Although harvesting an unripe melon wouldn’t be sweet, not doing so would cost a life and bring down the name of the entire village. Therefore, this melon had to be harvested no matter what.(1)
(T/N: A metaphor referring to the situation that Youth Chen caused as the unripe melon. Meaning that it wouldn’t be easy to solve this issue, but they had no choice but to go with it)
After all, the melons were planted by the scumbag Youth Chen!
In order to avoid being seen and suspected, they did not say anything else. They merely warned him to act properly and seek them out whenever.
Upon hearing this, Youth Chen immediately turned around and ran away.
Lin Lan discussed with Dong Huaihua whether to ask Han Yongfang to help, but Dong Huaihua was afraid that the others would start to chatter. After all, if too many people were to know about this issue, it would be quite troublesome.
“You wouldn’t know about this, but some people in our Brigade are very difficult to deal with— especially Han Yonglu’s family. If this matter was to be known to him, it would definitely be chaotic.”
Dong Huaihua then told Lin Lan about the grievances between the two families.
During the previous years that were full of natural disasters, neither of the two families became team cadres. Han Yonglu then led his wife and children to steal some corn and sweet potatoes from the fields, but Liu Guifa caught them in the act. Liu Guifa refused to let him go and asked him to surrender to the Brigade Headquarters. Otherwise, he was going to expose the thieving actions.
Han Yonglu refused to turn himself in, but also refused to put down the food, so they fought. With his wife and children, he beat up Liu Guifa in front of a large crowd. It was there that Liu Guifa exposed him. After that confession, the entire village criticised Han Yonglu to no end.
Since then, the two families have destroyed the bridge between them.
This was the case in the countryside. Sometimes, no matter how great the grievances disputes were, they could be wiped away with a smile as time went by.
But there were times where certain individuals could remember the smallest little things for a lifetime. They wouldn’t speak to each other because of it, causing an eternal rift to form between the two families.
Liu Guifa wasn’t that hung up on the incident, but Han Yonglu refused to give up. He insisted that Liu Guifa had evil intentions and wanted to starve his family to the brink of death in order to gain credit.
It was especially when Liu Guifa later became the Security Director that enforced Han Yonglu’s assumptions.
Coupled with a lot of matters occurring both intentionally or unintentionally later on, the two families naturally stopped talking.
Fortunately, they lived far from each other and were not under the same Production Team. Hence, not talking wasn’t that much of a deal to them.
Still, now that Liu Xiuyun was involved in a matter of her own, Han Yonglu wasn’t going to let the chance slip by if he were to ever catch wind of it.
Lin Lan also felt that the situation was getting even more serious, “There isn’t any other way to go about it. Let’s wait till my husband gets back and have him pressure Youth Chen into agreeing. Then, they’ll get engaged and be married quickly.”
A divorced marriage would be better for the Liu family compared to getting pregnant before marriage.
Divorce, widowhood and pregnancy out of wedlock all have a chain of contempt attached to them.
In this era, unmarried pregnant women would be considered indiscreet and improper. They would be branded as broken shoes(2) and perhaps even sentenced as one.
(T/N: Broken shoes are usually shoes that were worn by someone too many times before being thrown out. In that sense, it refers to a woman who was impregnated by someone and then discarded)