I asked the girl.

"Why did you set aside two bowls of rice? Are you going to eat it at night?"

The girl shook her head.

"This is what I eat, and my new mother and I eat!"

The girl said, bringing all the dishes to the table. The women of the village were not allowed to eat at the table, not even the daughters of other people.

Women don't have the right to go to the table, even the three-year-old son behind the girl. Although he is a son, because he is too young, he has no right to go to the table.

The younger son can wait until the adults finish eating and then pick up the leftovers on the table. The girl didn't even have the qualifications to pick up leftovers, she could only eat dry rice, swallow it bite by bite, and then smell the meat fried by herself in the house, and silently swallow saliva into her stomach.

I simply poured the only meat dish on the table, that is, fried pork belly and chili peppers, into the girl's bowl.

"Children grow up, eat more meat! We adults eat meat, and we're spoiled!"

Because I had given money, the owner of the shop, although he had a very bad face, did not stop me from acting.

The girl didn't speak, but silently walked into another locked room with her rice bowl.

I didn't go to the door of the room to take a look, but I knew in my heart that the girl's new mother should be locked up in that locked room.

Because faintly, I would hear a woman's moaning coming from that room. The woman seemed to be in pain, probably just beaten.

I had a hasty meal, and when I helped pack up the dishes and chopsticks to the kitchen. Only then did I realize that the bowl of meat I poured for the girl, she didn't even move. She just dipped the rice underneath in the broth and ate it cleanly. And the pork belly on top is still so crystal clear, full of stacks in the bowl.

Girls don't dare to eat meat. She had long since become less of a flesh-and-blood person, more like a marionette carried in the hands of the shopkeeper.

Early the next morning, Pan Donghan and I got up early, and the shopkeeper still didn't do his own business today, so he decided to take us door-to-door to collect mountain goods, that is, dried pears.

The pears on the mountain are all wild pears, and of course there are also those grown by their own families. Every autumn, when the pear trees are full of fruit, the villagers will take these wild pears home, and the pears that have just been plucked from the trees are not so delicious. It will be a little sour, but it is full of pear flavor, special fragrance, and the taste is completely different from the taste deducted from the greenhouse.

The villagers would make small cuts on these noses, expose them to the sun, and hang them on the eaves to dry.

After the fist-sized pears are dried into dried pears, only the size of a sand fruit remains. Some of them are smaller, and they taste like dried sweet potatoes, but the taste becomes extremely sweet and the pear aroma is rich.

Such naturally made dried pears are rare outside, and some good stores specialize in dried fruits and nuts.

So some people specially went up the mountain to collect dried pears, seven or eight pieces of 1 catty purchased, and when they got to the bottom of the mountain, they would be sold for forty or fifty-one catties in a blink of an eye.

I told the owner of the shop that I was willing to pay a lot of money for the dried pears on the mountain. Other small traders and vendors give 8 yuan a pound at most, and I am willing to give 15 yuan a pound.

When the owner of the shop heard this, he first took out his own inventory. It's only about 20 pounds in total! After all, this thing has shrunk seriously because of drying, and 100 catties of fragrant pears can't make ten catties of finished products in the end.

I gave the boss more than 300 yuan to buy his family's dried pears. Then he asked him to take me from house to house in the village to collect mountain goods.

I walked one by one, one by one. To be honest, I don't have much in my heart. I also wish I could meet Chu Qingqing in the mountains.

But there is still a faint worry in my heart, because Chu Qingqing is either the one who went up the mountain by himself or was deceived by those people to go up the mountain.

I'm afraid that she hasn't been up the mountain for a few days now, and it is estimated that she will not be released, and she should be locked in the room by others.

only

Like the shopkeeper and the woman in the house. Yesterday I secretly talked to the little girl, and the little girl said that every new mother she was brought home. will be locked up in that small room for half a year, some new mothers are more persistent, and the longest woman was locked up for two whole years, and then that woman died!

I was in a bit of a trance in my heart, walking one by one, one by one.

Some of the families have female dependents, most of whom are in their 40s, followed by three or four children.

Some of these women have been deceived into going up the mountain for 20 years, some of them are scarred, and some of them have fully adapted to the environment of the village. They don't have any act of resistance, and they even love their husbands and children. Keep the house very clean.

However, most families still don't have female dependents. It's not that there isn't, it's that we don't see those women. Most of the women had just come up the hill and were to be locked up, but we couldn't see anyone, and we could hear the women's howls from time to time.

There are about 80 households in the entire Upper West Village! It is sparsely populated, but the villagers are united, like a village made of hard copper walls.

We go from house to house, and some families are poorer, so they can collect ten catties of dried pears. Some families are relatively wealthy and can collect more than 50 catties of dried pears.

I asked Pan Donghan to take a small notebook and write down all the goods received by each household. In fact, I asked Pan Donghan to remember not how many goods each family received, but to remember which family did not see the female dependents, and which family had a woman who had just been arrested in the room.

We walked from the east end of the village to the east of the village, and after walking for most of the day, we finally saw the richest family in the village.

As soon as I arrived at the door of this house, I saw three dolls running freely on the ground.