, much of it sticking to his body.
"Dad, didn't I tell you not to roll around in bed? Look how dirty you are..."
Han Zhiyuan shouted at his elderly father in annoyance.
My father is not completely immobile; he is not entirely incapacitated. He can eat and can move his hands slightly, but he cannot lift heavy objects, not even the weight of a sesame seed cake.
But if anyone displeases him, he can grab a pile of excrement and throw it at them.
"Stop crying!" Han Zhiyuan snapped at his second son, who was crying and begging him to hold him.
It wasn't that he refused to hold his second son; it was that his second son was too dirty.
Children don't know how to be clean. When they sit on the ground to play after pooping, they don't even realize they've sat on it.
Han Zhiyuan put down his eldest son and went to help his elderly father up from the ground and put him on the bed.
When the eldest son saw his father put him down, he started crying as if he was afraid his father would abandon him.
The two sons cried louder and louder, waking up the little girl in the other room.
The three children cried together, which gave Han Zhiyuan a headache.
Just then, his father, being a troublemaker, grabbed some excrement from the ground and threw it at his face.
Han Zhiyuan lost his temper and punched his father.
"You old geezer, if you keep causing me so much trouble, I'm not going to take care of you anymore. I'll just let you be ruined to death!" Han Zhiyuan used all his strength to get his old father onto the bed and haphazardly took off his father's dirty clothes.
He snapped at the two children impatiently, "Stop crying, do you hear me?"
His harsh words only made the two children cry even harder.
In a fit of anger, he beat both children.
Now, no matter how loudly his three children cry, the neighbors no longer come to his door.
Everyone knows that the child's grandmother goes to the convenience store to play cards all day long. If anyone feels sorry for her family and wants to help out, the grandmother will ask that person to watch the child while she goes off to play cards.
Han Zhiyuan picked up his eldest son and rushed to the village store.
Upon entering the room, the entire place reeked of smoke.
Wang Naiyun was sitting there playing mahjong, surrounded by a room full of people watching.
Some people are so meddlesome and always want to give orders, sometimes saying they'll attack this person, sometimes they'll say they'll attack that person, and sometimes they'll say, "Why didn't you listen to me? Now you've lost."
"Wang Naiyun, when are you going to stop hitting me?" Han Zhiyuan, holding his eldest son, angrily called out his mother's name. "Aren't you going to take care of this family?"
"What are you yelling about? Is that how you talk to your own mother?" someone complained. "It'll be over after this round."
Wang Naiyun acted as if she hadn't heard anything, flicking a mahjong tile in front of her, "Five of Characters!"
Han Zhiyuan was furious. "If any of you play cards with my mom again, I'll flip the table!"
When the people inside saw Han Zhiyuan rushing in with his son, as if he really wanted to overturn the table, they quickly got up to stop him.
Some tried to stop her, some tried to persuade her, and others told Wang Naiyun to go home with her son and come back to play tomorrow.
Wang Naiyun didn't want to leave; she had lost a lot of money today.
"Let's all quit and leave!"
"I'm not playing anymore!"
The people playing mahjong inside were packing up and getting ready to leave when Wang Naiyun reluctantly went home with her son.
The three generations of the family started playing mahjong right after the people in the convenience store.
Han Zhiyuan and Wang Naiyun argued the whole way.
They blamed each other.
The son complained that his mother only knew how to play cards and ignored her elderly father and children.
The mother accused her son of dragging the whole family down by marrying a daughter-in-law who ran away with the money, and even wanted her, his own mother, to bail him out.
The mother and son blamed and undermined each other, arguing all the way home.
"You're not allowed to come looking for me again tomorrow!" Wang Naiyun snapped at Han Zhiyuan. "I can play as much as I want! I raised you, got you a wife, and that's the end of my job. Now that you're living like this, I have no obligation to clean up your mess, and don't expect me to bail you out."
"You're my biological mother, and Da Bao and his two siblings are your own grandchildren. How could you say such a thing? How could you even bring yourself to say it?"
"What is it that I shouldn't say? Why can't I say it? You're always trying to outsmart me, wanting me to clean up your messes. Why don't you go talk to your wife?"
"It's all your fault!" Han Zhiyuan said angrily. "I want to marry Song Yinhua, so why did you cause trouble for her in town? Now Song Yinhua is even less willing to marry me."
"What does that have to do with me? I only heard from Old Lady Zhou from Songzhuang Village that Song Yinhua was a vixen and immoral. Who knew that someone deliberately hired a fortune teller to harm her family?"
Wang Naiyun suddenly remembered something and lowered her voice, saying, "I heard that the fortune teller was arrested by the authorities."
Han Zhiyuan overheard people from Songzhuang Village discussing this matter while he was eating at the factory.
"I told you Song Yinhua wasn't the shameless kind of person, and that you shouldn't cause trouble for her if you saw her, but you wouldn't listen!"
“Song Yinhua, Song Yinhua, all you ever think about is Song Yinhua! There are plenty of unmarried girls in town. If Song Yinhua doesn’t marry you, it’s because she has no taste. I’ll go find Matchmaker Wang another day and find you someone else.”
"Given our family's current situation, which girl would want to marry into our family?" Han Zhiyuan asked.
"Then what do you suggest? I've already fallen out with Song Yinhua. She told me herself, begging me to tell you to stop bothering her, that she won't marry you."
Han Zhiyuan stood there holding his eldest son, trying to think of a solution.
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