On the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, Zhao Dazhu's pig got loose. The enormous white pig, weighing over two hundred jin, rooted through the cabbages, crashed into a stall selling cured meat, and gobbled up three pieces of Wu Laonian's bacon. The whole village chased it all the way to the Yuntai Mountain Reservoir before finally pinning it down. Wang Defa fell while chasing the pig, and his daughter filmed it and posted it online. She photoshopped a pink peach blossom onto his face, and overnight he became the laughingstock of the entire village.
But Wang Defa had no time to worry about that. His daughter, Chen Xiaoman, had brought her boyfriend back from Wuhan for the New Year. The young man was named Lin Yiming. He was from Xiangyang, wore black-rimmed glasses, and blushed whenever he spoke to anyone. Wang Defa said, “He seems all right,” but secretly dug out the dark blue padded jacket he had kept at the bottom of the trunk. Liu Cuihua started frying meatballs and stewing cured pork knuckles three days early, and changed the sheets in the west room three times.
Everything seemed to be going well. Until someone casually mentioned that Lin Yiming's grandmother was called Wu Yulan.
Thirty years ago, Wu Yulan and Zhang Guiying, Zhao Dazhu's mother, had gotten into a fight at a banquet over a bowl of braised pork. Zhang Guiying had declared right then and there, “I'll never sit at the same table and eat with anyone surnamed Wu again.” Thirty years had passed, and she had kept her word.
Now there was only one round table for New Year's Eve dinner. Wang Defa rearranged the seating seven or eight times. Zhang Guiying had to sit with her back to Lin Yiming. But even sitting back-to-back meant sharing a table, and sooner or later their chopsticks would reach for the same dish.
On the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month, Zhang Guiying came early to “check things out.” She stared at Lin Yiming for a long time, while everyone in the courtyard held their breath. Lin Yiming's ears turned bright red, but he didn't look away. “Grandma Zhao, my grandmother asked me to pass on a message: she was in the wrong about the braised pork back then.”
Zhang Guiying stood there for a long while. At last, she said only, “...You look more spirited than your grandmother did at your age.”
At one in the afternoon on New Year's Eve, Zhang Guiying arrived, bringing along a
