Forty Years of Free Care, I'm Done, 40 Ep. Free

The one point two million in land compensation goes to the younger son, Jiang Bei, every cent of it, without a word of notice. Lin Xiu neither cries nor shouts. She says on the phone that whose money it is was always the mother's call, and that the care, the funerals and the holidays should therefore fall to the household that took the money. Then she closes the ledger, blocks the number, and prices forty years of free labour for the first time. Three days before New Year's Eve the call comes in on schedule: this year's reunion dinner standard is five thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight, transfer it now, the seafood market is about to close. Lin Xiu does not argue. She pushes a ledger kept for five years across to her husband: two thousand a month for living costs, eight hundred for imported medicine, one hundred and twenty thousand for the heart bypass. Then she says one sentence that puts forty years of this family's accounts on the table for the first time.