Chapter 103: Facing Reality

Page 1 of 3
She sighed, and Tang Mother immediately asked, “Xin, is your money enough?”
In this world, who would ever complain that money was too much? Yet Tang Xin answered her mother honestly, “Don’t worry, there are not many places to spend here. I’m getting by quite well.”
It was a truly sincere answer, not a perfunctory one meant to placate her parents.
Whether Tang Mother believed it or not, no matter how far apart the two were, phone calls only amounted to mutual comfort.

After that, their moods improved a great deal, and later Tang Xin did not bid farewell to Tang Father again—Tang Mother simply hung up first.
Even Li Sheng noticed it all.
Perhaps Tang Mother and Tang Father did not get along well, and his wife and her real father did not either.

Besides, while Li Sheng and Tang Xin were trying to maintain a bond with Tang Mother only to grow farther from Tang Father, Mengjia was planning her own moves.
She hadn’t gone home for the New Year, but she called her own mother and wept; then Meng’s mother ran to Tang Father with tears in her eyes and tears running down her nose.
That stirred Tang Father’s deep fatherly love, and he eventually agreed to send the hundred yuan to Tang Mother, thinking that if his daughter had money, she and Mengjia would share it anyway.
In truth, he also knew that money was not his—it was private savings his wife had scraped together over a lifetime.
The thought that Mengjia and Tang Xin would spend it together filled him with quiet satisfaction.

Of course, he rarely communicated with his daughter by phone, so Mengjia’s complaints reached him only through Meng’s mother.
Meng’s mother, a calculating and cautious woman, had never let it cross Tang Father’s path that Tang Xin’s relationship with Mengjia had already broken.
So Tang Father still believed his daughter merely had a bad temper and had had a small quarrel with Mengjia.
That is why he did not add that the money was meant to be spent together with Mengjia.

Now Tang Xin was not the same as before. If Tang Father dared to say that, she would snap back with a fierce glare,
“That money is my mother’s. My mother sent it to me. Why should I spend it with someone else?”
Mengjia, of course, did not realize that Tang Father had indirectly sent her money and parcels as well—anything sent had to be handed to her by Tang Xin.
The Mengjia who had come back to life was proud as the heavens, convinced she was a favorite of fate and that a dazzling life awaited her.

Page 2 of 3
But months passed. The man she wanted did not want her, and even ordinary days seemed to grow only worse.
In her previous life she had lived a plain, mediocre life, and she had once thought that if life could start again, she would do things differently.
Yet after truly being reborn, Mengjia discovered that appearance, temperament, habits, even the sharpness of the mind were fixed.
Life starting over did not magically turn her into someone else.

She had not become more capable or outstanding, nor did she suddenly possess astonishing beauty.
Though she had a few early advantages, she had no capital, and with the real market still years away, she had no idea what she could do.
At heart, Mengjia was a girl who loved comfort, hated hard work, and cherished display; she feared toil and fatigue and could not bear a harsh life.
Though, with time, many people might become successful after years of relentless struggle, who truly understands the pain of that path?

From the very beginning, Mengjia had never intended to endure that suffering.
So after seeing things clearly in her rebirth, she never dreamed of winning success by her own effort. She only wanted to find a good man and marry him.
Naturally that man was Lu Liqin. The life she imagined—Tang Xin as the wife of a great man—was exactly what reborn Mengjia sought.

Her first urgent task was to clear Tang Xin out of the way.
Everything moved swiftly. As Mengjia had wished, Tang Xin became entangled with another man and even married him.
But Mengjia paid dearly. She ended up in open conflict with Tang Xin, was denied all her “good deals,” and was forced to sign a debt note.
Even worse, it was Tang Xin who had been unreasonable and bullying, yet Lu Liqin seemed to see nothing.
In his mind, even if Tang Xin had already married, there was no room in him for another girl. Their relationship did not deepen in the least; it only felt as though it were drifting farther apart.

Then Mengjia panicked: What on earth was she to do now?

And Tang Xin, who had been forced by design to marry Li Sheng, the worst-natured man in the brigade, found married life gradually becoming unexpectedly pleasant.
She saw it with her own eyes—the Li family were all so kind to her.
She had married a man from the countryside, yet her life was decent enough; Mengjia, trying to recall, could not remember a single person named Li among the prominent people she had once met while following Lu Liqin’s household.

Page 3 of 3
Let the later details be discussed later. But whenever Mengjia thought of Tang Xin’s good in-laws—an arrangement she herself had engineered—her stomach turned.
This only hardened her determination to marry Lu Liqin.
It was clear: the normal route, going out with him openly and then progressing naturally to marriage, would not work. So Mengjia decided to take another path.

After New Year, the sent-down youth camp held a banquet. Besides feeding their own people, they also invited the brigade chief and others.
For those sent-down youths, if they wanted to do well here, the first person they had to get along with was the brigade chief.
Reality had taught them a lesson: once they had descended with grand ambitions, thinking, “Build a new countryside and return after a while.”
How it turned out was another matter.
The earliest youths who came to Fengshou Brigade had already been there nearly ten years; even with visits home, they had only left for three or four short spells.

So most of them now knew they would have to keep living here, and it was essential to maintain good relations with everyone in the brigade.
They pooled what they had and put together as decent a feast as they could. Besides the people from the sent-down youth office, they invited Tang Xin and Li Sheng as well.
After all, Tang Xin had married out from the youth point, and isolating her alone would look improper.

Even girls like Li Xuewei and the others came from poor families and were used to labor since childhood, so cooking several dishes in a kitchen was no problem at all.
Tang Xin, of course, was not empty-handed either. She brought dishes her mother-in-law had prepared: scrambled eggs with chives, dried meat with preserved bamboo shoots, and two cold plates.
A few other youths prepared things like stir-fried pork with mushrooms and peanuts, and somehow fetched in two fish from somewhere.
The most extravagant was Lu Liqin, who simply paid out of pocket and bought a chicken from a fellow villager’s home, making half of it into soup and cooking the other half with potatoes.

When Mengjia, moving about by Lu Liqin’s side and bustling like a hostess at home, Mulh? no—when Mengjia was fussing around him like a housewife, Tang Xin only gave a faint smile.
In truth, inside she was relieved that Li Sheng had come with her; otherwise, alone she would have been pitied.

The Comeback Life of the Disposable Supporting Woman will continue to be updated without errors on New Book Sea Pavilion; there are no advertisements inside. Please bookmark and recommend New Book Sea Pavilion.
If you enjoy The Comeback Life of the Disposable Supporting Woman, please add it to your favorites. It is updated there at the fastest pace.