Xiaotong

China is a big country with many mouths to feed. Most of its food is imported. That's why our farm made only enough to live on. Most of our young men went into the city in hopes of becoming rich, ending up as cheap labor for factories.

Women normally didn't have the physical strength to work in the fields or in factories. Those that didn't marry scraped by. Except Zhang Ayi, who was nearing sixty, still single and living comfortably. 

After all, no one in their right minds would marry a poor factory worker from a rural village. Wives were bought, from a neighboring village or the city. Zhang Ayi traded in them. We would visit her sometimes, when she had brought back a younger girl, to check out a suitable future wife for my younger brother.

My mother was from the city. She had been in her first year of colllege when she went to a party and got drunk in the wrong corner of town. She had woken up as the van transporting her to our village bounced over a pothole.

She was pretty, and I had her looks. They fetched us an extra hundred yuan when I was sold. I was six. It was the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. My mother counted the 300 yuan under the moonlight. I recounted the sum, rejoicing that they would be able to eat meat once a day for the rest of theweek. My father took 5 yuan and bought two mooncakes. I got to have an entire cake to myself for the first time in my life.

My future husband was 7 then. His father had gone to work in the city, and had by some miracle been promoted to foreman, making them the richest family in the area. My parents were very happy about the match.

Zhang Ayi drove me to their village in the same van that had brought my mother to ours. We stopped in front of the most extravagant house I had ever seen. There were two whole stories, and every inch was covered in white paint, without a single water stain. They didn't even have any tilled land, only two large fishponds.

Something was off, though.  Not a bit of red could be found throughout the entire village. I had only seen that once before, when my grandmother passed away. Otherwise, there was always some red in the form of a banner, or lucky charm or such.

Zhang Ayi went inside the house for five minutes and came out, cursing under her breath and muttering about someone "dying without even paying me, the bastard."

She got back in and started driving. I thought of asking why we were leaving, if we had come to the wrong place, but she seemed angry, and I had learned not to ask an angry adult questions the hard way.

I threw up, twice, once on the seat and once out the window after I learned how to roll it down. Then I fell asleep in the midst of the stench. Zhang Ayi really did not look happy, but she said nothing.

She shook me awake a while later. "We're here. Get out."

My feet hit the ground unsteadily. I looked up once I could stand properly. And then up, and up, and up.

Not a single building around me was less than three stories high.  More people than I had ever seen in my life jostled around me. Cars that looked too new, too luxurious to dream of honked on the streets. Everyone and everything looked more expensive than me.

I stood for a whole minute just taking it in, with Zhang Ayi impatiently tapping her foot beside me, before realization hit me.

This was how my mother had described the city.

So a whole chapter and nobody from EXO has appeared ...somehow I haven't gotten to them yet, and may not for another chapter at most. Sorry...

$1 is approximately 6～7yuan, so Xiaotong was sold for around $40～50.

Ayi means something like Auntie or ahjumma.

...Is it okay so far?