On the afternoon of my sister-in-law’s wedding, I only remember that she was crying so hard that her shoulders vibrated like bee wings, pulled from her chest to her shoulders, and tears flowed like an open faucet.
The groom is her cousin, the son of my uncle. Before he married his sister-in-law, I called him cousin. After marrying my sister-in-law, I changed my name to my sister-in-law. In those days, we people in Taizhou said: “Cousin marrying cousin, stir-fry mustard with pork.” “Caihong” is translated into Mandarin as fresh vegetable stems. Pork was rarely eaten in those days. The combination of these two is a good dish. Cousin marrying cousin means wonderful. I heard from my grandma that this marriage was a match between the two of them. They were childhood sweethearts. The uncle’s hometown is from Haimen. His father, I call him uncle, works in Wenzhou, and the uncle follows his father in the industry.
Soon, the little girl returned to her natal home, and I saw my little uncle for the first time. He was tall and big, and he performed internal martial arts for us, and two or three people couldn’t get close to him. It’s just that his eyes are a little wandering, his speech is not very sharp, and he is a little dumb anyway. I heard privately from the Chen family that my uncle had a high fever when he was a child, which caused him to be a little confused. I saw that he was very easygoing, not a mother-in-law, but also very obedient to my sister-in-law. But one time, when he came to Niu Jin, he resolutely refused to obey my sister-in-law’s will, and my sister-in-law had nothing to do with him, so she let him go. My sister-in-law is very beautiful, with delicate features, but she has a strong personality and is outspoken. Once she thinks that something is not pleasing to the eye, she is not afraid of anything. My previous generation were almost all honest people who broke their teeth and swallowed their stomachs. Only when she and my uncle encountered unbearable things, they dared to fuck the guy.
My grandfather, who was in his fifties, unfortunately fell ill and passed away. That day, my sister-in-law and my uncle came to mourn the funeral by taking a long-distance bus from Wenzhou. From the alley at the back of the temple, I heard cries. My sister-in-law didn’t arrive, so the cries came far away. When I arrived at the hospital mortuary less than 100 meters away from the alley, the alley was full of her cries. Crying and screaming, each cry always has a sad ending sound “Where”. People from Taizhou have “Where—” at the end, and Xiaogu uses Wenzhou dialect. Soon she couldn’t cry, almost passed out, and was hugged by my mother. My sister-in-law’s face was pale. I heard from my uncle that my sister-in-law got carsick and vomited all the way. In the evening, a dozen tables of mourning wine were set up in the courtyard of Chen’s family. Among them were some Wenzhou friends, and my sister-in-law spoke Wenzhou dialect to them, and then translated into Taizhou dialect. I thought at the time that my sister-in-law has learned this Wenzhou dialect by heart within a few years of her marriage, she is really smart. To me, Wenzhou dialect is like a foreign dialect.
Another 20 years passed, and my sister-in-law still had no children. The two returned to Taizhou to settle down. The younger uncle had a monthly pension of a thousand yuan, and the younger sister had a few hundred yuan in insurance for landless farmers. I heard that my sister-in-law married to Wenzhou and couldn’t do family work, so she simply opened a breakfast shop and even learned how to grind soybean milk…