The two of them instructed the young pair once more with concern, telling them that if anything happened, they must come get them.
It was only after the two left, closing the door to the room, and the sound of the adjacent room’s door opening and then closing was heard, that it became completely quiet.
Tong Xiaoqian looked at Lei Yihong. “Speak, what’s going on?”
Lei Yihong pointed to his own head. “Is there anything extra in your brain?”
Tong Xiaoqian, bewildered by his question, shook her head. “No!”
“I have extra…”
“Did water get in?”
Lei Yihong: “…”
This woman really shouldn’t have a mouth.
“If I said there is an extra person’s memory, would you believe me?”
Tong Xiaoqian froze and looked at him.
Lei Yihong briefly explained the memories in his mind.
Their current location was Laixi Village, under Laibin Town, Laibin City, in Heilongjiang Province in the Northeast. It was a village extremely close to Soviet Russia; standing on the mountaintop, one could see Soviet Russia on the opposite side.
As for Laibin City, it was a county-level city as well as a port city.
The village was very large, with over five hundred households and more than two thousand people.
It was a mixed-surname village with local residents, people whose ancestors had migrated from various provinces and cities, those who had come when venturing to the Northeast, and those who had fled here in the 1960s during the famine to seek refuge with relatives.
The Lei family had only three members. After Wang Yumei gave birth to her son, her body was damaged, preventing her from having more children. With only this single son, the couple doted on him immensely.
Coincidentally, Tong Xiaoya was also an only daughter.
The difference was that Xiaoya’s parents had no children for a long time after getting married. By the time the original host’s mother finally became pregnant and gave birth, she was already in her thirties. It was her first child, and she suffered from a difficult labor.
Medical standards in the 1970s were very poor, with childbirth handled entirely by village midwives, and almost no women went to the hospital to give birth.
By the time the child was born and severe hemorrhage occurred, it was already too late to send her to the town hospital.
After Xiaoya’s mother died, her father never remarried, acting as both father and mother to care for the child until she was ten years old.
In the end, while repairing a house, he fell from the roof and passed away as well.
Xiaoya witnessed her father’s death with her own eyes, cried until she fainted on the spot, and lost the ability to speak after waking up. Later, she became like an idiot who only knew how to smile.
The villagers then began to say that this child brought bad luck to people.
That was in 1981, and the village brigade leader took it upon himself to register the child’s household status under the family of Tong’s second uncle, Tong Tieshan.
Xiaoya’s second aunt, Tian Juhua, was a hundred percent unwilling, clamoring that they could not adopt a jinx. However, she had no choice; an arm couldn’t twist a thigh. Back then, the brigade leader was like a local king in the village, his words like imperial decrees. Besides, Tong Xiaoya had no other living relatives left.
In less than a year at her second uncle’s house, Tong Xiaoya was reduced to a wretched state, thin as a bag of bones.
Every day, she was ordered around to work while enduring hunger and cold.
Not to mention wearing tattered clothes, she was covered in injuries all over her body.
When the villagers couldn’t bear the sight and spoke up, Tian Juhua would yell clamorously, “Don’t act like a good person here! If you can raise her, take her back and raise her yourselves.”
Although times were no longer as impoverished as in the 1960s and 1970s, having an extra child meant an extra mouth to feed, and she was an idiot at that. No matter how unbearable it was to watch, no one else would take the child home to raise her.
At most, seeing her pitiful state, they would give her a bite to eat.
The Lei couple were kind-hearted, and their family had only one child.
Most importantly, the Lei family’s conditions were considered good in the village.
Lei Wanqiang worked as a veterinarian.
At that time, the Laixi Production Brigade had ten production teams, and he was the only veterinarian, working with an apprentice. His work points were the same as those of the brigade leader, the brigade party secretary, and the accountant, being drawn directly from the brigade at 12 work points per day.
It was a work point calculated from the average points of each production team plus the brigade’s income.
For instance, when livestock from various production teams came for breeding, fees were collected, all of which counted as brigade income.
In good years, his income might be higher than the wages of factory workers in the city; in bad years, it was still far better than that of ordinary villagers.
The brigade provided him with a designated bicycle. The village was large, and some production teams were down in the gullies. Whichever production team had sick livestock, he would ride his bicycle straight there.
The level of prestige was no less than that of high-tech experts equipped with private cars in later generations.
Moreover, everyone knew that veterinarians not only had high incomes, but also had some extra perks.
For example, when a production team’s livestock died, after Lei Wanqiang diagnosed it to determine which parts were edible and which were not, some production team cadres would privately distribute the meat.
By modern standards, the entire animal would certainly be inedible, but back then, people were poor and craved meat, so they would always save some portion.
When the production team distributed meat, the team leader would have someone send a portion to Lei Wanqiang.
During holidays and festivals, when various production teams slaughtered pigs, they would invite him as well. While it required spending money to buy, before the land was contracted out, meat could only be obtained in small amounts during collective pig slaughtering; it was difficult to buy even with money ordinarily. Thus, the Lei family was able to get much more than others.
During this period when mechanization was not widespread, everything relied on animal labor. Livestock was more precious than humans, making it completely necessary to maintain good relations with the veterinarian.
On one occasion, when Wang Yumei saw Xiaoya being kicked out in the dead of winter wearing thin clothing by Tian Juhua to stand as punishment, she could no longer stand it.
She had always wanted another child, whether a daughter or a son; nowadays, who only had one child? Every family had several.
The second brother of the Tong family had picked up a child for free yet abused her. Although Xiaoya was foolish and young, she was very hardworking.
The brigade leader felt pity for her; since she was foolish and couldn’t attend school, he would arrange some light work for her each time to earn two or three work points a day, which was fully enough to feed the child when grain was distributed at the end of the year.
However, a child without a mother or father was disliked even by her own biological uncle, and the other children in the village bullied her too.
Wang Yumei had previously wanted to adopt her, but with the child’s relatives still around, she couldn’t reach out her hand.
She went to the brigade leader and requested to adopt Tong Xiaoya.
The brigade leader also knew the child had suffered a lot over the past year. He had originally thought that since Xiaoya’s father had taken great care of his younger brother during his lifetime, out of respect for his elder brother, the uncle wouldn’t treat the child too badly.
It turned out he was even worse than outsiders in the village.
He summoned Tian Juhua, but this time Tian Juhua refused again.
Xiaoya’s annual work points could leave some surplus grain, and even if she wasn’t fed, she could beg for food in the village, and she could also be worked like livestock.
Her family had two sons and a daughter, all half-grown kids who ate their parents out of house and home, unable to earn many work points while eating more than adult men.
Most importantly, the eldest brother’s family had left behind a house.
Although the brigade leader had stated that the house must be reserved for Tong Xiaoya in case the child recovered one day, in her eyes, how could an idiot turn the tables? The house was practically their own.
Land had not yet been household-contracted, so the brigade leader remained a local king whose word was absolute law.
In the end, a compromise was reached: the household registration would remain with Tong’s second uncle’s family, while the child would be taken back and raised by the Lei family, with the work points Xiaoya earned also belonging to the Lei family.
Ever since Tong Xiaoya entered the Lei family’s door, her bitterness had ended and sweetness had begun.
Although she was still foolish, the Lei couple treated her like their own daughter, making new clothes for her and keeping her neat and tidy every day.
Well-fed and warmly clothed, her physical constitution grew stronger and stronger.