The Qeo Family Girl

After marrying, the Qeo Family Girl goes to live with her husband’s family in a distant village. Her mother misses her and sends her younger son to ask that she be allowed to visit. Each time he comes, the mother-in-law names unfinished work in the twelve-mu fields: leveling manure, digging earth, burning clods, spreading the soil, planting rapeseed, and finally harvesting it. The young woman completes the planting, but when harvest time comes she cries in the field. Magpies and pigeons fly close and help her gather the seed.

At last the mother-in-law permits a visit, but requires her to return the next day with three pairs of shoes sewn for every member of the family. The girl agrees. At her parents’ home she sews through the night and finishes the shoes, but she is a little late returning. Her mother-in-law scolds her; her father-in-law and her husband’s younger brother beat her; then the younger brother’s wife kills her with a broom. They bury her in the furrows behind the house.

Her husband returns with a mounted retinue after passing the examination to become Number One Scholar. A bird flies near him, and he wonders whether disaster has struck his wife. He refuses to dismount for the relatives who come to greet him, insisting that only his wife can make him do so. His younger sister tells him that she is dead and buried in the field. He pulls her body from the furrows, cremates it, places her ashes and bones in a small wooden box, and rides away.