Arriving at his older sister's apartment, Fu Yu found that his brother-in-law had already gone to work overtime. His sister was busy folding clothes—the ones dried using the honeycomb briquette stove that afternoon. They looked quite small, evidently belonging to the little nephew.
Seeing the two of them walk in, Fu Yu asked if they had eaten, and both nodded.
Fu Ying went over to pick up her niece, sitting down with her to watch television.
The sister's family owned a television set, about the size of an office desktop monitor, thick and chunky, with a color screen. Connected to a set-top box, it could pick up satellite channels without needing any major VIP subscriptions.
*Armor Hero* was playing on the TV. Indeed, cartoons differed across generations; she remembered watching *Cardcaptor Sakura* when she was little.
After watching for a while, Fu Ying suddenly caught a whiff of a foul odor. Fu Yu smelled it too. Opening the youngest nephew's diaper, sure enough, he had pooped, and it smelled truly awful.
The sister carefully folded the diaper, afraid the baby might kick it and spill the mess everywhere. First, she wiped him clean with tissue paper, then she fetched warm water from the thermos to wash his bottom. After that, she placed the soiled diaper into the warm water, preparing to wash and hang it out to dry later.
Fu Ying went over to help fetch a diaper, but her sister said she would put a disposable diaper on him for the night so it would hold through till morning. Fu Ying told her sister that she would do it.
Lifting one of the youngest's legs, she first pulled the diaper up to his knee level, then placed his other leg in. Once she pulled it up, she gently lifted both legs together, bringing the diaper up to his waist. She adjusted the back of the diaper first, and then adjusted the front around his legs and tummy.
Watching her younger sister's movements unfold with such practiced ease, Fu Yu grew bewildered. In the past, whenever she changed a diaper, it always ended up crooked and lopsided. How had she gotten so fast and neat now? Just as she was about to speak, another wave of the stench hit her, and she decided she had better go wash the diaper first.
Fu Ying had no idea what her sister was thinking. The reason she handled it so skillfully was that she had spent a year working as a nanny—or, to put it more politely, an early childhood educator. A friend of hers had opened an early childhood development center and kept urging her to join, saying her personality was well-suited for teaching little ones. Too embarrassed to ask about the salary, Fu Ying had just gone straight to work. Only after starting did she realize that early childhood educators were really just nannies. The children were all under three years old; every day, she had to feed them, coax them to sleep, and take them to the toilet. For the ones who hadn't been toilet trained yet, she had to deal with their bodily output every single day, then carry them off to wash their bottoms. After doing that for a full year, she had become an expert at handling babies.The main reason for leaving her job was that the boss wanted to promote Fu Ying from an early childhood nanny to her private nanny. This meant picking up and dropping off her boss's children for their extracurricular classes on weekends and evenings, or entertaining them when there were no classes, all while being strictly prohibited from looking at her phone or watching cartoons. The pay raise for all this was a mere 500 yuan.
Later, Fu Ying found a part-time job at an amusement park and refused to babysit for her boss. The boss asked Fu Ying several times to take care of her children, and each time she was refused, leading to a falling out between the two. During the lockdown when businesses and schools were suspended, the boss insisted on holding classes anyway, demanding that Fu Ying and another colleague live at the early childhood center, bring their own daily necessities, and receive board and lodging.
Fu Ying, who had just started living with her boyfriend, refused once again.
The boss tried to intimidate Fu Ying, claiming that this round of lockdown was the most severe yet, caused by a virus specially transmitted from abroad. Her friend had told her, she said, that the lockdown would last at least a month, many people would lose their jobs, and finding a new one would be difficult. She added that it would be very easy for her to hire someone else, as people were messaging her on job boards every day applying for positions, though she simply hadn't replied.
Seeing that Fu Ying was completely impervious to persuasion, the boss settled her wages, though she did not explicitly say she was firing her.
As Fu Ying was taking the bus back to her rented apartment, Fu Yu happened to message her. Fu Ying told her older sister what the boss had said, and Fu Yu bluntly advised her to quit, pointing out that the boss just wanted a private nanny without paying extra, and calling such manipulative talk disgusting. After pouring her heart out to her sister, Fu Ying let go of her worries and set out to find a new job.
On Saturday, a week later, the lockdown was lifted. The boss did not notify Fu Ying to return to work. When a colleague asked her if she was bringing breakfast on Monday, Fu Ying replied directly that the boss had not notified her of any classes resuming, and her wages had already been paid in full.
On Sunday night, that colleague suddenly called her, asking her to cover a week of shifts because a family member was gravely ill and the colleague needed to buy a ticket home immediately to take care of them. Fu Ying could neither quit her current job nor did she want to go back.
Ten minutes later, the boss notified her to come to work on Monday, as the early childhood center was reopening. Fu Ying stated bluntly that she had already found a new job and her wages had been settled, making it impossible for her to return to work. The boss accused her of backstabbing by finding a new job without notifying her. In the end, the two had a complete falling out; the boss blocked her, and she deleted the boss in return.
From then on, Fu Ying resolved to find jobs on her own and vowed never to work for relatives or friends.