Reborn in a small village in the 1990s

Chapter 139

So, there's not much left of Old Zhao's old house. Just that dilapidated courtyard, which was quite large.

If you ask what's most valuable in Old Zhao's house right now, Zhao Da'e thinks it's that big pear tree, and the few towering poplars that Old Zhao's family planted in front of the old well in the backyard.

Those trees were planted by Zhao Tingxu when he was a child. They're all about sixty years old, standing in a row. They're thirty or forty meters tall.

In their past life, Zhao Tingxu and his wife had also run out of money, and in the end, they decided to sell those few trees to make ends meet. Ultimately, when Zhao Tingxu passed away, they didn't even have enough money for his coffin. It was only thanks to the wood provided by the village that they were able to make a very thin coffin board so he could be buried.

Whether he will be laid to rest in peace is unknown.

Therefore, the Zhao family is so poor that they are almost out of money. There is not much property to divide in this family, unless Zhao Tingxu has other debts that Zhao D'e is unaware of.

But even if there were other famines, Zhao Da'e didn't care.

You owed money through your own abilities, so you should pay it back yourselves. It's fine for children to pay their fathers' debts, but it's not her place as a granddaughter, especially since she's an unloved granddaughter. She has even less reason to concern herself with this.

Everyone knows that the Zhao family is poor. But they all live ordinary lives, and other families have already escaped poverty. Why is the Zhao family so poor? There are some historical reasons, as well as some problems that have emerged in recent times.

Zhao Da'e knew this all too well.

The Zhao family's poverty began more than a decade ago. Back then, the Zhao family had six children, and three of them were already in school: the eldest son, the youngest son, and the youngest daughter.

The remaining three children, for various reasons, could no longer afford to continue their education. According to custom, if someone in the family was studying, someone else would be working. Otherwise, given the economic conditions at the time, it would have been impossible to support so many children's education.

Zhao Tiesheng, the second son of the Zhao family and father of Zhao Da'e, dropped out of school because his older brother went to study and stayed home to work on the farm. Subsequently, the eldest and second daughters of the Zhao family were also forced to drop out of school one after another.

Later, things improved a bit, and when it was the time of Zhao Tiegang, the third son of the Zhao family, he also went to school, as did Zhao Chunqin. We won't go into the details of Zhao Tiegang's dropping out of school, but let's focus on Zhao Chunqin, who went on to attend university.

This education placed a huge financial burden on the family, a burden they carried for seven years.

In those days, very few people in rural areas could afford to go to school. And in a remote and impoverished rural village like Dongtaizi in the north, the difficulty of sending a student to university was practically hellish.

Zhao Chunqin is very smart, that's for sure.

But is the world lacking in geniuses?

The world has never lacked geniuses, nor has it lacked ordinary people like Zhao Chunqin who are not true geniuses. Zhao Chunqin was able to afford to go to school entirely thanks to her family's support.

Zhao Da'e didn't want to deny the contributions of her eldest and second aunts; they had done a lot of work. However, both of Zhao Da'e's eldest and second aunts had married very young.

This resulted in Zhao Da'e's father becoming the pillar of the family. Zhao Da'e's uncle, Zhao Tiebao, after graduating from high school, accepted his job assignment and returned to Dadao Village, next to Dongtaizi Village, to become a primary school teacher. He later got married. Zhao Tiebao had very little contact with his family, having separated from them early on.

As is well known, Zhao Da'e and Zhao Yongbo, the younger brother of Zhao Da'e's third uncle, are very close in age, but Zhao Da'e's father, Zhao Tiesheng, is much older than Zhao Tiegang.

Because he had to support his younger sister's education and also support Zhao Laosan's education, Zhao Da'e's father, Zhao Tiesheng, was already quite old and couldn't afford to marry, so he didn't get married until much later. This resulted in the second and third sons of the Zhao family getting married almost exactly one or two years apart.