The year their son turned eighteen and started college, Chen Yulan received a divorce agreement from her husband.
Zheng Siyuan slapped the agreement down in front of her, his face expressionless.
“For more than a decade, I stayed home and raised the children. I gave up my career and my future, all because you, a country woman, were so vain you dreamed of moving to the city and becoming a city dweller. I gave up the brilliant life I should have had.”
“Now I’m fifty-six. I’ve finally held on long enough to see our son get into college. It’s time for me to go back to the life that belongs to me.”
“At this point, I won’t hide it from you. There’s someone I love. She’s gentle, considerate, and sensible. She supports my career, and she’s ten thousand times better than you.”
“If I’d met her when I was twenty, there’s no way I would have chosen you.”
“Let’s get divorced.”
The thing Chen Yulan regretted most in her life was not signing that divorce agreement.
She thought she was fifty-five, and that more than half her life was already behind her. After thirty years of weathering life’s storms and supporting each other, it wasn’t easy to let go.
She had grown up in a single-parent family. She knew what it felt like to have no family to lean on, no one to depend on, no place to call home.
For the sake of their two children, she held back her tears and refused her husband’s request for a divorce.
But her children didn’t understand her reasons. When they learned that their father wanted to divorce her and she had refused, they made a special trip home to find fault with her at every turn.
Everything they said blamed her for failing to see reason and holding back their great, heroic father from the life he deserved.
Her son brought home the girlfriend he’d just started dating at college, then made a show of banging things around and finding fault with his mother in front of her.
“You spent all those years out there living it up. You say you did it to earn money and improve things for me and my sister, but how much did you even bring home each month?”
“Just twenty thousand a month!”
“If Dad hadn’t been careful with money and taken care of everything at home, big and small, would you have been able to enjoy yourself out there?”
Their daughter’s expression was even darker.
“While you were away working, everyone in the village said my mom was fooling around with other men, that she’d run off and didn’t want me anymore! Do you know how I got through that time?”
“I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve met the woman Dad found. She comes from a family of scholars. She’s cultured and gentle, prettier than you, better at making money, and more knowledgeable and refined!”
“You’re just a country woman. So what if you’ve earned a lot? You can’t hold a candle to her—not even close!”
Chen Yulan stared at her daughter in shock, unable to believe what she was hearing.
This was her own child!
How could she say something like that?
Back then, the family had been so poor they could barely afford to eat, let alone pay for both children’s school fees.
Zheng Siyuan had spread his hands, said he had a headache, then turned around and gone to bed.
The little children had tugged at her clothes, looking up at her with pleading eyes. They told her they wanted to go to school and didn’t want the other village children to laugh at them.
She gritted her teeth and begged someone from their village to take her along to find work.
When she left, she had only ten yuan in her pocket—enough for the fare, but not enough to buy a meal.
After a long, difficult journey, she finally reached the factory where she’d be working. She lived on thin porridge and pickles for a month before payday at last came.
The day she got her wages, she couldn’t even bring herself to buy a steamed bun. She hurriedly sent the money home so the children could pay their school fees.
For nearly three months, she made do with thin porridge and pickles. She grew so thin she was skin and bones, and more than once she nearly fainted at work, but she gritted her teeth and pushed through.
As soon as she had enough money to get by, she hurried to ask around locally about transferring the children to new schools and arranging for them to move on to junior high. She wanted them to study in the city and get a better education.
From the time she left to find work to the day she brought the whole family out of the village, only a year and a half had passed.
She hadn’t rested for a single moment during that time.
Chen Yulan swallowed her sorrow and didn’t argue in front of the guests. Instead, she turned to the kitchen to prepare food for the whole family and entertain the girlfriend her son had brought home.
She told herself the children were still young and didn’t understand all the complications behind what had happened.
She thought that, with time, when they matured, they would naturally understand how hard she had worked.
She stood firm, and in the end, the divorce never happened.
Then came Lunar New Year’s Eve. She was in the kitchen, busy cooking for the family, when the gas stove failed to light several times.
She tried again and again. On the final attempt, the flint sparked, and a fierce burst of flame shot straight at her.
Her whole body was burned. Large patches of skin peeled away as she sank to her knees, writhing in agony and screaming the names of all three of them.
But all she heard in response was their irritated complaints that she was making a fuss. They told her to rinse herself with cold water.
Just before she lost consciousness, she saw that the kitchen window, which was supposed to be kept open all year round, had been sealed shut with tape.
Someone had tampered with the kitchen door lock, too. No matter how hard she tried, it wouldn’t open.
…
By sheer luck, she survived.
She spent nearly a month in intensive care, with burns covering eighty percent of her body.
Neither her husband nor either of her children came to see her during that time.
She called them more than a dozen times. Each time, they let it ring twice, then hung up.
When she logged into her messaging app, she discovered that after her accident, her husband had taken their son and daughter out in the middle of the night to celebrate the New Year.
Though he’d used a phone for years, at the stroke of midnight, for the first time in his life, he posted to his WeChat Moments feed. He even included a photo.
The caption read:
“Family reunited, welcoming a new beginning!”
Her fingers trembling, she opened the photo and slowly enlarged it.
It showed only her husband, son, and daughter.
There was also a small glimpse of the photographer: a sliver of a pale finger with red nail polish.
It must have been the soulmate her husband had mentioned.
In that moment, the pain in her heart was so intense she nearly fainted.
Once she came around, she wiped away her tears and gave up on them for good. She decided to let everything go.
The doctors at the hospital told her that while she’d been unconscious, a biomedical company had supplied her with a drug to treat her burns. The experimental treatment had worked remarkably well for her. If she kept using it, she might even look twenty years younger!
Seeing the new, smooth, fair skin growing on her arm gave her just enough hope to keep living.
But that very night, her son and daughter ignored her wishes and the doctors’ objections and forcibly took her home.
Once she was home, they confiscated her phone and ignored her completely. They left her lying in her own waste without cleaning her in time, until her unhealed skin became infected and ulcerated and her life hung in the balance.
When it came to caring for her, her son merely spread his hands and refused to do a thing.
Her daughter fed her a couple of bites, then lost patience and said that caring for her was a burden—why hadn’t she died sooner?
While she drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness, her husband forced her several times to sign a stack of documents.
She couldn’t remember exactly what they said.
She only vaguely recalled hearing something about inheritance, debt, repayment, and life insurance.
Sometimes she was awake but couldn’t open her eyes. Her husband, Zheng Siyuan, thought she was still unconscious. Sitting beside her, he would speak on and on, his voice trembling.
From the few things he let slip, she learned what had happened.
While she’d been unconscious, that woman had not only swindled every last bit of the family’s money from him, but had also talked him into taking out loans to start a business. She’d passed him off as a successful businessman, and in the end, he’d lost every penny.
Desperate to pay back his debts, he’d lost his mind and started gambling. He owed nearly ten million, and the debt collectors had driven him close to a breakdown.
He planned to use her death to claim the life insurance. He also planned to fabricate credit reports and bank statements for their son and daughter-in-law, and their daughter and son-in-law, so he could take out loans in their names to fill the hole.
Sobbing, he clasped her severely burned hand.
He said he was wrong. He said he regretted it.
He said she was the person he loved most after all. He said he deserved to die, that he had been a fool to trust those women he barely knew.
He sounded utterly sincere.
But to Chen Yulan, whom Zheng Siyuan loved no longer mattered.
She had been gravely injured in the height of summer. Her will to live kept her clinging to life for nearly a month.
But she didn’t make it to the cool days of early autumn.
With her eyes wide open, she listened to the cicadas calling through the night and looked back on her life.
All her life, she had thought of others and lived for others. For people and things that weren’t worth it, she had missed too many opportunities—and lost herself completely.
She hadn’t expected anything in return, but she couldn’t accept that after a lifetime of struggle and giving all her love and energy, this was how it would end.
Consumed by resentment and bitterness, in the end, she could hold on no longer. She closed her eyes for good.
…
When she opened her eyes again, Chen Yulan realized she had been reborn on the very day her husband, Zheng Siyuan, had handed her the divorce agreement.