In 1992, Zhou Weidong worked as a cook in the mechanical factory canteen, handing every cent of his monthly wages to his mother-in-law to repay his father-in-law for saving his life and teaching him a trade.
He thought that if he put up with a little more, his daughter would be able to live in peace.
Then one day, he came home and saw his feverish daughter crouched under the table, picking up chicken skin her uncle had spat out and eating it. The sixty yuan he'd hidden away to pay for her medical treatment had been taken by his mother-in-law to buy his brother-in-law a bicycle.
His mother-in-law cursed him as a live-in son-in-law who ate from the Yang family's table. His wife told him to stop being unreasonable, and his brother-in-law even forced his daughter to kneel and beg for meat.
At last, Zhou Weidong understood. For eight years, he'd endured their mistreatment, but it hadn't earned him his family's sincere affection. Instead, they'd come to believe that he and his daughter were born to be bullied.
That day, he overturned the dining table, picked up his daughter, and left the Yang family.
Everyone expected the penniless live-in son-in-law to come crawling back.
But with the twelve yuan and seventy cents he had left, Zhou Weidong set up a breakfast stall. Starting with a pot of cabbage and crackling pancakes, he sold breakfast, opened a snack shop, and took on boxed-meal orders from construction sites, building himself a foothold in a county town of the 1990s, one step at a time.
When his wife's family came back, hoping to take his business and savings, the long-suffering live-in son-in-law was already gone for good.
Zhou Weidong stood by the steaming stove and handed the first meat pie to his daughter.
"Go ahead and eat."
"The money Dad earns is only for taking care of you, not ungrateful wolves."
