Chapter 67

“Is that okay?”

Li Fang glanced around and asked: “Battalion Commander won’t get angry, right?”

Yin Xiaoman looked at her, momentarily stunned, and then she finally reacted. She couldn’t help but laugh: “You’ve been avoiding me all this time… because you’re afraid of him?”

Li Fang nodded her head vigorously without delay.

She looked around again and, only after making sure that Shen Qingyun had already dragged Grandpa Chen away and wouldn’t suddenly appear, did she finally reach out to hold onto Yin Xiaoman’s arm and let out a long sigh of relief.

Then she whispered her complaint: “Sister Xiaoman, you have no idea how terrifying Battalion Commander Shen is. I haven’t seen him smile once this whole month. There’s thirty of us or so in our group, right? All sorts of families, parents and children. Along the way, it’s been total chaos—you wouldn’t believe the mess.”

At this point, Li Fang instinctively waved her hand in the air as if to dispel lingering fear, her expression still unsettled.

Then she continued: “But you didn’t see it. Whether it was quarreling couples, mothers and sons at odds, or crying children—just one glare from the Battalion Commander, and all of them went silent right away. Dear heavens, Sister, in my entire life I’ve never been this afraid of anyone! Not even in front of my dad did I ever cower!”

Yin Xiaoman: “……”

Li Fang, perhaps feeling emboldened now that the “divine figure” was no longer around and no longer concerned about being overheard, began to vent her thoughts without restraint.

“My brother told me in his letters before that I had to behave during the journey, keep up with the Battalion Commander’s pace, don’t cause trouble, don’t drag anyone down… Sigh, he really doesn’t know me well enough. Would I even dare? Let me tell you, even if Battalion Commander Shen just happens to glance at me—just a quick sweep of his eyes—my calves start cramping on the spot!”

Yin Xiaoman: “…That’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it?”

“It’s not! Didn’t you see that Grandpa Chen? He’s so fierce, like a demon king. No one dared to go near him the whole way, and when he beat up Mingshi, no one dared to interfere. But Battalion Commander—he just ran up and hugged him! My god, that’s Grandpa Chen! He’s a blacksmith! One punch from him could kill a man!”

As Li Fang spoke, she followed Yin Xiaoman toward home. All the way, her little mouth chattered nonstop, amusing Yin Xiaoman to no end.

Yin Xiaoman felt as if it had been a long time since she had laughed like this.

She had never known that, in the eyes of outsiders, her man actually appeared like that.

But in her heart, she understood clearly—among such a large group of people, if there was no one to hold the ground, who knew what kind of trouble might have occurred along the way. It was very likely that not everyone would have arrived in peace.

Her man must have worn himself out with worry on this journey.

Once they returned home, she brought out the mangoes and coconuts that the children had picked to treat Li Fang.

Since these were things she had never seen before, Li Fang’s eyes were full of curiosity, but she still restrained herself and waved her hands at her vigorously.

“Sister Xiaoman, I’ve already eaten. Save these for the children. I’m a grown woman—I don’t need to eat fruit! Hurry and put it away.”

“You mean eating fruit depends on age?”

Yin Xiaoman laughed as she poured out the coconut water for her. Then she took a small knife and sliced the mango into thirds, cutting the fleshiest part into tiny cubes like a checkerboard, placed them in a small bowl, and handed her a spoon to scoop them with.

“Go ahead and eat. You’ve only been on the island for a short while. Once you’ve stayed longer, you’ll know—there’s no shortage of fruit here.”

Li Fang carefully scooped a piece of mango and placed it in her mouth, and at once, her eyes squinted in blissful satisfaction.

Just by looking at her expression, one could tell she probably hadn’t tasted anything sweet in a long time.

After a while, she suddenly said: “I always thought my brother only had his job in his heart—nothing else. As his sister, I wasn’t even worth a single letter in his data files. But now, all of a sudden, I feel like maybe I do weigh a bit more than a letter—he actually remembered to bring me to a place as heavenly as this!”

Yin Xiaoman: “……” She had never realized that Li Fang was actually such an amusing girl.

Li Fang have opened up and became more comfortable with Yin Xiaoman. After that, she didn’t need much prompting—words started flowing out of her like a stream.

Only then did Yin Xiaoman learn that Li Fang and her brother, Li Hai, were from C Provincial Capital. Their father was a mid-level official. Their mother had died early, and when Li Fang was still very young, their father remarried and brought two more sons and one daughter into the family.

The stepmother was not particularly harsh, but as people always distinguish between those close and those distant, and with the family’s financial situation never being very strong, she and her brother always received just a little less.

Li Fang and her brother had quite an age gap—12 years. So, in later years, she was essentially raised and supported by her brother after he graduated and began working.

Even so, as she grew older and the house felt more and more cramped with so many people living together, her stepmother began, from time to time, to drop hints that she should respond to the nation’s call—to go to the vast countryside and seek a new world of opportunity.

She had been so irritated by her stepmother’s constant nagging and, unable to bear living in the same room with her two now-grown stepbrothers any longer, that she simply gave in to the woman’s wish and signed up to be sent down to the countryside.

What happened afterward, Yin Xiaoman already knew—Li Fang and her classmate Liang Xiaoyu had been assigned to Shuanggui Village, and eventually the two of them moved into her family’s old house.

Hearing Li Fang meander through her story and finally bring up the house, Yin Xiaoman quickly seized the moment and asked casually, as though offhandedly: “Are you girls still living in my old house? I remember the west room used to leak a bit—did it ever get fixed? It didn’t rain on you, did it?”

Li Fang didn’t detect the hidden concern in her tone at all and responded cheerfully: “Leak? No way! Before we moved in, the brigade had already organized laborers to fix the house from top to bottom. Don’t worry, Sister Xiaoman, the house is solid now. They even replaced more than half the tiles on the roof!”

Seeing Li Fang’s expression, Yin Xiaoman knew she was telling the truth. The situation she had feared and that had haunted her dreams over and over likely never happened.

That tightly strung feeling in her chest finally relaxed a little.

Smiling, she went on to ask: “The others must’ve been sad when you left, especially Xiaoyu. Who knows when you’ll see each other again. By the way, has the village taken in any more Female Educated Youth these past few years? How many are there now at the Educated Youth Station?”

What she didn’t expect was that at these words, the smile that had lingered on Li Fang’s face suddenly faded. For the first time, the carefree expression gave way to something pained.

“What’s wrong?” Yin Xiaoman’s heart sank at once.

“Xiaoyu got married.” Li Fang said softly.

“Married? Married to whom?”

Immediately, the image of that somewhat delicate girl flashed through Yin Xiaoman’s mind. She remembered they were about the same age, but Xiaoyu had always seemed like someone raised under the careful protection of her family.

She also came from a fairly good background—after all, at the time, she could afford to share the rental of that house with Li Fang.

“She married Er Wazi.”

“Er Wazi? The old Party Secretary’s youngest son?”

Yin Xiaoman could hardly believe her ears. She abruptly sat up straight. “Xiaoyu married Er Wazi? How old is Er Wazi?!”

She still remembered that it had been Er Wazi who escorted her family to the train station back then. In her memory, he had been a quiet, reserved little boy.

How could he possibly have married Liang Xiaoyu?!

“He’s nineteen now, nearly twenty in traditional age.” Li Fang explained. “The old Party Secretary wants them to hold the wedding feast first. When he reaches the legal age, they’ll go to the city to register the marriage.”

Yin Xiaoman looked at her and asked in a low voice: “What really happened?”

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Er Wazi’s character—on the contrary, she had always had a rather good impression of the boy. But that didn’t mean she thought he and Liang Xiaoyu were a good match.

Not to mention anything else—Liang Xiaoyu must have been a high school graduate when she was sent to the countryside, at the very least already nineteen.

Three years had passed. That would make her about twenty-two or twenty-three now.

A young woman in her twenties from the Provincial Capital, could she really fall for a boy raised in a village, not even twenty years old?

Li Fang bit her lower lip, her eyes brimming with tears. “Liang Xiaoyu’s parents are both University Professors. They’ve been sent to a reform-through-labor farm now. The director of their school’s Revolutionary Committee was one of her father’s students—a man almost forty years old. Somehow he got it into his head that he liked her, and he said if she agreed to marry him, he’d help get her back into the city.

Then her parents sent word through someone—if Xiaoyu dared to marry that man, they would hang themselves on the farm. They said they would never see her again in this life. Xiaoyu had no way out. She couldn’t go back, and if she stayed in the village, she was afraid that man wouldn’t give up and would try some other tricks, so she figured the only way was to get married.

But in her situation, no one dared to marry her. In the end, it was the old Party Secretary who couldn’t stand it anymore and forced Er Wazi to marry her.”

At this point, Li Fang wiped away her tears. “Sister Xiaoman, you asked how many Female Educated Youth are left at the Educated Youth Station? To tell you the truth, I’m the last one. Once I left, our village no longer had any Female Educated Youth.”

Yin Xiaoman’s hand trembled sharply. “What happened to them? I remember there were several female educated youths there. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had that housing shortage back then.”

“They’re all gone.”

Li Fang’s eyes dimmed. “Not long after you left, one of the educated youth went back to the city on medical retirement due to illness. Then, I don’t know what happened, but it was like we were cursed—Female Educated Youth started encountering misfortunes one after another. First, a senior from my school got hit in the leg by a hoe during fieldwork. She got tetanus. They sent her to the Commune Hospital, but they couldn’t save her. She died in less than a week.

Then another girl was riding a horse cart into town when the horse got spooked halfway, flinging her from the cart. Her head hit a rock, and she suffered a serious concussion. She was in a coma for a long time. In the end, they had no choice but to contact her family and send her to a hospital in the Provincial Capital. Before I left, she still hadn’t woken up. They say she’s now in a vegetative state.”

After saying this, Li Fang gave a bitter, self-mocking smile. “The villagers said that we Female Educated Youth are haunted by something unclean. Otherwise, why would every unlucky thing happen to us?”