Chapter 104 Zhu Juan White Mourning Cloth
The medical examination report was white, transforming into a white mourning cloth that covered Zhu Zhiwei's life which was just beginning.
She didn't know what the blood HCG index was, but she understood the word pregnancy when the doctor said it.
"Doctor, this examination must be wrong. How could I..."
"Don't you know whether you have ever engaged in high-risk sexual behavior?" the doctor said impatiently.
In the mountains, contraception was rarely used. Zhu Juan considered washing up afterward to be contraception. Coupled with her malnutrition, her periods were mostly seasonal, coming only every three or four months. Therefore, she hadn't noticed—or perhaps even realized—that she might be pregnant.
Leaving the hospital, she felt a strange sensation. The report in her hand felt like someone else's. Even though she was holding it, she felt nothing. She returned to the restaurant and continued her job as a waiter, serving dishes, clearing tables, and opening beers for customers. That night, she didn't even suffer from insomnia; the moment she closed her eyes, she fell into a sound, peaceful sleep until dawn.
Three days later, Zhu Juan gradually accepted the fact that she was pregnant. The belated fear and nausea surged over her like a rising tide, drowning her.
She couldn't believe that a life was growing in her shriveled belly, and the father of this life was Gu Dachun, whom she hated to the core. Why didn't he beat the baby to death when he was abusing her?
She had resolved to escape because of the brutal beating he'd given her. He'd kicked her in the stomach, grabbed her hair, and slammed her against the wall. Her molars had broken, and she tasted the rich taste of rust in her mouth. Zhu Juan felt a chill run down her spine, and the hair on her arms stood on end, trembling with fear for the child in her belly, whose parasitic, sickening vitality was so strong it felt like a parasite.
A week later, she came alone to a small hospital far away from the restaurant.
An ultrasound examination is required before the abortion. She completed the entire process according to the doctor's instructions and waited in the waiting area for her number to be called.
Thinking of killing the unborn fetus in her belly, Zhu Juan felt no mercy at all, only a chilling pleasure that was almost trembling.
The small hospital was small, with poor soundproofing, brief consultations, and low-quality medical staff. She heard one doctor ask another, "Who's next?"
"Abortion of female foetuses."
Then they called her—
"Zhu Juan!"
After calling three times, no one answered, so the doctor came out and asked, "Zhu Juan—Is Zhu Juan here?"
Not here.
Zhu Juan has already left.
She walked on the road outside the hospital, listening to the rustling sound of tires rolling over the asphalt road. She felt that she was like a road, and was rolled over by the wheel of fate in an instant.
Look, what a ridiculous joke God played on her.
Zhu Juan has six younger sisters.
Among these six sisters, there are countless ghosts.
While squatting by a mountain stream, washing clothes, Zhu Juan had a sinister thought: let all those who abort female fetuses in the mountains die. They would be crushed to death by forceps, churned into a blur of blood, and transformed into ghostly baby girls, grinning and demanding their lives. They would fall into hell, never to be reincarnated.
Her curse didn't come true on anyone, but it came back upon her. Her dead sisters transformed into little vampires that parasitized her womb. They called her—
Mom, mom, mom.
Sister, sister, sister.
**
Later, Zhu Juan tried to go to the hospital for an abortion several times, but every time she was about to go, it seemed as if an invisible hand dragged her back.
When Dayu was controlling the flood, he passed by his home three times without entering. What about her? She passed by the gynecology department three times without entering.
At thirty-two weeks of pregnancy, her baby bump finally showed. To avoid being noticed by her boss and his wife, she resigned, saying her parents had died and she was returning home to attend the funeral. The boss and his wife complained profusely, but Zhu Juan humbly apologized and walked away resolutely.
The 2008 Spring Festival Gala no longer had the three black minutes of the previous year. The theme was "Working together to look forward to the Olympics." Cai Ming played the sales lady who kept asking "Why?" in the sketch "Dream Home." This sentence later became a popular phrase that year.
Why? Zhu Juan also wanted to ask, why did she end up lying in a hospital bed giving birth between the 2007 and 2008 Spring Festivals? She had spent all her savings on having a child, and she had no idea what the future held. She only knew the pain from the cesarean section wound. The nurse forced her to walk, saying, "If you don't walk, the wound will stick together! You'll be the one suffering then."
The premature baby resembled a mouse, wrinkled and black. Every time she looked at it through the incubator glass, she thought it was so ugly, so ugly that she wanted to vomit, so ugly that she didn't want to stuff her breasts into its hungry, toothless mouth, so ugly that she didn't even want to use the human word "she" to describe it.
She thought that after giving birth, she would naturally develop a motherly love for the child. Just as the old folks used to say, hormones would numb the mother's nerves, making her naturally love her child. But she was wrong, completely wrong. She didn't love the child, not during pregnancy, and even less after birth. She felt no affection for this child, as ugly as a rat. She wished it dead.
What frightened Zhu Juan even more were the looks and whispers from other people in the ward.
Even before she gave birth, she had a vague sense that giving birth at sixteen in Beijing was a terrifying prospect, a choice not normally educated women would make. This premonition was further confirmed after the birth. Their ward had six beds, all occupied by mothers. Aside from her, the others were women in their twenties to forties, either accompanied by their husbands, boyfriends, or their mothers.
She was the only one who was completely alone.
Everyone who sees her asks, "Wow, little sister, you look so young! How did you have a child so young? Why are you here all alone? Where's your husband, your boyfriend, your parents? You haven't been treated badly, have you? How old are you?"
She couldn't answer any of the questions, and every question made her feel genuinely terrified and ashamed as if she had done something wrong.
"No." She always shook her head and said no. No husband, no boyfriend, no parents, and she hadn't been treated badly. It was only much later, after she was discharged from the hospital, that she realized the "bad treatment" they were talking about referred to was whether she had been raped.
How could she be raped?
Zhu Juan smiled brightly.
After looking at the mice in the incubator again, she walked back to the ward and heard someone inside say:
"It must be a chicken, otherwise how could it give birth to a child so young?"
"I don't even know if she has any serious illness. It's so unlucky to be in the same ward with her."
"Maybe she was tricked by the yellow-haired guy... Anyway, she's a bad boy. If my daughter did that, I would definitely break her legs!"
"A daughter like this is already useless. Her parents must have committed a sin by giving birth to a child like this..."
"Keep your voices down, be careful she's coming back."
Zhu Juan walked into the ward, and it seemed as if the room was muted.
She lay on her bed, lying on her side, facing the wall, and her salty tears soaked the pillow, swelling it into a vast white sea.
**
The scar from the caesarean section remained on her belly, and Zhu Juan became suspicious from then on.
She was afraid of wearing belly-revealing clothes, afraid that people would see that she had given birth, and afraid that she was different from "normal people".
She became paranoid.
Sometimes when she logs into a forum and sees someone say, "Brothers, let me teach you how to identify married women," she gets so scared that her heart starts beating faster and her hands start shaking. She clicks on the comments like she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, carefully reading each one, making sure to eliminate all the above characteristics, regardless of whether those descriptions have scientific basis or not.
She corrected the so-called characteristics of her childbearing one by one, except for one thing that could not be corrected - the child that was the irrefutable evidence of her childbearing.
For many nights, Zhu Juan tossed and turned in bed, thinking about the possibility of getting rid of the child without bloodshed.
Throw it down from the building? Drown it in the wash basin? Cover its mouth and nose with a pillow? Several times, she suspected she was about to do it. Pillow clutched in her hand, just inches away from the child, her face twisted with intense pleasure and fear as she stared down at the child's ugly face, which increasingly resembled Gu Dachun's.
People say daughters look like their fathers, and this one she gave birth to is especially like him.
It seems like she is just a medium for spreading the virus.
**
The decision to give the child up for adoption was made one day after the Spring Festival.
She specifically looked up information online to find out which hospital specialized in treating infertility, and then waited in front of the hospital with her child.
Day after day, she actually spotted a middle-aged couple who had been married for ten years and all their health indicators were normal, but they just couldn't conceive. Having tried everything, the couple, desperate for fertility, heard a fortune teller suggest that adopting a child destined to have siblings would help them have their own children. With some hesitation, they began searching for a suitable candidate. They happened to meet Zhu Juan. After comparing her birth charts, the couple discovered that the child was destined to have siblings. Overjoyed, they asked an internal agent to handle the adoption procedures, and the child was registered in their household registration.
Everything went incredibly smoothly.
Giving the child away was like sending a huge weight off her heart. On the day the adoption paperwork was completed, Zhu Juan felt for the first time how fresh and pleasant the air in Beijing was. She was walking down the street, planning to use her last bit of money to buy a good meal, when someone gently tapped her shoulder from behind.
She turned around and saw an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a suit standing behind her with a half-smile on his face.
"Hello." He spoke with a pure Beijing accent. "I've been keeping an eye on you for a few days. Would it be convenient for us to have dinner together? I'll treat you."
Later, Zhu Juan would often wonder why Huang Yuliang had chosen her. Or perhaps, why was she chosen by Huang Yuliang?
She pondered this question for many years. She thought Huang Yuliang chose her because she was such a perfect prey.
Stupid, cowardly, ignorant, cheap, and lacking love.
She was the prey that could prove his power and majesty, and her stupidity was another kind of perfection for him.
But Zhu Juan didn't understand this at the time. She was just terrified because Huang Yuliang said, "You're so young and you've already given birth to a child."
This almost threatening remark successfully captured her and brought her to the dining table he carefully selected. From then on, she became an indispensable dish on his table.
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