1
In the spring of 2019, when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, I went to Wuhan and stayed in a youth hostel. The owner was a young man with messy hair like a tornado had hit him. My room had four beds, and only one roommate joined me during the period, staying overnight and then disappearing. It’s a good thing that I’m writing a screenplay at the moment, so I didn’t think about changing places when I got a bargain of peace and quiet.
Downstairs is an old alley, near the entrance of the alley there is a cafe, the 2nd floor open skylight, set up a smoking area. As a person who can’t write without a cigarette in his hand, it naturally became another place where I could write outside the balcony of the hostel.
When I entered the store on the first day, behind the bar was a short-haired woman in overalls. I was hungry and asked her what she had to eat, and she asked if I wanted to try her freshly baked muffins. I swallowed and went upstairs to wait. I had a DV recorder in my bag and listened to her clanking away downstairs while I hid at the glass fence on the 2nd floor and quietly shot a few videos.
When she came up with the coffee and muffins, she saw my DV on the table and asked me what I was doing. I said casually that I was a documentary filmmaker and came to Wuhan to find material. She seemed a little interested, sat down to chat, and suggested I go to Wuda to shoot cherry blossoms.
I said, I am more interested in human life. When I said this, an idea came to my head – to record a day of a “muffin-making woman”. I asked her if she wanted to be the “documented” person, and she smiled and shook her head.
In fact, I understood that she was suspicious of my identity. It’s normal to have such concerns, as a stranger who has only met for two minutes should take what he says as a passing thought.
When she left, she handed over her business card and added a WeChat friend. Her name is Qiu Ye, is the owner of the small store. Because it’s off-season, she usually guards the store by herself, and only hires part-time help on Sundays and holidays.
The next day, I spent another afternoon on the 2nd floor with a cup of coffee and a few muffins. When I was leaving in the evening, I saw Qiu Ye sitting on a table outside the door, writing on a wooden sign. On the table was a small flower pot filled with cigarette butts, with a lit cigarette resting on the edge.
It turns out she is also a smoker. I sat down and watched her finish writing on the wooden sign – “Tonight there is wine, we can talk about the wind and the moon”. She handed me the wooden sign and asked me how I wrote it. I complimented her twice and she hung the sign on the hook of the door and window and picked up the cigarettes.
When I asked her how long she had been smoking, she thought for a moment and said that she had smoked her first cigarette on her 14th birthday and it had been 10 years since then.
I looked at her face again – slightly fat, round, not beautiful, but durable. 24 years old, but the manner of speech and calmness of a 30-year-old woman.
She also asked me how old I was, and I said I had been smoking as long as she had, but I was 8 years older. She said I didn’t look like I was in my 30s. I smiled and told her that I was a single father and that my kids were playing soccer.
She looked a little different, smoked less often, and seemed to wander off. After a while, she asked me how old my children were and I said, 7 weeks old, and I was raising them. She asked me again if I had ever considered remarriage, and I shook my head: “It was screwed up by me, I’m not cut out for marriage.”
“So you haven’t thought about making changes for the sake of the kids?”
“I’m not the kind of person who would sacrifice my ideals for the sake of my kids. It doesn’t seem to have affected him much either, he’s as lively as ever.”
“That’s what you think – do you know the real feelings of a child who grew up in a divorced family?”
At her question, I was dumbfounded for a moment, trying to organize words of rebuttal, but I couldn’t find anything. She wanted to say something too, but couldn’t. When an acquaintance arrived, she took a sip of her cigarette, got up to greet me, told me to “talk to you later”, and left her cigarette butt and went in.
After waiting for a few moments, I saw another set of customers, so I left my seat.
2
In the following days, I was busy discussing the script I was working on with a friend who was a producer, so I didn’t go to the cafe. During this period, when I came back to the cafe in the evening, I could always see a young man behind the bar.
One day when I went out at noon, I saw Qiu Ye and the man eating hot noodles together at the entrance of the alley. After saying hello, she realized that I was staying at a hostel nearby. She introduced me to the man, Bo, a graduate of the photography department of Beijng Cinema, to whom she had mentioned that I was a documentary filmmaker. Bo said that he had just returned to Wuhan from his work on the set to rest, and that if I needed help with the film here, he would be happy to participate. We then added WeChat.
It was midnight when I returned to the alley that night. The cafe was still lit up with no customers, Qiu Ye was cleaning up and Bo was helping. I thought to myself, the two should be lovers, it’s too late, don’t go in.
Two days later, in the late afternoon, I went to the cafe to sit down, and Qiu Ye was the only one in the cafe, sitting at the entrance table, smoking and staring. I wasn’t hungry, so I just ordered a cup of coffee. I heard that my mouth was a little hot, so she made a pot of tea and brought it out, saying that she didn’t want to pay. I was very happy and felt like I was being treated as a friend. When I asked her why Bo was not here today, she said that he had gone to Yunnan with his girlfriend, and that “if you didn’t contact him, he went out to have fun”.
I apologize, I’ve been busy with the script lately and didn’t think about the documentary. I also said that I thought Bo was her boyfriend.
The two of them tried dating, but they didn’t feel right, so they made it clear that they were only friends: “Our relationship is more like a sister and a brother, he’s two years younger than me, and he’s still a child. Every time you come back, you run to me. His girlfriend is still my introduction, little girl, beautiful and cute.”
She poured the tea, pinched the cigarette, pointed to an empty flower pot at the door and said, “Look, the flowers that were raised for 3 months were stolen last night.”
I said, “Someone would actually steal the flowers? She said it had happened before, thinking of adding a surveillance camera to the door, but because the rent expired in June, the landlord plans to sell the house, when the cafe can continue to operate or unknown, they dragged on.
I asked how long she had been running this cafe, she said, she came to work as a clerk in the spring of 2015, less than six months, the owner wanted to change hands, she used her savings, plus the money borrowed from her boyfriend, the store down.
I calculated her age at the time, only 20 years old, actually have the courage to make such an investment. She said she had dreamed of having her own coffee shop for a long time, but she didn’t think too much about it at the time, so it was lucky that the store is now much better than the previous business, and although she didn’t make a lot of money, it is a career, which is much better than a part-time job.
I complimented her on her independence, which is better than the average man. She laughed lightly and said she had no one to take care of her since she was a child, so how can she survive in this society if she is not independent and self-reliant?
“When I first borrowed money for this store, no relatives were willing to help. My boyfriend borrowed a sum of money from his family in the name of his partner to support me, and then his parents knew that we were in a relationship and were afraid that he would be cheated and chased me to the store to make me play an IOU and write interest on it. Less than 1 year I paid back with interest, and we also split up. He loved me very much, but I knew that someone with a strong personality and low self-esteem like me would have no future with him.”
I asked her what she meant when she said she “grew up with no one to care for her”. She said that I grew up in a divorced family.
I remembered our conversation that day and understood her reaction and question.
I took a sip of tea, picked up her words, and asked her when her parents got divorced, and she said that she was one year younger than my children, and that she had an older brother who was one year older than my children.
“You have an older brother?”
Her eyes flushed red: “Yeah, we’ve been separated for 17 years ……”
I looked at her calm face. For a long time, she opened the box and talked about the memories that were hidden in her heart.
3
For as long as Qiu Ye could remember, she and her brother had lived with their grandparents, and her parents only came home once in a while.
When Qiu Ye was six years old, her grandmother became very ill, and her health deteriorated so much that she could no longer take the two siblings to school on a tricycle.
One day, a circus came to town and raised a large tent castle. Qiu Ye is fascinated by a beautiful woman standing on a horse, and when she looks back, her brother and her friends are gone. She was found by her grandparents and uncles in the crowd only after the circus show came to an end. When she got home, she saw her brother burying his head and wiping his tears, while her mother on the other end of the phone was also crying.
Soon, her mother returned, and a few months later, her father returned, with a cute little puppy for her birthday. Qiu Ye asked her dad if he was still leaving, and he shook his head. She was so happy that every day she lay between her parents and slept, laughing in her dreams.
But the happy dreams didn’t last long and were soon interrupted by the sound of a fight. Qiu Ye doesn’t remember what her parents were arguing about, only the broken TV set kicked by her father and her mother’s tear-filled face. The smiles on the siblings’ faces became fewer and fewer as their parents fought more and more. Sometimes when the two returned home and heard the commotion of a fight in the house, her brother would drag her to her grandmother. But Qiu Ye increasingly disliked going to her grandmother’s house, which was so sick that the house smelled of herbs.
The siblings often wandered the streets with their school bags on their backs. The puppy had grown up and wandered along with them. The brother loved the dog and always held the puppy in his arms, Qiu Ye was jealous, angry and did not speak. Sometimes her brother would coax her, sometimes he would impatiently leave her. Qiu Ye’s most common trick was to cry, and as soon as she cried, her brother would come back in no time. She never thought she would be separated from her brother one day.
When the river froze over, her grandmother’s picture was placed in the hearse. Her brother told Qiu Ye that her grandmother had gone to heaven and would watch over them from the sky. She looked at the sky and asked her brother when they would go to heaven, and he hung his head and did not speak.
Soon it will be New Year’s Eve. After changing into new clothes and listening to the sound of firecrackers, she woke up in the morning and her mother and brother were gone. Qiu Ye asked her father where they had gone, and he grimaced and didn’t tell her. She later learned from other adults that her father and mother had divorced, and she was raised by her father while her brother lived with her mother.
Qiu Ye didn’t know what “divorce” meant at that time, but she only hoped that her mother and brother would come back soon.
As the days went by, she got a new school and a red scarf. She asked her teacher if she knew her brother, but she shook her head. She went to find her brother’s friends, but they didn’t know where he had gone.
Later, Qiu Ye understood what “divorce” meant, but she didn’t understand why her parents had separated.
Dad said that if two people don’t like each other anymore, they can’t live together. She asked her father why he didn’t like her mother, but he didn’t answer. She asked again if her brother didn’t like her anymore either, and that’s why he followed mom. Dad remained silent. When she continued to ask, he frowned and said you will know when you grow up.
Qiu Ye wished she could grow up quickly, and every day she went to the wall and drew horizontal lines on top of her head.
The horizontal lines on the wall changed slightly, and a strange woman came into her life. It was a woman who was more stylishly dressed than her mother and had big, beautiful eyes. The first time the woman entered the house she knelt down, looked at her with a smile, and asked her name. She kept her mouth tightly shut. The woman then took the hairpin off her head and put it on her head, complimenting her on her fairy-like appearance. She was happy inside, but her face held a smile. Finally, the woman used that hairpin and exchanged her name.
Before long, the wedding photo of the woman and Qiu Ye’s father was hung on the wall of the house, while the photos of her mother and brother were hidden by her father. The woman took Qiu Ye to the city for a big meal and to the amusement park, and finally used a beautiful dress as a condition for her to call out “mom”. Qiu Ye did not ask for the dress, nor did she call out to her mother. In her memory, her mother always hugged her, and it was a warm, pampering embrace. The woman had opened her arms to her, but that was a performance in front of her father. She always felt that the woman was exchanging small favors for her love for her mother.
On Qiu Ye’s ninth birthday, the woman’s belly grew round and her father told her that she was going to have a baby brother. Qiu Ye is surprised and then afraid that if the woman gives birth to a brother, her father will love her less and even abandon her.
With this fear, Qiu Ye calls out “mom” to the woman for the first time. Dad and the woman were surprised, and then a smile appeared. The woman kissed Qiu Ye’s forehead, like a dragonfly dipping its foot in the water.
After the death of grandpa, a younger brother was born. Watching her father carefully hold her brother in his arms, Qiu Ye’s heart was not very happy. The house was livelier than before, with grandparents and aunts and uncles of the younger brother appearing one after another. Occasionally, someone stroked Qiu Ye’s head with a fleeting smile on his face, but more often than not, the gaze was a bland glance without any emotion. Sometimes the meal was half eaten before someone suddenly remembered Qiu Ye’s presence.
Qiu Ye no longer likes to eat at the table. When the woman took her brother back to her mother’s house and was alone with her father, she felt a little more comfortable. Dad would cook her good food and ask her how she was doing at school. In order not to be disliked, she would lie to her dad, saying that his cooking was delicious and that she had gotten good grades on her exams.
More often than not, Qiu Ye didn’t like to talk and didn’t want to answer her dad’s questions. Especially when she missed her mom and brother, she never wanted to be seen by her dad to see through her heart, which was a secret that only she and her puppy knew.
4
On a rainy day, Qiu Ye saw her mother holding an umbrella from the classroom window, looking up at the school building. She was shouted out of the classroom by the class teacher. Looking at her mother standing in the corridor, tears rushed out of her eyes like a river breaking its banks, even though she held back her voice.
At a restaurant near the school, her mother wiped away her tears, saying that it had taken a day and a night on the train to get to her. Qiu Ye had a lot to say, a lot of questions to ask, but they were stuck in her throat and couldn’t come out. It was not until the tears were gone and the food on the table was cold that she mustered up the courage to ask her mother why she had left in the first place.
The mother dropped her gaze for a long time and asked her father if he had told her anything. Qiu Ye shook her head. As if relieved, her mother said, “That’s fine,” and then added, “When you grow up, I’ll tell you the truth.
Qiu Ye thought she was old enough to understand everything – that people who love each other get married, that marriages produce children, that divorce means a breakup of a relationship, and that ascending to heaven means goodbye forever. She didn’t press her mother, understanding that the answers she was forced to give were probably lies, just like the ones she told her father.
Later, in the small hotel where Mom had landed, Qiu Ye saw her brother’s letter. Mom asks Qiu Ye not to open the letter in front of her, or she will shed tears again. Qiu Ye asked her mother why her brother hadn’t come along. Mom said that her brother was already in high school and couldn’t take a leave of absence. She asked her brother if he missed her, and her mother’s tears spilled out of her eyes.
Mom said that her brother had put her picture in his diary and wouldn’t let anyone touch it. Once the photo was pranked by a classmate, and he beat them up. She couldn’t control her brother anymore, they would fight whenever they met, so she had no choice but to send him to boarding school.
Qiu Ye asked her mother if she had remarried, and she nodded, saying that she had met a man who loved her. Qiu Ye subconsciously looks at mom’s stomach and asks when she will have a new baby. Mom’s eyes flickered for a moment and said she didn’t know.
What Qiu Ye didn’t say was that she knew Mom would definitely have a new child and asked her not to ignore her brother at that time.
Qiu Ye stayed with her mother for the night. In her mother’s arms, she wanted to be pampered, but forgot how. She remembers the warmth of her childhood and feels further and further away.
All this today, decided before birth
That was the night she grew up quickly.
After her mother left, Qiu Ye opened her brother’s letter. The letterhead was wrapped in a large sticker, and the picture of a handsome boy with neatly combed hair quickly whisked away the droopy-headed, always preoccupied, hairy child in Qiu Ye’s mind. The handwriting on the letterhead was crooked and ugly. The words she remembered most were her brother asking her if the dog was still there. She giggled and cried.
Later, in her reply, she enclosed a large head posting of herself holding the puppy. She asked her brother if he would be sad if the puppy was not there one day. Her brother’s reply brought tears to her eyes: “As long as you are there ……”
Later, the puppy died unexpectedly. Qiu Ye buried the dog on the river bank outside the town and put a wooden sign. After a few days and then go back, the wooden sign was pulled off and the puppy’s body floated in a puddle by the river, stinking.
She was sad for a long time, but didn’t tell her brother about it in a letter.
5
The summer after elementary school ended, her father took the family thousands of miles south to Wuhan, where they made their home in the old Wuchang district. Qiu Ye did well and was accepted into a local middle school as a loan student. Her father said that her brother’s uncle had helped her with the schooling and warned her to study hard and not to embarrass him.
Qiu Ye nodded, but she was reluctant. In the past, her father had never consulted with her about any decision he made, not even in a false sense. Even this time she was taken away from her hometown, where she had lived for more than ten years, without any prior knowledge. She felt like an object in her father’s suitcase, which could be moved and placed at will without any consideration for her feelings. She suspected that her father did not love her and that what he was doing was just fulfilling his responsibilities under the law. She even wondered if Dad and his family of three would have been happier without her presence.
Ever since Qiu Ye learned that her father had worked under Xiao Ma’s brother and was now in business in Wuhan with her support, and that even the house they lived in was a gift from Xiao Ma’s mother’s family, she began to feel a deep sense of inferiority in front of Xiao Ma, feeling that even the clothes she wore and the food she ate were like handouts from Xiao Ma.
But Qiu Ye couldn’t look up to Xiao Ma with the eyes of her own daughter, so she couldn’t accept her favors with peace of mind, and she couldn’t resist her demands with a cold and arrogant posture like before.
After having a younger brother, Little Mother no longer looks after her emotions like she used to. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. ……”
Every time she hears this kind of advice, she feels a pair of invisible hands on her neck.
What Qiu Ye remembers most about school is the uncountable tardiness – walking three blocks from home to the bus stop, reversing two buses, and passing through a dozen stops before the school gate. Her father only took her on the first two days of school to familiarize her with the route, and she spent the rest of her life going to and from school alone, getting on the wrong bus and missing stops every now and then, so ashamed that she no longer dared to look her class teacher in the eye.
A more unbearable pain was the rejection and ridicule from her local classmates, who spoke a Wuhan dialect that she did not understand or speak, and no one took the initiative to make friends with her. Her classmates soon learned of her status as a student on loan, and at that time she was still very fat and her face would turn red when she got hot.
The summer she turned 14, Qiu Ye met some female seniors on the bus who were also foreign students. That year, her father was so busy that he rarely came home, and her young mother left her brother in the care of her mother’s family and started working. Qiu Ye learned to smoke and drink with her new friends, and got earrings and tattoos on her legs, just like the girls.
The tattoo artist is a cool guy who cheats her out of her virginity with a few kebabs. Qiu Ye thinks that having sex is being a lover, and the seniors laugh at her for being a fool. When she sees the tattoo artist walking into the hotel with another drunk girl, Qiu Ye wakes up from her dream and cries hard, and the cynical smiles of the seniors begin to appear on her face.
By the next summer, she was already a famous “big sister” in school.
The day before the final exams, the school director called Qiu Ye’s father to come and do a big reckoning on her past year of skipping classes, fighting, and early love. The father, dumbfounded, turned around and gave Qiu Ye a big mouth. The pain in Qiu Ye’s face was not yet gone, her hair was pulled again, her head hit the door, her stomach was kicked by a leather shoe, and she fell to the ground for breath.
Later, Qiu Ye jumped on a bus to the train station to go to her mother in Guangdong, but could not buy a ticket because she did not have an ID card. She wandered around town for a few days, spent the last penny on her body and went to the tattoo artist’s studio. She said she had broken up with her father and was homeless, and was willing to be a free helper.
The tattoo artist treated Qiu Ye to a full meal and a night in the store, and then introduced her to a job selling alcohol at a bar. Qiu Ye had no choice but to put on a wig and heavy make-up, wear a fleshless dress and step on ill-fitting high heels, and start weaving in and out of men.
The men in the bar were not interested in Qiu Ye because she was fat, and she did not sell many bottles of wine, but received many taunts. She was drunk several times, and the most serious one was when she was picked up by a police patrol on the street late at night and taken to the hospital. When she woke up, she saw her father’s face. She tried to run, but couldn’t move.
She was picked up and brought home. In her bedroom, she heard her father and her mother discussing her affairs in the living room. She wanted to ask her brother to talk to the school director and give her a chance to finish junior high school. Dad said he had no face to open his mouth to his brother-in-law, and that she had already been infected with social habits, so even if she went back to school, it would be a waste of time, so it would be better to arrange a job where she could learn a trade early.
The young mother felt that her father had a point, and the result of the discussion was that Qiu Ye should become an apprentice in her “uncle’s” cake store.
Qiu Ye refused – she had given up sweets to lose weight and did not want to face temptation every day; more importantly, she did not want to be a thoughtless object anymore, she wanted to choose her future life according to her own ideas.
When her father asked her what she wanted to do, she looked at the sneer on his face and remained silent.
Qiu Ye was not sure what she wanted to do or what she could do. Her only thought was to make money with her own hands and prove that she could live a good life without their “gifts”.
A few days later, Qiu Ye took to the streets and launched a flyer in the hot sun. It was a part-time job that could make money and burn fat, and she persisted for more than two months, wearing out two pairs of shoes and losing a few dozen pounds. She was especially happy that her previous clothes were getting looser and looser.
Dad and little mom also noticed the change in her. Little mother sent her own designer clothes into her room, and she returned them into the closet. Dad’s mouth no longer smiled coldly, and on the way to take her back home for her ID card, he gently asked her what she wanted to do next. It wasn’t until after the photo shoot at the police station that she told her dad that she was going to visit her mom and brother.
Dad furrowed his brow. Qiu Ye looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he had ever missed his brother over the years, even for just a minute. The look on Dad’s face gave the answer.
“He’s your son too, and you’re so cruel! You don’t deserve to be a father!”
Dad’s veins flared up and raised his arm, Qiu Ye put her face up and her big hand stopped in the air. She grabbed dad’s hand and slapped it towards her face.
“This is the last time, if you touch me in the future, I’ll return it.”
Dropping those words, Qiu Ye turned around and walked away.
She told me that now she still thinks it was the most beautiful thing she ever did.
6
After getting her ID card, Qiu Ye stepped onto a green train bound for Guangdong. The train went for a day and night, and the sound of the tracks swung up all the things she missed about her mother and brother.
At the exit of the Guangzhou train station, after hugging her mom tightly, she saw a cute face behind her mom again. Her mother picked up the doll and told her that it was her sister. She pretended to like it and touched her sister.
In the cab, looking at the shadow of her mother embracing her sister on the window, Qiu Ye forgot the words that had been building up in her heart for years, and her mind remembered the image of being picked up by her mother as a child at the bus station, running towards the huge white carriage.
She understood that she could never get back the feeling of the past – this woman was her only mother, but she was not her mother’s only child.
Her mother’s family rented a modest house in a midtown village, with no decent furniture and no designer clothes in the closet. Qiu Ye remembers that her mother took all her photos with her when she got divorced, but none of the photos in her room were of her.
Her mother said that every time she looked at her photos, she would shed tears and her heart would ache, so she locked them in a box. Qiu Ye has experienced the pain of not being able to read, and understands.
There is no brother’s stuff at home either. The mother said that her brother went to work after graduating from junior high school, and occasionally came back, but also sat for a while and left. It sounds like the relationship between mother and son is not much better than her relationship with her father.
Since she met the female seniors in her second year, Qiu Ye hadn’t written to her brother. Qiu Ye asked her mother where her brother was working. She gave her brother’s cell phone number to her, but Qiu Ye dialed it, but it was down. The mother had tears in her eyes – it turned out that the mother and son had just had a fight not long ago and the brother had changed his number.
She said that since he left school, he doesn’t talk to her about himself, and she doesn’t know what he does, where he lives, or if he’s sick. Before Qiu Ye arrived, her brother had been detained for three months for fighting, and if he hadn’t been under 18, he would have received a heavy sentence.
Qiu Ye couldn’t figure out how her brother, who had been so understanding as a child, had become like this. She asked her mother if her stepfather was bad to her brother, but she denied it, as if she was hiding something.
During the evening meal, Qiu Ye meets her stepfather, a soft-spoken man. He knew Qiu Ye was coming and bought a lot of fruits and snacks on his way from work. He also took out a dress from his backpack, saying it was a new design from the company and asked his mother to try it on.
The mother took the dress and asked Qiu Ye to wear it, but Qiu Ye didn’t like the dress and didn’t take it, so the mother had to wear it herself. In the room, Qiu Ye noticed a few black bruises on her mother’s body, and when she saw her gaze, she said that she had fallen on the stairs.
7
Despite her loss, Qiu Ye stayed in Guangzhou. She stayed at her mother’s house temporarily, and her stepfather found her a job as a salesman in a wholesale clothing city. She charged her brother’s cell phone number and sent text messages to the number every day, hoping to hear back soon and see her brother and sister.
While living with her mother, Qiu Ye discovered that her stepfather’s temper was not as kind as it appeared. One night, her mother took her out shopping, leaving her sister at home under her stepfather’s care. When they returned, they heard her crying before they entered the house. When they got in the door, they saw their sister crying on her bare bottom, while their stepfather was sitting on the couch fiddling with his phone with a grim look on his face.
The mother picked up her sister and found a bruise on her bottom, and immediately argued with her stepfather. The stepfather, who was in Qiu Ye’s presence, didn’t say anything back, took his clothes and slammed the door.
That night, the stepfather did not come home. Qiu Ye asked her mother if her stepfather had violent tendencies. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers.
The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. The mother probably felt that she could not hide anymore, before she spoke again.
It turns out that the stepfather was the mother’s first boyfriend, the two were in love for many years, she had several abortions. The last pregnancy, the two decided to get married, but near the wedding date, stepfather again on her, she hurt very badly, do not want to get married. She wanted to have an abortion and was afraid she would never have another child again, so she gritted her teeth and stayed.
She went back home and gave birth to a son alone, then went out to work and met Qiu Ye’s father. At the beginning of their relationship, she hid the fact that she had a child, and only when she was in love did she tell the truth. Although Qiu Ye’s father was surprised, he accepted and married her. Qiu Ye’s father hid the truth from his family that his son was not his own, and the family never suspected.
She then loved her husband to death and later gave birth to Qiu Ye. The two children were left in the care of the elderly, and the couple worked together in Wuhan, and their relationship remained undiminished. After a few years of peace and quiet, she left her husband to return to the town to look after her children when Qiu Ye’s grandmother fell ill.
Later, when her husband came home to visit his family, he found the phone records of her and her first boyfriend on her cell phone. She explained to her husband that her first boyfriend had visited her in her hometown and learned that she had given birth to a child that year, so he used all means to find her cell phone number and wanted to meet her son, but she refused.
Her husband believed her, but the incident planted the seeds of discord between the two. Later, when her husband came home from work, she also found his chatting text messages with his boss’s sister in his cell phone, which was quite ambiguous.
The next thing you know, there were arguments, fights and cold wars caused by mutual suspicion. A few months later, simmering until Qiu Ye’s grandmother died, the two did the divorce procedures ……
The mother told Qiu Ye that after the divorce, she was depressed for a long time, and several times stood on the bridge and wanted to jump down, if not because her brother was still young, I’m afraid she would not have wanted to live. The first thing you need to do is to take your brother to live in Wuhan for a year, the income is not high, you really can’t stay up, you take the initiative to contact the first boyfriend who wants to meet his son.
The man received the call and immediately took a plane from Guangzhou to Wuhan. He was still all alone after years of not seeing him. Seeing his own son thin and bony, tears immediately fell down. When she saw how well he treated her son, Qiu Ye’s mother’s heart fell to the ground and she came to Guangzhou with him.
Qiu Ye’s mother dragged her feet for more than a year and learned that her ex-husband had remarried his boss’s sister and had a child, so she broke off the idea of remarriage and lived with her first boyfriend, who had quit drinking. She originally thought that the biological father and son blood is thicker than water, so it is a good thing for the son, but Qiu Ye’s brother has never called his biological father “Dad”. The relationship between father and son broke down when the man became disillusioned and, after a drunken episode, relapsed and beat his son.
When Qiu Ye’s mother saw her son’s hateful glances at her, she understood that the reunion with her first boyfriend was more than a mistake. She wanted to separate from the man, but once again she was pregnant with a child. At the man’s begging, the two received a marriage license.
8
After hearing her mother’s account, Qiu Ye felt like she had a bizarre dream.
She couldn’t accept her brother’s true blood identity and understood more or less her father’s “desperation”. She still couldn’t think about these issues from her parents’ point of view, just as they never considered the consequences of every decision they made from her and her brother’s point of view.
I asked her if she had seen her brother since then.
She breathed a sigh of relief and said, “When I was in Guangzhou, he hadn’t been heard from for a long time, so my mother called the police and the police station found out that he had bought a train ticket to Yunnan. About a year later, I received a call from the police in Yunnan saying that he had been arrested. It took a year before he was sentenced, he joined a club, someone gave him a gun to kill someone, he missed, there were other cases on him, and he was sentenced to a total of 13 years.”
“Did you go to visit him?”
“During the trial, I cried when I heard the judge read out the evil things he had done. When he was taken out, looked back at the gallery, I stood up, I do not know if he recognized me ……”
Speaking of this, Qiu Ye choked up and could not speak. A little later, waiting to calm down, she said that because of the distance, she later never went to visit her brother in prison, according to the address of his sentence, wrote two letters to him, and waited for a long time, but did not receive a reply.
Then later, she and her then-boyfriend left Guangzhou and returned to Wuhan, and then her mother’s second divorce. Qiu Ye said, “When my mother told me about her affair with the man, I looked at my little sister and wondered if she would repeat what happened to me – and sure enough, the year before, my mother and the man got divorced, and she called me in tears, but I couldn’t say a word of comfort. “
I asked her if she hated her parents.
She said, not hate is false, but hate is useless: “I have long figured out that the more you hate something, the more you will be what kidnapped. My brother was destroyed by the hatred in his heart, and I was the lucky one.”
At the end of the conversation, I asked one last question: will she enter into marriage in the future.
Her answer was beyond my expectation: “Later, who knows?”
Postscript
Soon after, I left Wuhan.
In July, I once again changed trains in Wuhan to catch up with Qiu Ye, but when I got to the alley, I saw the cafe padlocked. I saw that she was in her circle of friends, and that she had gone on a trip.
Later, we slowly broke off contact. The last time I went to Wuhan was in winter. The cafe was being renovated and the owner was a man. The owner is a man. I greeted Qiu Ye on WeChat, but I didn’t get a reply.
When I saw the news of Wuhan’s closure, I quickly put on a mask and sent greetings to several friends in Wuhan on WeChat. Some of them are packing their luggage to leave Wuhan overnight, and some of them just finished a wedding banquet in the field and are on the highway back to Wuhan. I probably forgot about Qiu Ye, and only remembered to contact her a few days later when I saw her in my circle of friends, which had been swept up by the epidemic.
I spoke to her by voice and asked her where she was and how she was doing, but she said the situation was very bad and she was under quarantine. I couldn’t speak for a moment, and she suddenly laughed again, saying she was scaring me. She told me that not long after she put the store out, she moved away from Wuhan to Shanghai, met a man and started a new life.
I was relieved and wished her a happy new year. She also sent me her best wishes, and then asked how I would have reacted if she had not left Wuhan and had contracted the virus and become part of the isolation ward. I didn’t know how to answer at once, and she didn’t wait and hung up her voice.
Later, she sent me a message telling me that she had received more greetings and care during this time than she had received in the past 10 years: “Do some people really care about me? I don’t think so. They just want to know something from me, to confirm something, to dig up news they don’t see on the news. I don’t need this kind of ‘care’. Don’t I have to deal with it myself, good or bad? To tell the truth, I’m not happy at all – this spring.”
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