Chapter 53

A roar of voices erupted from the crowd; divorcing one's wife was no trivial matter. The head of Dali Village, a plump, stout man in his fifties, stepped forward upon hearing this. "Scholar Meng, you married into the Cheng family as a live-in son-in-law. On what grounds do you speak of 'divorcing' your wife?" A live-in son-in-law was, at best, considered half a son to the wife’s family; at worst, he was little more than a servant. Had the Cheng family not favored Meng Nanzhou, they would never have spared him from heavy farm labor all these years, let alone exhausted the entire family’s resources to support his studies for the imperial examinations. Given the destitute state the Meng family had been in when they first arrived in Dali Village, Meng Nanzhou would never have become a scholar, even if he were a prodigy sent from the heavens.