Chapter 2

The house their family is going to buy today is the four-story building they rented.

The floor area is approximately 38 square meters. There are only two rooms on the first floor, with a stairwell, a narrow kitchen and a toilet at the back.

Their family rented the first and fourth floors. One of the rooms on the first floor was used to store the carts, tables, chairs, benches and other miscellaneous items used for their stall, and the other was for Mr. and Mrs. Si to sleep and store miscellaneous items.

The fourth floor belongs to Si Cheng and his younger brother Si An.

Because the area is not large and it is on the first and fourth floors, the annual rent is only two thousand yuan.

The landlord’s son wanted to buy a house in Beijing but was short of tens of thousands of dollars, so the two old people wanted to sell the house in the small town and move to Beijing to live with their son in his old age.

It just so happened that Mr. and Mrs. Si had saved more than 10,000 yuan in the past two years, plus the money that Mr. Si won at the gambling table a while ago, so they put together 22,000 yuan. They then borrowed 8,000 yuan from Grandpa Si and 10,000 yuan from the third aunt, planning to buy this self-built house.

My mother doesn’t want to buy this building. She wants to buy a commercial house and live in a spacious three-bedroom, two-bedroom apartment.

She felt that the self-built house had been under construction for many years, but its quality was not as good as the one built at home three years ago.

Living in a self-built house is no different from living in the village. The key is that the rent for a two-story house is only two thousand yuan a year. Forty thousand yuan can be used for twenty years, so there is no need to buy a house at all.

Living in commercial housing is the symbol of city dwellers.

Because of this, she argued with her father for a while, but in the end, since the bulk of the house payment was paid by the Si family, she had to agree.

Unexpectedly, they were framed when they went to watch people gambling, and the 30,000 yuan house payment that Si’s father carried with him for safekeeping was confiscated.

Thirty thousand yuan is an amount of money that a family would have to save up for several years.

For this, Si’s mother complained day and night about Si’s father, Si Cheng, Si’s grandfather, and even her third aunt.

What’s even more outrageous is that she suspected it was her third aunt who reported her, because her third aunt couldn’t bear to see her living such a good life. Not only did she make enough money to build a house in the village, she also had the ability to buy a four-story self-built house in the city.

The most crucial point is that in the end it was the third aunt who paid for the self-built building and gave it to their family to live in for free.

The house payment was confiscated, and Si’s father could not say anything, so he asked the third sister to borrow all the money.

However, within less than a year, the housing prices in the small town almost doubled, and a house that originally cost 40,000 yuan was sold for 100,000 yuan.

Mother Si became more and more suspicious that it was the third sister of the Si family who set a trap for her brother. Firstly, she didn’t want to borrow money, and secondly, she didn’t want Mother Si to live in the house in the city.

Third Aunt Si and Father Si have always had a good relationship, and they could not stand Mother Si treating her own sister in such a sarcastic way. After the two bought the house from Third Aunt Si, they started arguing endlessly.

Mr. Si has a bad temper and when he gets annoyed by Mrs. Si’s nagging, he starts to get violent.

But Si’s mother was not the kind of person who would quit when she saw an advantage. The angrier Si’s father got, the more she provoked him, and then she was beaten badly.

After beating Si’s mother, Si’s father will leave home, and Si’s mother’s resentment will turn into fists and kicks, hitting Si Cheng.

Having tasted the sweetness of winning eight thousand yuan before, Si’s father became addicted to gambling, hoping to make a comeback. However, the more he gambled, the worse his situation became, and the family became more and more divided.

For more than three years, Si Cheng was afraid of being beaten whenever there was any disturbance at home.

She used to be afraid of being beaten, but when she was beaten, she was expecting it. She would only be beaten if she made an obvious mistake.

From then on, when she was beaten, there would be no signs at all.

After Father Si beat Mother Si and they left the house, she would definitely be beaten. Maybe it was when she put the cup down loudly while drinking water, or when she smacked her lips while eating, or when she sighed while doing her homework, or even when she was five minutes late coming home from school. In short, any reason, as long as Mother Si could find fault with it, could be a reason for her to be beaten, even if the reason was absurd and ridiculous.

She became the punching bag for Si’s mother, who was furious at her fate and powerlessness.

More than two years later, Mr. Si won hundreds of thousands of yuan again, but lost it all because of Mrs. Si’s constant nagging.

Mother Si resented that Father Si would not take the money while he was ahead and put it in his pocket.

Father Si complained that Mother Si was making a fuss in his ear, affecting his mood and judgment, which led to him losing all his money.

At this time, the self-built house they lived in was included in the list of expropriation, and they could at least get hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in demolition compensation. However, this huge sum of money that fell from the sky had nothing to do with them because of a point. The conflict between the two of them broke out to an infinite level, so big that it could not be resolved, and they just broke up.

The resentment towards his mother is engraved in Si Cheng’s bones.

When faced with a husband with a bad temper and violent tendencies, the hot-tempered mother not only fails to save herself and her children, but instead becomes more eager to provoke her husband, unable to control her temper and wanting to fight him to the death.

I also became a person who couldn’t control my temper like him, and an even worse person than him who only bullied the weak.

What bothered Si Cheng even more was that her mother’s anger was never directed at her brother, but at her.

When she was fifteen years old, her mother would still slap her without hesitation. When she asked her mother for money for bus fare and stationery, she would go to the bank to change the coins into coins, throw the three- and five-yuan coins on the ground, and watch her crawl on the ground to pick them up.

The mother showed a ferocious smile: “If it weren’t for you, I would have divorced your father long ago. If you don’t study hard, if you can’t get into the top ten in the class, the top 100 in the school, and get into a 985 or 211 university, you will be unworthy of my hard work.”

At that time, she felt that spending even a penny more was a heinous crime.

I even wanted to leave several times.

On the one hand, I thought that if I had good academic performance and was admitted to university, I could escape from this family. On the other hand, I felt that I had to study hard to change my fate.

She lived like this until the winter break of her second year in high school, and then her life came to an abrupt end.

Because the relationship between my parents had reached a point where it was beyond repair, my father was not at home and had an affair. When my mother found out, she divorced him quickly, regardless of his pleas and apologies. It wasn’t as great as she said. For the sake of the children, she gritted her teeth and persevered for a year or two, or even a month or a week.

As a result, less than a day after the divorce, my mother regretted it and forced my father to remarry the next day, but my father refused.

She intensified her torture of Si Cheng in disguised forms, and also tortured Si An as well.

Si Cheng was a day student in high school and was forced to go home for lunch and dinner. It takes 30 minutes to walk from home to school, but the bus driver often reduces it to 20 minutes.

Her family runs a breakfast shop, so she and Si An are forced to get up at 5:30 or 6:00 to help out in the shop.

You can only go to school on time after seven o’clock.

I have to come back to eat at noon, and after dinner I have to wash the dishes, mop the floor, and change the tablecloths and clothes for the whole family.

When she came back in the evening, she had to cut ingredients, blanch noodles, and make soup base. She was only allowed to go to school for evening self-study when the teacher said there were classes or exams.

It was not until she found another job and the winter vacation was about to begin that she ended her more than three months of morbid torture and venting of anger on Si Cheng.

After Si’s mother left, she completely ignored her two children, did not even provide child support, and lost contact with them.

Si Cheng and Si An’s tuition and living expenses were paid partly by Grandpa Si and partly by the three aunts of the Si family.

Although the torture inflicted on Si Cheng was transferred after Si’s mother left, the damage caused to her will never be erased.