The family door was tightly shut, and no matter how much Madam Zhou called out, not only did no one come to open the door, there wasn't even the creak of a sound!
Madam Zhou thought that her family had all gone to visit relatives, so she decided to ask the next-door neighbor where they had gone so she could find them. Little did she know, she would receive a response that was all too real.
Her family hadn't gone out at all; they were all at home, simply not wanting to let her in.
And the neighbor looked at her with full-faced disdain, not even regarding her as a person.
Because everyone knew that she had gone to live in the countryside with her husband, and now she didn't have a single copper coin to her name. She had walked all the way, hoping to ask for a bowl of water at a neighbor's house, only to be scorned by her own family's neighbors as too dirty to even be given a drink of water!