Chapter 121: Eating the Whole Family
"Mom, please eat a little. Don't get yourself sick from anger. It's not worth it for those people."
Xia Yue knocked on the door and came in with food. Her mother, Yang Shujuan, had been sulking in the room since she received the letter from Shanghai.
"Xiaoyue, those people are so shameless, they can even say such things! They really have no conscience!"
Yang Shujuan's face was covered with tears. She received a letter from home this morning. Her husband, Xia, had just gone out to the bookstore to buy books and had not returned yet.
She saw that the address was in Shanghai and thought something had happened at home. She hurriedly opened the letter and almost fainted from anger.
The letter was indeed sent back from my hometown, but it was written by Wang Ximei, the wife of Lao Xia’s second brother.
What he said was to find out whether Xia Yue had found a partner. She was already grown up, and if she didn't get married she would become an old maid.
Her eldest daughter, who is three years younger than Xia Yue, has already found a good husband. However, Xia Yue, as the older sister, has fallen behind her younger sister.
At the end of the letter, she also said that her nephew Wang Yaozu was also a very good young man, very honest and upright.
She and Xia Yue are a perfect match, so she asked her elder brother if he was interested and she would go back to her parents' home to help mediate.
"I'm ashamed for her that she actually said that!"
Yang Shujuan said this viciously. She really wanted to slap Wang Ximei.
"Does she think everyone in our family is stupid? How can a nephew from her mother's family be good to her when she's such a cunning and lazy person like her?"
Even if he was a good man, she would not marry her daughter to him.
Yang Shujuan’s husband, Xia Yuanqing, is the eldest in the family. His biological mother was originally an orphan from a scholar’s family. She is a gentle person and has beautiful handwriting.
She married her father, Xia Xiongbin, who was an accountant at the commune grain station. Unexpectedly, she died of complications during childbirth of her eldest son.
A year later, Xia Xiongbin married a widow, saying that she was there to take care of his young son.
Originally, the stepmother Wang Juhua seemed to be a very honest person. She told others that she was in poor health and could not have children.
On weekdays, outsiders saw that she treated Xia Yuanqing thoughtfully and attentively, and people living near the Xia family gradually recognized Wang Juhua.
Unexpectedly, when Xia Yuanqing was four years old, Wang Juhua became pregnant.
This is really a bombshell: Didn’t she say she couldn’t have children? Why is she still pregnant?
Some of the neighbor aunts thought it was fake, but unexpectedly, ten months later, Wang Juhua really gave birth to a big fat boy and named him Xia Yuanzhong.
The son born to the first wife is named "Qing", and the second son is named "Zhong", which sounds inferior.
It turned out that the first husband Wang Juhua married came from a poor family. The dead man himself could not have children, and she was hungry every meal and had poor health. It was not until she returned to the Xia family a few years later that she recovered.
Having her own biological son, Wang Juhua felt more confident and her domineering nature came out.
She was very nice at home, and a year later she gave birth to a little daughter, Xia Yuanyuan.
Now that they have a son and a daughter, they have broken the Xia family's three-generation single-line inheritance pattern.
The Xia family's grandparents no longer value Xia Yuanqing, who has lost his mother, as much as before, and they turn a blind eye to Wang Juhua's indifference to their eldest grandson.
After Xia Yuanqing had younger brothers and sisters, he had frequent meals and hadn't changed his clothes for several years. His body became thinner, and his clothes became shorter, leaving his hands and feet exposed.
When he was seven years old and ready to go to school, Xia Yuanqing went to his grandfather and told him that he wanted to go to school. In the end, he barely got the tuition, but the child had to earn the money for the textbooks by himself.
He gritted his teeth and persevered, dragging a small bag to pick up bottles and cardboards during his spare time. When a neighbor aunt saw him, the gossipy aunt ran to tell Wang Juhua about it.
Wang Juhua turned around and pretended to be pitiful and told her man that Xia Xiongbin was a man who cared about his reputation and could not bear to see his family members slap him in the face.
When Xia Yuanqing returned home in the evening, he was beaten up and sternly ordered not to go out to pick up trash in the future.
In order to make a living for myself, I had to study hard, because the top three students in the commune would receive rewards, such as enamel cups, towels, etc., which I could use to pay for textbooks at home.
In order to save more money, he had to skip grades continuously. When he was in the fifth grade, he was noticed by a promising uncle from the Xia family who came back to visit because of his excellent grades.
In order not to waste this promising student, Xia Yuanqing's uncle took the initiative to bring him to live in the city.
Xia Yuanqing was also very successful. He was admitted to the best university in Shanghai at the age of 14. After graduation, he was assigned to work in a Shanghai machinery factory. Last summer, he was transferred to a steel rolling mill in Beijing.
When facing the old Xia family who came to ask about his well-being after learning that he was successful, he put on a show so that others could not find fault with him, but in fact he did not let those people get any benefits at all.
Last year, Yang Shujuan's family was still in Shanghai. During the Qingming Festival, the three of them returned home to visit the grave of Old Xia's mother. On the way, they heard their second brother's wife, Wang Ximei, bragging that her nephew had been admitted to the county transportation team.
"This is too much! This is simply too much!"
Yang Shujuan couldn't control her usually good temper, and the anger in her chest made her breathless.
"Mom, don't be angry. Let's talk about it after Dad comes back. Eat something first."
Seeing her mother like this, Xia Yue sat on the edge of the bed, hugged her mother, and gently helped her to breathe smoothly from behind.
"Xiaoyue, don't worry, you're my only daughter, and I will never let you marry someone like that!"
Yang Shujuan looked at her daughter whom she had loved since she was a child, and patted Xia Yue's hand to reassure her.
"Wait until your father comes back and we can discuss it as a family."
She knew that her man was not the kind of person who couldn't handle household affairs.
…
"How shameless! How can she have the nerve to say such words!"
Sure enough, when Xia Yuanqing happily walked into the house with the books he had bought, his face turned pale after Yang Shujuan handed him the letter.
Yang Shujuan thought about this and said, "Old Xia, Wang Ximei's nephew is in the transport team. Do you think he will find his way here?"
Xia Yuanqing took the warm water that Xia Yue handed over, took a sip and replied, "My uncle hasn't told the people over there where we're working now, so they probably don't know."
"But this letter was sent here with some trickery!"
They used to live in the factory's staff quarters, so it was inevitable that they had friction with others.
Or maybe there's a scoundrel in my hometown who can get the address by asking at the post office.
Uncle Five was the uncle from the same family who took him home to raise him. He was the fifth child in the family, and they called him Uncle Five all their lives.
"I think this matter might be the intention of that woman? Otherwise, Wang Ximei wouldn't have the courage to mention this to you."
Yang Shujuan never regarded Wang Juhua as her mother-in-law. She only had one mother for her husband.
The wife that Wang Juhua suggested to the second son Xia Yuanzhong was her distant cousin Wang Ximei, who was five generations away from her family. They were close relatives, and Wang Ximei and Wang Juhua got along very well with each other on weekdays.
"Humph, I think that man probably has the same intention. He knows that my family only has Xia Yue. If he gets close to me, it will be a business with no capital!"
Xia Yuanqing's heart had already turned cold when she thought of her father, Xia Xiongbin, who gave birth to a child but did not raise him.
So he gave up the promotion to deputy director of the Shanghai Machinery Factory and was transferred to Beijing. The farther away he was, the less he could reach.
"I asked Qiaofeng, and she told me to keep an eye on her after the Chinese New Year to see if I could find someone suitable."
Yang Shujuan and Xia Yuanqing are both old, and for the sake of her daughter's future life, she still has to find a suitable partner for Xia Yue.
It is too difficult for a woman to survive alone these days. What's more, if something happens to her and Old Xia, there will only be one daughter left at home. It is possible that people from her hometown will come north to eat up the whole family.
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