My Father Used Me to Pay Off a Debt of 3,000 Yuan

When I was nineteen, my father traded me to the village butcher to cover his thirty-thousand-yuan gambling debt.

The butcher was twenty years older than me and treated me like livestock. When I gave birth to a daughter, he despised her for being a girl and tossed her into the back hills to be fed to the dogs.

My grandmother, my only family, died. My own father didn't even send word, just to save the fare.

On a snowy night, I used a knife to sever the tendons in the butcher's wrist, stole fifty yuan, and climbed aboard a southbound train with my daughter in my arms.

Everyone thought I had died out there, without even a scrap of bone left behind.

Ten years later, I returned to the village in an imported Land Rover, carrying several large suitcases full of cash.

The father who sold me was working a sewing machine in prison. The village bully who tried to steal my money was sent to jail by my own hand. The stepmother who once forced me to drink pesticide knelt before a bulldozer, kowtowing and begging for mercy.

Everyone in the village changed their tune. They all called me "Boss Chen" and scrambled to kneel and apologize.

I sat in the seat of honor in the ancestral hall and tossed down a pair of scissors.

"I still have the butcher's knife from back then. I'll build the roads and the factories, but if any of you bloodsuckers dare set foot on my road, just try me."

This is the story of a straw doll trampled into the mud, who fought her way out through blood and fire and crushed every enemy beneath her feet.