"If he were going to pay, he'd have done it by now," Rong Xuelan said, shaking her head again. "I've given him his chance. He doesn't see us as people. Since this road is blocked, we'll take another one."
"Will it work?" Jiang Nan asked, his face full of worry. "Brother Cao and the others have already reported him to the police several times, but the cops just tell them to file a lawsuit."
"I'm confident," Rong Xuelan reassured him. "Go tell everyone to get ready."
Jiang Nan nodded his head hesitantly, while Rong Xuelan returned to her dormitory.
She removed her mask, revealing a layer of thick yellow dust coating the outside.
Using the numbers from Jiang Nan's old phone, Rong Xuelan dialed the hotline for the local TV station that she had jotted down the night before. "I'm a worker at the Huanfei Commercial Building construction site in Huapu District. I'd like to report the foreman for maliciously withholding workers' wages… Yes, over a hundred workers… I have evidence…"
Hearing the response that someone would be dispatched immediately, Rong Xuelan ended the call.
The old fan in the corner of the dormitory slowly oscillated, emitting a creaky sound as it turned.
Dou Dou lay at the center of Rong Xuelan's bed, surrounded by a "little castle" of clothing she had arranged to prevent him from rolling off.
The baby slept soundly, his small belly rising and falling rhythmically.
Rong Xuelan fixed her gaze on that gentle rhythm, and a soft smile spread across her face.
Dou Dou was still alive, and so was she.
That was a blessing.
One day earlier, Rong Xuelan had discovered she had been reborn, back to two years ago, when Dou Dou was only six months old.
One moment, she had been lying on a temporary hospital bed in the emergency room hallway.
She was gasping for breath between dry coughs and swallowing the blood that she spat up while a nurse yelled at her, "You have pneumoconiosis and tuberculosis. Do you have any family to pay for your admission?"
The next moment when she woke up, she was shocked when she found out that she comes back to two years ago, when Dou Dou was just a six-month-old baby.
At that point in time, the foreman hadn't yet absconded, and she hadn't yet, out of sheer desperation, taken Dou Dou to a coal mine in the mountains to work as a cook.
She hadn't yet developed pneumoconiosis from years of inhaling dust, nor had Dou Dou lost his ability to speak.
She had returned at the perfect time.
She had been given with a second chance.
This time, no matter what, she would protect her life and, more importantly, protect Dou Dou.
First, she had decided that she would no longer work as a cook at the construction site.
Initially, she had chosen the job because it had low requirements and she just need to prepare meals for the workers on time and nothing else mattered.