Yang Wanlin was able to study until the third grade thanks to Mr. Yang. After he found out that Mr. and Mrs. Yang Wen were not close to Yang Wanlin, he communicated with them many times, but to no avail.
Finally, Yang Gong planned to teach Yang Wanlin how to hunt so that he would have a skill and at least not starve to death. The money for Yang Wanlin's studies was given to him by Yang Gong after he sold the prey every time he went hunting with him in the mountains.
Every time Mr. Yang sold his prey, he would keep one dollar for himself and give the rest to Yang Wen and his wife. Yang Wen was a man who only knew how to work and had no opinions of his own.
The family's money, food and other things are all managed by Yang Wen's wife Li Xiaomei. Li Xiaomei is not a person who knows how to make money. She spends whatever she has and never thinks about saving money. She always thinks that Yang Gong will always be there. Except for disliking Yang Wanlin, she treats everyone else the same, but her favorites are his eldest son Yang Wansen and the youngest son Yang Wanli. Yang Wansen is a symbol of Li Xiaomei's stable status in the Yang family, and Yang Wanli is the baby Li Xiaomei conceived six years after she gave birth to Yang Wanmu.
After Mr. Yang passed away in 1962, his funeral was paid for with the fifty yuan he had saved before his death. At that time, Li Xiaomei and her husband only had three yuan in savings.
Because of natural disasters, Yang Wanlin did not go to school for two years. After Mr. Yang passed away, Yang Wanlin planned to earn money to go to school.
However, Li Xiaomei and her husband disagreed. With their village work points, they could barely support a family of six, let alone send their older and younger sons to school. Since Yang Wanli was born, Yang Wanmu's treatment at home has been less than before, but it's still much better than Yang Wanlin's. At least Li Xiaomei and her husband paid for Yang Wanmu to finish third grade.
Yang Wanlin often went up the mountain with Engineer Yang to exercise, and Engineer Yang often secretly grilled wild animals for him. As a result, although Yang Wanlin was a year younger than Yang Wansen, he was much stronger, several centimeters taller, and had more strength than him.
Therefore, Li Xiaomei and her husband coaxed Yang Wanlin, taking advantage of his filial piety and concern for his brothers, and asked him to stay at home to do farm work, and occasionally sneak up the mountain to hunt to help reduce the burden on the family.
Within two years, Yang Wanlin discovered his parents' thoughts, but he did not resist because he needed to use the opportunities of working at home and hunting in the mountains to save money for himself and prepare to live his own life away from them in the future.
In recent years, Yang Wanlin followed his parents to work in the village every day. When he was not working, he would go hunting in the mountains. In the first one or two years, Yang Wanlin was hunting alone after all, so he didn't get much.
Later, when Yang Wanlin discovered his parents' partiality, when he caught little prey while hunting, he would roast it and eat it on the mountain to replenish his body. If he caught a lot of prey, he would secretly exchange most of it at the commune or county town, and then take some home for his family, so that Yang Wen and Li Xiaomei would not stop him from going up the mountain to hunt. After all, who doesn't want to eat meat?
Yang Wanlin had been staying home since the first day of the Lunar New Year, eating and sleeping. Li Xiaomei, whose eldest son had been unhappy recently, was very unhappy to see Yang Wanlin sitting at home all day without working, so she asked him to go up the mountain to hunt for money so that they could prepare more betrothal gifts for Yang Wansen.
Since Yang Wansen turned sixteen, Yang Wanlin rarely ate the prey he brought home. Li Xiaomei would trade it with acquaintances at the commune. But even if that were not the case, Li Xiaomei and her husband would not have much savings, because the family was full of young men who could eat a lot, and it was even harder to save money if they didn't have enough food.
Li Xiaomei and Yang Wen were very worried when they saw how much her four sons ate, because Li Xiaomei was the one who distributed the food at every meal. On several occasions, Li Xiaomei deliberately reduced the amount of food given to Yang Wanlin in order to let others eat more.
Yang Wanlin found out but didn't say anything. Anyway, he would get as many work points as Li Xiaomei gave him that day. When others asked him why he worked so slowly today, Yang Wanlin said sadly that he had no energy to work because he had no food to eat.
After several such incidents, the reputation of Li Xiaomei and Yang Wen for being partial spread throughout the village. However, Li Xiaomei and her husband did not care about their reputation. What they cared about was Yang Wanlin's work points. Normally, Yang Wanlin could get eight or nine work points a day, and during the harvest period, he could get at least ten work points a day.
Therefore, after being bullied by Yang Wanlin several times, Li Xiaomei no longer dared to interfere with Yang Wanlin's appetite. She always gave Yang Wanlin the same amount as Yang Wansen and Yang Wen. However, when it came to good things like eggs and meat, Li Xiaomei always hid most of them and secretly shared them with others without Yang Wanlin's knowledge.
Yang Wansen had started working in the village a long time ago. He and Yang Wanli stopped studying after graduating from elementary school. Li Xiaomei wanted them to continue their studies, but they had no talent for studying. They were able to finish elementary school because they paid tuition.
Yang Wansen turned twenty-one this year. Li Xiaomei and Yang Wen were both of average height for southerners: Li Xiaomei was a little over five feet tall, and Yang Wen was a little over six feet. Yang Wansen was only about five feet sixty-eight, and an average worker, earning seven work points a day on average, and eight or nine during busy farming seasons.
Yang Wansen was half a head shorter than Yang Wanlin, the tallest and most handsome of the family. Yang Wansen, on the other hand, was quite ordinary-looking. Although he was the least striking of the four brothers, he resembled Li Xiaomei's younger brother, with small, single-lidded eyes and dark skin. This was one of the reasons why he was so beloved by Li Xiaomei.
Li Xiaomei had been planning to find a wife for Yang Wansen since he was sixteen. Back then, the family was so poor that they only had two wooden houses to live in, which were built by Yang and his wife when they were still together.
No one was willing to marry into the family. Did they have to share a room with Yang Wansen and his three brothers? Li Xiaomei and her husband began to scrimp and save. They only started building a house last spring, after the village distributed grain and money. They added two new wooden houses next to the old one. They called them two rooms, but they were actually a single, 20-square-meter room divided by wooden planks, with two doors opening onto the courtyard.
A few days after the new house was completed, Yang Wansen and Yang Wanli moved in, each with a room. The room that originally housed the four brothers was now only occupied by Yang Wanlin and Yang Wanmu. Yang Wanlin knew that the house would not ultimately belong to him, and that Li Xiaomei and her husband would give it to Yang Wanmu.
After the house was repaired, Li Xiaomei began to look for a matchmaker for Yang Wanlin. To Li Xiaomei's surprise, the matchmaker immediately asked how much she could give as a betrothal gift. Li Xiaomei only had a few dollars at the time, so Li Xiaomei and Yang Wen thought about it and decided to wait until the end of the year to discuss the matter after the grain and money were distributed.
After the autumn harvest last year, someone came to inquire about Yang Wanlin and asked him to become a son-in-law. Li Xiaomei originally disagreed because Yang Wanlin earned the most money and work points for the family every year. If he became a son-in-law, the family would suffer a great loss.
It was not until the matchmaker told Li Xiaomei and her husband that a son-in-law could ask for a dowry, and that the woman's family conditions were not bad, so he might get a dowry of dozens of yuan. In this way, at the end of the year, the second son's marriage could be solved with just one penny in the village.
Li Xiaomei and Yang Wen were attracted to Yang Wanlin. They had no regrets about letting her go. When they met the girl, they even took out the new clothes they had made for Yang Wansen and asked Yang Wanlin to wear them.
Unfortunately, the woman did not like Yang Wanlin, which shattered the dream of Li Xiaomei and her husband. During that time, Li Xiaomei looked at Yang Wanlin every day and felt that his nose was not a nose and his eyes were not eyes.
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