Three months after marrying into the Chen family, my dowry changed three places. My mother-in-law, Huang Qiuyue, said, "If you marry from the second family, you will become the Chen family, and the dowry will naturally be at the disposal of the father-in-law." Then she moved the mahogany box my mother had given her into her house, and "borrowed" 180 yuan for her brother-in-law's engagement. My sister-in-law, Chen Zhaodi, was chewing melon seeds and laughing: "The money-losing goods are the money-losing goods. You have to spit them out no matter how much you bring." I knelt on the stone slab of the ancestral hall and wiped the altar table, and my knees were bleeding. My third aunt, Lin Xiulan, secretly slipped me a piece of plaster and whispered, "Just bear with it, that's what we women are like." Tolerate? That night, I broke into the woodshed to steal back the silver bracelet my mother gave me. As soon as his hand touched the dowry wooden box on the bottom floor, a light suddenly cracked open at the bottom of the box - what was inside was not a torn cotton jacket, but a bottomless warehouse filled with rice, flour, grain, oil, and cloth and general merchandise. I grabbed a bag of fine white noodles with words engraved on it: Being bullied once, there are ten more in the warehouse. The next day, my mother-in-law scolded me for being lazy in front of the whole family and asked me to hand over the last piece of my trousseau - the pair of silver bracelets. I put my hand into the wooden box and what I touched was not a bracelet. It was a note handwritten by the director of the county supply and marketing cooperative: "With this certificate, you can have priority in purchasing any in-demand supplies, with no limit." I slapped the note on the donation table, looked at Huang Qiuyue's wide eyes, and said with a smile: "Mother-in-law, do you still dare to 'borrow' this dowry?"
The sedan shook as if it was about to fall apart. I tightened my cuffs and dug my nails into my palms - it hurt, but I could bear it.
The suona outside was playing out of tune, and the crackling firecrackers blew out a smell of sulfur, which mixed with the salty smell of the sea breeze and penetrated into the cracks of the sedan curtain, making my eyes sore.
"The Chen family is poor
