His sisters were renowned beauties far and wide, so Wang Zhengjun naturally had high standards. Handsome, articulate, educated, and refined, he piqued the interest of the daughters of landlords and young women from the town alike. However, he believed in his own dignity and didn’t need to "marry up". The idea of the woman being wealthier than him was nothing more than an attempt to imitate a reversed process of climbing the social ladder – something he considered distasteful. Furthermore, he didn’t find those young women to be anything special, nowhere as charming as his sisters. So, he turned them down, righteously.
Once news of his refusal spread, it earned him the label of being "dignified". So boosted was his ego he almost seemed to strut around with his tail pointed straight to the sky.
With her fair skin, large eyes, and slender physique, Liu Jinhua somehow managed to catch Wang Zhengjun’s eye.
Liu Jinhua was very smart and calculated. Wang Zhenguo never considered her as a potential sister-in-law, however she managed to charm Wang Zhengjun. Seeing as she had no siblings, one thing led to another and Wang Zhengjun became smitten, declaring he would marry no other.
When Wang Zhengjun and Liu Jinhua got married, Liu Jinhua practically brought her entire dowry from home.
She had promised her parents that she would take care of them in their old age after marrying Wang Zhenguo.
The two villages were close by, and considering the Wang family’s many brothers, one more or one less made little difference.
The Liu family only had one daughter, and they were afraid there would be no one to care for them in their old age. They believed her and gave her all their five acre field and savings as a dowry. Who knew that just as Liu Jinhua stepped out of their home, her mother fell pregnant and at the age of forty shockingly gave birth to a boy.
Having a son and not having a son made a world of difference, so the old man Liu wanted his five-acre field back.
Now he had a son and needed to plan for the future.
Liu Jinhua was unwilling, stating that a dowry, like a married daughter, is not something to be returned. This left old man Liu sick with rage and he nearly died of it.
Unfair as it was, the Liu family became a landless farming family after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and their social status became the highest. Liu Jinhua’s dowry field was nationalized. Had it not been just a five-acre field, and social status not tied to the father, the couple might have been classified as poor farmers or middle peasants, who were considered landowners if they labored and did not exploit others.
Before long, the city’s coal mines started hiring. Then-village head Wang Zhenguo got a few quotas to allocate to the village’s young labor force, but in the end, only Wang Zhengjun was chosen. The reason was simple: he was literate, sweet-tongued, and handsome, so he was quickly selected.
While Wang Zhengjun gained a city resident’s household registration, Liu Jinhua and their child remained rural residents.
While Wang Zhengjun had access to rationed food, Liu Jinhua had to farm and earn work points for food. Wang Zhenguo was impartial in his distribution; if you didn’t work and earn work points, you didn’t get food. For a few years, the relationship between the two brothers was not very good.
Later, Wang Zhengjun managed to get Liu Jinhua and the child to the city. For the first couple of years, Liu Jinhua had to come back, work to earn work points, and bring some food back. After a couple of years, she stopped coming back. Apparently, they had settled their household registration and were receiving rationed food. Except for the time Wang Jiao got married and Wang Zhengjun came back, in the last five or six years, they hadn’t been seen at all.
Now Wang Zhengjun appeared again, asking for several hundred kilograms of grain. Honestly, Wang Zhenguo was quite shocked.
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