A 180,000-Yuan Santana and an Apartment in the County Town

Her sister put the terms on the table: it works out, the family's Santana is mine to drive; we marry, they buy us an apartment in the county town. The car was worth about 180,000 yuan then; the apartment, around 70,000. I asked myself: is my whole life worth just a few hundred thousand yuan? Question first, story after — in my place, do you nod, or shake your head? What you need to know: a Santana then cost about 180,000 yuan — many years of a worker's wages — and the offer meant marrying into her family's world. In China, the groom's family normally pays at a wedding. Here, the money flowed the other way. She came to me herself — asked her way to my house the first time, then kept coming, bringing cooked chicken, cooked beef, New Year goods my family rarely bought. The offer was made at the county power plant, where her sister worked, with her sitting right there. Richest family in town; they could pay it. Hardly a household in town owned a car. At the factory, my section chief said: "Marry in, and you skip decades of struggle." My mother pushed me to settle it. I'd heard she'd had boyfriends before, more than one. My mother: "That counts for nothing." I won't pretend I wasn't tempted — car, apartment, a living, all overnight. I thought hard. But I didn't like her, and I couldn't fake it. She offered to buy me a motorcycle with her own money — over 10,000 yuan — to hold on to me. I said I didn't want it. Days later, on an evening walk toward her home, twenty minutes in, I said it plainly: "This won't work." Her eyes reddened with anger. We parted mid-road. She never came again. Decades on, I still hear my chief. So: car and apartment on the table, decades of struggle waived — do you nod, or ask what your life is worth? Which side are you on? Reasons below. — Mufan From Mufan's memoir *At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River* — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMFM99H8

评论

发表评论

此博客中的热门博文

The Week I Waited for the Report, I Fed Him and Put Him to Sleep as Usual

At that time, my son was with me alone. After his mother went back to her parents' home, he stayed with me. In our neighborhood there was a boy about my son's age who was mostly looked after by his grandmother; his parents would ride off on their motorcycle and leave the child with her. I had seen that more than once. But my parents would not help me with my child. I had asked my mother, and she refused. He was a little over two years old, and I had been at home raising him for close to a year. I had almost no money left, the financial pressure kept growing, and I was getting more and more anxious. I felt I could not go on staying at home like that; I had to go out and earn money. But if I went out, someone had to look after him. It was in those days that I had just had a paternity test done on myself. I was my mother's biological son, but I was not the biological son of the man I had called my father for decades. That first test was to find out whose son I actually was. ...
阅读全文

On New Year's Morning, My Father Held My Brother's Hand. I Held My Grandfather's.

That year I was seven or eight years old, and I had run away from home — to my grandparents' house, diagonally across the lane from ours, a dozen metres away. I was staying there, waiting for my father or my mother to come and say one sentence: "Come home." I waited several days. Nobody came. The seventh or eighth day after I left home was the first morning of the new year. It was the first time in my memory that I had gone so long without seeing my parents. On the morning of Lunar New Year, everyone goes out early to pay respects to elders and greet the neighbours; the lanes are full of people. That morning, my grandfather went into the yard to set off firecrackers, and I went with him. In other years, it was my father who got up to light the firecrackers, with my brother and me at his side. This year, the man standing beside me was my grandfather. After breakfast, at about eight o'clock, we went out. Our lane was very narrow — about three metres wide, with houses ...
阅读全文

Five Hundred Yuan, Up Front

In the 1990s, Chinese hospitals required a cash deposit before emergency treatment began. I already knew this the way you know any rule of the world you live in. What I did not know, until one night at the county hospital, was what that rule looked like when it landed on a family that did not have the money. My son was about eighteen months old. His mother had gone back to her parents' home, and I was raising him by myself. With a child that small, nothing about him was a small matter to me; the moment he burned with fever, I felt we could not afford to lose a minute. That night he spiked a temperature, and I carried him from our town to the county hospital's emergency room. The doctor took his temperature, said he needed an injection, and told us to wait. While we waited, the emergency room doors were pushed open. Two women wheeled in a gurney. On it lay a girl of eleven or twelve. Her whole body was shaking, convulsing violently, and white foam was coming out of her mouth. ...
阅读全文