"He should be quite a bit older. He was much older than my dad, by twenty years... maybe more... Hmm... He should be eighty or ninety this year, right? Our family married late, theirs married early. The father he acknowledged—the one who adopted him—was actually his maternal grandmother's older brother. His grandmother and that man were the only two siblings. They were both cousins of my grandfather, from a different branch of the family. When that man got married, my grandfather was still unmarried. By the time my grandparents married, that man had already adopted him. He'd also been divorced three or four times before that. None of his previous wives had had children, which was why he'd gone through so many marriages. The problem of having no children must have been his. His family was furious back then, and they argued and fought with the women..."
"Mm."
"Oh, I've gone off on a tangent. Xiao Ying was the youngest son in his original family, with three older sisters. I mean, for generations, his family was a mess. There was always one thing after another. They favored sons over daughters and were always doing things like marrying into a family, adopting someone, or taking someone on as a godchild. They also loved making a big spectacle of everything. It was a really old-fashioned way of doing things. When they acknowledged someone as family, they had all the relatives witness it in person. The same went for bringing in a son-in-law or adopting someone. Sometimes they'd even get people to talk things over and have relatives keep an eye on things, because they were afraid the adopted son or the son-in-law would run off... The rest of us relatives just watched the show. If it weren't for that, we couldn't possibly