Li Jiangbao stammered for a long time. Apparently realizing the truth could no longer be concealed, he finally admitted that he had bought Mei Rui from someone outside the village for a little over three thousand yuan.
Mei Rui had been eighteen when she arrived at the Li home. She was filthy and looked as though she had suffered a great deal, but she was pretty. By the older generation’s standards, she also looked strong enough to bear children. Li Jiangbao wanted a wife, but he was too timid to buy a younger girl. Mei Rui was already considered difficult to sell at her age, which was why he could buy her so cheaply.
Mei Rui had been mistreated before and was extremely wary. Li Jiangbao swore that he had never hurt her. He fed her until she was healthy again before even considering life as husband and wife. By then, Mei Rui trusted the Li family and believed they had rescued her from suffering. Little by little, she told him about her past.
Only then did Li Jiangbao learn that his new “wife” had quarreled with her parents and run away from home, only to be tricked. She’d spent six months being moved from place to place before returning to Han Province. She’d had chances to go home along the way but hadn’t dared. In her condition, she felt too ashamed to face her parents.
Li Jiangbao was timid and weak-willed himself and thought he understood her. “Then let’s make a good life together,” he told Mei Rui.
Their first child was a daughter, and the baby had a cleft lip. That would never do in Yuanshu Township. As soon as Mei Rui recovered from giving birth, they tried again for a son. Now everything was perfect. Li Jiangbao had fulfilled his obligation to his parents, and even began considering a visit to Mei Rui’s parents with her.
But the good times did not last. A group of interns arrived. They taught the villagers about the law. One woman in particular, Zhu Yi, fixed her gaze on Mei Rui the first time she visited the Li house.
Li Jiangbao still remembered that look. It was as though Zhu Yi had immediately recognized that Mei Rui had not come into the household through a proper marriage. Li Jiangbao forbade the interns from approaching her. Mei Rui had become timid and emotionally unstable after years of being passed from place to place. She was always afraid someone might come to take her away and had even become harsh toward the children.
During that time, Li Jiangbao was suspicious of everything. He guarded the courtyard gate and refused to let the interns near. Several times, he caught Zhu Yi trying to speak with Mei Rui.
Eventually the interns prepared to leave Yuanshu Township for the next village. Li Jiangbao breathed a sigh of relief. Yet the very next day, he saw that Zhu Yi had stayed behind. Startled, he quietly asked around and learned she had started seeing Yi Lei and was staying at the Yi family’s home.
His first reaction was: How could that be possible?
How could a city woman like Zhu Yi be interested in Yi Lei, a man who couldn’t find himself a wife?
Before Mei Rui had come into his life, his elders often nagged him: “If you don’t find yourself a wife soon, you’ll end up just like that man from the Yi family!”
Yi Lei was the village’s best-known bachelor. People had all sorts of explanations, but the most common was that his mother had an appalling temper and he was blindly devoted to her. Nobody wanted to marry into that family.
Li Jiangbao suspected something underhanded. Perhaps Zhu Yi had persuaded Yi Lei to shelter her so that she could stir up trouble in other households.
In one respect, his guess came close to the truth. What he didn’t know was that Zhu Yi had not won Yi Lei over. She had deceived him.
For a while, Yi Lei was beside himself with pride at finally having a wife. Li Jiangbao remained wary, but when Zhu Yi made no immediate move, he gradually relaxed. Then he noticed Mei Rui had brought home something that could never have come from Yuanshu Township: perfume. Her attitude had changed as well. Where she used to obey his every wish, she now increasingly refused, and even said she wanted to go home.
How could he let Mei Rui leave? They could only visit her parents together, as husband and wife. Mei Rui began distancing herself from him. She said she did not belong there and would go home one day. For the first time she said, “Li Jiangbao, do you even realize you’ve broken the law?”
He lost his temper and slapped her. “Who’s been filling your head with this? Where did that perfume come from?”
After prolonged questioning, Mei Rui finally admitted that Zhu Yi had given her the perfume. They had been meeting often recently. Gradually, Mei Rui had come to understand that she should not keep hiding from her life. The Li family was merely temporary shelter, and they had treated her as a machine for producing descendants. Everything they had done was illegal from the beginning.
Li Jiangbao flew into a rage and announced he would go confront the Yi family. Mei Rui grabbed his leg and said in an unfamiliar tone, “Li Jiangbao, let me go home and I won’t send you to prison. My parents will come soon. If you dare hurt Teacher Zhu, I’ll tell everyone you bought me and trafficked me here, and that you raped me and fathered the children!”
Li Jiangbao was so frightened he didn’t dare act without thinking. Half a month later, officers really did arrive at the house, accompanied by two gray-haired elderly people. They were Mei Rui’s parents.
Reunited with her family, Mei Rui knelt before them and everyone wept. With officers present, the Li family was too frightened to speak. Mei Rui herself told the police that she had been foolish when she was young, had run away and met bad people, and then Li Jiangbao rescued her. For years she’d felt too guilty toward her parents to go home, despite Li Jiangbao repeatedly urging her to return.
Even a good magistrate has trouble settling family disputes. The police withdrew temporarily. Mei Feng and Li Ping were furious at first, demanding that the Li family answer in court, but Mei Rui held them back, sobbing that Li Jiangbao was the children’s father and absolutely could not be allowed to get into trouble.
Eventually the two families reached a compromise. Mei Rui would return to Junan City with her parents and take her daughter, while the son would remain in Yuanshu Township. Mei Feng forced Li Jiangbao to swear he would never bother Mei Rui again.
Li Jiangbao insisted he had feelings for Mei Rui and did not want to agree. She quietly shook her head at him, then proposed that her parents needed time to calm down and that the urgent thing was to appease them and get past the police. As for the future, she had arms and legs of her own. Surely her parents couldn’t lock her up forever?
Both families went to the Gezi Town station and made matching statements. That afternoon, Mei Rui and her daughter left with her parents.
At the time Li Jiangbao was too preoccupied to think about Mei Rui, because the police hadn’t simply closed the matter. They returned to Yuanshu Township to investigate several more times but found nothing. During that period he worked out what must have happened: Zhu Yi had persuaded Mei Rui and alerted her family, bringing her parents to the village.
Once he’d realized that, his affection for Mei Rui evaporated. A woman from outside could never be relied on to stay loyal. At least she’d given the Li family an heir. If they never met again, so be it. The family would save the cost of feeding two people.
His anger turned toward Zhu Yi. For reasons he couldn’t understand, Zhu Yi was nowhere to be seen whenever police came to Yuanshu Township. He found Yi Lei and loudly demanded that he hand her over.
Yi Lei only smiled. “Your sister-in-law is pregnant. I know about Mei Rui. Your family’s got an heir now, and mine needs one too. Come back after a while. I’ll give you an answer.”
Li Jiangbao said that something in Yi Lei’s smile had chilled him to the bone.
To the best of Li Jiangbao’s recollection, he hadn’t seen Zhu Yi since Mei Rui left with her parents. Thinking more carefully, it might have been even earlier, around the time he first realized Mei Rui was no longer willing to stay with him.
After being turned away that day, Li Jiangbao found Yi Lei again some time later and threatened him. “You defend your wife now, but what happens when she reports you too? You’ll be finished! Don’t you know what that woman’s been doing?”
Yi Lei replied, “Do I need you to tell me what she’s been doing?”
Li Jiangbao was furious. “You! So you really are working with her! I haven’t seen her outside once. Were you the one who helped her contact my wife’s parents?”
Yi Lei’s face darkened. “I’m a victim too. Old Li, what she did to me wasn’t any less serious than what she did to you.”
“Then why…”
“Didn’t I tell you? She’s about to have a baby. My mother is looking after her. Once she’s given my family an heir, I’ll make her learn what happens when she uses me. You can come along then.”
Li Jiangbao asked suspiciously, “Where is she, exactly? Don’t lie to me. I haven’t seen her in ages!”
Yi Lei glanced toward the courtyard and said mysteriously, “Your woman brought so many police officers here. If I still hid her at home, wouldn’t they come arrest me? She’s staying with a relative of mine.”
Li Jiangbao didn’t know where that relative lived. But several months later, a plump baby boy’s cries could indeed be heard from the Yi home. As promised, Yi Lei drove a three-wheeled vehicle and took Li Jiangbao to Jianya Township. He opened a dark cellar door, and Li Jiangbao saw Zhu Yi tied to a bed.
By then, Zhu Yi looked nothing like the woman he remembered. Her hair had been cropped close to make cleaning easier. Iron chains bound her wrists and ankles. Her body was swollen, and a chamber pot stood nearby.
At the sight of Yi Lei, Zhu Yi instinctively curled into herself, terrified. Li Jiangbao could only stare. His own wife had been purchased, but he told himself he’d never mistreated Mei Rui and had never considered tying her up. Yi Lei, though… Zhu Yi had only just given birth. This wasn’t something a human being should do.
Yi Lei went over, smiling, and turned Zhu Yi’s face toward him. “Xiao Yi, I’ve come to see you.”
Zhu Yi shook even harder. Yi Lei held her head still and forced her to look at Li Jiangbao in the doorway. “That’s Old Li. Do you remember him?”
A pained sound emerged from Zhu Yi’s throat. She could no longer speak normally, and her voice was hoarse. Li Jiangbao had no idea what had happened to her.
“He’s Mei Rui’s man. Have you forgotten what you did to him? He’s come to collect what you owe him. Do you think I should hand you over?”
Li Jiangbao really had come intending to settle a score, but seeing Zhu Yi in that state, all he wanted was to get away. “I-I don’t want her to pay me back!”
But Yi Lei continued as though talking to himself. “Xiao Yi, look what you’ve done. I treated you so well. What was wrong with being my wife? Those colleagues of yours never really cared about you. They left you here and went away. Have any of them contacted you since? I’m the only person who loves you. But you tricked me and betrayed me! You were kind to me only because you wanted to use me as a stepping stone!”
His anger built as he spoke. Yi Lei slammed Zhu Yi’s head against the bed. Li Jiangbao screamed in fright, but Yi Lei seemed well practiced at it. The bedding was covered with a thin layer of cotton, enough to prevent her head from splitting open.
“Old Yi, Brother Yi, stop!” Afraid someone might die and he’d be implicated, Li Jiangbao ran over and pulled him away. “Don’t hit her. Come outside and have a cigarette.”
Yi Lei gave Zhu Yi a disgusted look, shoved her hard against the wall and left the cellar to sit with Li Jiangbao in the courtyard and smoke.
Jianya Township belonged to another town’s jurisdiction. Gezi Town police had recently searched villages within their own jurisdiction, but their investigation did not reach Jianya. Yi Lei’s maternal aunt had married into Jianya, and the house belonged to his cousin. With Zhu Yi hidden in the cellar, Yi Lei believed there was no chance she would be found.
Li Jiangbao couldn’t contain himself. “Old Yi, what have you done? Why are you locking her up? You could go to prison!”
“What do you know?” Yi Lei said. “If I didn’t lock her up, that’s when I’d go to prison. And so would you.”
Li Jiangbao jolted. “Don’t talk nonsense! I haven’t done anything wrong!”
Yi Lei gave him a cold look. “You haven’t done anything wrong? Then how did Mei Rui give your family an heir?”
“I already let her go back!” Li Jiangbao protested.
“That’s how you see it. Zhu Yi doesn’t see it that way. She wanted to bring down our entire village, and the other villages too!”
Li Jiangbao didn’t understand. “Weren’t you helping her?”
Yi Lei shook his head. “She tried to trick me, so I turned her own scheme against her.”
When the interns first arrived in Yuanshu Township, Yi Lei noticed they were focusing on the village’s women. Similar things had happened before. Those sanctimonious charity groups with nothing better to do kept looking down on Yuanshu Township from above, accusing villagers of oppressing women one day and arranging marriages the next.
Oppressing women? Arranged marriages? What a joke. Weren’t these traditions passed down by their ancestors? The village women themselves were perfectly content. Who were outsiders to lecture them? Did a few extra years of schooling make anyone superior?
Yi Lei watched coldly as the interns went from house to house trying to persuade the villagers and conducting their supposedly important research. He despised them and hated them. They didn’t farm or produce anything. Why should they be able to earn with their mouths more than the villagers could make in a lifetime?
He was unmarried and had no children, so the interns initially paid him little attention. Then a young woman named Zhu Yi came to his door.
Zhu Yi was not the prettiest of the three women, but she looked the most gentle. She greeted him politely. He wore glasses and appeared more educated than the other villagers. Since she had come to him on her own, he chatted courteously and invited her to see his study. She was surprised to find such a well-read man in Yuanshu Township.
He smiled modestly but sneered inwardly. What, did she think only city people could read?
Zhu Yi had come to see him for a reason. Once they were somewhat familiar, she asked about marriage customs in the village. He gave her a mixture of truths and lies. Country people, he said, didn’t place much importance on romantic love because marriage involved more than two individuals. There were too many practical factors, so parents generally arranged it: girls from one village married into another, and vice versa.
Zhu Yi was curious about why he was still single when everyone else his age in the village had married.
He smiled bitterly and deliberately left her hanging without answering.
Soon Zhu Yi came again and spent an entire afternoon in his study. Their relationship grew closer. When she asked again why he had never married, he finally told her he had never agreed with arranged marriage, had turned down several proposals as a young man, and had eventually stopped being introduced to prospective wives. In recent years, seeing everyone else with a family, he’d begun wanting one himself, but something had happened just when he was ready.
Zhu Yi asked what had happened. Looking embarrassed, he told her that while gathering forest products in the mountains, he’d suffered a fall that damaged his ability to have children.
Zhu Yi’s face changed, and she apologized at once. He shook his head and said he’d accepted reality. If he couldn’t have descendants, he couldn’t. At least he had a room full of books to keep him company.
Li Jiangbao listened openmouthed. “Y-you really…?”
“Of course I lied to her. Otherwise where did my son come from?” Yi Lei said scornfully. “I only wanted her sympathy. I never expected she’d use it to take advantage of me.”
The villagers’ unwillingness to cooperate made the interns’ legal-outreach project increasingly difficult. Everyone else prepared to leave, but Zhu Yi came to the Yi household and showed Yi Lei that she was interested in him.
Yi Lei was surprised at first. After thinking it over, he understood that Zhu Yi wanted to infiltrate the village’s women by using him as a cover. He was furious, but pretended to court her. Zhu Yi said she admired him for remaining unsullied by his surroundings. She had stumbled through more than twenty years of life before finally finding her direction.
Zhu Yi seemed to quarrel with the other interns, who couldn’t believe she had fallen for a farmer. She came to the Yi home seeking help, and Yi Lei prepared a room for her. She moved in and parted ways with her fellow interns.
Their relationship was intimate in appearance, but they never slept together. Yi Lei knew Zhu Yi had yet to show her true intentions, so he could remain patient. Later, a woman whose clothes and accessories all looked extremely expensive came to Yuanshu Township. She appeared to be Zhu Yi’s teacher and tried to take her home, but Zhu Yi behaved as though she were deeply devoted to Yi Lei. Disappointed, the woman left abruptly. After that, no one else came to Yuanshu Township looking for Zhu Yi.
At last, Zhu Yi began putting her plan into action.
She dressed like the village women and worked diligently, even learning the traditional rules of “womanly virtue” from the older women. Yi Lei’s mother didn’t know what she really intended and treated her as a daughter-in-law of the household, regularly imposing “family discipline.” Zhu Yi appeared to accept it just as the other women did.
Gradually the women came to see her as one of their own and opened their hearts to her. Mei Rui became her first target. Unlike the women who had married in from other villages, Mei Rui was from the city, and the Li family treated her well by local standards. Yi Lei had no idea what Zhu Yi said to her, but Mei Rui became increasingly dissatisfied with the life she had previously accepted.
Then Yi Lei discovered that Zhu Yi was sending information to the outside world. Until then, he’d been content to watch. She was the one who’d approached him, they weren’t married and hadn’t had a sexual relationship, so even if police arrived, he felt he’d have no responsibility.
But Zhu Yi’s audacity unnerved him. She had helped Mei Rui get away. What would she do next? The whole village would be thrown into chaos, and he would be the weapon she wielded.
He might not have cared what happened to the village, but he could not tolerate a woman exercising power over him. He summoned his cousin, knocked Zhu Yi unconscious and locked her in the cellar, cutting off her ability to contact the outside world.
Zhu Yi had deleted the messages she’d sent, so he didn’t know who had received them. She refused to tell him. In his panic, he erased all the contacts on her phone. He was extremely nervous in those days. Zhu Yi surely had someone supporting her outside the village. What would happen when that person realized she could no longer be reached?
But nothing happened. Inside the village and beyond it, all was quiet. No one came looking for Zhu Yi.
Mei Rui’s parents did arrive, and took her away. Even Mei Rui never asked what had happened to Zhu Yi. On the night Mei Feng stayed in Yuanshu Township, Yi Lei secretly met him and asked where he’d gotten his information. Mei Feng was guarded and said he didn’t know.
Yi Lei waited a while longer and concluded that Zhu Yi might have been abandoned by her companions. Otherwise, the police would have turned the village upside down long ago, and Mei Rui couldn’t have gone home so easily.
He no longer needed to restrain himself. He would repay everything Zhu Yi had done to him. He’d once been injured in the mountains, but had recovered long ago. In the cellar, he raped Zhu Yi and kept her imprisoned. His abuse devastated her mental health, and she begged him to let her go. He gave her a cold promise of hope: “Give my family an heir, and I’ll let you go home.”
Li Jiangbao said in a panic, “That can’t be right, Old Yi! Would you really dare let her go? She’s a lawyer! She already cost me my wife. What you did to her… isn’t that a crime? Would she let you get away with it?”
Yi Lei regarded him contemptuously and laughed. “I was lying to her. You believed it too?”
Li Jiangbao swallowed. “Then what are you planning? If you don’t tell me, I’ll be terrified!”
Yi Lei revealed a monstrous expression. “I’m going to make her earn money for me until she dies!”
Word spread among men in Jianya Township that men could pay to rape a woman held in the Zhang family’s cellar. Zhu Yi was unable to resist. Yi Lei and his cousin made a great deal of money through exploiting her, and Yi Lei even invited Li Jiangbao to visit her. Li Jiangbao was frightened and never went back to Jianya Township.
Later he heard Zhu Yi had contracted what villagers called a “filthy disease.” Far from being ashamed, Yi Lei spread a story that after having his child, Zhu Yi had looked down on him and on Yuanshu Township, yet was too embarrassed to go home, so she’d fallen so low as to be unfaithful.
Everyone in the village condemned Zhu Yi for being an improper wife. Yi Lei obtained some herbal remedies for appearances’ sake but never provided proper treatment. When Zhu Yi died, the Yi family held a grand funeral, and Yi Lei went through the motions of mourning her.
Zhu Yi was soon forgotten, and people came to offer Yi Lei new matches. A widower might ordinarily have trouble marrying again, but Aqiong’s family was desperately poor. She had two younger brothers, and her parents urgently wanted to marry her off. Yi Lei suited their purposes.
Li Jiangbao finally let out a long breath and clasped his hands in a pleading gesture. “Officers, that’s everything I know! Let me make one thing clear: I never hurt Zhu Yi. Yi Lei did all of it! I wanted to tell you the day before yesterday, but he glared at me and I panicked. That man’s heart is poisonous. I was afraid he’d hurt me!”
Cold sweat had soaked Xie Wuming’s clothes. She stared at the timid, weak-willed villager before her, her mind utterly blank.
In her memories, that lively young woman she had known as a junior still laughed brightly. Zhu Yi had said she was an orphan and had only grown up safely because society had extended helping hands. Many of the people who helped her had been women. That was why she’d chosen to study law, so she could use what she learned to help more girls and women like herself.
Zhu Yi had been gone for so long. Xie Wuming had considered the possibility that something terrible had happened, yet she’d never imagined the abuse Zhu Yi endured during the final years of her life. Zhu Yi had helped another woman, only to be cast herself into an abyss of bone-deep cold, with no one to save her and no one she could rely on.
“Sister Xie! Sister Xie!” Xu Chuan’s voice brought her back to herself. She wiped her face hastily and only then realized tears had covered it.
“I’m sorry.” She could no longer control her emotions. “Xu Chuan, you take over the questioning. I need to step out.” With that, she rushed through the door.