Period story | reborn | family life | putting scumbags in their place | raising children and turning the tables | satisfying read
In the winter of 1977, Gu Ling breathed her last in the hospital.
When she opened her eyes again, she was back on the kang in her courtyard home. Her husband, Wang Jianjun, handed his thirty-two yuan and fifty cents in wages to his mother in front of her, giving her twenty yuan and leaving twelve yuan and fifty cents to support five people: forty-one cents a day.
In her previous life, she endured it for over a decade, until she lay on her sickbed with no one by her side.
This time, Gu Ling stood outside her mother-in-law's room and itemized every expense, one by one, until she got that twenty yuan back. Then she spent thirty-two cents on a few jin of cucumbers and radishes and made her first jar of pickles.
One jar became four, then twelve. A basket stall became a neighborhood processing group, then the district's first pickle factory. Counterfeiters showed up, shell-company fraudsters came around, and district auditors checked the books. Gu Ling never argued or made a scene. She brought out the ledgers.
People forget, but paper remembers. She had always kept the books.
She raised all three children herself: the eldest passed the entrance exams and went away to study, the second had been copying her accounts since the age of nine, and the youngest fell ill but came back and still ranked first.
There was only her husband. She watched him for more than a decade, and she and the children were never at the top of his list. He secretly gave the family's money to his mother.
Gu Ling neither cried nor made a fuss. She laid the two account books side by side in front of him. "The factory is the factory. The family is the family."
Once the divorce was final, the house was hers, the factory was hers, and the children were hers.
Later, her husband went south for work and left.
His name never appeared in the ledger again.
