At this moment, Mei Yu Zhen has just woken up in the car.
Manchinshan and Man Yingjie had taken turns driving overnight and had only driven a thousand kilometres, and they were now over two thousand kilometres from the US-Mexico border.
According to Mei Yu Zhen’s plan, she wanted the two men to drive all the way to El Paso, Texas, and from there to enter Mexico by road.
After a night of rocking in the car, Mei Yuzhen was still somewhat in a trance because she had not slept well.
She suddenly thought back to when she had first arrived in the United States.
In the first two years after she first arrived in the United States, she had used a false identity, but she did count herself as dedicated to her work.
Although the money she earned was far from generous in the United States, she was able to send almost all the money she earned back to her family intact, as her employer covered her food and accommodation, and she was able to quickly pay off the foreign debts she had borrowed when she smuggled herself into the United States, as well as improve her family’s poor living conditions to a large extent.
But the longer Mei stayed in America, the more she was influenced by the materialistic society.
Gradually, she began to feel resentful about her treatment as an illegal immigrant.
At that time in Chinatown, there were two different kinds of Chinese nannies.
One was a nanny who had legal status or a legal green card in the US, while the other was a black nanny like Mei Yu Zhen who was an illegal immigrant and black in the US.
The former is usually half or more expensive compared to the latter.
Sometimes, when nannies and babysitters meet and talk about their respective situations, Mei Yuzhen will spout off about her meagre salary.
She always felt that her work was exactly the same as everyone else’s, and that she was not cheating, but why was her salary only 60% or even less than others.
As a result, she gradually developed resentment towards her employer’s family, feeling that they were deliberately bullying and oppressing her, a poor woman who had abandoned her husband and children and left her home.
However, Mei Yuzhen overlooked the simple reality that the reason her employer took a chance on her as an illegal immigrant was because the price of illegal immigration, itself, was relatively low.
Considering their own limited conditions, the employer was therefore forced to make this choice.
If the price was the same for both, all employers would not consider the latter.
The vast majority of illegal immigrants can understand this, but Mei Yu Zhen does not.
She did not realise the natural disparity between herself and the legal nannies, and she just kept building up her resentment, even to the point of hatred.
In her third year in the United States, a fire broke out in her employer’s home, killing three members of her family: a young couple in their thirties and their five-year-old daughter, while their youngest son, who was less than a week old at the time, disappeared in the blaze.
The fire was the work of Mei Yuzhen.
After setting the fire, Mei moved to another city in the United States with her baby in swaddling clothes.
She asked a middleman to sell the baby for $30,000 to a Chinese couple in their forties who were late in getting their baby.
The deal, at the time, far exceeded the local market price and the buyer was once dissuaded by the high price.
But Mei Yu Zhen was very clever.
She could see the couple’s desperation to have a child, and she could also see that the one-year-old baby had some resemblance to a male, so she gave them a picture of what the child would look like when it grew up, based on the child’s features, saying that the child would grow up to resemble the male.
In addition to this, the astute Mei Yuzhen also hit on the sore point that moved the couple the most: because of the resemblance, as long as they took the child to live somewhere else, no one would suspect that the child was bought when it grew up, even if they took it back home in three to five years and said it was their own child.
Moreover, she told the couple that, unlike adopted children, the child she brought with her was not yet a week old and would have absolutely no memory of his or her original parents when he or she grew up.
In Mei Yu Zhen’s words, if they bought the child, the heirloom would be pa*sed on to the next generation, and it would be a step in the right direction.
So the persuaded couple put up US$30,000 to buy the child, while Mei Yu Zhen got US$25,000.
This was more money at the time than she had made in two years as a nanny.
Since then, Mei Yuzhen has been on a sinful path of “making quick money”.
In the early years, she used various identities to select Chinese families with babies. Later, as the internet became more popular, many Chinese families were afraid to hire illegal immigrants as nannies, so Mei Yu Zhen switched to other businesses, until she hooked up with her current handler.
Over the years, Mei Yu Zhen has made more and more money, and her two sons, both of whom live in large villas and drive luxury cars, and her eight grandchildren, all of whom are healthy and knowledgeable, have made the family a prosperous one.
Because she has been away from home for so long, and because she has so many grandchildren, Mei Yuzhen is increasingly eager to return to her home country sooner rather than later.
In her own words, even if she were a bad person, she would still want to retire and enjoy her life.