Jiang Chun stood still without moving.
Want her to break up the fight? Simply dreaming. She couldn’t wait to wave a flag and cheer them on, hoping they’d tear into each other louder.
Jiang Hu saw her not moving and urged again: “Chun-niang, you’ve got strength, hurry over and pull the two of them apart, what kind of scene is this!”
He, a big and burly man, it wasn’t that he couldn’t separate them, but with so many people watching, he still had to make it clear he had nothing to do with Matchmaker Wang. How would he dare get close?
Jiang Chun leaned on the donkey cart’s sideboard and said in a strange tone full of sarcasm:
“Second Uncle, don’t make things difficult for me. I don’t dare touch the two of them. You know me, I’ve got strong hands. If I accidentally hurt someone, wouldn’t I be extorted? The money in our family was earned through hard work slaughtering pigs by me and my dad, not blown in by the wind. Second Uncle, how could you ask me to walk right into being blackmailed?”
Jiang Hu was choked to the point of leaning backward, and for a moment didn’t know how to respond.
This kind of thing, Ma-Shi and Matchmaker Wang were indeed capable of doing.
Even if Ma-shi didn’t go make a fuss at her elder brother-in-law’s house, her mother-in-law, Li-shi, would definitely seize the opportunity to go to her eldest son’s house to extort something and make off with some silver.
Just when there was no way out, a loud wail suddenly came from afar: “Matchmaker Wang, you stinking filthy whore, hurry up and hand over our Jiang family’s silver bracelet!”
Jiang Chun immediately said “oho” in her heart again.
Her grandmother, Li-shi, had arrived. Things just got even more lively.
But Jiang Hu nearly blacked out. Why had his mother come? Things were already chaotic enough—what was she here to stir up now?
Li-shi squeezed past the crowd of rubberneckers and rushed in. The moment she saw her daughter-in-law and Matchmaker Wang tangled together, she immediately charged in to help.
This old woman who spent her days loving to tear into others was more cunning than Ma-shi, and her fingers picked precisely the tender insides of the arms and thighs to pinch.
In no time, Matchmaker Wang was pinched so hard she let out soul-wrenching wails.
Jiang Hu’s heart ached terribly. He quickly rushed over to pull his mother back: “Mother, Mother, please don’t make things worse here.”
Li-shi elbowed him aside, threw down, “I’ll deal with you when we get home!”, then pounced again.
“Ah… it hurts…” Matchmaker Wang screamed, loudly cursing at Jiang Hu: “Jiang Erlang, are you even a man? Just standing there watching your mother and your wife gang up on me, is that it? You’re a grown man, and you can’t even control the women in your house—what a useless thing you are!” [“Erlang” (二郎) is a traditional way of referring to the second son in a Chinese family, or someone in the position of the second male child. ]
Jiang Hu was scolded until his face flushed red. He charged forward in anger and grabbed Li-shi around the waist, dragging her back.
Li-shi kicked in mid-air, slapping Jiang Hu’s arms while yelling, “Erlang, put your mother down! Put your mother down!”
Without Li-shi’s strong combat strength, the pressure on Matchmaker Wang lessened a lot. She turned her head and bit down on Ma-shi’s arm.
Ma-shi screamed “Aow!” and quickly let go of Matchmaker Wang’s hair, both hands pushing at her head, trying to rescue her own arm.
Matchmaker Wang took the chance to scramble up, lifted her skirt, and began fiercely kicking Ma-shi again and again.
In just a moment, she kicked seven or eight times.
Ma-shi rolled on the ground to dodge the kicks and only managed to get up after quite a while.
First her arm got bitten—probably broke the skin, burning with pain—then she got solidly kicked several times.
Truly, every part of her body hurt.
Ma-shi, being Li-shi’s niece, was cut from the same cloth as her aunt—someone who wouldn’t take a loss lying down.
She let out an “ah” scream, used all her strength, and rammed her head into Matchmaker Wang’s lower belly.
Matchmaker Wang, caught off guard, was directly knocked over to the ground, falling with arms and legs facing the sky.
Seeing this, Ma-shi immediately pounced, straddled her body, grabbed Matchmaker Wang’s hair with one hand, and began slapping her face with the other.
While slapping, she cursed: “Beat you to death, you prostitute! Daring to seduce my man! Daring to steal my dowry bracelet!”
Matchmaker Wang struggled desperately, but Ma-shi was tall and fat, and even with all her strength—like using the strength for breastfeeding [吃奶的劲 – idiom meaning using every ounce of strength]—she couldn’t manage to throw her off.
After getting slapped on the face more than ten times, she only felt dizzy with blurred vision, and her stomach hurt like hell.
Jiang Hu was extremely anxious, but in his hands was still his old mother bouncing and trying to rush in, and he had to hold her back. He had the will but not the power, so he could only shout: “Wife, wife, stop hitting! If you beat her up badly we’ll have to pay for her medicine!”
Li-shi heard this and spat, “Pei!”
“Pay for her medicine? She deserves it? Beat her! Beat her hard! Anyway, this filthy whore doesn’t lack lovers to pay her medicine money!”
The woman standing next to Jiang Chun, who was munching melon seeds while watching the drama, suddenly cried out “Ah!” and pointed forward, not even caring that all the seeds in her hand had spilled to the ground.
Jiang Chun followed the direction of her finger, and immediately sucked in a breath of cold air.
Only to see that Matchmaker Wang’s apricot-yellow pleated skirt was soaked red, and a large patch of the yellow earth beneath her had darkened.
The fat woman also saw it and shouted, “Stop hitting! Matchmaker Wang is bleeding from down there!”
The melon seed-eating woman came to her senses and also shouted, “Stop hitting! Matchmaker Wang’s lower half is bleeding a lot!”
Ma-shi was enjoying the beating, ears completely shut off to the voices around, just wanting to beat this prostitute who seduced her husband to death.
Jiang Hu heard the shouting, looked toward Matchmaker Wang’s lower body, and instantly turned pale with fright. He flung Li-shi aside with one shove and rushed forward to give Ma-shi a kick.
He directly kicked Ma-shi off of Matchmaker Wang.
Jiang Hu helped Matchmaker Wang sit up and shook her anxiously: “Madam Wang, Madam Wang, are you alright?”
Matchmaker Wang was dazed, unable to speak, only groaning a couple of times.
Ma-shi, having gotten up from the ground, couldn’t even avoid seeing Matchmaker Wang’s blood-soaked skirt. Her whole person was frightened dumb, sitting there stunned without reaction.
Jiang Chun really didn’t want to get mixed up in this mess—after all, neither Matchmaker Wang nor Li-Shi and her daughter-in-law were any good people.
She would love nothing more than for them to dogfight one another.
But that didn’t mean she wanted to see someone die.
If Matchmaker Wang died just like that, the second branch of the Jiang family would be hit with a manslaughter case.
The Great Zhou’s laws were strict—Ma-shi would most likely be executed immediately, and Li-shi, who took part in the group beating, would also receive a heavy sentence.
Back then, Li-shi only split Jiang He off from the family—Jiang He hadn’t actually been expelled from the clan.
If two murderers came out of the clan, whether for Jiang He or the Jiang clan members, it would be a terrible thing.
After all, the ancients placed great emphasis on clan reputation—truly sharing glory and loss together.
So Jiang Chun held it in for several moments, and in the end still spoke up to remind: “Second Uncle, hurry and send Matchmaker Wang to the medicine hall! If you’re late, she won’t survive!”
Jiang Hu was suddenly awakened as if from a dream, carried Matchmaker Wang up horizontally, and rushed in a hurry toward the medicine hall.
The crowd of melon-eaters immediately lifted their feet and followed.
This melon was hard to eat with a single sentence [这瓜吃得一言难尽 – idiom meaning “this drama was messy and hard to summarize”], Jiang Chun couldn’t be bothered to join in the bustle any longer.
After all, she had already reminded what needed to be reminded—if Matchmaker Wang really lost her life, and Li-Shi and her daughter-in-law were thrown into prison, that would be their own fault and deserved outcome.
—
Jiang He was pasting lanterns. Seeing his daughter return, he immediately showed off like he had found treasure and said: “Chun-niang, come quickly and look at the Mid-Autumn lantern skin your son-in-law wrote—he wrote it so well!”
Jiang Chun walked over and lowered her head to examine the lantern in her father’s hands.
On the light yellow thick cotton paper, written in square and upright Guange style was the verse:
“The bright moon rises over the sea, from afar we share this moment.” [海上生明月，天涯共此时 – famous Mid-Autumn poem line by Zhang Jiuling]
The corners of Jiang Chun’s mouth twitched.
What kind of scholarly person uses Guange style for inscription? Song Shi’an obviously just didn’t want to stir up trouble, that’s why he wrote like this.
But her father was illiterate—not knowing even a single big character—and thought that the squarer the characters, the better.
So she nodded against her conscience and said:.“Yes, it’s written very well. The horizontals are horizontal, the verticals are vertical, very neat and proper.”
Sitting on a small stool beside Jiang He, squinting and basking in the sun, Song Shi’an let out a faint snort when he heard this.
Jiang Chun had sharp ears and naturally heard it, but she pretended not to, went into the main room to get a small stool, and sat down opposite Jiang He.
Then she told Jiang He about the farce that had just happened in town.
The scissors in Jiang He’s hand dropped to the ground with a “clack,” and he shot up, immediately spinning in anxious circles.
“Foolish! Truly foolish! If something really happens to Matchmaker Wang, our Jiang family’s reputation will be completely ruined! Who would still want to marry into the Jiang family after that? What about those boys and girls in the clan?”
This speech of Jiang He’s made Jiang Chun look at him with new eyes.
The first thing he worried about wasn’t whether his own mother and younger siblings would be sentenced, but about the effect on the Jiang clan members.
In ancient times, having such an un-filially blind father was considered lucky—at least, that’s how Jiang Chun felt.
After pacing in circles for a while, Jiang He suddenly seemed to remember something and praised Jiang Chun:
“Chun-niang, what you did was very right. In the future, you must keep thinking of the bigger picture—consider things more for the sake of the clan.”
He circled a few more times, still uneasy, and finally threw out a line: “Father’s going to the clan leader’s house!”
Then he rushed out the door in a hurry.