浙东家乡纪实：买老婆的故事

My grandparents have a neighbor. His family had been broke for generations and he hadn't had a wife until he was like 40 or 50. Well, poverty made him look older.

Finally, he bought a teenage girl originally from a distant mountain village in Guizhou. Since both of them couldn't speak Mandarin, they weren't able to talk. In the beginning, he was afraid that his young wife would escape. After consulting his one-eyed mother, he decided to chain her. Since then, the whole village people had been interested to see what the poor girl looked like in the chain.

For years, the man tried hard to have a son. He wasn't lucky. Instead, he got a daughter, which was laughed at by the village people. After all, this silly poor guy had invested a lot on buying and feeding his woman. The chain cost a lot too! In the end, he got nothing to carry on his family name and financially support himself as a really old man. To earn his mianzi back, the only thing he could do was to make a son's name for his daughter!

Since the woman failed her reproduction job, he was trying to find her the other one: working in a factory. She felt free though. After watching TV and listening to her mother-out-law for many years, she ended up speaking broken Mandarin and dialect. She could talk with her co-workers now.

It's when her daughter was about 8 that the woman asked her to leave together. The kid refused. She was afraid, because her father would beat her to death if she and her mother got caught. And she wanted so much to go to school. She didn't want to leave her home behind and got no schooling. She'd asked her father several times but he always said no. He thought education was useless for his girl and it would cost money.

Being abandoned by her daughter, the mother cried to escape penniless, only with her boyfriend she'd met in the factory. And she's never been heard. The old man asked some relatives to help search the town and city though. After a few weeks, they failed. Later he wanted to try their luck in Hangzhou or Shanghai, but they couldn't figure out the 3-hour bullet train trip.

Luckily, the father finally agreed to send the daughter to school. You know, no one would marry her if she didn't even finish elementary school. She struggled to finish junior high though.

...

I've not seen the daughter often since my childhood. Last year, it was heard she finally got married to a nice guy after receiving a 200k-kuai brideprice. Everyone in the village thought it's a great deal considering she didn't even go to college. She could only get less if she still waited and became older. Her father kept the money in his own bank though. The old man said:

she's still too young and naive to manage the money. I'll take care of it for her own sake. And I'll only take the interest payments. The rest is always hers!

Well, it sounded just like what old Tony said when Léon asked for money:

Hey, it's your money. I mean, I'm just holding it for you, like a bank.
Except better than a bank, 'cause you know banks always get knocked off.
No one knocks off old Tony.

Léon: The Professional

Original title: A Story: Marriages Never End

🙈英语/英文🙊