"Carp, tofu, square-cut pork. Why is there still one kind of fruit missing? You two grown men stayed home and didn't know to prepare it beforehand? You just waited for me to come back and bustle around?"
"It snowed heavily yesterday. The fruit sellers didn't come out, so I bought calcium milk biscuits instead."
"Instead? Can that sort of thing be substituted? Why don't you go down there and ask whether the Li family ancestors are willing to accept a substitute? Why not spend money to have someone else visit the graves for you? Wouldn't that save you trouble?
"You're both such grown people, yet you can't even handle such a tiny matter properly. Look at this house—it's like a dog's nest. If you two couldn't clean it up, couldn't you have had Mingxiang come over and do it?"
When Wu Juying returned to the family home in Qingshui County, she began preparing for the ancestral rites. As she checked over every item her husband and son were supposed to have prepared, her mouth kept chattering away with an "extremely overbearing" air. Neither Li Zhongfa nor Li Kaijian dared talk back.
The father and son were both standard Dongshan men. At work, they were both figures of some standing, but when it came to household trivia, they were complete scatterbrains. This was missing, that was forgotten, and with one sentence—"The ancestors won't blame us"—they tried to brush it all aside.
But to a woman who believed in ghosts and gods, such things were no small matter. Besides, Li Ye's relationship with Old Scholar Tree was simply too mysterious and profound. Wu Juying believed in it beyond all doubt; turning her into an atheist would have been harder than ascending to heaven.
So when Li Ye saw his grandmother Wu Juying