It was autumn, 1979.
Outside the River City Song and Dance Theater, a young woman with twin ponytails, fair skin, and a tall, striking figure was just getting ready to head home after work when the elderly gatekeeper called out to her.
“Comrade Xiaoli, hold on a moment. There’s a letter for you.”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
Liu Xiaoli paused. A moment later, the old man returned with the letter and placed it in her hands. She glanced down. It was indeed addressed to her.
From Harbin.
A letter from home. A thick one.
Since it wasn’t convenient to open it now, Liu Xiaoli tucked the letter into the green canvas bag at her waist, thanked the gatekeeper once more, and set off.
“Teacher Little Chen, off work already?”
“That’s right, all done. See you next week, Teacher An.”
“See you next week.”
At the entrance to the Foreign Languages College at River City University, An Shaokang watched the retreating figure who had just cycled past him, a naked flicker of envy crossing his eyes.
“Shaokang, who was that?” a young female teacher beside him asked.
“Chen Fusheng.”
“Oh, he’s the Teacher Little Chen from the Foreign Languages College who just married a dancer last month!”
An Shaokang nodded through tears. He’d had his eye on that dancer too, but Chen Fusheng had come barreling in out of nowhere and beaten him to the punch.
If time could be rewound, he would never have dragged Chen Fusheng to that welcome party. Then maybe they wouldn’t even have had a chance to meet…
But what An Shaokang didn’t know was that Chen Fusheng had actually known Liu Xiaoli in his past life. And it wasn’t just Liu Xiaoli. He’d known her daughter too.
That’s right. Chen Fusheng was a transmigrator. He came from more than forty years in the future, or perhaps a parallel world.
In his past life, he’d been a Hengdian drifter, drifting for twenty years straight.
(T/N: Hengdian World Studios is a huge Chinese film/TV production base)
But none of that mattered now.
What mattered was the present. The here and now. This life.
In this life, Chen Fusheng had been born in 1957 and had just celebrated his twenty-third birthday last week. He worked as an English teaching assistant at River City University. Both his parents were professors there. He also had an older sister who was already married.
He had crossed over on the day of the welcome party in the first half of the year. Still dazed from the transmigration, he’d been dragged along by his predecessor’s friend An Shaokang to attend the party, and sure enough, it was that night he’d met the then nineteen-year-old Liu Xiaoli.
Everything after that was simple enough. A fair maiden, a gentleman’s pursuit. He and Old An had both courted her, but in the end, he’d won the beauty’s heart and gotten their marriage certificate just last month, on National Day.
To be honest, their marriage had been rushed. Chen Fusheng still hadn’t even met his father-in-law or mother-in-law. But there was no helping it. Girls in this era were conservative. Without marriage, you absolutely could not touch them.
And the crime of hooliganism hadn’t been abolished yet, so Chen Fusheng was wary.
Hence, the accelerated timeline. Thankfully, it was still 1979, and all you needed for a marriage certificate was your work unit’s approval. Wait another year, no, another few months, and you’d need the household registration booklet from home.
It was worth noting that after Chen Fusheng and Liu Xiaoli married, they didn’t live with his parents. The main reason was that his family home was quite far from Liu Xiaoli’s workplace, nearly seven or eight kilometers. The secondary reason was that the young couple wanted some privacy.
So before the wedding, Chen Fusheng had already bought a two-bedroom apartment with a river view near the River City Song and Dance Theater, in the Riverside Community, to serve as their marital home.
It had cost him several thousand yuan!
Of course, he didn’t have that much saved up. Even combined with Liu Xiaoli’s savings, it wasn’t enough. His parents had covered the bulk of it. The two of them had scraped together the remainder.
The Riverside Community was about five kilometers from River City University, with a produce market along the way. After work, Chen Fusheng would stop in every so often to buy groceries.
Given his personality, he’d prefer to buy a week’s worth at once, but they didn’t have a refrigerator yet. Buy too much and it would spoil and go stale. So the best he could do was a day or two’s worth at a time.
Today, Chen Fusheng was in luck. At the entrance to the market, he’d run into a father and son from the countryside selling swamp eels. Since they didn’t require ration coupons, he bought all of their stock. It wasn’t much, just eight eels, a little over five pounds.
But this was good stuff, and he hadn’t touched meat in over a week. His mouth was bored to death from blandness.
After leaving the market, Chen Fusheng didn’t delay, pedaling his bicycle straight into the Riverside Community.
Since Liu Xiaoli worked closer to home, she usually beat him back after work.
Today was no exception.
When she got home, she went into the kitchen first to rinse the rice and set it to cook. Since they only had a single burner, she’d need it to stir-fry the other dishes once the rice was done.
Then she gave the dirty clothes the two of them had changed out of last night a quick scrub, hung them on the balcony, and gathered the laundry she’d washed the day before yesterday, now dry.
After putting the laundry away, and with her husband still not home, Liu Xiaoli opened the letter from home that had arrived today.
As she read, her nose stung, and tears began to patter down her cheeks.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
Liu Xiaoli hurriedly wiped her eyes, set the letter down, and walked to the door. As she approached, she called out, “Who is it?”
From outside came: “Your man! Open up, I’ve got something good!”
“What good thing?”
Liu Xiaoli opened the door, curiosity getting the better of her as she immediately peered at what he was holding.
“What’s this?” She saw something wriggling in Chen Fusheng’s hands and stumbled back two steps in fright.
“Don’t be scared. It’s eel.”
Chen Fusheng comforted her, then noticed the tearstains on his wife’s face and quickly asked with concern, “Sweetheart, why were you crying?”
Liu Xiaoli looked at him with a hint of grievance. Seeing him open his arms, she threw herself into his embrace and said, “My parents wrote again…”
“What did they say in the letter?”
“They said when you come to Harbin, they’ll be sure to give you a proper welcome.”
“Hiss… Then do I even dare go?”
“If you don’t go, they’ll come to Jiangcheng and break your legs.”
“Holy crap, are they really that scary? You’re just messing with me, right?”
Liu Xiaoli lifted her head, a sly glint in her eyes.
She had taken some artistic liberties, but her parents’ letter really did urge them to come home soon.
Chen Fusheng leaned down and kissed her red lips, then said earnestly, “As soon as the school holiday starts, I’ll go back with you. And my parents will come too.”
“Mm!” Liu Xiaoli nodded. “Also, when my parents heard that this apartment cost a lot, they were worried we’d be short on money, so they sent me a thousand yuan.”
“You didn’t tell them we still had money?”
“I did, but they didn’t believe me.”
“Then just keep it. Consider it a loan. When you owe enough, you stop worrying about it.”
It was exactly this brazen shamelessness of Chen Fusheng’s that Liu Xiaoli admired.
The young couple shared some affectionate moments, then parted and headed into the kitchen together.
Liu Xiaoli, still a bit frightened by the eels that now spilled out looking somewhat like snakes, instinctively grabbed Chen Fusheng’s sleeve.
“How do we prepare these?”
“I’ll handle it. You just need to do the eating.”
Chen Fusheng set to work.
“Put on an apron, or the blood will get on your clothes and be hard to wash out.”
“My hands are full. Can you tie it for me?”
“Then turn around.”
After tying the apron on Chen Fusheng, Liu Xiaoli didn’t leave the kitchen. She stood beside him watching him work, listening as he explained.
“We can’t eat all of this.”
In truth, Chen Fusheng could have polished off all five pounds himself. But you couldn’t be so extravagant in this era. So he set aside half, planning to send it to his parents tomorrow.
“Good ingredients often need only the simplest preparation.”
“Pour less oil. It’s breaking my heart to watch.” Liu Xiaoli saw Chen Fusheng steadily pouring from the oil bottle into the wok and desperately wanted to step in and stop him.
“This dish needs a generous amount of oil, or it won’t taste right.”
“You think oil is cheap or something?” Liu Xiaoli smacked him on the back in exasperation.
Ten or so minutes later, Chen Fusheng lifted the lid, eyeing the fragrant, perfectly colored pot of eel with deep satisfaction in his masterpiece. Before serving it, he pinched a piece of meat with his chopsticks, blew on it, and held it out to his wife’s lips.
“Sweetheart, have the first bite.”
Whether it was the unpleasantness of watching the eel preparation, Liu Xiaoli couldn’t quite bring herself to open her mouth. “You eat it. I’m feeling a bit nauseous.”
“Nonsense, this is great stuff. Extremely nourishing.”
Seeing this, Liu Xiaoli endured the discomfort and put the piece of eel in her mouth.
The taste was actually decent, the texture tender and silky. But just as she was about to swallow, a surge of stomach acid rose up her throat. She crouched beside the trash can and vomited.
She threw up not just the eel she’d eaten, but retched dryly for quite some time.
It wasn’t until Chen Fusheng poured her a glass of water to rinse her mouth that she felt somewhat better.
“Was it really that bad?”
Once Liu Xiaoli had recovered, Chen Fusheng asked the question with deep suspicion. Then he picked a piece of eel from the pot himself, popped it in his mouth, chewed, and nodded.
“Tastes fine to me.”
Liu Xiaoli said, “I didn’t say it was bad. But maybe you used too much oil. Just thinking about it makes me feel queasy… Blergh.”
Before she’d even finished the sentence, Liu Xiaoli was hunched over the trash can retching again.
Chen Fusheng hurriedly patted her back, and at the same time, a bold thought suddenly struck him.
When Liu Xiaoli’s second round of retching ended, Chen Fusheng asked cautiously:
“Sweetheart… could you be pregnant?”
