A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The Arrangement

UNCLE BING CAME TO VISIT RUOLAN AND HER mother when her father went away on business trips. Ruolan’s father worked as a salesman for a tea factory, so every year in late spring, he traveled with samples of new tea to Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, big cities Ruolan dreamed of visiting when she grew up. Earlier on, he had come home before summer, but each year he traveled longer, and by the time Ruolan was ten years old, he did not show up until late December, when he was home just in time for the end-of-the-year housecleaning and the holidays. He sent postcards but not often. He brought Ruolan gifts from the cities, too: a doll with blond, curly hair and blue, deep-set eyes, fragrant rubber erasers in the shapes of little bunnies, dresses with laces and shining decorations that were too fancy for the town. Her mother put the dresses away in a trunk and never let Ruolan touch them. After a while, she learned not to ask. She wore passed-down clothes of her mother’s to school, gray blouses and blue pants, faded and too big. Gray-Skinned Mouse, the boys in school nicknamed Ruolan, but even that had stopped bothering her.

Uncle Bing lived in the mountains nearby, and was the only teacher in the small village school there. He was not married. He was not even a relative, but as long as Ruolan remembered, he had been Uncle Bing. Every spring, before her father’s trip, he left an envelope for Ruolan; inside were a piece of paper with Uncle Bing’s address and enough money for the round-trip bus fare. “Go find Uncle Bing in case of an emergency,” Ruolan’s father told her. She had never taken the trip once; there was no need really, as Uncle Bing came to visit Ruolan and her mother every weekend when her father went away. The paper bills Ruolan had put away, between pages of an old textbook that she hid under her straw mattress.

On Saturday evenings, Uncle Bing arrived, with a small basket of bayberries, or apricots, or freshly picked edible ferns, gifts from the students and their parents. They cost Uncle Bing nothing, but Ruolan’s mother always thanked him as if he had gone to great trouble to get them. “It’s so very kind of you, Uncle Bing. How could we ever repay you for your generosity?” she said.

Ruolan frowned. Her mother had the ability to fill her words, even the best-meaning ones, with disdain and sarcasm. Uncle Bing, however, was not annoyed. He went into the yard to chop the firewood, and when he became warm, he took off his shirt and hung it over the clothesline. From the kitchen, where Ruolan was cooking, she looked at the small and big holes in his undershirt. When she had been small, she used to stick her fingers into the holes and call it a fishnet. She no longer did it now; thirteen years old she was, and already she had started missing her childhood, when she had been less restrained around Uncle Bing, and happier.

Uncle Bing went on to fix the grapevine trellis that had been partly taken down by an early storm. Ruolan watched him work, and cut the vegetables halfheartedly until her mother called from the bedroom, “Does the knife weigh a thousand tons?”

Ruolan did not answer and chopped the celery with an angry speed.

At supper, Ruolan’s mother poured the strong yam wine for Uncle Bing. They talked about the weather, too much rain or too little, and how the peasants’ lives would be affected, even though neither of them needed to worry about the harvest season. Ruolan listened to their pointless chatting and spun the chopsticks between her fingers. Her mother did not tell her to stop the bad-mannered game in a snapping voice when Uncle Bing was around.

Sometimes, when they ran out of small talk, Uncle Bing poured a cup of yam wine for Ruolan’s mother, and they let the rims of the cups touch slightly. She took a few sips, which made her cough and blush, and she would tell Ruolan to see to it that Uncle Bing had a good drink, and then excuse herself and retreat to the bedroom.

“How’s Mama’s health?” Uncle Bing asked Ruolan after her mother left.

Ruolan shrugged and did not reply. Her mother had been ill, or thought of herself as ill, for as long as Ruolan remembered. Every morning, her mother rocked her awake and told her to get rid of the dregs from the medicine pot — it was said that to make a patient recover, the dregs were to be scattered on the crossroads for people to trample on. Ruolan believed that her mother did it only to remind the world that she herself was not well; since age five, Ruolan had been the one to carry the medicine pot into town, disgusted by the bitter smell of the leftover herbs, her mother’s prolonged and fake illness, and the looks people gave her.

Uncle Bing drank silently for a few cups. Ruolan pushed a plate of fried peanuts toward him. “Uncle Bing, drink slowly,” she said.

He downed another cup. “Want to hear a story, Ruolan? Once upon a time, there was a man who loved dragons so dearly he had dragons painted everywhere in his mansion.”

“And when the real dragon came to visit him, he was scared out of his wits,” Ruolan said. “You’ve told it many times before.”

“Once upon a time there was a man who spent a fortune to buy a pearl—”

“And he fell in love with the box, and thought it alone was worthy of the money, so he returned the pearl to the seller,” Ruolan said. “Why are your stories always about idiots?”

Uncle Bing smiled a sad and drunk smile. “What other stories can an idiot tell?”

Ruolan regretted her impatience right away. It had always been a game between them that Uncle Bing told stories and sang folk tunes to her when they were left alone. But she knew enough now to start suspecting the real reason for those stories and songs. The neighborhood grannies and aunties commented to her on her father’s long absence, and the frequent visits of Uncle Bing. “Do they send you to bed early?” some of them asked, their smiles pregnant with mean curiosity. “Is your mother still sick when your uncle’s around?”

Ruolan tried to ignore the women, chatty and shameless like a group of female ducks, but they had left something poisonous inside her. She had looked at herself in the mirror and tried to find a resemblance to her father’s face, or Uncle Bing’s. She did not look like either of them.

“Here’s a new story,” Uncle Bing said and poured another cup for himself. “Once upon a time a man heard the story about magic leaves. If you put a magic leaf in front of your eyes, it would make you disappear so nobody would be able to see you. The man believed in the story, and went out to gather bags of leaves every day. He put each leaf in front of his eyes and asked his wife, ‘Can you see me now?’ The wife said yes until she finally lost her patience. ‘Oh, heaven, where are you, my husband? I can’t see you now.’ The man was happy. ‘Finally, the magic leaf!’ he said, and went to the marketplace with the leaf in front of his eyes. But when he tried to steal, people caught him and gave him a good beating.”

Ruolan laughed for the sake of Uncle Bing. He laughed, too. “Poor woman. How could she marry such a stupid man?” Ruolan said afterward.

“Perhaps her father didn’t pay the matchmaker enough,” Uncle Bing said.

“Perhaps she was very ugly, she could only marry an idiot.”

“Or she was a lazy woman, nobody else wanted to marry her.”

“Or when she was a girl, she stole men, so only an idiot wouldn’t mind being a cuckold,” Ruolan said with a wicked joy.

“Don’t say words that you don’t understand,” Uncle Bing said.

“I’m not a child anymore,” she said. “A good woman doesn’t let her husband live elsewhere and let another man visit her every week.”

“Ruolan,” Uncle Bing said, and she stared back until he looked away. “You’re a big girl now, and Uncle Bing is old,” he said, and got up drunkenly.

Ruolan ran across the room and made a bed for him in her cot before he could stop her. When Uncle Bing came and stayed overnight, he slept in her cot at the corner of the living room, and she slept with her mother in her big bed. “Uncle Bing,” she said, the edge of her defiance softened by a sudden pity for his sadness, “have a nice sleep.”

Later, Ruolan huddled on the edge of the bed, as far away as possible from her mother, whose shallow and quick breathing reminded Ruolan of a dying fish. Ruolan covered her head with the blanket, but the smell of her own body, warm and familiar, mixed with the bitterness of the herbs from her mother’s bed, nauseated her. She wished she would never have to sleep near her mother, but then, when Uncle Bing’s bus was late, she was the one to look out the door for the sight of him every three minutes until her mother reminded her not to lean on to the door frame like a shameless girl displaying herself for all the men in the world.

Every time after Uncle Bing left, Ruolan buried her head in her pillow and sniffed the unfamiliar scent of his hair. It smelled strangely comforting, different from the stinky boys in her class, or her own home.

ON THE FIRST day of every month, Ruolan walked to the cement factory three miles outside the town for the illness allowance for her mother. Ruolan’s mother had stopped working totally two years ago. She was forty-one now, still four years short for the early retirement pension.

Ruolan signed the slip and accepted the few bills, soft and worn out, from the old accountant. “How’s your mother?” he asked.

“All right.”

The old man looked at Ruolan from above his glasses and shook his head. “The most beautiful woman always has the saddest fate, ” he said. “When your mother first came— you were a baby then — she looked so young that you’d think she was only sixteen. Who’d imagine that she would become ill so early?”

Ruolan left the old man lost in his own sentiment. She could not imagine her mother possessing any beauty. Because she lay in bed all day long, her complexion was sickly pale, almost translucent. Her hair, carelessly cut by herself, was like a bird’s nest most of the time. She wore her pajamas even when she had to walk to the next lane for the public outhouse. On Saturday afternoons, however, before Uncle Bing’s arrival, she cleaned herself and changed into her best clothes. She powdered her face, too, with stale, caked rouge; it gave her hollowed cheeks an unnatural pink, as if she were a patient dying from consumption.

That summer, Ruolan had her first period. She was not surprised; she had seen darkly stained tissues in the public outhouse, and had heard other girls her age discuss it. She found an old cotton shirt in a trunk and ripped it into rags. “What are you making all the noises for? I’m having a headache now,” her mother said from her bed.

Ruolan hesitated and answered, “I have my bad luck with me.”

Her mother sighed aloud and came out to the living room. “ Bad luck? What’s bad about it?”

“What do you call it, then, Mama?” Ruolan said. Her mother had never talked about it with her; moreover, untidy as her mother was, Ruolan had never seen stained underwear or any sign of her having the monthly visit of her bad luck.

“It’s not something you need a name for,” Ruolan’s mother snapped. “You don’t need to go around and talk to everybody about it.”

“Whatever,” Ruolan said under her breath.

Ruolan’s mother stared at Ruolan with contempt. “Why does a patient want to waste her energy talking to a brat like you?” her mother said, and counted a few bills and coins from her small silk purse. “Go buy what you need.”

Ruolan accepted the money. She did not know what she needed, but she would rather ask a stranger in the street than her own mother.

“And stop by at the old pharmacy,” her mother said, and brought out a piece of carbon paper and two more bills. “Ask for a week’s dose for yourself.”

Ruolan looked at her mother’s handwriting on the paper. It was the same prescription her mother sent her to fill every month, the mixture of grass roots, tree barks, and dried flowers that her mother boiled the first thing in the morning. “I’m not sick,” Ruolan said.

“A prolonged illness makes a good doctor out of a patient,” her mother said. “I know what you need.”

“I’ve heard that all medicines are poisons,” Ruolan said.

“Are you saying that your mother wants to poison you?”

“I’m only saying maybe it’s not good for you, or anyone, to have medicine every day.”

“I’m ill,” her mother said. She dropped the bill and the carbon paper on Ruolan’s cot. “You’re a woman now, so you’d better listen to me,” her mother said. “Being a woman is itself an illness.”

Before Ruolan replied, her mother walked back to her bedroom. Ruolan looked at her mother’s feet, skinny and ashen colored in the tattered, sky blue slippers. She felt choked by disgust and pity for her mother’s body. Her own body had changed over the last two months, her breasts swelling with a strange, painful itch. She imagined herself growing into a woman like her mother; it was the last thing she wanted from life. She squeezed the carbon paper into a small ball and flipped it through the open door to the courtyard. She flattened the extra bills with her palm and put them in her textbook.

Ruolan’s father came home the next week, much too early. For the first time, Ruolan was overjoyed to see him. They had never been close. She had got used to his absence, and now she understood the reason for it. They were comrades, trapped in a life with the woman they could not love, but could not leave, either.

At the end of the dinner that evening, Ruolan’s father brought up the topic of a divorce. He had submitted an application to his and her working units, he said. In a few days they would expect the welfare officials from both factories to come and dissuade them, but if they could agree on the divorce, the officials would sign the application so they could go to the county courthouse to replace their marriage certificate with a divorce certificate.

Ruolan’s mother did not reply. She dipped the head of a chopstick in the soup and drew linked circles on the table. Her father’s eyes followed the strokes of the chopstick. He looked older than Ruolan remembered; his hair, at fortyfive, was more gray than black.

“What if I don’t agree?” her mother said finally.

“We’ll have to go to the court,” her father looked at his own palms and said. “But why do we have to make it hard for us?”

“For you, you mean? Why should I agree to save you the disgrace of going into the court?” Ruolan’s mother said. “You’re the one to keep a mistress.”

Her father looked at Ruolan and said, “Go out and play, Ruolan.”

“Let her stay. She’s a woman now. She should learn from my lesson of how to keep a man.”

It was not about keeping a man; it was a lesson on how not to become an ugly woman. Ruolan felt a revenging joy of seeing her father leave her mother. She was ready to desert her, too.

Ruolan’s father opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, her mother cut him off. “Don’t say anything. I won’t agree to sign,” she said, and stood up. “I won’t let you off the hook so easily,” she said before she banged the bedroom door closed. The venom in her words made Ruolan shudder. She looked at her father, tired and crestfallen, his lips quavering. “Baba,” she said in a low voice, “are you going to take me in after the divorce?”

“I’m sorry, but Mama needs you more than I do,” Ruolan’s father said, still studying his palms. “She’s ill.”

“I’m not her medicine,” Ruolan said, choked with disappointment in her father.

He looked up at her, but his eyes were empty, his mind already floating to another place. “Am I your daughter, Baba?” Ruolan asked.

Her father looked at her for a long moment and said, “No.”

“Am I Uncle Bing’s daughter?”

“No,” her father said, and picked up the suitcase that he had not unpacked. “You’re your mother’s daughter,” he said, and ran away into the night street before she could ask more questions.

The next morning, Ruolan’s mother did not wake her for the medicine pot, and Ruolan got up late for school. The door to her mother’s bedroom was closed. For a moment, Ruolan imagined her mother hanged from the ceiling with a broken neck and a long, dangling tongue. She shivered and pushed the door; it was bolted from inside. “Mama,” she said. When there was no reply, she hit the door with a fist and started to cry.

After a while, her mother opened the door. “What are you wailing for the first thing in the morning?” she said and shoveled the medicine pot into Ruolan’s hands. “You think I would kill myself and let your father get away so easily?”

Ruolan wiped her tears dry. Halfway to the crossroads, she changed her mind and walked back. Her mother’s bedroom door was closed, and Ruolan dumped the dregs by the door. She unloaded all her books onto her cot and put her clothes, a few pieces altogether, into her book bag. She took the old textbook from underneath her mattress and counted the bills, enough for a day and a night of bus ride to Shanghai, she imagined; but when she reached the ticket window at the bus station, she lost her courage and asked only for a ticket to Uncle Bing’s village.

TWO HOURS LATER, Ruolan got off the bus, and, aftergetting lost a few times, she found the mud shack that served as the classroom for the village school. About twenty boys and girls, of all grades, sat on wooden benches, reading together a story about a tadpole looking for his mother. Uncle Bing was walking around, patting the younger kids’ heads while reading along with them.

Ruolan walked away before Uncle Bing saw her. Across the yard there was a smaller shack. She pushed the door ajar and entered. It was dark inside and it took her a few seconds to see the cot and the desk covered with workbooks and papers. At one corner of the shack was a stove, on which a huge pot of millet porridge was simmering. Ruolan sat down on the stool in front of the stove, and out of habit she took up the ladle and stirred the porridge. The handle of the ladle had been broken and fixed with a pair of chopsticks bound together. She stroked the chopsticks with a finger, and imagined living her life in this shack, cooking for Uncle Bing, waiting for him to finish work, loving him like a good woman.

The door opened and Uncle Bing came in. Ruolan saw his expression change from surprise to worriment. “Is there something wrong?” he said, and clutched Ruolan’s shoulder. “Is Mama all right?”

“She’s fine,” Ruolan said.

“Ah, Ruolan. You’ve scared the soul out of me,” Uncle Bing said and let go of her. “Why are you not in school today?”

“Uncle Bing, the porridge is ready,” Ruolan said.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Let me get it to the students first. They must be hungry now.”

“Do you cook for the students?”

“Otherwise I wouldn’t have more than half of them,” Uncle Bing said, and explained that for many students, the porridge would be their only meal during the day, and they came to school because of that.

“Baba came home yesterday and asked for a divorce from Mama,” Ruolan said, cutting off Uncle Bing.

“So he told me. He came by last night,” Uncle Bing said, and went out of the shack with the porridge. Ruolan sat down on the cot and looked at the pillowcase, torn at a corner and in need also of a good wash. She remembered Uncle Bing’s scent left on her pillow.

When Uncle Bing came back with the empty pot, Ruolan had found the sewing bag in a basket underneath the cot, and was mending the pillowcase. The needle was rusted, and she wiped it on her hair from time to time. Uncle Bing watched her work for a moment and then said that he had canceled the afternoon’s class. Ruolan looked out the window and saw the children chase one another off. “Let’s catch the next bus home,” Uncle Bing said and walked to the door. “Mama must need comfort now.”

Ruolan checked the stitches without replying. He had only one person in his heart, and Ruolan was disappointed that it was not she. “Don’t worry,” she said finally. “Mama won’t die before everyone she knows dies first.”

“Ruolan,” Uncle Bing said disapprovingly. “She’s your mother.”

“Is she really?” Ruolan said, looking up at Uncle Bing. “Baba said I wasn’t his daughter. How could I be her daughter?”

“She brought you up.”

“She did it only to have someone to torment.”

“Ruolan.” Uncle Bing raised his voice, and she stared back. “She’s in a bad mood because she’s ill. You need to help her feel better,” he said.

Ruolan did not reply, and started sewing again. When she finished, she broke the thread between her teeth and ran a finger to smooth the stitches. She patted the pillow into a good shape before putting it back on the bed. “Why do people all expect me to be her medicine?” she asked.

Uncle Bing sat down by the stove. “You’re the only one she has now,” he said.

Ruolan sneered. Uncle Bing hesitated, and said, “Perhaps it’s time to know their story so you’ll understand her.”

“There’s nothing for me to understand,” Ruolan said.

Uncle Bing ignored her words. He poured a bowl of water into the stove to put out the leftover fire, and said, “I’ve known your mother all my life, since when we were small children. She was a beautiful girl. She was loved by many boys my age, and she was proud and happy about it, but when we reached eighteen, something changed. The proposals that many of us sent with the matchmakers to her parents were rejected, and she became less happy. Her parents must be holding on to her for an offer better than any of us could afford, the townspeople said; look how the greedy parents are wasting her youth for money, the townspeople said. Soon many boys found other girls as wives, but year after year, there was no sign of marriage on her side. They must have some unspeakable and dirty secret in the family, the townspeople said, and then had wild guesses. Your mother became very sad and pale.

“The year when we were twenty-seven, her parents suddenly married her off to your father, who lived two counties away. After the wedding, the couple moved to a new town even farther away. I was the only boy who hadn’t married then. A fool stricken by love, people said about me, and perhaps I was. When she left, I moved too, to the town where she lived with her husband. I thought I would be satisfied if only I could see her in the street from time to time, but a few days after the wedding, rumors started that every night the bridegroom was heard sobbing in the yard. People talked about the scandal that the bridegroom’s family must have hid his mental disorder from the bride before the wedding, and when your mother’s family did not show up to denounce the cheating, people looked down upon her, too.

“For the first year of their marriage, I was your mother’s only friend, and she came to talk to me every day, until there were rumors about our affair. I thought it would only make her life more miserable, so I planned to leave her for good. When your father learned that I was leaving, he came to visit me. I thought he was coming to fight me; I told him your mother and I were innocent, but he only smiled and brought out a bottle of liquor. We drank for the whole night like a pair of old friends, and he told me his story. He had been in love with a widow twelve years his senior since he was fifteen, he said. His family thought a wife would cure him of his infatuation with the older woman, so they arranged for him to marry a girl from out of town and arranged for them to move away so nobody would know his history. But on the wedding night, your mother told him that she could not become his real wife.”

“Why?” Ruolan said for the first time since Uncle Bing started the story.

Uncle Bing hesitated for a moment, and said, “Your mother — she is a stone woman.”

“A stone woman?”

“It’s something you’ll understand when you’re older,” Uncle Bing said.

“How does one know if she’s a stone woman?” Ruolan asked. She wondered if all the medicine her mother drank in the morning year after year had turned her into a solid rock. Ruolan wondered if she herself would be poisoned, by the years of breathing in the bitterness from the dregs, into an ugly and cold woman like her mother.

Uncle Bing did not reply, his eyes looking past Ruolan into a distant past. “She told your father to either live with the fact or divorce her; she said she didn’t mind because her only goal was to get married and leave her hometown so people would no longer talk about her. Your father was shocked that her family had cheated in the matchmaking, but he could not tell this to anyone, including his family. I asked him why, and he said a husband was a husband no matter what was missing from the marriage, and it would be unforgivable if he attacked his wife’s name even with the truth. Besides, he said, they deserved it because they had planned to deceive, too. Your father, he’s one of the good people in the world. There was nothing wrong with his mind. He was in love with an older woman, that’s all, but he was willing to be thought a crazy person and stay in the marriage to protect your mother’s name.

“After that night, your father and I became close friends. I helped them to adopt you. We — your father and I— thought it would make their marriage better if they could raise a child together. To make you their own child, they moved farther away, to a different province — where we live now — so that people would not know anything about their past. I did not move at first; I thought I would let them live in their own marriage, and it seemed that things were fine for a while. But after three years, your father came to visit me again. We had another night of drinking, and he confessed that he could not help going back to the widow from time to time. Your mother was very upset when she found out about it, and she refused to leave her bed. I moved again to be close to your mother. I came to take care of her and you when your father was away to live with the other woman. He stuck to his words and came home as a husband for the year-end housecleaning and celebration. The rest of the story you’ve known. Believe me, Ruolan, your parents are good people. They’ve tried all these years; they’ve tried very hard.”

“Why does he want a divorce now?”

“The other woman — she used to work as a nanny for people — she’s sick now, and he wants to marry her so he can take care of her, and help with the medical bills.”

Ruolan thought about her father and the other woman, and she pitied them. “Why didn’t you get married, Uncle Bing?” she said.

Uncle Bing smiled. “I’m one of those fools who puts a magic leaf in front of his eyes and then stops seeing mountains and seas.”

“Would you marry Mama if their divorce goes through?”

“What difference would a marriage make now?” he said.

Ruolan was relieved but unsatisfied. “Don’t marry her,” she said. “She’s poisonous. Look how she’s already destroyed half of a life for Baba. You don’t want her to destroy your whole life.”

“Ruolan!” Uncle Bing raised his voice.

Ruolan looked at the dark veins on his forehead. He looked unfamiliar, ferocious even, but she did not recoil. She had seen two men poisoned into sad and sheepish beings by her mother, and she wanted to correct the mistake. “What’s good about her? She’s lazy, ugly, bad-tempered,” Ruolan said. “Whatever she does, I can do a hundred times better.”

“Ruolan?”

“Think about it, Uncle Bing. We’re not related to her. We can leave her, and make a new family ourselves. I can cook. I can sew. I’ll do all the housework. I’ll find a job after middle school. When you are too old to work, I’ll earn money and support you. Why do you need her if you have me?”

Uncle Bing watched her with a sad, tender look. “You’re too young to know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I’m old enough to tell what’s good for you,” Ruolan said, and felt something soften inside her. She was not a stone woman, after all. She walked to where Uncle Bing sat on the stool, bent down, and put her hands palms down on his knees. “Uncle Bing,” she said in a whisper, looking into his eyes the way she imagined a seductive woman would do. “Have you heard of the saying that what a mother owes, a daughter pays back?”

Uncle Bing’s lips quavered. “No, I’ve never heard it.”

“Now you know,” Ruolan said, and touched Uncle Bing’s face, his sideburns stubby under her palm. Uncle Bing breathed hard, and then brushed her hand off gently. “Your mother doesn’t owe me,” he said, putting his head between his hands, not looking at her.

Ruolan knelt down and looked up at Uncle Bing. “You need an antidote for her poison,” she said eagerly. “Baba has his other woman. You need one yourself, too.”

“You’re a big girl now, and Uncle Bing is getting old,” he said. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you catch the next bus home so Mama doesn’t worry about you?”

Ruolan burst into tears. “Why don’t you understand me?” she said.

“I do,” Uncle Bing said. “But let’s keep life as it is.”

“What’s good about this life, Uncle Bing?”

“You and Mama are my only family now. I can’t afford losing either one of you.”

Ruolan wiped the tears with the back of her hands. She stared at Uncle Bing; he looked weak, despondent, beaten, and she pitied him. If she was willing, she could keep the nameless love, not of a daughter or of a lover, but both. She could as well stay in the arrangement, tolerating her mother for his sake, but then, why should she choose misery because of love? Why should she choose misery for any reason? She touched the money in her pocket. “I’m leaving, Uncle Bing,” Ruolan said, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Perhaps when she was gone, he would realize what a mistake he had made; perhaps only then she would beat her mother, and he would understand that he had chosen the wrong woman.

“Tell Mama I’ll come Saturday,” Uncle Bing said, still not daring to look up at Ruolan.