Chapter 1230 - 1103: Bell-Bottoms

Chapter 1230: Chapter 1103: Bell-Bottoms

Man proposes, Heaven disposes; you can’t force it.

Zhuge Liang, Kongming, did his utmost, then sat and waited for the right moment.

Only at the very end did he help Liu Bei establish Western Shu, passing through two generations, and Liu Bei still only guarded his tiny corner of land, never fulfilling the grand wish of reviving the Han Dynasty.

Does that count as success?

Even sages and wise men dare not force things—let alone ordinary folk.

You are not a fish; how can you know the joy of fish? What is honey to me is arsenic to another.

So sometimes, whether it’s doing things or being a person, you really can’t force it.

Zhou Jiao had figured it out. She wasn’t going to force her children’s wishes, but she couldn’t just ignore them and toss the matter out of her mind, either.

She, who had inherited the full body of Doctor Hu’s unique skills, packed up the medicines and sent her three sons off to do internships at the grassroots level; she herself also returned to the municipal hospital’s traditional Chinese medicine clinic on weekends.

Here with her third senior brother, Dong Zhichao, she wasn’t the deputy director of some department in the Planning Commission, but her master—over eighty-year-old Doctor Hu’s disciple, a young TCM doctor adept at acupuncture.

As some historical turning point drew near, Zhou Jiao spent more and more of her spare time on medicine. To train her hand feel, she even picked up embroidery work again.

Lately the happiest one had to be Doctor Hu. If Zhou Jiao didn’t also have achievements in her current job, the old man would have wanted his only successor to give up work entirely and devote herself to studying medicine.

With such thoughts, he naturally brought it up whenever he had the chance, hinting left and right.

Like this day, in the ward, Doctor Hu once again watched Zhou Jiao performing acupuncture on a patient. When they stepped out and saw his little disciple starting to beam, he raised the old topic yet again.

"Jiao Jiao, seeing another patient recover, doesn’t it feel like a great achievement?"

"Mm."

"To save a single life is better than building a seven-story pagoda. No profession is greater than healing the dying and rescuing the injured. That patient just now is the pillar of his family—saving him is equivalent to saving a whole household. As the ancients said: if you cannot be a virtuous minister, then be a virtuous doctor. In the old days, a doctor’s status was no less than that of an official."

Zhou Jiao looked at him, face full of guilt. "Master."

This trick worked on Doctor Hu every time; the old man immediately rolled his eyes and waved his hand broadly. "Aiya, forget it, forget it. As long as you’re happy."

Zhou Jiao might be indifferent to whether outsiders lived or died, but toward the old man she truly felt sincere guilt.

The better he treated her, the more guilty she felt. In the past, constrained by circumstances, he hadn’t forced her—he was worried about her.

But now?

Originally he’d let this good-for-nothing disciple go, then picked the youngest, Wu, and the old man genuinely wanted to train his grandson-disciple single-mindedly to succeed him.

In the end her youngest son wasn’t interested either, happily running off to college. Together with his mother, they both went into what he called a "side track."

Luckily the sect still had her senior brothers. She remembered clearly the oath she’d sworn when entering the sect: she must not let the lineage die out, or she’d truly have to apologize with her life.

When Zhang Guoqing came to pick her up, Zhou Jiao was still thinking about a question.

"The old man really doesn’t want to take another disciple? Should I try persuading him?"

Zhou Jiao shot him a sidelong glance. "Five years ago he already said he’s just a pile of old bones now; he’d have to be crazy to waste time and effort teaching people. And not just him—even I have no interest in teaching outsiders.

It’s not about some secret art that mustn’t be passed on, it’s that it’s exhausting, emotionally draining. You need talent and hard work both. Do you know how many books I read in those first three years?"

Zhang Guoqing shook his head wordlessly. Wife, you’re being proud and tsundere, you know?

"At first I wanted to take advantage of being close at hand, like a pavilion near the water gets the moon first—Mai Sui at least has some foundation. But after she came, I tried a few times, and it still didn’t work.

A slim little volume of the Treatise on Cold Pathogenic and Warm Pathogenic Diseases took her three or four full days to memorize. Compared with the four of us—my mother and the three kids—if she landed in my master’s hands, she’d be at least half-dead if not entirely."

Zhou Jiao sighed. "I really sympathize with my master now. No wonder he’s always refused to take disciples. My senior brothers and sisters all started reciting medical texts at the age of three; as soon as they could walk they had to carry little baskets and follow him up the mountain to gather herbs. Think where you could find conditions like that nowadays."

"The Welfare Institute?"

Zhou Jiao hurriedly shook her head. "Who would look after them? No. He’s at such an age and truly doesn’t want to take anyone, and I have no interest in exhausting myself for outsiders."

Zhang Guoqing smiled. "Then we’ll talk about it later. Maybe one of our grandsons or granddaughters will be interested—who knows. I have a feeling the old man might be thinking along those lines too."

"You’re the clever one."

Zhang Guoqing kept both hands on the steering wheel and slowed down. "They say people wise up as they grow old. He’s lived this long—who could be more cunning than him?"

What Zhou Jiao least wanted to hear now was anyone mentioning how old someone was, how advanced in years; it only meant the time left to accompany her was decreasing day by day.

She turned her head to look out the car window, better to feast her eyes more on the energetic young people in the streets—good for the eyes...

"Hey? Brother, quick, look up ahead on the left—yes, that male comrade everyone’s staring at. Bell-bottoms, wow, someone’s actually wearing them out on the street. Pull over, quick."

At her words, Zhang Guoqing immediately hit the brakes. One glance and he burst out laughing—what a real dumbass youth!

"They really do look like a big broom. The bell-bottoms Old Steward gave me already seemed way over the top to me; didn’t expect there’d be something even more exaggerated."

"Brother, hurry and get out, let’s go watch the fun."

It was rare that his wife wanted to join a bit of commotion. Without another word, Zhang Guoqing got out of the car and stood by her side. "Don’t get too close. My guess is someone already reported it to the neighborhood committee."

As he spoke, quite a few pedestrians had already crowded around in front. From inside they could hear a girl screaming for help, and a boy angrily yelling, telling them to go ahead and try cutting.

Zhou Jiao hadn’t planned on squeezing into the crowd. She and Zhang Guoqing stayed on the fringes, tiptoeing to watch the spectacle.

She’d heard before that when bell-bottoms first became popular in China, quite a few had been "snip-snip" cut by old aunties and grandpas they ran into; she hadn’t expected it to be literally true.

"See that? Those are what they call foreign jeans."

"Jeans? Pants for foreign cowherds?"

"Hahaha, I heard these are bell-bottoms. And jeans aren’t pants worn by foreign cowherds, either."

"Doesn’t matter what kind of pants they are—they’re not anything good, that’s for sure."

"So embarrassing, looks no different from a hooligan, strutting around in pants like a giant broom. How come the adults at home don’t put a stop to it?"

With a sharp scream of "Ah!", the people in the big ring around them forgot about talking and commenting, and all burst into peals of snickering.

Seeing this, Zhou Jiao tugged on Zhang Guoqing and turned to leave.

The attitude of these onlookers was, in fact, the attitude of many people in that era.

And it was hard to blame them.

In the past decade or so, people living on this land had gone through too much suffering, which left them afraid to accept any new things, even more afraid to take one step forward.

That mindset had long since taken deep root; it wasn’t something that could be changed overnight.

And whatever new things the youngsters found easy to accept, in the eyes of these older people they were nothing short of heresy and rebellion. So she hadn’t even thought about stepping in to help.

This kind of clash could only be slowly eroded by time. Who knew whether that was good or bad?