Rebirth on the Doors to the Civil Affairs Bureau

09

When she went into the kitchen to get some water from the refrigerator, she found a post-it note on it.

‘Although it’s summer, it isn’t good to directly drink ice water. There’s honeyed water that I made on the table, just drink that if you’re thirsty, and I cooked some egg fried rice, just microwave it when you get hungry.

P.S Thank you for helping me with my files!

–Xia Feng. ‘

Yu Dong smiled, took the post-it note, heated up the fried rice, then went into the living room with her food and honeyed water.
After eating, Yu Dong felt much better.

Suddenly her phone rang.

Yu Dong looked at her phone screen and saw the caller to be her brother, Yu Song.

Yu Dong suddenly felt morose as she held her phone. She had been happily living for more than a month since her rebirth. She had never called home, had never thought about it, but now that she was confronted with this situation she became afraid.

Before Yu Dong’s rebirth, her family’s urging to get married reached unprecedented heights after she turned 28. Even her older brother, who always ignored family affairs, began to join pressure her.

Yu Dong often got pulled aside and lectured about it. That marriage was so integral to life, how this relationship was similar to the relationship between the left hand and right hand. How her likes or dislikes were no relevant when picking a man.

Yu Dong remembered one time when she went home for a visit, she happened to bump into Yu Song who just came back from work. When he saw her, he opened his mouth, and the first thing he said to her was: “What the hell are you going to do? Being so picky, do you think you’re still in your early 20s ah, thinking you’re so high and mighty. You think we’re willing to take care of you? If it weren’t for the fact that you’re my sister, I wouldn’t even bother with you. Look at you, every day you get older and older. Did you not think that everyone else has already married out except you?”

Then her mother, who was usually picky said, “The last man was good, you complained that he was a little short at 166 cm, but you’re only 158 cm anyway. Any taller and he’d be a tree. You also complained about his low salary, but it’s not like you can’t live with 3000 yuan a month. Better than nothing.”

Even her father finally said, “I beg of you, stop being picky and get married quickly.”

After all that? Yu Dong doesn’t dare go home, she didn’t want to listen to such words, to quarrel with her family. In the end, she started to celebrate New Year’s alone, watching the overcrowded Shanghai slowly become an empty city, tens of millions of reunions happening elsewhere, sleeping in a hotel at 30 years old, only to call home and still end up being scolded…
In those years, home was a place Yu Dong couldn’t go back to.
No matter how close she was with her loved ones, in the end, they became a miserable existence.

So she began to dread festivals and holidays.

Yu Dong didn’t even dare visit her hometown, because even the street next to theirs knew of a girl who can’t marry out of her home!

The phone stopped, and after a while, it started it ring again. Yu Dong gathered her courage and connected the phone.

“Answer your phone!” Her brother’s voice roared, “What have you been doing lately? You didn’t really marry your boyfriend did you?”

“No!”

“No? Because you ran away from home with your suitcase, mom got sick.” Her elder brother yelled some more, then asked: “Where are you, what are you doing now?”