An 80s female translator was spoiled rotten by a rough and jealous man.

Chapter 107 The Past Was Slow

Huo Qingshan knocked on Meng Youyou's door.

The door was opened from the inside, and a wave of hot air rushed out.

"Are you ready to eat?" Meng Youyou asked.

"Not yet. Shall I come in?"

"Huh?" Meng Youyou peeked out of the corridor and looked back and forth a couple of times, her expression hesitant. "Isn't this inconvenient? What if someone sees us and thinks we're on a paid trip? That wouldn't look good."

Huo Qingshan laughed: "I'm here to talk to you about serious matters, what have you been thinking about?"

She then added, "Why don't you come out with me? We can talk in the lobby."

The smile that hadn't faded from the corner of the man's eyes still held a hint of amusement.

What a fine gentleman's act you've got! Huh?!
You'd better keep doing this.

Learn from you.

Meng Youyou flung the door open, turned and walked into the room, leaving behind the words, "Please come in!"

The room is heated, and it's perfectly fine to stay inside; she doesn't want to go out!
Huo Qingshan followed him into the room.

Meng Youyou straightened the chair and gestured with her hand: "Commander Huo, please sit down."

She found a chair and sat down, with a tea table between them.

Meng Youyou asked in a businesslike tone, "Did Battalion Commander Huo want to see me about something?"

A standard, faint smile still lingered at the corners of his mouth.

After Huo Qingshan sat down, he immediately began discussing official business: "Grandpa Yang's parents and younger brother have all passed away one after another, and we haven't been able to contact his sister through the Ministry of Civil Affairs yet."

Meng Youyou tightened her grip on the cup, and after a moment she slowly spoke: "Actually... I think Grandpa Yang was already prepared. After all, he was someone who had carried a gun and been on the battlefield. He had seen so many life-and-death things, so he's not that fragile. Let's just tell him directly."

She made her decision.

……

Early the next morning, Huo Qingshan, Meng Youyou, and Yang Jianze walked out of the state-run hotel, where the black Shanghai-brand sedan from the previous day was parked.

Liu Jianhong had excellent eyesight; as soon as the group appeared, he quickly stepped forward to greet them.

Today they are driving to Yang Jianze's hometown, Xingyang Village. Due to war and natural disasters, it was divided into two villages many years ago and both were renamed. Yang Jianze's hometown is in the upper village, which has now been renamed Beiyang Village.

After entering the village, the driver stopped the car, turned around and asked the elderly Yang Jianze how to get there next.

The old man's words kept repeating themselves, but he couldn't come up with a clear, logical, and coherent statement.

After all these years, I can't really remember clearly.

It was Liu Jianhong who stepped in to mediate: "Why don't we go to the village committee first and talk to the village chief and secretary? Maybe we can get more useful information."

None of the people in the car objected.

The village chief was a man in his early fifties, more than ten years younger than Yang Jianze. When Old Yang went to war, he was probably still a little kid who hadn't been weaned yet.

Naturally, they couldn't get much useful information, but they later checked the village chronicle and also looked through the family genealogy. Finally, after much searching, they were able to pinpoint the location of the Yang family's ancestral home.

The village chief led the group at the front, while Meng Youyou helped Grandpa Yang walk in the middle.

Despite the passing years, perhaps due to her eagerness to return home, familiar features of the village kept appearing along the way, and Meng Youyou could sense that her grandfather seemed to be walking faster and faster. At this moment, the village chief suddenly spoke up, turning to the side and pointing to a dilapidated mud house not far ahead, calling out to everyone, "That's it, the Yang family's ancestral home."

A few unfamiliar faces suddenly appeared in the village. Although their numbers were not large, the younger ones were well-dressed and had striking appearances, which attracted a group of idle villagers to come and join in the fun.

I want to see what's going on.

Old man Yang Jianze stood in front of the old house, staring blankly at the dilapidated building that was no longer recognizable as a house.

Large chunks of the wall had crumbled away, revealing a mess of dry grass and rubble underneath.

The broken roof beam protruded from under the eaves. After a long period of wind and rain, the wood was dry, cracked, rotten, bent and deformed.

The crowd gathered behind them was buzzing with discussion. Most of them were around forty or fifty years old, and none of them knew who Yang Jianze was or what this old man was doing in their village.

Suddenly, an elderly woman with gray hair and a cane walked out from the crowd, trembling.

Meng Youyou was the first to notice, and just as she was about to ask what was going on, she saw the old woman raise her cane and poke Grandpa Yang's heel.

Grandpa Yang then turned around, and the two looked at each other.

After an unknown amount of time, the old woman spoke her first words: "So you know how to come back? I thought you were dead."

Her voice was hoarse, like the hissing sound of an old bellows being pulled, the years leaving indelible marks on her throat.

With a sudden "plop," to everyone's surprise, Grandpa Yang knelt down in front of the old woman, his voice choked with emotion: "Cui'er, I'm sorry."

The days used to pass slowly
Carriages, horses, and mail were all slow.
One lifetime is only enough to love one person.

On the way back, Meng Youyou buried her face in Huo Qingshan's arms and secretly shed tears. Huo Qingshan held her with one arm and patted her back gently with the other from time to time.

In high school Chinese textbooks, almost every middle school student has studied excerpts from Shen Congwen's "Border Town".

Meng Youyou found the original book and read the whole thing. It wasn't a thick book, and she remembered the last paragraph vividly:
But when winter came, the collapsed white pagoda was rebuilt, and the young man who sang under the moon, whose song gently lifted Cui Cui's soul in her dreams, had not yet returned to Chadong. Perhaps he would never return, or perhaps he would return "tomorrow"!
"This person may never come back, or he may come back 'tomorrow'!"

"How annoying!" Seventeen-year-old Meng Youyou couldn't help but complain as she read this.

Do all these famous writers like to leave blank spaces when writing novels?
They're all like that.

Really annoying!
In the book review assignment given by that same Chinese teacher who was both loved and hated, Meng Youyou wrote: I hope that Cui Cui can wait for the person she wants to wait for.

There are no fancy book reviews; this is just the simplest wish of a young girl in her naive years.

However, the Chinese teacher, whom I both love and hate, once again displayed the most realistic and cruel side of a middle-aged woman. She wrote in her comments under the homework: "This is just your beautiful but unrealistic vision. But from a literary point of view, we all know what the quotation marks around 'tomorrow' at the end of the article means. The literary undertone of 'Border Town' is tragedy."

In fact, Meng Youyou knew that the people Cui Cui was waiting for were unlikely to return.

After the composition books were returned, the stubborn girl Meng Youyou, unconvinced, wrote a few more sentences under those few lines of elegant red pen writing: In real life, would anyone really be willing to wait indefinitely for someone who might never return? It's just a literary creation, a pipe dream!
……

But today, Youyou got the answer.

Yes, there will be.

Before he left, he gave her a love lock and said, "Cui'er, when I go out to fight and win the war, I will come back and marry you."

For over forty years, he wandered in foreign lands, remaining unmarried until his return, only to learn that she was still unmarried.

If you lock it, people will understand.

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