With Mingxia supporting Xiuying from behind, allowing her to have money to spend and raise her children, they planned to find a publisher for their novel after finishing it; the current priority was to write it well and take good care of the children. If they ran out of money, they could temporarily borrow from Mingxia—that was the sisters’ current way of maintaining their situation.
This phenomenon was set to spark a significant rise in the printing industry, akin to a nearly defunct bicycle factory that suddenly received an order for shared bicycles, thus securing its safety.
In June, Xiaoyan received her Level 3 piano certificate, making Mingxia incredibly happy, and further solidifying her belief in her daughter’s talent in this area.
She also danced beautifully in her traditional dance performance. On Children’s Day, she even performed a solo dance on stage, making Mingxia so proud. Unfortunately, the era lacked suitable smartphones, so she specifically rented a video camera, not only taking photos but also recording videos, preserving her daughter’s first stage performance and her achievement of Level 3 in piano.
After returning home, she recorded snippets of life with her daughter, Aunt Wang, and Cao Yang with the video camera, including group photos at West Lake. Throughout the month she rented the camera, she was never idle, even capturing moments of her selling boxed meals at the market stall or buying groceries at the morning market, assisted either by her daughter or Aunt Wang.
To Mingxia, these would be precious memories, so she wanted to capture every little detail of their lives. When she got old and couldn’t move around, she could live in these memories every day—how wonderful would that be?
Maybe because she got addicted to filming, Mingxia later spent 1,500 yuan to buy a Phoenix Henix DC828N SLR camera—an incredible indulgence, especially given the high cost of film. Mingxia’s move was simply epic.
But her idea was simple, even though she knew that digital cameras would surge in the 2000s, what mattered to her was the present environment. Her daughter’s and her own growth were irreplaceable and irreversible, so she wanted to use a camera to document their extraordinary lives together.