The summer of 1994.
Night had fallen.
A cold wind howled outside the window, and heavy rain pummeled the doorframe.
The patter of rain caused some restless irritation.
In the dim yellow light, the quarreling voices escalated.
"Bang!"
The table was flipped aggressively onto the floor, green soup splashed everywhere, and a piece of green vegetable landed on Yang Jianguang's face.
Yang Jianguang numbly brushed off the vegetable from his face, silently observing the scene before him.
A loud thunderclap erupted from the distant sky.
A flash of lightning made the room appear even brighter and more conspicuous.
His mother was seen crying on top of his father, harshly clutching his hair.
"Yang Dazhi, damn you! If you're so capable, then go ahead and kill me!"
"Just end it, what life is there left for us to live?"
"How can we even continue living?"
His mother sobbed in despair. Her long hair was messy and scattered, her forehead smeared with a mixture of mucus and tears.
Father didn't speak, merely pursing his lips, his face flushed crimson as he attempted to pry free from mother's grip.
Such a familiar sight!
Yang Jianguang's eyes were inexplicably damp. He stood motionless as always, watching his parents' quarrel.
It was as if he was witnessing a scene from his childhood, an ordinary memory that somehow distorted his mind.
For a moment, Yang Jianguang could not distinguish whether it was reality or a nightmare.
He continued to stand there, his expression becoming more and more painful, no attempt to intervene in the situation.
Suddenly, the stinging sensation from the yellow rubber shoe that his mother had hurled at his father hitting his face, forced Yang Jianguang to a painful realization with tears streaming down his face:
He was actually back twenty years ago!
In those poverty-stricken years!
Ever since he could remember, Yang Jianguang's family was one of the poorest households in the entire Yang Village.
When he was ten, his father borrowed a relative's motorcycle to return from the city and ran over a drunken man asleep by the roadside late at night.
The accident wiped out their family's savings and burdened them with a mountain of debt.
The drunk man's relatives besieged their home and it was his mother who led him from the front to the end of the village, knocking barefoot on all the relatives' doors overnight to gather the money needed to compensate.
Upon release from the detention center, his father contracted more paddy fields, planted more rice, getting up earlier and returning later than any other family in the village.
It was from that time on, during summer, while other kids were hiding at home enjoying popsicles, watching TV, and playing video games, he could not.
In the scorching heat of the summer midday, reaching over thirty degrees, the water in the field was so hot that it could burn one’s feet. Yet Yang Jianguang could only smear layer upon layer of mud on his face and hands. Amidst his mother's cursing, he deeply planted the seedlings inside the paddy fields.
The character of his father, who was rescued back home, had changed drastically. He not only became addicted to smoking and drinking but also fell into the pit of gambling.
Even decades later, Yang Jianguang still couldn't understand why his hard-working father, who was out from dawn to dusk, begrudged food and clothing, yet was willing to throw wave after wave of money onto the gambling table.
If it wasn't for Yang Jianguang's mother firmly controlling the money from selling rice, their father would probably gamble away even this money when he was in the red.
From beginning to end, Yang Jianguang regarded his father as a deeply flawed man.
Even those people at the gambling table, those willing to lend money to the villagers for gambling deserved the same condemnation.
If it weren't for the fact that his despicable father did genuinely love him and sometimes brought home a few pounds of meat for his mother when he won, Yang Jianguang would have been completely estranged from his father!
The hard-earned cash, scrimped and saved all year round, not willing to spend on food or clothing, instead, all the remaining money has to be spent on paying off debts!
How could such a person have the nerve to gamble?
Even this recent fight between them, Yang Jianguang knew, resulted from another instance of gambling. His mother found out, leading to a squabble that turned into a brawl.
This was a family full of holes and even Yang Jianguang firmly believed that, under such circumstances, it was surprisingly out of ordinary that his mother did not divorce his father.
Due to money issues, their constant quarreling and even fighting had become the most familiar scene in Yang Jianguang's eyes.
Yang Jianguang also clearly knew that this situation would remain unchanged for several years ahead, even until he graduated from college.
Later on, his mother became pregnant with her second child. Because she didn't keep herself well during pregnancy, she barely survived childbirth.
Even later, she contracted hepatitis B due to overwork.
Overnight, Father's hair turned white. He even sold his blood and fields, but he could never scrape together enough for a hospital bed.
The poor simply cannot afford to fall ill, let alone a costly and hard-to-treat disease like Hepatitis B.
From what I remember, it was precisely because we didn't have the money for an operation, my mother's health steadily deteriorated to the late stage of Hepatitis B.
The poorer you are, the more humble you become!
The poorer you are, the more painful life is!
Being so poor, he went through high school without a new set of clothes. He even lived off only steamed buns and pickles brought from home, and endured constant ridicule from his classmates.
When you're poor, people do not pity you. On the contrary, you become a laughing stock!
Because of this environment, Yang Jianguang worked hard in school, got into a good university, worked part-time while studying, and finally made it through.
He borrowed money to buy a house in the county town, worked day and night to clear the mortgage, struggled to climb up, and barely managed to put down roots in this small town.
But even after paying off the mortgage, starting a family, and stabilizing his life, Yang Jianguang still felt insecure, constantly finding ways to make money.
He was genuinely scared of being poor!
Only those who have truly been poor know how terrifying it is to have no money.
Even after he grew up, Yang Jianguang didn't think of anything in his home as worth remembering.
The only emotion was relief, a deep relief, that he had finally climbed out of that abysmal pit of poverty!
But Yang Jianguang never imagined that he would return to this place, in such a way, and relive his past despair once more.
He watched his parents, who were still wrestling in front of him. All of a sudden, he broke into an irrational laughter, laughing so hard that he was almost in tears.
This laughter made his wrestling parents stop abruptly, looking at each other in bewilderment.
His mother's sobbing came to a halt, and she anxiously whispered, “Yang... Yang JianGuang, what’s wrong with you?”
However, Yang JianGuang didn't respond at all. He laughed and rushed out of the hall, into the pouring rain outside, and plopped down on the muddy ground in the yard.
At that moment, tears mixed with rain, dropping continuously on him as he wildly pounded the ground.
Once.
Twice.
Looking at the pitch-dark sky, all Yang JianGuang wanted was to cry out, to accuse Heaven,
Why, why did he have to return to this moment, to this painful time?
This kind of poverty-stricken misery, having experienced it once, Yang JianGuang was absolutely unwilling to endure a second time!
Upon seeing this, his mother immediately grew anxious and yelled at the outdoors, “JianGuang, we'll stop fighting, come back quickly!”
His father was also frightened, quickly pushing his mother away and dashing out of the house to pull Yang JianGuang, who was sitting in the water,
“JianGuang, get up quickly, come back, we won’t fight anymore, we won’t…”
His mother, disregarding the rain, rushed to Yang JianGuang and tried to pull him up.
Yang JianGuang, however, baring a silly grin, his face seemed to be filled with an unexplained mixture of pain and desperation. His thin body shivered uncontrollably in the rain, yet he still stubbornly sat in the muddy water.
The mother tried several times to pull Yang Jianguang up, but instead, she ended up sitting on the ground. She watched the despairing and pained Yang Jianguang, with large tears rolling down from her swollen eyes, wetting her patch-covered garment.
"What sins did I commit in my past life?"
The father, somehow also full of tears, cried out and hugged the mother and son sitting on the ground, mumbling, "I'm sorry, I've failed you... I've failed you..."
"Boom!"
Within a moment, the yard was illuminated as if it were daylight.
For a brief instant, the image of the tearful family of three embracing each other appeared before vanishing once more into the pitch-dark rain.
