Facing the sharp questions from her younger brother Doggy, who was so smart and enthusiastic and had helped her so much, Lin Juan really couldn't brush him off. So she reluctantly began to share the story of her past years.
Lin Juan had taken the college entrance exam and went to study in the South at a second-tier university not long after Liu Zhizhong, then twelve years old, left Yingxi County. This was over sixteen years ago.
Not much later after she started university, Lin Juan's father, Lin Zhijie, was laid off after the state-owned Yingxi Salt Factory bought out his work years.
Lin Zhijie, a minor leader, was certainly proud and arrogant. He took the money, sold the house allocated by his unit, and headed south with his daughter to start a business.
Lin Zhijie, who had been somewhat of a big shot in his small town, was completely out of his depth in the big city of the South. He was neither successful nor content to settle for less and ended up losing all his investments in business.
In the end, the money Lin Juan needed for her education was earned by working in an electronics factory.
As for Lin Zhijie, he succumbed to laziness and alcoholism, and during the summer of Lin Juan's second year in university, he drowned in the Pearl River while drunk. When his body was found, fish had nibbled away his ears and toes.
Lin Juan's mother had died young, and now she was all alone, supporting herself through university, which was doubly challenging.
Fortunately, Lin Juan was beautiful, and many boys pursued her.
She couldn't withstand the onslaught of love and fell for a boy from Wumeng County in Ningnan Province.
The boy's family was relatively well-off, and his parents were both minor leaders in state-owned enterprises.
In the year Lin Juan graduated from university, she became pregnant and planned to stay in the provincial city of Ningnan Province, marry the boy, and start a business together.
But who could have known that the boy, after getting involved in business-related entertaining, would develop a drug addiction that quickly spiraled out of control?
In less than six months, all his savings were squandered, and he died from a drug overdose, leaving behind Lin Juan, who had just given birth, and their daughter Lin Youyou.
Ironically, on the very day Lin Youyou was born into the mortal world, her father never even saw her face before dying from a drug overdose.
People in Ningnan Province held traditional views that favored sons over daughters. The boy's parents, grieving the loss of their son, callously gave Lin Juan fifty thousand yuan and washed their hands of her and Youyou.
Now without any family to turn to and with a newborn daughter, Lin Juan's life became even more difficult.
With no home to return to, and her grandparents having passed away years ago, and her father having no siblings, she had nowhere to go back to.
So Lin Juan rented a house in the provincial city of Ningnan Province and settled down temporarily with her daughter.
She later found employment at a foreign language tutoring school as a Japanese teacher.
In the college entrance exam options, Japanese was indeed an alternative. Some students who were not good at English, and their parents, were willing to have them take lessons in Japanese for the exam.
After all, there are many connections between Japanese and Chinese languages, making it relatively easier to learn. Plus, the difficulty level of the college entrance exam for Japanese isn't that high, and getting a perfect score isn't impossible.
As for why Japanese was included in the college entrance exam, there's no need to elaborate—any cursory search online will reveal the truth.
Regrettably, Lin Youyou suffered from congenital heart disease, had always been weak physically, and had undergone several surgeries, costing Lin Juan a significant amount of money, even going into debt at one point.
Once, for a heart transplant surgery for Lin Youyou, the hospital charged her four hundred thousand yuan—but the operation failed.
To repay her debts, Lin Juan, who had taught at the language school for less than four years, had no choice but to leave her job.
Because Lin Youyou's condition could flare up at any moment, requiring immediate hospital care, Lin Juan had to find more flexible work, like driving a ride-hailing service, which allowed for greater freedom.
That old Elantra, which she bought after her first car broke down, now had 300,000 kilometers on it.
Of course, with the recent influx of driverless taxis in Ningnan Provincial City, Lin Juan felt she was nearly out of work, with bookings becoming increasingly scarce.
In the past, running orders day and night had taken a toll on her, with her hair growing grayer each year.
And with Lin Youyou's illness growing worse by the day, Lin Juan fell into complete despair.
However, in this circle of patients, Lin Juan learned that there were two suitable heart donors for Lin Youyou's condition in Yangzhou City, but the cost of the surgery was staggering—a secured successful operation and recovery would require three million yuan.
Without money and unable to raise it, Lin Juan could only drive 1,700 kilometers with her daughter back to Yangzhou Hospital to reserve a spot for the surgery, and then figure out a way to raise the funds.
Her daughter couldn't wait any longer; without the heart transplant surgery soon, she wouldn't have many days left.
The challenge was that Lin Youyou's condition was unusual—the air conditioning in the car made her too cold, but without it, she would grow restless and hot, struggling to breathe.
During that 1,700-kilometer journey, that's what Lin Juan did, running the air conditioning and keeping the windows half-open, enduring hardship all the way to Yangzhou City. Only in these conditions did Youyou feel a bit more comfortable, but for Lin Juan, it was genuine suffering...
As for raising money, Lin Juan wasn't without options, but she was always reluctant to take that route.
And the man who would give her money, Lin Youyou knew him—he was a rather perverse Japanese man.
Originally Chinese, he had emigrated and taken Japanese citizenship, and he happened to be the boss of the language tutoring center where Lin Juan had once taught. Fresh chapters posted on 𝕟𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕝⁂𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖⁂𝕟𝕖𝕥
Some people emigrate but still profit off their fellow countrymen, leeching off them because money from their homeland is just so easy to earn! No need to detail such examples—it's something the informed understand...