2 – Sisters Return Home

Granny Zuo waved her hand: “You don’t have to be polite to me. Your parents have helped my family a lot in the past. If you don’t accept it, it will hurt the relationship between our two families, and I won’t agree. By the way, have a pancake first. I made it early in the morning. It’s still soft. Eat it while it’s hot. Poor child, you must be hungry, right?”

Qixun thought so, and she was really hungry, so she was no longer polite and took the palm-sized pancake and started to eat it.

The unleavened cake didn’t taste very good to Qixun, who had recalled all kinds of delicacies from her previous life, but it was considered the best refined grain in the countryside and had a strong wheat flavor. The unique sweetness of wheat made Qixun salivate when she was hungry, so how could she dare to dislike it?

She was grateful to Granny Zuo. While eating, she smiled and said, “Granny’s pancakes are so delicious.”

Granny Zuo touched her head and said with pity, “Eat slowly. Granny will serve you a bowl of porridge to warm your stomach.”

There was a clay pot in the basket, which also contained mixed noodle porridge along with two clean bowls.

The pots and bowls in her house weren’t destroyed, but they were all covered with ashes and hadn’t yet been cleaned.

Granny Zuo waited for her to drink the porridge and didn’t take back the bowls. Thinking that her family would need it for two more days, she let her lie on the bed and told her not to go out. If she got sick again, it would be no joke.

Qixun agreed obediently. Granny Zuo helped wrap her up in the quilt, then she put on her raincoat and left the room: “I’ll go back first. If there is anything, just shout. I can hear you at home.”

When Granny Zuo left the yard, Qixun lay on the bed wrapped in the torn quilt, not wanting to move. If she moved, she would hear the straw crackling. The autumn rain outside at this moment definitely did not follow the beautiful artistic conception of listening to the sound of rain hitting the withered lotus leaves.[1] Instead, it matched the autumn chill, making her feel doubly desolate.

After lying down for a while, she slowly fell asleep, but she was soon awakened by the sound of someone entering the yard.

Qixun rubbed her eyes and pushed the wooden lattice window out to have a look. She saw that the rain had stopped and her elder sister and younger sister in this life followed two men, one old and one young, into the yard.

The vigorous country man in his fifties in front was her great-grand-uncle’s eldest son Yan Hongyun, whom she called First Grandpa. The boy carrying a load beside First Grandpa was about fifteen or sixteen years old, tall and thin, with a delicate and handsome appearance. He was Uncle Grandpa’s eldest grandson, her eldest cousin Yan Lingzhou.

The beautiful young girl with a slender figure and a pair of extremely bright almond eyes behind them was her older sister Yan Lingsu. And the beautiful girl with a frown on her face as if she were worried was her twin sister Yan Lingyu.

Qixun was an only child in her previous life. Her parents were soldiers. Her mother died on a mission when she was three years old. Her father did not remarry, and he was too busy with work to take care of her. She was raised by her unreliable uncle, a CEO.

However, her uncle got married late, and wasn’t married until she was fifteen or sixteen years old. Her younger cousin was sixteen years younger than her. Because the age difference was too big, in her heart, they were of different generations. Although she felt that she would be a teenager even if she lived to be thirty-eight, she was as busy as a dog and basically lived in the laboratory, and she didn’t have much experience getting along with her younger cousin.

The memories of a few years in this life couldn’t compare to the memories of decades from her previous life.

Seeing her sisters at this moment, she felt that it was quite magical, and all the troubles before going to bed were thrown out of the sky.

She jumped off the bed happily, ran to the door of the main hall, and saluted her grandpa first: “Qixun greets First Grandfather.”[2]

She also smiled to her cousins and sisters: “Brother Lingzhou, Little sister Xiaowu.”[3]

First Grandpa Yan Hongyun shook off the mud on his shoes at the door and entered the house first. Seeing Qixun only wearing a thin inner shirt, he couldn’t help but frown, touching her head as he asked: “Why are you only wearing an inner shirt? I heard from your sister that you fainted yesterday. Are you feeling better now?”

She was sleeping when the fire started and was choked by the smoke. She had to be carried out by her second brother, so she was only wearing an inner shirt at the time. The others rushed to get clothes, otherwise the family might not have been able to go out today.

“I’m fine. I had a fever before, but I feel much better now.”

“Go to bed quickly. If you catch a cold, your mother will worry in vain.”

Yan Hongyun looked at the situation in the house and frowned. “No one has lived in this house for several years. It’s really shabby. Why don’t you live in my house when your mother comes back? I will clean up a room for you, and you and your mother can live in it, and let your second brother and your brother Zhou live in one room.”

There were five people in her family. How could it be convenient to live in someone else’s house?

Before Qixun could answer, her third sister Yan Lingsu, who had just entered the house after picking off the mud on the soles of her shoes on the threshold, hurriedly said, “We’re waiting for Mother and Second Brother to come back, then we’ll clean it up.”

Yan Hongyun didn’t force it, thinking that he would discuss this matter after his niece-in-law came back.

Yan Lingzhou had already put down the load he was carrying, picked up Qixun and put her on the bed in the inner room, then wrapped her in a blanket. He scolded her with a smile: “You don’t have any outer clothes to wear, so stay in bed honestly. If you get sick and cry later, your brother won’t have money to buy candy to comfort you.”

The action of carrying her was not very harmful, but it was very insulting.

Thinking of her father and uncle who also liked to carry her when she was young in her previous life, Qixun couldn’t help but roll her eyes. However, she was really cold, so she sat on the bed honestly.

There was really no other place to sit in the house, so Yan Lingzhou said, “Grandpa, I just brought some food and two quilts. I see they have nothing here. How about I go back and bring two sets of clothes for Xiaoxun?[4] She can’t be like this. Besides, I think we need to get some firewood, bowls, chopsticks, oil, and salt.”

Yan Hongyun waved his hand, “You carry Xiaoxun on your back, and we’ll go home first. This house is like an ice cave, and Xiaoxun is sick and can’t stay here.”

Her great-grand-uncle’s house wasn’t spacious, and First Grandpa lived with him. His three sons hadn’t yet split the household,[5] and there were eight grandchildren born by his three sons. There were nearly twenty people living in a small two-story courtyard.

It would be inconvenient for their family to move there.

Yan Lingsu hurriedly said, “Grandpa, it’s really not necessary. I’ll light a pot fire in the house later to keep Xiaoxun warm. Besides, didn’t Brother Lingzhou send a quilt? My mother will be back in the afternoon. Xiaowu and I will take this opportunity to clean up the house. There’s no need to send firewood either. There is half a room of firewood piled up in the west room. The original back room of my house wasn’t burned down, and there is some firewood stored in it. There is also no need to send oil and salt. My mother and second brother went to the town to buy these. These three rooms can be lived in after they are cleaned up. Just clean the kang when the weather is good, so that the fire pit won’t be cold this winter.”

Seeing that the little girl was determined not to move, Yan Hongyun sighed. Thinking that the eldest nephew of the eldest house[6] went to the capital and wouldn’t be able to come back until after the exam next year, which would take at least half a year. If everything in the house was burned down by a fire, how could life be easy? They had to help out.

Fortunately, most of the families in Yanjia Village[7] were from the same clan, so they wouldn’t let these children go hungry or cold.

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  1. CN: 雨打残荷听雨声 (yǔ dǎ cán hé tīng yǔ shēng) | TN: This is a reference to a line from a Tang dynasty poem called “宿骆氏亭寄怀崔雍崔衮” (sù luò shì tíng jì huái cuī yōng cuī gǔn) by Li Shangyin [李商隐]. The line being alluded to is “留得枯荷听雨声” (liú dé kū hé tīng yǔ shēng), which roughly describes the sound of withered lotus leaves in the wind as being reminiscent of autumn rain (according to an ancient Chinese poetry analysis website I found). So Qixun is making an allusion to this poem’s description of autumn rain, but expressing disappointment that the reality does not at all give her the same feeling as this poem does. ↩︎

  2. Technically, this “First Grandpa” is actually her eldest first cousin twice removed. (I had to look up a chart for this.) He’s the eldest in the same generation as her grandfather however, so she likely calls him first grandpa for simplicity’s sake (as many people do IRL). It should also be because Qixun’s family has no grandparents, uncles, aunts, or great-grandparents, so these are their closest relatives, and they have a good relationship with them. As a result, they get to be called much more intimately than is accurate. ↩︎

  3. Xiaowu lit. Little Five, as she is the youngest and fifth child in her family. Someone else will also be a “little five” or “little fifth” in this story shortly, and since she’s called Xiaowu so much more often, I figured it would be smoother to keep the nickname untranslated for differentiation. ↩︎

  4. Xiaoxun lit. Little Xun, taking part of her name, Qixun, and adding the word little/small as a prefix. This is also one way people turn names into terms of endearment or make nicknames or diminutive forms of names in Chinese. I kept the “xiao” instead of translating it because she’s twins with Xiaowu. ↩︎

  5. In ancient China, adult children could keep living together unless they decided to “split” the household — that is, a bit like splitting the inheritance before their parents actually died, with a final settlement later. In ordinary families, inheritance was split equally among sons. Although splitting the household was not entirely necessary — brothers could still form one “household” with the eldest as the head even after they all got married and had their own families as long as they wished. It depended on the individuals and the family’s situation. ↩︎

  6. Branches of large families that were still closely related were often called “houses” or “rooms.” If, for example, three brothers became grandfathers, their descendants might refer to the descendants of the eldest brother as being from “the first/eldest house” and descendants of the second brother as from the “second house/room” and so on. In this case, Qixun’s family’s branch has a higher seniority in the generation they’re counting from, so they’re the eldest house. ↩︎

  7. lit. Yan Family Village — many small villages were named after the most numerous clan or a prominent family. In this case, Yanjia Village is mostly led by those of the Yan clan and has more Yan clan members than those from other clans. ↩︎