Chapter 24: Repeating Old Tricks, Premeditated Long Ago

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“You little wretch, playing around here again!”

With a thunderous crash, the bedroom door was kicked open. The entire room seemed to shudder three times. The image on Sun Yali’s phone, propped beside the doorway on a selfie-stick stand, trembled several times before toppling to the floor.

The angle was unexpectedly good. Instead of focusing on Sun Yali beside the small table on the kang bed, the fallen phone now looked upward at the entire room.

A man who appeared to be in his fifties strode in angrily. His hair was disheveled, his clothes sloppily worn, and his face was furrowed with the ocher-colored creases of someone who had spent years under the sun.

“Play, play, play! That’s all you know how to do all day! You’re old enough to be doing something respectable!”

He seemed to reek of alcohol. He barged into the room and swept aside the little table Sun Yali had set up on the kang, scattering tiny wheat-straw carving components across the floor.

Like a frightened kitten, Sun Yali sprang up from the kang and backed into a corner. Her voice trembled with panic and hurt.

“Dad! I’m working!”

The man gave her no quarter.

“Working? You stay home every day without even stepping outside, and you call that work? How much can you make in a day? Five yuan? Ten? Do you even know how much a pack of cigarettes costs? You could at least go out and deliver food! All you do is fiddle with worthless little things at home.”

Violent footage would cause a livestream to be cut off immediately, but the kick had happened outside the camera’s view. Only the crash and the sight of the fallen door had been captured. At that moment, the two of them were merely standing in the cramped room, facing one another.

The number of viewers in the livestream began to rise silently.

A female streamer arguing with her own father—spectators flocked in as soon as word spread. Speculation multiplied in the comments, and some viewers were even shouting, “Start fighting and I’ll send you a Carnival!”

Sun Yali’s voice was thick with tears.

“Art cannot be measured with money!”

The man showed her no sympathy.

“Art? That kind of shameless junk? I’ve clearly fed you too well. You want art? The daughter of Old Li’s family was already raising children at your age! You do nothing worthwhile all day long, and even the matchmakers in the village don’t want to introduce anyone to you!”

“This is an intangible cultural heritage! A cultural treasure! The crystallization of generations of artistic achievement! It is not some shameless junk!”

Sun Yali nearly shouted the words, tears spilling uncontrollably down her face.

But the man continued to curse her.

“I fed you, clothed you, and raised you all these years—not so you could sit here making art! A cultural treasure? The only thing you’ve got is the ‘turtle’ in treasure! It’s worthless junk that couldn’t fetch half a yuan. We stopped caring about this worn-out nonsense fifty years ago!”

The conflict grew more heated, edging toward the point where the livestream would have to be banned. Yet the moderators still had not intervened, while the number of viewers continued to soar.

“What the hell! This is outrageous! He’s crushing a child’s artistic nature and passion just like that! Her work is so delicate!”

“Give me a break. Her father has done more than enough. She’s a grown-up baby in her twenties, living off her family, and the old man hasn’t even complained about marrying her off for a bride price.”

“To make art, you have to settle your heart and spend ten years tempering a single blade. I’ve followed her for a long time. She truly loves wheat-straw carving, and she has stuck with it all this time. This is cultural inheritance!”

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“You need to eat before you can make art! Living off your parents isn’t an accomplishment.”

“And what exactly is she making? Do you honestly think it looks good? Even my daughter’s little punch-needle crafts are better than this art.”

“What do you know? Wheat-straw carving is the ultimate use of agricultural materials. It embodies the farming culture’s prayers for a good harvest, its reverence for nature, and the folk aesthetic of everyday life. It is a visual vessel for regional customs, local culture, and collective memory—the finest form of folk art there is!”

“Even so, the streamer’s skill is pathetic. What she makes is barely worth looking at.”

Some viewers debated the intangible cultural heritage in Sun Yali’s hands. Others had long since shifted their attention elsewhere.

“Hey, move again. Go on, keep moving!”

During Sun Yali’s livestreams, the camera had always been aimed only at her upper body. She wore a floral dress and was dressed in a delicate, sweet style.

But when the phone flipped over, viewers finally saw that the floral dress was only just long enough to cover her buttocks. From the low, upward-looking angle of the camera, every slight movement made the loose skirt shift, revealing glimpses of black lace underwear beneath.

“Dressed up like a respectable person, calling herself a pastoral streamer and an artist. Who would’ve thought she was such a slut?”

“How is this not art? The real art is right here~”

“She wears lace at home? Could she be hiding someone in the room?”

“Oh my, those look almost like a thong. She really knows how to have fun~”

Whatever the viewers were interested in, the streamer offered not a single response. But at least for that moment, the livestream’s traffic exploded, propelling it into the top twenty of the Breakout Live rankings.

It was a height Sun Yali had never reached before.

After cursing for a long while, the man seemed to tire. He lifted his oversized undershirt and fanned himself, yet his contempt remained.

“You’re just like your mother—good for nothing, doing nothing worthwhile all day. I must have been cursed for eight lifetimes to marry such a useless woman and father such a money-losing burden.”

Those words seemed to strike a sudden, painful chord in Sun Yali.

“I won’t let you talk about my mother like that! My mother was the best person in the world! She was a true artist! If she hadn’t married an alcoholic like you, she wouldn’t have worked herself to death and died so young!”

Smack.

At last, the violence appeared on camera.

Enraged and humiliated, the man slapped Sun Yali hard across the face.

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Sun Yali’s entire body flew toward the camera, knocking over the phone that had been recording from its tilted position in the corner.

The screen showed nothing but the ceiling.

Then came the sound of the man kicking aside a stool and leaving, followed by Sun Yali’s muffled sobbing.

The livestream ended abruptly.

Once the system detected violent behavior, the broadcast was finally cut off. The spectators were left unsatisfied, and several gossip streamers immediately went live themselves, solely to discuss what had happened.

Some busybodies had already pieced together the whole story. Sun Yali, who called herself a successor to an intangible cultural heritage, really did have a mother who was highly skilled in the craft. But born in a poor alley with no control over her own fate, her mother had married an alcoholic from the same village at a young age and been swallowed up by endless daily toil.

Sun Yali had learned some of the so-called heritage craft from her mother as a child, and she truly possessed an innate love for the art. Unfortunately, her mother had died too young, and Sun Yali’s own skill had barely progressed beyond the beginner’s level.

The plain craft of wheat-straw carving could not bring her a substantial income, and her father’s dissatisfaction with her had grown day by day. At last, after drinking that evening, he could no longer hold himself back and had come to disrupt his daughter’s livestream.

Was she wrong?

She loved what she did and devoted herself completely to creating intangible cultural heritage art. She carefully studied every minute technique—cutting, carving, folding, weaving, scorching, and gluing—immersing herself in the farming culture’s reverence for nature and its pursuit of beauty.

Was she wrong?

And yet, past the age of twenty, she still could not support herself. She stayed at home all day, infatuated with her so-called “art,” while the money she earned was not even enough to buy the materials required for her creations. Even filling her stomach depended on her aging father working the fields.

Was she not wrong?

Or, perhaps, was it she who was at fault?

Or was it this so-called art?