1975, Zhaojiagou.
Su Xiaomai's parents forced her to marry the most taciturn man in the neighboring village.
Just how quiet was he? You could hit him with three sticks and not get a peep. He couldn't manage three sentences in a day.
On their wedding night, she sat on the kang and talked nonstop all night, while he squatted by the door and whittled wood. He said exactly three things: "Mm." "All right." "Go to sleep."
Su Xiaomai thought, I can't live like this.
But life went on. She raised chickens, set up a stall, argued with people, and went to the county to negotiate business deals, charging ahead with boundless energy. He didn't stop her or praise her. He simply built the chicken coop where she couldn't see him, kept the accounts straight, and quietly cleaned up the messes after her arguments went wrong.
She complained to a neighbor, "My husband must have borrowed his mouth from someone else. He's too stingy to use it."
The neighbor asked, "Then why are you still with him?"
Su Xiaomai paused. "...He hasn't said he wants to leave me, either."
Later, she learned that all the words he never said were hidden in the moments when he said nothing at all.
When someone bullied her, he spoke up in front of them for the first time: "She's my wife."
When her business hit a rough patch and she couldn't stop crying, he struggled for a long time before saying, "Don't cry. I'm here."
When she asked if he liked her, he was silent for a long while, then said, "I wouldn't have married you if I didn't."
Later, everyone in the village said Su Xiaomai was lucky to have married such a decent, capable man.
Su Xiaomai would say, "What's so great about him? He's so quiet it's maddening." But when she got home at night, she secretly put all the little wooden toys he'd carved into a cupboard.
How did two people who had been forced together end up building a life everyone else envied?
Theme: Build a good life with your own hands, and warm each other's hearts with sincerity.
Author, can you change the sentence that says the Zhou family has a lot of land? In 1975, there was no land distribution to households. In 1975, there were still educated youths who went to the countryside. The college entrance examination was only resumed in 1977. The earliest land distribution to households was in some remote areas after 1978. Even in 1982, the land was distributed. So you wrote that the Zhou family had a lot of land. Where did the land come from? Please use the wrong information when writing the chronological essay. Don't write randomly.