Yuan Qionghua waved her hand dismissively, not taking it too seriously.
If one were to speak honestly, she was the one who felt more embarrassed.
A few days ago, when the third brother’s family suddenly made such a big move and started building houses, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had some thoughts about it.
After all, not long before that, the third brother had specially called and asked her family’s Jianguo to help inquire about transferring residential land.
At the time, as elder siblings and sisters-in-law, they had taken the matter to heart.
They even skipped breakfast and went into the village to help ask around.
In the end, after much effort, they finally managed to gather some information, only for the third brother to call back and say that he had decided not to transfer the residential land after all.
That left the couple awkwardly caught in the middle.
But later on, not only did Jianguo not mind at all, he was actually especially happy and eager to help make arrangements.
Yuan Qionghua couldn’t quite understand it.
But An Jianguo, over all these years, had always understood things very clearly.
Compared to other families in the village, their own family’s life had actually never been that bad.
And a large part of that was thanks to the third brother and the youngest brother.
Not to mention how much benefit they gained early on when the third brother entered the city ahead of others, just in recent years alone, so many orchards in the village had been left idle, with no one willing to contract them.
Wasn’t that because fruit dealers had been offering lower and lower prices when coming to the village to buy fruit?
Yet their family had always relied on the youngest brother’s fruit shop, never having to worry about selling produce from their orchard.
And back when the youngest brother first opened the fruit shop, both the startup capital and the courage to do so—weren’t those also connected to the third brother’s family?
All in all, when one clearly understands one’s own abilities, having capable relatives and friends around who are willing to lend a hand truly surpasses many other things.
Because of this, Yuan Qionghua had listened to An Jianguo’s nagging for several days.
She had thought over everything they had experienced over the years, and came to feel that her earlier line of thinking really hadn’t been very good.
But it still genuinely annoyed her.
So now, taking advantage of how frequently the third brother’s family had been coming around lately, she made a point of getting closer to them.
She also wanted An Jianguo to see that she had long since cast aside those unpleasant thoughts.
An Songyu, however, knew nothing about all this.
It was only through her aunt’s words that she learned that the residential land being developed together in the village wasn’t one plot, or two plots— but a full four plots!
“So…” An Songyu looked at her aunt in a daze.
For a moment, she truly didn’t know how to describe her own feelings.
Seeing her niece’s reaction, Yuan Qionghua instead found it strange.
“What’s wrong, Ah Yu? Didn’t your dad tell you that this time, in order to come back to the village to contract mulberry fields and fish ponds, he fought for residential land plots for both you and your sister?”
An Songyu pressed her lips together slightly and shook her head subconsciously.
Yuan Qionghua was stunned and couldn’t help muttering, “Your parents really do love you girls.”
There was no exaggeration in her words at all.
In the entire Jiang Village, there were only a handful of families who had ever specifically applied for residential land for their daughters.
In this area of South Province, even after family planning was implemented, families that truly had only one child were mostly urban households with two working parents.
Among rural families like theirs, it was far more common to have two or more children.
And the preference for sons over daughters— not only in a small village like Jiang Village, but even in a city like Rongdi— was something difficult to avoid.
Yuan Qionghua considered herself not at all a harsh mother.
But to treat sons and daughters with the same basic fairness, like the third brother’s family, was something she honestly felt she couldn’t manage.
After all, applying for a residential land plot wasn’t difficult.
But according to village regulations, if the owner later transferred their household registration out, the ownership of that residential land would become an issue.
In some cases, it could still be retained.
But to this day, only a few households in the entire village had enjoyed such treatment.
And those families had all made considerable contributions to the village.
As for the rest, once the household registration was transferred out, the residential land was generally returned to the village.
Of course, families that had ended up in such situations were usually those that had done well developing in the village before moving into the city to settle down.
The houses left behind in the village were never very good to begin with, and deteriorated even further as time went on.
As for families that applied for residential land for their daughters, most of them also had special circumstances.
For example, some dearly cherished their daughters and had already selected families for them to marry into within the village.
Others had no sons at all and had long decided to keep their daughters at home and bring in a son-in-law.
Some of these situations were ones Yuan Qionghua couldn’t emulate, and others she simply disdained to emulate.
At this point, An Songyu was no longer able to think about those matters.
She had originally believed that having her parents transfer the household registrations of her and her sister back to the village was already fair treatment for the two of them.
After all, there were two residential land plots in the village.
One of them had long been firmly determined to belong exclusively to An Songlin.
With a very high likelihood of demolition, houses would definitely be built on both plots.
Even though the family had discussed taking out loans to buy them new houses,
An Songyu didn’t think that fact would change.
So she had originally assumed that the sisters would register their household under the other residential plot together with their parents.
Then, if demolition really happened, perhaps their parents would distribute part of the compensation from that plot to them.
But what An Songyu never imagined was that without the sisters knowing anything at all, their father had actually applied for separate residential land plots for both of them.
Following behind her aunt,
An Songyu looked at the four adjacent residential plots that had already begun construction.
The complexity of emotions in her heart was simply impossible to describe.
It was as if all the effort she had spent over more than twenty years trying to calmly accept her mother’s obvious favoritism had, in this moment, finally been released.
“That one over there belongs to your younger uncle’s family,” Yuan Qionghua said, pointing at the slightly smaller plot among the four, her expression even more complex.
An Songyu felt confused. If she remembered correctly, her younger uncle had already applied for a residential land plot for her cousin long ago.
And for the sake of convenience, that plot had been near the fish ponds their family had contracted.
The fish ponds contracted by An Jianmin were not the irregularly sized ponds formed after Jiang Village adopted the mulberry–fish pond system.
They were among the earliest and largest fish ponds in Jiang Village.
In the past two years, aside from raising fish, his family had also started allowing people to come fish there.
In the early stages, when there weren’t many visitors, the lack of accommodation didn’t matter.
But now, with Jiang Village’s farmhouse tourism booming more and more, visitors to the fish pond included not only long-time regulars who truly loved fishing, but also some guests who had originally come to Jiang Village simply for fruit picking and leisure.
The demand for lodging naturally increased.
Thus, An Jianmin had long begun planning to apply for a residential land plot there in his son’s name, and intended to start building a house this very year.
An Songyu’s expression was far too obvious.
Yuan Qionghua pursed her lips slightly before explaining:
“That one isn’t for your cousin. It’s because your younger uncle saw that your family had contracted quite a few mulberry fields and fish ponds, so he followed suit and contracted some as well.”
“So he took the opportunity to apply for a residential land plot for your cousin.”
“I heard that your family’s houses are all being built by your dad to be left to you kids.”
“And your younger uncle decided to learn from that as well.”
(End of chapter)