Chapter 124: Cousin Who Married Far Away
My dad's face was twitching with laughter. "No one calls you Xuanxuan. Your grandma is old, so they called you the wrong name." As he said that, he hurried forward to help grandma walk into the house, whispering something as he walked. I followed him into the house.
Grandma usually lives with my uncle's family. My aunt is busy in the kitchen preparing lunch, and my uncle is watching TV in the main room. I didn't see my cousin, so he must be in his room and didn't come out.
They were obviously very surprised to see me, "Why is Mengmeng here? Then..." She didn't finish the second half of the sentence, and the look in her eyes as she looked at my dad was clearly full of inquiry.
My dad coughed twice strategically and said, "I originally wanted the whole family to come together, but Mengmeng's cousin is spending the New Year at my house, so Shuyao didn't come along. I only brought Mengmeng."
"Just now, grandma called me Xuanxuan, and I thought my uncle had a new brother." I told them this as a joke, and they laughed with stiff faces.
The aunt brought out a fruit plate, her face full of enthusiasm: "I haven't seen you for a few years. Mengmeng has grown up to be more beautiful than her mother. Come, have some snacks. This is my home, don't be polite~" Then she shouted into the room: "Junliang, Mengmeng is here, come out and talk to your sister for a while."
Xia Junliang is my uncle's son, four years older than me. With the financial support of my father, he repeated his high school entrance exam for three years and was able to barely pay his own way to a third-level university. After graduating last year, he changed several jobs in the county, but he couldn't stay in any of them for long, either because he was too tired or too bored.
My uncle has a daughter who is six years older than me. She is married in a neighboring province, a four or five hour drive away. I don’t know if she will come back for the Chinese New Year this year.
I have a good impression of this cousin. When I was a child, I came to my grandmother's house. My grandmother didn't like me, and my cousin also looked down on me and always wanted to bully me. It was my cousin who protected me.
Although grandma didn't like her very much, she was her first granddaughter after all, and her aunt was a hot-tempered person, so grandma didn't dare to treat her badly openly.
However, when I was in high school, my grandmother thought it was a waste of money for girls to go to college and did not allow her to take the college entrance examination. Even though my father said he would support my cousin to go to college, my grandmother refused.
At the time, she said, "If you give money, it's not money anymore. You have a lot of money, why not save it for Junliang, Wenbo and Wensong in the future? Why give it to a little girl like Jundi? Why would a girl go to college? After graduation, she still has to get married."
Wenbo and Wensong are my uncle’s children. Wenbo is 16 years old and has just started high school, while Wensong is 13 years old and is in the first grade of junior high school.
Since Wensong was over one year old, grandma has been saying that she wants to adopt him to our family. My dad was about to give in, but my mom refused, so we gave up.
My grandmother was unwilling to give up and brought up the adoption issue whenever she had the chance. I don’t know when it started, but she never mentioned it again. I guess she knew that my father already had a son.
My father persuaded my cousin to finish high school, but on the eve of the college entrance examination, my grandmother tore up her admission ticket and said that she wanted to break up her dreams and told her to either get married or work.
It is said that my cousin cried all night and went south to work the next day. She did not come back for six years.
My uncle complained a lot about this matter, and my aunt had quarreled with my grandmother countless times. It was not until the year before last that my cousin came back home. She brought her brother-in-law with her. I haven't met him yet, but I heard that he is a nice person. He and my sister met at night school.
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