The Bumpy Road of Marriage: Divorce Now, Daddy

The old man shook his smoking pipe and inhaled deeply.

“You called it an infection. Here, we called it a plague,” declared the old man, as if to answer Gu Juexi’s question earlier.

“The plague took a lot of lives, including the husband and wife of the Ye family and their youngest son Ye Xuan. The brother, Ye Shu, and the sister, Ye Di survived,” said the old man with a sob.

“All his life, Brother Ye practiced medicine to help the people, but in the end, he died of the plague. Anyway, humans are very selfish by nature.”

As the old man was telling the story, Ye Yuwei’s hands curled into a fist.

“The first one to fall sick in the Ye family was Ye Xuan. The couple wanted to send Ye Shu and Ye Di away but no one was willing to take them in. Ye An was worried that the two kids might be infected by their brother, so he sent Ye Xuan to the isolation center. There were only a bunch of sick people there in the isolation center.”

The old man continued with a chuckle, “Two kids, five and three years old, stayed in an empty house without anyone looking after them. So I told my son to bring them over and I let them stay with me.”

“What happened then?”

“What happened? Since Ye An and his wife were treating the patients, they too were infected. It was that particular night that Ye An burnt the isolation center to ashes. It was untreatable! Everyone didn’t want to die so they wanted to escape from isolation but if they did, the whole county, no, the whole city would be infected and everyone would die. So, Ye An set the center on fire.”

“Those days, where could you find sensible and mature people? To save everyone else, Ye An burnt the place down, even though his own wife and son were inside with him. No one survived. However, it was very hard for Ye Shu and Ye Di after that. They became the target of bullying and insults in the neighborhood.”

Ye Yuwei’s fist clenched even tighter.

“Because Ye Shu and Ye Di were at my place, my noodle shop was affected badly as well. Every day, there would be people coming in to yell at them to get out of the village.”

The old man continued with a grin. “Hah! Humans… They were so ungrateful. The people who would have killed them were their own family and relatives. Ye An was the one who saved them all, but no one remembered that! All they knew, all they saw was that their family members were burnt to death, but they seemed to forget the reason they were dead.”

Gu Juexi held onto Ye Yuwei’s clenched fists.

“Ye Shu was a very intelligent kid. He was young, but he knew so much. People can be ungrateful but not me. I could close my shop, I could move, but I had to take care of these kids and live well,” said the old man while turning toward Ye Yuwei. “Your father is very smart, very sensible, but his problem was that he was too smart and too sensible for his age.”

“Then?” asked Ye Yuwei in a shaky voice. The only thing she wanted to know was what kind of person her father was.

“Then, my family and I took the two kids with us and left this place. My own kid was bad at school, but Ye Shu and Ye Di were intelligent. They basically skipped grades all the way from elementary to junior high and high school. Not only that, in junior high, Ye Shu learned to earn money by tutoring. He got himself a scholarship in high school and could even give me money every month. At that moment, I knew that boy was a golden boy with great prospects. He was at the tender age of fourteen when he was accepted into a university! Fourteen!”

Gu Juexi tapped his finger on the table. The timeline matched the age progression. When Ye Shu was doing his doctorate overseas, he was only twenty years old.