“Mom, are you sure this is a good idea? Liu Laizi has several children to raise, and I heard he beats women. They say he beat his previous wife to death. If Lihua marries him, I won’t be able to live with myself as her aunt.”
“Oh, give it a rest! Who are you trying to fool? I took Liu Laizi’s money and agreed to marry Lihua off to him so we could afford to get that educated youth from the city, Zhao Qingrou, as a wife for our Dajun.”
“But what if Second Brother’s wife wakes up?”
“I poured an entire bowl of cattle medicine down that fool’s throat. Even an ox would collapse after drinking that stuff. How could she possibly wake up anytime soon?”
Everyone in Heping Production Brigade[1]In Chinese history, a Production Brigade (大队 – dàduì) was a collective farming unit under the People’s Commune system from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. It roughly equated to a … Continue reading jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3694779_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3694779_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); had been busy with spring planting these past few days. All the commune members were working in the fields, and there wasn’t a soul in sight outside the house. That was why Old Madam Lu and her eldest daughter-in-law made no effort to lower their voices.
They assumed no one would hear them.
Little did they know that someone was standing behind the door of the side room adjoining the main hall. It was none other than Old Madam Lu’s second daughter-in-law, the woman she had forced to drink the cattle medicine.
An entire bowl of cattle medicine was enough to knock down an ox.
How could a human possibly withstand it?
A few days earlier, an unexpected cold spell had struck in early spring. Despite the freezing weather, the original body’s mother-in-law had insisted that she wash a cotton-padded quilt for her nephew, Lu Dajun.
Washing such a quilt required trampling it underfoot. The river water was so cold that the chill seeped up through her feet. To make matters worse, she happened to be on her period. Under those circumstances, she inevitably fell ill.
Her eldest daughter, Lihua, had begged her grandmother to buy medicine for her mother. But Old Madam Lu had been saving every penny to arrange a marriage for her grandson.
How could she bear to spend any of it?
To silence Lihua, she had forced a bowl of cattle medicine down her mother’s throat.
And that was how the woman ended up with a different soul inside her body!
After spending an entire day lying in bed with her stomach growling from hunger, then overhearing the conversation outside the side room, Bai Su finally understood her situation. She had transmigrated into a period novel.
Her nephew, Lu Dajun, had taken a fancy to Zhao Qingrou, an educated youth[2]“Educated Youth” is the established English rendering of 知青, referring to urban youths sent to work and live in rural China during the Mao-era countryside movement. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3694779_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3694779_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); from the capital.
As for Old Madam Lu, she was dreaming of the day Zhao Qingrou would return to the city, allowing her to follow her grandson Lu Dajun there and enjoy a comfortable life.
That was why she planned to sell Lihua, the daughter of her second daughter-in-law, to a widower in the village. The money would then be used to arrange Lu Dajun’s marriage.
In the novel, Bai Su was the Lu family’s second daughter-in-law.
After marrying the second son of the Lu family, she had given birth to daughter after daughter.
Her mother-in-law, who favored sons over daughters, despised her for it. Her sister-in-law mocked her inability to produce a son, and the people in the production brigade joined in with their gossip. Over time, this left a deep wound in her heart.
Unfortunately, she was a foolish woman.
Deep down, she wanted to adopt her nephew Lu Dajun as her own son.
Old Madam Lu and her eldest daughter-in-law knew exactly what Bai Su wanted, and they used it to manipulate her completely.
Take Old Madam Lu’s decision to sell Lihua to Liu Laizi, for example. It wasn’t that Bai Su had never considered making a scene. But when her nephew Lu Dajun stepped forward and promised to treat her like his own mother once he married, she immediately backed down.
She even said that every woman had to marry and settle down eventually, then tearfully begged Lihua to go through with the marriage.
After that, Old Madam Lu found it even easier to control her!
She went on to marry Bai Su’s second daughter, Lanhua, to a crippled man from the neighboring production brigade, and her third daughter, Hehua, to the mentally disabled son of a county employee.
The novel’s plot was certainly full of outrageous twists and turns.
After her mother-in-law had sold off three of her daughters, Bai Su finally fulfilled her wish of adopting her nephew Lu Dajun. This happened because her elder brother, who had earned military honors, left the army and returned to civilian life, taking up an official position in the county.
The girls’ maternal uncle doted on his younger sister. Even while serving in the military, he had scrimped and saved to provide for her.
Naturally, when he learned of his nieces’ miserable fates, he wanted to stand up for them.
But no matter how forceful their uncle was, he couldn’t overcome his own sister’s foolishness. Not only had she adopted Lu Dajun as her son, but she also made a fuss demanding that her brother arrange a good job for him.
That was the final straw. Lihua and her sisters’ uncle washed his hands of Bai Su completely.
Determined to ensure that Lu Dajun and his wife Zhao Qingrou enjoyed a prosperous life, Bai Su then turned her attention to her fourth daughter, Guihua.
Unable to endure her mother’s coercion, Guihua jumped into a river and took her own life.
Her youngest daughter, Meihua, also lost all hope. She simply dropped out of school and ran away with a group of delinquents from the city.
In the end, when the national college entrance examination was reinstated, Lu Dajun passed the exam and was admitted to university. He abandoned Bai Su, leaving her to grow old alone, and returned to the capital with his wife, Zhao Qingrou.
After recalling the entire plot, Bai Su was furious!
She wasn’t just angry at the shameless Old Madam Lu, her eldest daughter-in-law, and that ungrateful wretch Lu Dajun. She was equally furious with the original Bai Su.
In her previous life, she had once accompanied police officers as a doctor on a mission to rescue trafficked women from a remote mountainous region. No matter how much time passed, she could never erase the horrific condition of one rescued woman from her memory.
The woman had been locked inside a cage in a dark room. She was reduced to skin and bones, dressed in filthy rags, and reeked of an unbearable stench. Her eyes were vacant and lifeless.
Years of humiliation and beatings had left her completely numb. Although she was still breathing, she was little more than a walking corpse.
When the police burst in to rescue her, she was crouched on the ground like a dog, grabbing handfuls of spoiled rice from a basin and stuffing them into her mouth.
Her entire existence had been reduced to an outlet for abuse and a machine for bearing children.
Regardless of her wishes, she had been tortured until she was barely aware of her surroundings, yet she had already given birth to several children to carry on that family’s bloodline.
The original Bai Su’s daughters had suffered the same fate as that trafficked woman. Her eldest daughter, Lihua, in particular, had also been imprisoned by Liu Laizi, subjected to years of humiliation and beatings, and reduced to an outlet for his abuse and a machine for bearing children.
And the people responsible for her tragic fate were none other than her own grandmother and biological mother.
How could Bai Su possibly remain calm after learning all that?
Of all the people in the world, the ones she hated most were the beasts who trafficked women and children!
When she heard the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law still muttering to each other as they prepared vegetables in the main hall, discussing how they would have Liu Laizi and his mother come collect Lihua while everyone was busy with spring planting and no one was around to see, Bai Su was so furious that the veins on her forehead throbbed.
She no longer had the energy to worry about the shocking fact that she, an older unmarried woman, had somehow become a mother.
She grabbed the sickle leaning behind the door, charged outside, and swung it at Old Madam Lu and her eldest daughter-in-law.
Unfortunately, the original body’s constitution was far too weak, and her aim was poor. The sickle grazed Old Madam Lu’s face, leaving a bloody gash across it.
“Murder! Murder!”
Old Madam Lu let out a bloodcurdling scream and collapsed to the ground. “Eldest Daughter-in-law! Quick! Get in front of her! Stop her!”
Lihua’s aunt would have liked to stop her, but Bai Su’s sickle was already swinging toward her. Seeing her younger sister-in-law’s swollen, red eyes and her desperate determination to fight to the death, while her mother-in-law had already scrambled up from the ground and was fleeing outside for her life…
Only a fool would try to stop her!
“She’s gone mad! She’s gone mad! Second Brother’s wife has gone mad!”
The sickle sliced a gash across her arm. The eldest daughter-in-law of the Lu family let out a shrill scream and scrambled toward the door, stumbling and crawling in her haste.
Bai Su chased after them wildly, sickle in hand, shouting as she ran, “You dare sell Lihua? You dare sell Lihua to Liu Laizi?”
“You vicious old hag! May your family line die out! You’d even sell your own granddaughter!”
“You force cattle medicine down someone’s throat to kill them, and you traffic human beings! Do you think you someone special? Why don’t you just ascend to heaven while you’re at it?”
“You want to throw my daughter into a living hell? Then none of you deserve to live! Come at me one at a time, and I’ll kill you one by one! Come at me in pairs, and I’ll kill you both! I’ll hack you filthy beasts to death.”
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