My grandmother’s oldest daughter—my eldest aunt—was six years older than my mother. She did not marry until she was twenty-five, which was considered quite late at the time. She was introduced to a man from a village several dozen li away and married into that family.
In those years, when women looked for a husband, the main concern was not property. What mattered was whether the man was healthy and whether he could work. In that sense, my uncle fit the standards of the time very well. He was physically strong, especially capable in farm work, and he had some schooling too: he had finished middle school, which already counted as being educated in those days.
The matchmaker was my grandmother’s second older brother. I mentioned earlier that both of my grandmother’s brothers were obsessed with gambling. They played paijiu constantly and eventually lost all the mountains and farmland the family had accumulated over generations. Strangely enough, that ruin later spared them. My grandmother’s eldest brother died at nominal age thirty-seven, and her second brother died in his seventies after starving himself. While he was still alive, he once said during a visit that losing all that land had actually turned out to be fortunate—otherwise, if the family had been labeled landlords in those years, they would have been beaten to death. And that was no exaggeration. Not only the landlord himself, but his brothers, sons, and grandchildren could be beaten to death. There had been several such cases right in front of people’s eyes.
My grandmother’s second brother later moved to a village a few miles from his original home. My uncle happened to be from that village, which was why he introduced my aunt to him.
Why he called my grandmother “Third Aunt”
As my grandmother’s son-in-law, he should have called her “Mother,” but he always called her “Third Aunt” instead. I once asked my mother whether there was some family connection there, something like a marriage within extended kin. My mother thought they were probably distant relatives through my grandmother’s second brother’s side, but she did not know the details.
My uncle was known for how hard he worked. Whether it was dry fields or rice paddies, he was always busy, and he did everything in an orderly way. Their family also kept cattle and used oxen to pull carts. Some years ago, while he was out working with one of the oxen, it suddenly went mad. The cart lurched, he was thrown off, and when the cart overturned, he was pinned underneath it. After a few months of recuperation, his body gradually recovered.
My aunt and uncle were often hired by other families to transplant rice seedlings or plant corn. In the fall, people also hired them to help with the harvest.
My uncle had studied Buddhist teachings, and my aunt followed along with him. At that time, I myself was in a period when I was slandering the true Dharma. My aunt, my mother, and others in the family were the kind of people who did not reason things out; whatever the issue was, they responded with verbal aggression. My aunt once said, “Your uncle finished nine years of school, he’s educated, and he has thoroughly studied the sutras. The Buddha does not save those without affinity.”
Looking back now, I have thought a lot about why I was in that state at the time. Some of the reasons came from myself, but some came from the outside, and those external factors were closely tied to the character of my grandmother’s whole family.
As I see it now, my uncle’s understanding of Buddhism back then was still shallow. He had not touched its core, and the conclusions he reached actually ran against the deeper meaning of what he thought he was studying.
I do not know all that much about what their marriage was really like in private. But one thing I could see clearly was that my uncle tolerated my aunt’s twisted temperament to an extraordinary degree. Most people would not have had that kind of forbearance. He was a stingy man, but it was not just him—his whole extended family was like that. When a personality trait runs through an entire family like that, its influence is enormous. I will mention that influence elsewhere too. My aunt never spoke of such things in front of outsiders, which also matched the broader family pattern on my grandmother’s side: they were good at wearing masks in public, then taking them off once they got home.
Their son A-Qing
The year after my aunt got married, she gave birth to A-Qing—a pseudonym. He was not a good student as a child and only barely finished middle school. When I was young, I liked messing around with cassette tapes and copying songs. After A-Qing quit school, I asked my aunt to give me his discarded English tapes. I had not studied English in primary school, so when I heard things like “Unit One” and “Number Two,” I was completely lost.
Before he had even properly completed middle school, my aunt sent him south to relatives of his father’s in Guangdong to learn how to make machine parts. Guangdong’s climate is brutally hot for people from our region. Locals who grow up there do not think much of it, but people from the northeast can have a very hard time adapting. In the daytime, even sitting under a tree, you feel short of breath. At night, the heat is so oppressive that even lying on bare wooden boards, you still cannot sleep. He repeatedly said he wanted to come back home, but my aunt would not allow it.
At the relatives’ small factory, he did not learn the most valuable skills, such as drafting blueprints or reading them properly. Still, he secretly picked up a few things and then taught himself the rest by trial and error. Those relatives withheld wages from the workers on one pretext or another, then went gambling in Macau, lost the money, and ended up bankrupt.
After that, A-Qing started his own small parts workshop in Guangdong, and he has kept it going ever since.
A failed relationship in Guangdong
While he was in Guangdong, A-Qing had several relationships. I remember my aunt once saying that he had been deceived by a woman there. I will not say what region she was from, because I do not need people accusing me of attacking a place. They had taken intimate photos together and had lived together for several months. My aunt loved bragging, and at the time she kept boasting that A-Qing was about to get married and that this woman would be my future sister-in-law.
But after that, the wedding was never mentioned again for a long time. The woman had already spent quite a bit of A-Qing’s money before returning to her hometown. Once she was back, she kept asking him to send her money for one reason after another. Later she claimed she was pregnant and again demanded money from him, but she always refused to meet him in person. Eventually, after enough time had passed, A-Qing realized he had probably been scammed. He then moved his workshop, changed his phone number, and cut off all contact with her.
The marriage that finally happened
Later he met the woman who did become my sister-in-law, and they got married on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth lunar month in 2012. I do not know how they met. Before coming north for the wedding, he had gone to her parents’ home. He could not understand their local dialect at all.
Generally speaking, in places where dialects are especially thick, rural speech is often stronger than city speech—though in some regions the opposite is true. At his future in-laws’ house, he could not understand a single full conversation. All he knew was that the family agreed to the marriage. None of them came with him to the northeast to attend the wedding. Only the main person did—the bride herself.
There was no grand celebration. Aside from close relatives, almost no outsiders attended. Normally the groom’s family arranges decorated wedding cars to go and fetch the bride, and there is a whole sequence of wedding rituals held at the bride’s family home. If the bride’s home is too far away, people might move those rituals to a hotel. But in this case, none of that happened. There was no convoy of wedding cars and no formal bride-pickup ceremony.
On the wedding day, my uncle gave a speech. He held a handwritten manuscript he had prepared in advance and read from it for five or six minutes. I even joked with A-Qing that his father had stolen the groom’s spotlight.
After the wedding
After they married, they returned to Guangdong. About two years later, they had a child. When my aunt went there to help take care of the baby, she discovered that her daughter-in-law often lost her temper with her. People say a woman’s expression can change in an instant, and my sister-in-law was exactly like that. But A-Qing surely knew what kind of temper his wife had. A daughter-in-law who is always making faces at her mother-in-law does not become that way in a vacuum, and it also had something to do with my aunt’s own personality.
My aunt, my mother, and my younger aunt all had extremely strong controlling tendencies. None of them knew when to stop once they thought they were right, and all of them spoke in an overbearing way. They inherited that temperament from my grandmother. It showed up in every corner of daily life.
When my third uncle died, we were eating at a hotel after the funeral arrangements, and I heard my uncle quietly scold my aunt: “Stop looking so agitated all the time.” He did not say it loudly in front of everyone, but in a low voice at the table. I only heard it because I was sitting beside her.
That day, after the dishes were served, I set my cigarettes on the windowsill next to us. When the meal was over, my aunt asked, “Where are the cigarettes?” But it was not an ordinary question. Her tone was so stiff and unpleasant that it sounded like an accusation, almost like she was dressing someone down. Anyone hearing that tone would naturally think: what exactly did I do wrong, and who are you to speak to me like that? What fault was there in my putting them on the windowsill? It is difficult to capture that kind of tone in writing.
My aunt was my mother’s older sister. How, then, did my mother end up marrying my father? And what was hidden inside that story?