Chapter Fourteen
On Friday after get off work, Zuo Xutong didn't work overtime at the company. Instead, he took a bus that traveled across most of the city to Hao Ling's new house. This 120-square-meter three-bedroom apartment still had a huge loan. The down payment was raised by Xiao Ping by selling her old house in the suburbs for the young couple.
This was the first time Zuo Xutong had been invited to dinner since returning to her hometown. Although Xiao Ping was divorced, she hadn't completely abandoned her daughter, often inviting her to stay for a few days. The relationship between mother and daughter deteriorated rapidly starting with the soaring housing prices in Longjin City.
When her daughter sold the house, she never expected that the property in that area would appreciate several times over in just a few years. From childhood to adulthood, this child has always acted on her own. No matter what, she is still her biological mother. Even if it is an inheritance left by her ex-husband, her mother's opinion should be taken into consideration. But she didn't even ask her before selling it.
In Xiao Ping's eyes, this daughter is extremely selfish. Her remarried family is not well-off and is now in debt for a large mortgage. People are heartless and watch her squander such a large sum of money. She is a real spendthrift!
So Xiao Ping hasn't given her a kind look in the past few years and never takes the initiative to contact her. If there's anything that needs to be discussed, it's always through Hao Ling who relays the message. For the sake of a house, mother and daughter almost became enemies.
When Xiao Ping celebrated her birthday, Hao Ling told her that the 4,800 yuan designer bag was bought with her sister's money, which softened Hao Ling's attitude towards her eldest daughter. The main reason she was invited over this time was that someone wanted to introduce her to a potential partner.
When Xiao Ping mentioned the blind date, she was unexpectedly rejected: "Mom, I don't want to find a partner right now."
"How old are you and still don't want to find a partner? Do you want to become a monk or nun?"
"No, I participated in a research project when I was pursuing my doctorate, and I wanted to focus on finishing it. Besides, I'm still young and should prioritize my career," Zuo Xutong explained.
"Young?" Xiao Ping seemed to have heard the biggest joke in the world, and raised her voice, "You're almost thirty! Still young? When I was your age, I had already been divorced once."
She was willing to reopen her own wounds to remind her daughter that she was getting on in years: "Besides, what career can a woman like you have? If you ask me, being a good wife and mother is a woman's career! You're already thirty years old, why don't you hurry up and get married and have children? Only by having children can you keep a man's heart."
Zuo Xutong found it increasingly absurd. Was the meaning of a woman's life simply to hold onto a man's heart? She couldn't help but retort, "I've never seen a man cheat because he doesn't have children. Anyone can take a man away from you, and children will leave you when they grow up. Only your career truly belongs to you."
"Nonsense! Whether you can make something of yourself depends on whether you have the luck. Besides, how much is your career worth? The young man your Aunt Zhang introduced to you is very well-off. His family owns several houses and two cars."
"Mom, money is just a tool for survival. We can't treat the tool as the goal and live for money."
"Then what are you living for? No matter how capable you are, how far can a woman go? Which woman doesn't go through life like this? You better behave yourself and live a good life, stop daydreaming. Families like that are lucky to marry a single woman like you who has nothing to offer!" Xiao Ping was getting impatient, and one hand was about to point at her daughter's face.
Zuo Xutong was speechless after being retorted. When she looked up, she saw Hao Ling leaning against the bedroom door frame, smiling gloatingly at her. Zuo Xutong's parents divorced when she was six years old. This younger sister was eight years younger than her, and many things from her childhood were vague in her memory. She only remembered that for a period of time, her mother always asked her one question: "Tongtong, your father and I are divorced. Who do you want to live with?"
In most cases, a man's wealth is directly proportional to his romantic experiences, while his lost wealth is inversely proportional to the stability of his marriage. Zuo Xutong's father originally had a stable job within the system, but was later misled into going into business. Within a year or two, he lost all his savings. After he went bankrupt, Xiao Ping swiftly severed ties with him. To avoid delaying her remarriage, she voluntarily gave up custody of her daughter and married Hao Ling's father less than six months later.
Recalling her painful experiences, Xiao Ping sighed with emotion: "People all love to think they're extraordinary, they all feel that they should live a different life, without ever asking themselves, why? Why should it be you? Do you have three heads and six arms, or an extra brain?"
Zuo Xutong admitted that Xiao Ping's words were not without merit. Success is never easy. In this world, how many people give their all and end up with nothing, and how many work diligently and conscientiously just to barely maintain an ordinary life? People tend to overestimate their talents and underestimate the difficulty of achieving success.
For this project, she spent all her savings from selling her house, gave up a promising future as a PhD graduate from a prestigious university, and devoted everything and most of her youth to it, but more than five years later, she still hasn't seen any results.
She couldn't convince herself to give up and drift through life. She couldn't bear to lose her freedom and ideals, to have her soul become an empty shell, or to let her thoughts and actions be driven by money, using material possessions to build a good life in the eyes of others. Perhaps that was the life many women envied, but it wasn't what she wanted.
Seeing her daughter remain silent, Xiao Ping assumed her attitude had softened and quickly pressed her advantage, continuing her brainwashing: "Why did I divorce your father? It was because I couldn't bear to suffer poverty with him for the rest of my life. When I was young, with my looks and circumstances, any man I could fancy would either be a government official or a mid-level manager in a state-owned enterprise. And what happened? Your Uncle Hao was a mid-level manager in a state-owned enterprise, but he was laid off a few years after we got married." As she grew older, Xiao Ping found herself increasingly fatalistic, because she couldn't understand why two men who initially had secure jobs lost their government positions a few years after marrying her. Wasn't this her fate?
“So, you have to accept your fate. Others are born with a bucket, but you’re a bottle. No matter how much water you’re given, you can’t hold it all.” Xiao Ping had repeated this theory eight hundred times. Zuo Xutong listened patiently, but disagreed, saying, “Mom, I’m not like you. I’ve never placed my hopes on others. Happiness is something you have to fight for yourself.”
"What you have and what you don't have in this life is determined by fate; you can't fight for it. So many people have ambitions higher than their lives. When you're young, who doesn't have wild dreams? Who isn't full of ambition? Only when you're old do you realize that fate is a mile away, and you can't expect to gain a mile." Like most women her age, Xiao Ping pinned all her hopes on her husband and children, giving up on herself early on. Their lives are more like a gamble; if their children are unsuccessful, their husbands incompetent, or their children are unfilial and their husbands unfaithful, then it's a complete failure. But successful and filial children are rare, and men who are successful and faithful are even rarer. So many women, as they reach their twilight years, successfully live lives filled with resentment.
“Mom, I understand what you mean. Right now, I don’t want to think about anything else. I just want to finish this project in a down-to-earth manner. I don’t expect it to bring me fame or wealth, but even if it can help others or society in the slightest, it will make me feel that I have value and that my life has not been in vain. That’s enough,” Zuo Xutong said earnestly. She so hoped that her mother could understand her.
"Okay, I don't object if you want to build a career, but that won't stop you from finding a partner!"
At this moment, Hao Ling finally gave up guarding the door frame and came over to speak up for Xiao Ping: "Sister, Mom just likes their conditions. I heard that their family also has a three-bedroom apartment in the city center. With the housing prices in Longjin rising like this, many people can't afford an apartment in the city center even if they work hard their whole lives."
“Yes, look at your sister and Cheng Hao. They’ve known each other for over ten years, childhood sweethearts, but after they got married, they’re always arguing and bickering over trivial matters like daily necessities,” Xiao Ping said.
"Could you please stop using us as a negative example?" Hao Ling complained in a low voice, annoyed. "If you hadn't insisted on buying a 120-square-meter apartment, would we be in such a tight financial situation now?"
Zuo Xutong felt sad for her sister's family. She wondered when it had started, but people's conversations always revolved around houses. She knew she couldn't change other people's minds, but she couldn't help but say, "That's right, poor people have a lot of worries about money, but rich people have their own worries too. If people don't know how to reduce their desires, worries will never end."
"Fine, whatever you say is right. If I say one thing to you, you'll have a hundred things to say in return!" Xiao Ping didn't dare to take her anger out on her younger daughter, because they would be living under the same roof for a long time, so she could only vent her anger on her older daughter, "You, you're so insensible!"
Seeing that Xiao Ping was about to fly into a rage again, Hao Ling quickly and tactfully retreated to her own room. Only then did she realize the advantages of a big house, and she stopped complaining.
In order to quell Xiao Ping's anger, Zuo Xutong had no choice but to compromise temporarily: "Okay, I'll go, I'll go, please don't be angry."
Hearing her daughter say that, Xiao Ping felt relieved and motivated to prepare dinner. She muttered a few more words, then got up and went to the kitchen, saying as she went, "Are you hungry? I went out this afternoon and bought two pounds of pork ribs. Your brother-in-law loves meat; he can never get enough of it."
Zuo Xutong then realized that she hadn't seen her brother-in-law since entering the house, so she casually asked, "Isn't Cheng Hao home?"
"I've gone to work for Didi to earn some extra money," Xiao Ping said, sitting on a small stool picking vegetables without looking up.
After picking the vegetables, she took the cooked ribs out of the steamer and called out to the bedroom, "Hao Ling, I'm going to make sweet and sour ribs. Come out and learn how."
Hao Ling slowly made her way to the kitchen, scrolling through short videos with her head down. Seeing her daughter approach, Xiao Ping started nagging, "Stop playing on your phone! Look how I'm cooking! There's a saying that you can win a man's heart by satisfying his stomach. You need to learn more signature dishes; a woman with excellent culinary skills is the one who can truly hold onto a man..."
Hao Ling put down her phone and said impatiently, "Mom, didn't you say last time that having a child would tie a man down? Now you're saying I also need to be a great cook? Why do we women have to live such a tiring life?"
Hearing their conversation, Zuo Xutong sighed silently. She didn't understand why women had to be tied down to men. Couldn't women exist in this world as independent individuals? Should women be born to walk on thin ice every day, putting all their energy into men? What kind of logic was that?
Leaving Hao Ling's house, she wandered aimlessly through the streets as night fell. Perhaps because it was the weekend and dinnertime, the streets were deserted and eerily quiet. Twenty years ago, this place was filled with rows of low-rise bungalows, the most vibrant and lively area in the entire city, with a constant flow of people in the alleys, street vendors pushing their carts, and a bustling farmers' market... all of which have been transformed in just a few years.
After the demolition, towering buildings sprang up from the ground, low-rise houses became high-rise apartments, and farmers' markets were transformed into commercial buildings. The expansion of vertical living space diluted the population density, and the streets became more spacious than ever before. With the shift in the city's development focus, this area is no longer the prime location of Longjin City.
Zuo Xutong walked along the street for a while, and suddenly looked up and saw a two-story domed old building with a huge plaque with several large red characters: Antique City.
Huh? How come I never noticed there was an antique market here before? She remembered the plate she broke last week and decided to come back tomorrow to take a look.
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