RWWAI 40

Chapter 40: A Kitchen Cleaver

Gazing at my mother's fatigued and weathered face, I finally stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her in a hug.

"What's wrong?" my mother asked, looking slightly startled before her tone quickly shifted to one of worry. "Did something happen outside?"

I shook my head and replied:

"Nothing, I just suddenly wanted to tell you... I know you've always had it so hard..."

Truthfully, my mother and I couldn't exactly be called estranged, seeing as we had never really gotten into explosive fights.

In the past, it was usually just me nagging her unilaterally while she listened obediently and submissively.

Yet we couldn't exactly call ourselves close either.

That night, I stayed over at my childhood home.

Instead of making my mother cook, I treated her to dinner at a restaurant.

Of course, when the bill arrived, I abruptly remembered I was no longer a wealthy aristocrat and would likely be surviving off instant noodles next week.

Walking back home from the restaurant, a delivery scooter nearly plowed right into my mother.

I yanked her out of the way just in time.

The bespectacled delivery guy flashed us an apologetic look and bowed repeatedly in remorse.

In the past, I would have already started chewing him out.

Lines like, "Can't you look where you're going just because you're rushing deliveries?" or "This is a pedestrian sidewalk! Don't test me or I'll report you to the company!" would have rolled off my tongue by the dozen.

Yet today, I stayed completely silent.

It wasn't because I suspected every random delivery worker might secretly be Luo Fan—I wasn't that hopelessly delusional.

It was simply because I felt it was pointless; the guy had already apologized.

Once we got back inside the house, my mother remarked:

"Yueyue... I feel like you... seem a bit different today?"

"Is that so?" I replied nonchalantly.

My mother nodded and said:

"You... seem a lot softer around the edges."

I joked back:

"That's not soft, that's called getting beaten flat by society and losing my sharp edges!"

My mother chuckled and observed:

"I always used to think you were the spitting image of your grandmother."

I certainly didn't care for that comparison.

How could anyone say I resembled that old woman who favored sons over daughters?

So I pushed back:

"How on earth am I anything like her?"

Turning her gaze toward the framed portrait of my grandmother hanging on the wall, my mother slowly explained:

"Your grandmother, just like you, was an unyielding, tough-as-nails backbone that nobody could bully."

"Huh? Compared to you, you mean? Anyone looks tough compared to you." I laughed in disbelief.

After all, in my childhood memories, grandmother either sat around in a daze or threw sudden, unpredictable tantrums, smashing things to pieces.

Granted, those episodes all happened after the onset of her dementia.

Back when I was very little, she had been perfectly normal.

Only, as the years rolled by, I had long forgotten what that version of her looked like.

Little did I know, this very evening would finally reveal a story my mother had never shared and I had never thought to ask about.

Namely, why she had willingly cared for my grandmother for twenty solid years, despite knowing full well that grandmother had handed over all her money to her two sons.

Though not quite a traditional child bride, my grandmother had been sold off to my grandfather by her own natal family at the tender age of fourteen.

Because she had zero say in her own marriage, she fiercely refused to let my mother suffer the same fate.

When my mother turned eighteen, a massive business partnership deal went sour, and my grandfather was scammed out of a huge sum of money by his business partner.

To plug that massive financial hole, my grandfather planned to marry my mother off to a man willing to cough up a hefty bride price.

The suitor wasn't some grotesque, bloated villain straight out of a melodramatic soap opera; he was just an ordinary guy whose wife had eloped, leaving him to raise a three-year-old son alone.

Though he was fifteen years older than my mother, by modern standards, that age gap wasn't even all that scandalous.

"Do you know what your grandmother did to make your grandfather never dare bring that matter up ever again?" my mother asked with an amused smile.

Suddenly, a creeping, ominous premonition washed over me.

"It couldn't have been... pulling out a kitchen cleaver, right...?" I stammered, shivering slightly.

With a delighted expression, my mother gasped:

"How did you know?"

Well...

We certainly ran in the same family.

To make a long story short, grandmother grabbed a kitchen cleaver right then and there, warning my grandfather that if he dared go through with it, she would hack him to death on the spot, followed by his two sons, ensuring he'd kick the bucket with money he didn't even have the life to spend.

That incident blew up into a massive family scandal.

Every single relative—aunts, uncles, anyone remotely related to my grandfather's clan—was summoned to sit in judgment, purely because grandmother was a "purchased" wife who had no business making decisions about household affairs.

And then, my grandmother pulled a stunt even more hardcore than anything I had ever managed.

She hauled out a heavy liquefied gas cylinder.

"I still remember it clear as day," my mother recalled, her eyes turning red with emotion. "That day I hid inside your grandmother's bedroom while it was absolute chaos outside, with everyone cursing her out, but she didn't budge an inch. I don't know who said what, but grandmother hoisted that gas tank straight up onto her shoulder and roared, 'Whoever else has something to say can come join me down in the underworld to discuss it with King Yama!'"

Naturally, with grandmother losing her mind to that extreme degree, none of those relatives dared meddle further.

Except, a few days later, they forced grandmother to swear a toxic oath stating that all future financial assets could only be left to her sons.

Simply because grandmother was a purchased wife with zero legal right to retain property.

Simply because my mother couldn't earn money for my grandfather, and thus held no qualification to inherit a share.

The person obsessed with favoring sons over daughters had never been my grandmother.

She possessed nothing to begin with; it wasn't that she refused to give anything to my mother.

Naturally, when my father threatened to divorce my mother over the fallout from grandmother's actions, that steel-spined grandmother of mine had no intention of rolling over either.

She even ran away from home on her own, surviving for half a month by picking up garbage on the streets.

It wasn't until my mother finally tracked her down that grandmother initially refused to return home with her.

From grandmother's perspective, my mother's freedom in marriage was something she had traded her very life to buy, and she refused to let it get squandered away under her watch.

And then my mother delivered the most wildly badass line of her entire life, convincing grandmother to come back home:

"A man who can share good times but not bad weather is trash I don't want."

I always thought I was the cool one—turns out it was entirely genetic!

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