Chapter 764: Chapter 323: Past and Present Lives, Looking Back at the Old Country
As the New Year approached, there were no shortage of cars on the highway. We had planned to get ho by two in the afternoon, but looking ahead at the endless line of traffic, it looked like we wouldn’t get there until four or five o’clock.
Luckily no one was in a hurry, chatting while on our way ho. During this ti, Li Shiqi said very little, sitting quietly in the back seat, while Su Qing was quite talkative. She actually said to Zhou Yuwen: “Hey, Yuwen, when your family gathers tonight, can you bring along?”
Yuwen replied, “You think you’re pretty enough for that?”
“Why would I want to bring you?”
“To see your interesting cousin again?” Su Qing said with a laugh.
After all, they’d been married for two years. Su Qing was quite familiar with Yuwen’s family situation.
Speaking of Yuwen’s family, they were considered a prominent local clan. His grandfather, who had been relocated to Huai’an as the head of the local Public Security Bureau, had then spread his branches in the Xu Huai Region, producing six daughters and one son.
Yuwen’s father was the third in line and the only male offspring. He was quite stubborn in his younger days, suffering outside for two years until Grandpa mocked him, prompting him to grit his teeth and join the Procuratorate with the city’s highest scores. Now, after more than twenty years, he’s beco a well-known figure in the city.
As for Yuwen’s aunts, with their grandfather’s help, they’ve done quite well too, all working in stable governnt or public sector jobs, so even marrying better off and moving to other cities.
The only one who didn’t do well was probably Aunt, who also quarreled with Grandpa back in the day and married a factory worker. As ti went on and everyone else advanced steadily, only Aunt’s family remained stagnant.
Aunt was stubborn too, at first unwilling to ask for help, thinking pride was enough. But as practice shows true knowledge, reality told everyone that pride was useless without a solid foundation for everything else.
All Aunt wanted to prove was that it didn’t matter how well the others were doing; her child was raised right!
So Yuwen’s cousin, Peng Xiaoyong, was always the top student in his class.
But truth be told, Yuwen didn’t envy Xiaoyong at all.
Yuwen had a vivid mory: while all the children could go out to play, Xiaoyong was ho every day, buried in endless howork, wearing those thick black-rimd glasses in Aunt’s allocated two-room dingy apartnt, working tirelessly at a makeshift desk covered in piles of never-ending test papers.
The gap between the different family backgrounds indeed grew, so relatives couldn’t really connect with one another, especially with Aunt’s family, with whom there was no common language. Even when gathering for als, there was nothing to talk about.
The younger generation didn’t understand these disparities, but Aunt would tell her children that the others didn’t want to interact with them because they were poor.
So Xiao Yong, you have to fight back!
You have to study hard!
You must make sothing of yourself!
The cousin did live up to expectations, always getting full scholarships.
After graduating from high school, he even went abroad to study.
Of course, the money for going abroad was scraped together by various family mbers.
That was the first ti Aunt bowed her head to ask for help.
But even in seeking help, she was proud. She said she hadn’t asked anyone for anything in her life, but for her son’s future, she had to lower her head.
“My life turned out like this, but I can’t let my son stay here. If my son is capable, he deserves the best!”
Yuwen rembered this sentence vividly because he was in high school at the ti.
That’s how Aunt ca to their house, biting her lip and saying those words to his father.
Other families might have contributed various amounts, Yuwen wasn’t sure, but his family gave a hundred thousand yuan.
Because Yuwen’s father, Zhou Guobin, did hope that his nephew would succeed. He was very fond of his nephew back then.
It’s just a pity that due to later conflicts over house demolition, they stopped contacting each other.
The house demolition is another big issue.
Grandpa also had so status, owning a large six-story house in the center of the city, located by the roadside. The self-built house might not be luxurious, but it certainly was big.
Yuwen’s impression was that as a child, many people rented rooms in their house, with as many as seven or eight tenants at a ti, including young couples striving in the city and parents who brought their children to study.
Yuwen was quite happy during that ti.
Being the landlord’s son, the children of the tenants mostly revolved around him. While children may not know what it ans to suck up to soone, that was pretty much the situation at the ti.
Yuwen still rembers when a single mother rented a room on the side, his lasting mory being how she constantly changed boyfriends, and her daughter, about Yuwen’s age, always clung to him, even sneaking kisses and claiming she would be his wife when they grew up.
She even called it a ‘little chicken’ while pointing to her own private parts and saying so bewildering words.
Back then, Yuwen didn’t understand any of it and didn’t want to.
His mind was full of gas like Contra, Super Mario, and MapleStory; he found these won so annoying!
The single mother only rented for three months before leaving with her daughter and a man.
Since then, Yuwen had indeed seen this girl, who could be considered a childhood sweetheart.
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