2511 No Hope
Wei Wucai unlocked the door with his fingerprint and went inside the house.
As he changed into the slippers in the hallway, he heard his mom, Dong Muping, say, "Xiao Cai, you are home."
"…" Wei Wucai changed into slippers and said in a helpless tone, "Mom, I am very old. You should stop calling me names that make it sound like I am a little girl."
Whenever Wei Wucai thought about this, he felt sad.
Even before Dong Muping got married, she had been determined that she would have a daughter after marriage.
Dong Muping thought that sons would eventually belong to another family, but daughters would always be their parents' warm, small, and cotton-padded jacket.
Therefore, she really wished that she could have a daughter.
After she got married to Wei Hezhang and was trying to get pregnant, she had even asked Wei Hezhang if he wanted a boy or a girl.
If Wei Hezhang wanted a boy, Dong Muping would have been very mad.
Thankfully, Wei Hezhang did not say that because he did not care about the child's gender.
And so, his answer was that both were good.
Yet Dong Muping had not been satisfied with his answer, "Girl! It must be a girl! Quick, say that you like daughters!"
As Wei Hezhang didn't care about the future child's gender, he quickly agreed and said that he wanted a daughter. He absolutely wanted a daughter.
When Dong Muping got pregnant, she could not even bear to hear anyone saying that she might be pregnant with a boy.
Once they could check the child's gender, Dong Muping had been adamant not to do so. She said, "No, I am not checking. I do not want to know."
A result that showed that she was pregnant with a boy would have been like a death blow to her.
And so, they did not check the baby's gender.
When they were thinking about names, they only thought of names for girls.
When the baby was born, they found out that it was a boy.
This was a heavy blow to Dong Muping.
Nevertheless, no matter what, this was her child and she still gave the child love and affection.
However, the names that they'd thought of previously were too feminine and were not suitable for this baby.
And so, they needed to come up with new names.
Because Dong Muping was still determined to have a daughter, she eventually still named the baby Wei Wucai with the word "Cai" meaning colors.
This name also had the meaning of regret over not having daughters.
When Wei Wucai was still very young, Dong Muping had clothed Wei Wucai with the dresses that she had bought even before she was pregnant.
Because kids would often dirty their clothes, Wei Wucai would change multiple times per day. This coincidentally satisfied Dong Muping's need to dress Wei Wucai up.
During the age when Wei Wucai was one or two years old, the young age that could still allow his mother to dress him up…
Dong Muping would tie his hair and dress him up with tiny dresses.
People who didn't know him would actually think that he was a girl.
Of course, when Wei Wucai grew up a little more, these actions became inappropriate.
However, Dong Muping still called him Xiao Cai as she had done since Wei Wucai was a baby.
When Wei Hezhang saw that Dong Muping wanted a daughter so much, he suggested, "Why don't we have another kid when Xiao Cai is five or six?
Because of Dong Muping, Wei Hezhang also got used to calling the baby Xiao Cai.
It wasn't good for women to have kids too frequently.
However, it shouldn't be too bad if they waited five or six years.
However, no matter what persuasion technique was used, Dong Muping refused to have another kid.
"What if we have another son? I can't take another heavy blow. One is enough," Dong Muping said. "I can only expect Xiao Cai to bring back a sweet daughter-in-law for me to love."
But even as Dong Muping wished and hoped for the presence of a daughter-in-law, Wei Wucai never brought one back for her.
Looking at Wei Wucai's current situation, Dong Muping felt a sense of suffocation as she thought that there was no hope of Wei Wucai bringing a daughter-in-law back home.
