She went into his house， and that was it. There was no ceremony， no wedding feast， and they certainly didn’t kneel together to pay respects and receive blessings of heaven and earth， as every other married couple in the village had+ You Hui’s parents died a long time before， and there were no other senior family members to be righteously outraged.
That was how， without any effort （and he was a notorious slacker） You Hui got married to the most beautiful woman in Water Village， with none of the usual help from matchmakers or family connections. Everyone in Water Village remembered and talked about the details of the day of Grandma Hui’s arrival for a long time afterward. Some liked to talk about her beautiful cheongsam-it was the kind of thing you’d only normally see a young， rich man’s wife wearing. Then there was her hair； black， shiny， tied in a bun with a fancy silver clasp. She wasn’t an ordinary country girl-one look at her pale white skin told you that.Nobody heard her speak until several days after she arrived，but when she began to talk with her new fellow villagers，her accent was unfamiliar， so she was not only from some kind of wealthy background， but she was also practically a foreigner.
All in all， no one was under any illusions that You Hui convinced her to marry him without some kind of trickery.The troubling part was， you’d think she was an idiot to have fallen into his trap， but she wasn’t， not at all. Quite the opposite， she could actually read， which was more than could be said for almost the entire village of Water Village!Added to that， You Hui was far from bright. It didn‘t make any sense! Grandma Hui didn’t talk much to start with， let alone go around making a show of her literacy， but everyone remembered the first time it revealed itself in full. One of those occasions was when a Communist Party official from northern China was visiting the village. He’d called a village meeting and was reading to the villagers from a newspaper. The article was about the Korean War， and when he read out the words “Yalu River” as in the river on the China-North Korea border， he slightly mispronounced the “lu” sound， obviously because he misread the Chinese character that corresponded with it， so it became “Yalew.”Grandma Hui tried hard to suppress a titter. The official asked her what she was laughing about， and eventually she had to break it to him that he’d made a mistake reading the newspaper. But the official would simply not be corrected.
“I know what I'm saying. It’s pronounced ‘lew’， like the ‘lew’in ‘wearing a green hat’”.“ Grandma Hui blushed. But she wasn‘t finished-she still had to educate the official on the differences between “support”and “volunteer”，which have very similar pronunciations in the standard Mandarin of the newspapers. Regrettably， the official was unrepentant：
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