My friend Xiaofeng is a city girl who married Zhao Wen from the countryside because of love.
After getting married, the young couple got a mortgage on a house in the county. Although life was tight, the two lived happily and never had a quarrel.
Zhao Wen has always doted on Xiaofeng and is a good and obedient man. But just a few days ago, Xiaofeng called me crying, and her voice made me feel extremely aggrieved.
It turns out that the cause of the incident was a visit to my second uncle's house in the countryside.
One weekend last month, Zhao Wen took Xiaofeng back to his hometown in the countryside.
Zhao Wen’s hometown is in a small village in Hebei Province. The village is relatively closed, so the local economic development is not very good.
But the villagers in the village are all very simple. Xiaofeng felt the strong simple folk customs when he went home with Zhao Wen for the first time. After her marriage, her relatives in the village were very kind to her, making her feel like she was at home every time she went back.
I got along well with my relatives in the village, so it was inevitable that I would visit them or something. But this time, something happened during the visit.
When the two of them went back that day, their mother-in-law told them that their second uncle’s new house had been built and that the family would be invited to have dinner there next month.
Xiaofeng was very excited when she heard that a new house was built. She really likes the big new houses in the countryside, which are much more spacious than the buildings in the city.
The excited Xiaofeng took Zhao Wen to his second uncle's house to see what the newly built big house looked like.
The second uncle’s house originally had two courtyards at the front and back. This time, the house in the back yard was demolished and rebuilt, and the one in the front remained untouched for the time being.
The enthusiastic second aunt took them into the house in the front yard and chatted all afternoon.
The work in the backyard was not finished yet, and there were still many shelves of cement on the ground, so the two of them opened the window and looked behind them for a while. The layout of the house designed by my second uncle himself looks really grand. Xiaofeng couldn't help but praise her a lot, which made her second aunt smile and roll her eyes.
Zhao Wen and Xiaofeng returned to the city the next day. It felt really good to go home this time.
But about half a month later, her mother-in-law called Zhao Wen and asked Xiaofeng if he had entered the yard of his second uncle's house.
Zhao Wen heard that there was something in this, so he asked a few more questions and found out that the old ladies in the village had been talking about Xiaofeng's visit to his second uncle's house recently, and his mother-in-law was the last to know.
It turns out that there is a taboo in the village. When a house builds a new house, married women are not allowed to enter, otherwise it will destroy the feng shui of the new house.
Zhao Wen has rarely returned to the village since he went to college, and he didn't know there was such a taboo. After Xiaofeng listened to Zhao Wen's narration, he was stunned for a long time.
Finally, at the suggestion of her mother-in-law, Zhao Wen specially bought eight apples and eight pieces of steamed cake, and also packed a red envelope worth 666 yuan to go to his second uncle's house.
Zhao Wen never blamed Xiaofeng throughout the whole process, but she did feel very aggrieved.
She told me that for a short period of time, she felt that her intelligence was deeply insulted. There was no one to blame for this incident, but it just happened. The only thing is that Xiaofeng was discriminated against.
China's feudal society has discriminated against women for thousands of years, but it is still popular in some places. Just like the most common gender discrimination in the workplace, women have to work several times harder than men to achieve the same level of things.
Xiaofeng said that on the day she and Zhao Wen got married, as a bride, she was taken care of in every possible way, and even relatives were responsible for laying out the wedding quilt. At that time, she thought she was a happy princess, but looking back now, she was like a thing that was sent to someone else's bed that day.