Xia Xiaolan appeared quite happy and started thinking about how to cook the black carp as soon as she got home.

Liu Yong and the others couldn’t tell if her happiness was genuine or fake, but they went along with whatever she said. While Xia Xiaolan had no knife skills to speak of, Li Feimei was experienced in cooking. Following Xia Xiaolan’s instructions, she deboned and sliced the fifteen-jin black carp, taking half the meat to slice thinly, then mixed it with two beaten eggs, cooking wine, ginger, and salt to marinate. She coated it with cornstarch and set it aside.

Meanwhile, she was busy making fish balls with the other half of the meat.

Making fish paste was troublesome – you had to scrape the meat into a paste using the back of the knife while removing any bones. Finally, salt and eggs were added, and the paste had to be stirred continuously until it became gelatinous enough to form into balls.

“This is so much work!”

Li Feimei was sweating. She could handle steaming buns, making dumplings, or cooking lamb noodle soup – ordinary home dishes. This was her first time making such an elaborate dish, but since Liu Zitao couldn’t eat spicy food, and a fifteen-jin black carp was too much for water-boiled fish anyway, making half into fish balls would give everyone something novel to try. Any leftover fish balls would keep for a couple of days.

“Delicious food takes effort. City folks are more particular about their cooking than us village people.”

Liu Yong had eaten this dish at state-run restaurants. Their home cooking wouldn’t match the skill of professional chefs, but even partially replicating it would do justice to the fish. Xia Xiaolan knew how to make water-boiled fish. She took out some preserved vegetables from the jar, chopped them finely with ginger and garlic, cut dried chilies into small pieces, and peeled some green onions.

The family acted as if the incident at White Stream Temple had never happened.

After heating oil in the wok and frying the seasonings until fragrant, Xia Xiaolan created a simplified version of water-boiled fish.

Though it couldn’t compare to restaurant quality, it looked appealing. With Li Feimei and Liu Fen monitoring the cooking time, the fish slices were tender enough. The homestyle taste was good – Xia Xiaolan’s water-boiled fish had passed the test!

The dish was perfect except for one thing – it used a lot of oil.

If you didn’t use enough oil, the chilies wouldn’t color properly, and the fish wouldn’t be as flavorful.

Previously, Li Feimei wouldn’t have splurged on cooking this way. Cooking oil costs over one yuan per jin, while salt was only two jiao per jin. Making a pot of fish requires at least one jin of oil. Even in summer when they could catch fish from the river for free, using so much oil for cooking fish would have been painful. Now, Li Feimei had a different perspective – if they could afford to buy a twenty-yuan fish, the cost of cooking oil was nothing.

Moreover, since the Xia family had paid for the fish, the water-boiled fish slices tasted even better.

Li Feimei suddenly remembered something, “That girl today, wasn’t she called Xia Chunhua before, not Xia Ziyu?”

“Yes, she was called Xia Chunhua, but after graduating from middle school, she thought her name wasn’t elegant enough and changed it to Xia Ziyu.”

Xia Xiaolan didn’t mock Xia Ziyu for this – changing a name you thought was too rustic wasn’t a big deal. Though Xia Xiaolan wouldn’t do it herself… after all, she wasn’t the one called “Xia Chunhua,” so she couldn’t understand how the person felt.

Li Feimei was displeased because Xia Ziyu’s name shared a character with her son Liu Zitao. Taotao was six years old and had been named at one month old, much earlier than Xia Ziyu. While shared names were common – not just the middle character “Zi,” but even identical full names weren’t rare – Li Feimei simply disliked Xia Ziyu and found fault with everything about her.

After dinner, Liu Fen secretly asked Li Feimei what to do about today’s events.

Li Feimei instead asked her:

“Do you want to remarry Xia Dajun? What if you cool down after a few months!”

Liu Fen had never considered remarrying. She was busy selling fried pork rinds, her time consumed by business and Xia Xiaolan’s affairs. How could she think about the past? A person might be used to submitting passively without knowing how to resist, but once they’ve tasted resistance and experienced being treated as a human, why go back to being a slave for the Xia family?

Liu Fen’s attitude was firm.

Li Feimei smiled, “Then what are you afraid of? Worried that Xiaolan might lose her mind and compete with Xia Chunhua for a man again? How could a man who lives off women compare to Zhou Cheng? I like everything about that Zhou Cheng boy.”

Zhou Cheng’s profession wasn’t very flexible – apart from not being able to meet often, there was nothing to fault about him.

But in the 1980s, not being able to meet frequently wasn’t a problem. Many couples lived apart their whole married lives. It was only in later generations when society changed so rapidly and both men and women faced more temptations, that long-distance relationships became particularly unstable.

Liu Fen naturally liked Zhou Cheng too. The young man’s spirited appearance would please most mothers-in-law, and he was especially attentive to Xia Xiaolan. Even when he couldn’t leave himself, he would ask friends to check on Xiaolan in Shangdu.

Women are all the same – to forget one man, find a better one.

Li Feimei is particularly related to this. She had no regrets about remarrying Liu Yong. Despite being poorer in the early years, the Liu family had no difficult in-laws to serve, and no complicated relationships with sisters-in-law. Li Feimei ran the household – it was much better than with her first husband.

In their years of marriage, they’d only had one big fight, during Spring Festival two years ago when debt collectors blocked their door. After the fight, Liu Yong went out to earn money.

Now, their family’s economic situation had suddenly improved, and they’d all moved to live in Shangdu. Li Feimei’s life couldn’t be more satisfying.

Even if her first husband knelt and kowtowed begging for her return, Li Feimei would have to be crazy to go back.

While the Liu family ate black carp, so did the Chen family.

Chen’s eldest sister-in-law wasn’t as refined in her cooking skills. She didn’t know how to make Sichuan-style water-boiled fish, but she could make spicy braised fish.

In later years, most restaurants in Shangdu would use grass carp for spicy braised fish, not because it was more authentic, but because black carp became increasingly hard to find, forcing restaurants to settle for grass carp as a substitute. The black carp Xia Xiaolan had given them was perfect for spicy braised fish. When the steaming hot dish was served, who in the Chen family could say it wasn’t delicious?

Chen Wangda picked up a piece of fish with his chopsticks. He preferred fish to chicken or duck – at his age, gnawing on bones was difficult, but fish meat didn’t require much chewing.

“That Xiaolan girl is right for Seven Wells Village.”

Chen Wangda wasn’t just grateful for Xia Xiaolan’s gift – the Chen family could afford a twenty-yuan black carp. But Xia Xiaolan never visited the village empty-handed. The value of the gifts wasn’t important; it was the thought that counted. Xia Xiaolan knew how to show gratitude and understood human relationships – that’s what Chen Wangda liked most about her.

Some villagers said the house plot given to Xia Xiaolan and Liu Fen was too large, but those fools knew nothing.

Without this house plot, what sense of belonging would Xia Xiaolan, who had only recently settled in Seven Wells Village, have? The girl was promising – after getting into university, she might never return. But now, no matter how far Xia Xiaolan went, her roots were in Seven Wells Village.

University students were precious nowadays. Wasn’t Big River Village praising Xiaolan’s cousin for getting into university while stepping on others?

What was so great about Big River Village having one university student? Seven Wells Village would soon have two!

Not all university students were the same – it would take ten or twenty years to see who was more capable. Chen Wangda was waiting for that day. Whether it was Xia Xiaolan or his grandson Chen Qing, one of them might bring new changes to the backward Seven Wells Village.

He hadn’t been educated, but he remembered what the old leader had said: picking up a gun could protect the country, but studying could govern it well.