CHAPTER 549: CHAPTER 549: INCREASING PRESSURE

"Am I supposed to hold out my hand to the Luo Family’s eldest brother and ask him to bring a wife into my home for me?"

Meng Xingsheng’s expression was despondent, yet if one paid close attention, it was not hard to detect a hint of resentment in his eyes.

Wang Guilan: "I don’t have the face for that."

Meng Xingsheng: "So you’re going to let me and the other brothers remain bachelors?"

"Are you all without hands or feet, unable to earn your own dowries?"

The old coot had kicked the bucket swiftly, leaving her alone to suffer in this household. Had she known this day would come, she would have never entered Old Meng’s Family’s door.

As Wang Guilan glanced at Meng Xingsheng and Meng Xingping, then looked out the doorway at a few of the younger ones, she felt a burden so heavy she could hardly breathe.

"Mom..."

Meng Xingping suddenly spoke up.

Wang Guilan: "Speak if you have something to say."

Meng Xingping: "Relying on earning work points and waiting for the year-end payout from the brigade, it could still take at least two or three years for my second brother and me to afford a bride."

"Having some is better than none. If worst comes to worst, you’ll have to think of other ways yourselves." Without their share of the public grain, like all the other villagers, weren’t they all earning work points in the fields?

If you don’t want to work, fine, but come time for the brigade to distribute the grain, you’ll get nothing. And at the end of the year when they distribute the cash, you’ll still get nothing.

"Put a bit more effort in, with the labor of you and your second brother, the money you get before the New Year won’t be little."

Hearing his mother say this, Meng Xingping pursed his lips and, ultimately, said nothing more before turning around and leaving the room.

Meng Xingsheng then asked Wang Guihua: "How much money can our family come up with right now?" Shuicao was a good girl, and he didn’t want to wait any longer.

"Can’t you do the math yourself? When your elder brother got married, our family already owed quite a bit of debt, and we’ve only managed to pay back a portion so far." Wang Guihua’s meaning was clear—there was no money!

If there was, it would have been used to pay off debts long ago.

Meng Xingsheng clenched his fists, took his gaze off his mother, and then left without looking back.

In the woods to the west of the village, as evening approached.

"Did Auntie agree to give my family a dowry of two hundred yuan?"

"We don’t have that much money in our family."

"So what do you plan to do?"

"When my elder brother got married, we already borrowed money and we haven’t finished paying it off yet. If we were to borrow more from the village, I’m afraid no one would..."

"My mother said, without a dowry of two hundred yuan, she won’t agree to betroth me to you."

The speaker was a seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl, tall and slender, with a comely face, her hair done up in a big herringbone braid.

Her surname was Cui, and her given name, Shuicao.

"You... don’t worry, I will definitely find a way to come up with two hundred yuan for your family’s dowry." That was Meng Xingsheng’s voice, standing face-to-face with Cui Shuicao, his demeanor slightly constrained, but his eyes revealed genuine affection.

Looking at him, Cui Shuicao’s face turned red, and biting her lip, she said, "Brother Xingsheng, I really do want to be with you, and I’m willing to wait, but if your family doesn’t send a matchmaker to my home to propose marriage soon, my parents might start looking at other potential suitors for me."

In the current times, for city folks to marry a bride, the dowry given to the girl’s family was usually around two or three hundred yuan.

Of course, for families with better conditions, it could go upwards of five hundred or more. For example, the dowry Luo Yanqing gave to Kang Li was definitely considerable.

But leaving the city aside, considering the dowries in farming families, those that gave a lot managed at most sixty or seventy yuan, going over a hundred was rare.

Some families could bring a bride home with just twenty or thirty yuan.

By comparison, Cui Shuicao’s family asking Meng Xingsheng for two hundred yuan in dowry was essentially demanding a king’s ransom. To put it bluntly, they weren’t marrying off a daughter, but selling her off.