13
After hearing Zhang Wenfang’s words, Jiang Suisui’s mind was churning with all sorts of thoughts and wild speculations.
She paused for a moment, then asked cautiously, “So… what happened after that? Was his mother just brought to the village and made to stay there?”
Zhang Wenfang nodded. “Yeah, isn’t she still there now? After she married Song Dashun, she never left the village.”
Jiang Suisui: Hiss… An amnesiac girl goes missing for twenty years, only to be trapped in a small mountain village?!
“But if she didn’t remember who she was or where she came from, why do you say she’s a bourgeois reactionary?” she pressed further.
Zhang Wenfang curled her lip. “You really did lose your memory, you’ve forgotten everything. When we were kids, we even saw it with our own eyes—Song Weizheng’s mother being dragged out and criticized.”
She then tilted her chin toward Li Daidi. “Daidi, right? You remember, don’t you?”
Li Daidi quickly nodded and said weakly, “Mhm, yeah. I think it was when I was seven or eight. One time, there was a commotion outside they said they’d caught a counter-revolutionary and were going to have a public education session… But I didn’t get to watch. I just heard about it from others.”
“I went!” Zhang Wenfang said smugly. “I sat on my dad’s shoulders and saw everything clearly! Song Weizheng’s mother was kneeling on the ground, heavily pregnant, while his father was crying and shouting beside her.”
Zhang Wenfang’s tone was flat, even carrying a hint of spectator’s glee, but the more Jiang Suisui heard, the colder she felt. “Why was she being criticized?”
Zhang Wenfang shook her head. “I’m not sure about that. I was too young back then, just watched for the excitement and didn’t pay much attention. I think I heard the adults say they found some kind of treasure on her, something only landlords would have, stuff squeezed out of the common people!”
Jiang Suisui was utterly baffled. “That’s it? She was amnesiac and had ended up in the village, a lone woman what could she possibly have done? Who could prove she was from a landlord family? And she was heavily pregnant… she was carrying a child—that’s just too cruel!”
Zhang Wenfang stared at her as if she were some kind of oddity. “Jiang Suisui, do you even know what you’re saying?”
“You’re sympathizing with a landlord? Taking the side of the bourgeoisie?”
Jiang Suisui was jolted awake by her words. She pressed her lips together and added, “No… I just mean, no one could really prove she was from a landlord family either.”
Zhang Wenfang waved it off dismissively. “So what? It doesn’t matter whether anyone can prove it. The clothes she wore and the things she had on her were proof enough of who she was. I heard my younger brother say that back when he was in school, a teacher got dragged out for criticism just for hiding a book! My brother went along too—heard it was quite a spectacle.”
Zhang Wenfang’s voice carried the innocent yet cruel tone of ignorance. Jiang Suisui knew she couldn’t say anything more—too much would only invite trouble.
At that moment, Li Daidi chimed in softly, “We’re all proper peasants with roots as red as they come. We can’t be mixing with landlord families.”
“Exactly!” Zhang Wenfang quickly agreed. “Jiang Suisui, think it through! With Song Weizheng’s mother’s background, who knows when she might get dragged out again. Just look at how Song Dashun got dragged down and died because of her—don’t you want to keep your distance? Stop being so foolish and running toward trouble!”
Jiang Suisui could see it now—the core purpose of these two today was to “persuade her to break it off.”
Although getting engaged to the hero wasn’t her idea, Jiang Suisui now found herself unwilling to give in to their wishes so easily.
After all, based on her impression of the plot, these two plastic besties—one of them, Zhang Wenfang, with those always-shrewd eyes, liked to stir up trouble around the original owner and push her into taking the lead in every disaster.
The other, Li Daidi, was the original owner’s and Zhang Wenfang’s little sidekick. Her family was poor and favored boys over girls, so she was often mistreated and had grown accustomed to enduring everything. Although the original owner was bossy and arrogant, she was quite generous to those she got along with, always sharing food and fun things. Li Daidi had always tagged along behind her, benefiting from the crumbs.
These two had been extremely supportive of the original owner’s pursuit of Song Weizheng, giving her all sorts of terrible advice. The idea of deliberately falling into the water so that Song Weizheng could play the heroic rescuer—that was something the original owner had overheard them mention and had rashly acted on in a moment of impulsiveness.
Real good sisters wouldn’t watch their friend constantly make a fool of herself, let alone “fall into a pit of fire,” would they? Jiang Suisui had reason to suspect that these two had actually enjoyed seeing the original owner embarrass herself and fall into that “pit of fire” with Song Weizheng.
Now that the original owner had finally succeeded, the two of them had suddenly had a change of heart, as if their consciences had awoken, and were offering well-meaning advice—it was quite baffling.
The original owner might not have understood, but Jiang Suisui knew exactly why.
In the novel’s plot, there was a similar scene. After the original owner’s failed plan to fall into the water ended in disaster, she was so frustrated she could tear her hair out and was already thinking up new ways to force the male lead to give in. That was when the two besties suddenly came to advise her that marriage was a lifelong matter and that she should think twice, rambling on about all of Song Weizheng’s shortcomings. The original owner had always been a carefree, impressionable sort with little sense of her own—she liked Song Weizheng partly because he was good-looking, and partly because these two besties had been constantly cheering her on and egging her forward. It was her stubborn refusal to back down that had kept her going.
Now that her two best friends had suddenly switched sides and started warning her, listing all kinds of seemingly reasonable downsides, the original owner was completely thrown off. She realized that Song Weizheng really was a trap and wondered how she had almost walked right into it.
If the original owner’s story had stopped there, perhaps she could have returned to a normal path, stepped out of the main plot, and followed the ordinary trajectory of life—set up for arranged marriages, married off, having children, and living an unremarkable existence.
But her two besties wouldn’t have it or rather, the female lead wouldn’t have it. The female lead had won them over, then gradually had them isolate and ostracize the original owner. Later on, when the original owner was framed and forced into marrying a village scoundrel, they had a hand in that too.
It seemed that Zhang Wenfang and Li Daidi had already been secretly won over by the reborn female lead, Jiang Miaomiao, some time ago. Now, they were probably acting on her instructions to help sabotage the engagement between Jiang Suisui and Song Weizheng.
During this period, Jiang Miaomiao had been carrying on a secret heated affair with the educated youth Shen Zhiwen. She frequently visited the educated youth outpost to bring him things, cook for him, wash his clothes, polish his shoes, and even secretly do his farm work. To curry favor with the entire outpost, she had also been quite attentive to the other educated youth.
Through these connections, she had promised Zhang Wenfang and Li Daidi that she would play matchmaker for them and bring them into the educated youth circle.
Zhang Wenfang, needless to say, was a young girl at that age, her heart already stirring with romantic feelings. Like Jiang Miaomiao before her, she held a certain special regard for the refined, cultured male educated youth from the city. It was just that Jiang Miaomiao was more daring—she acted on her impulses while Zhang Wenfang still clung to a bit of feminine reserve.
But as for Li Daidi, Jiang Suisui found her harder to read. She seemed honest and meek, her movements timid, her voice barely above a whisper—she hardly even dared to look up. If Jiang Suisui hadn’t read the plot, she would have thought Li Daidi was simply a shy, reserved, and modest girl.
Yet even someone like her had easily switched sides for the matchmaking promise Jiang Miaomiao had made, joining her circle and completely forgetting how well the original owner had treated her.
To be fair, although the original owner could be hot-tempered at times, she had always been generous with these two friends—sharing everything she had and opening her heart to them. And yet, not one of them had ever been truly sincere with her. Jiang Suisui couldn’t help pressing a hand to her chest, feeling a bitter pang of sympathy for the original owner.
“Jiang Suisui!” Jiang Suisui was jolted by an elbow nudge from Zhang Wenfang, who said impatiently in her ear, “Are you even listening?”
Jiang Suisui snapped back to attention and casually replied, “Yeah, I’m listening.”
Zhang Wenfang frowned, her face showing displeasure. “After everything I’ve said, that’s all the reaction I get? Give me a straight answer!”
“What kind of straight answer do you want?” Jiang Suisui played dumb.
Zhang Wenfang immediately said, “Call off the engagement! The sooner, the better!” She reached for Jiang Suisui’s hand, as if to drag her back home right then and there to break it off.
Jiang Suisui didn’t move. Meeting Zhang Wenfang’s puzzled gaze, she asked, “When did I ever say I wanted to call off the engagement?”
Zhang Wenfang was instantly infuriated. “So everything I just said went in one ear and out the other?! You didn’t listen to a single word?!”
Jiang Suisui rubbed her ear and said calmly, “I did listen. But so what? I don’t think any of that matters.”
Zhang Wenfang was about to explode when Jiang Suisui suddenly added, “Daidi just said it too—we’re proper peasants with roots as red as they come. So if we combine with families that have problematic backgrounds, that’s actually a form of re-education for them, a selfless contribution rooted in proletarian ideology.”
Zhang Wenfang and Li Daidi: ?
“Look at it this way—Song Weizheng’s mother has a problematic background, but she married into our village, so she’s half one of us now. The children she bore are half red-rooted too. Then if I marry Song Weizheng, our children will be three-quarters red-rooted. And so, generation after generation, the taint of bad elements gets diluted more and more, until finally there won’t be any landlord class or bad elements left at all! This is a silent assimilation and erosion of the bourgeoisie—a victory fought without gunpowder!”
“Don’t you think that makes sense?”
Zhang Wenfang and Li Daidi were both stunned, momentarily at a loss for words. All they could think was that it sounded remarkably logical—they almost felt like applauding her.
After a long pause, Li Daidi said weakly, “Suisui… since when did you learn to talk about such big principles?”
Jiang Suisui smirked, waved her hand, and said, “No need to admire me. People naturally mature as they grow up. And besides, I’ve been through life and death—of course I’ve come to understand things faster.”
“Later on, maybe you two will gradually figure out these truths too.”
Because in a few years, society and people’s thinking would slowly open up. And further down the road, there would be decades of enormous change—feudal ignorance and superstition would gradually fade away. By then, it would truly be a new society, a new century—a socialist era where everyone could live and work in peace.
**