Shi Zhen asked Shi Xinghuo to light the fire, while he began to deal with the pig heads to be sold tomorrow.
When he was finally done, Shi Zhen saw Shi Xinghuo lying in the straw behind the stove, already drowsy. As for Guan Baiyu, he had just finished washing the pots and pans they had used today.
He also washed his schoolbag.
Guan Baiyu had become fonder and fonder of cleanliness recently.
Shi Zhen added some firewood to the stove.
He had been busy all day, and he did all the tiring work such as moving goods back and forth and purchasing items by himself. Now he couldn’t hold on any longer, so he went into the next room and lay down directly on the straw piled up in Guan Baiyu’s room.
Guan Baiyu followed and saw him, and said hurriedly, “Brother, you go and lie down on the bed.”
“No, I’m dirty,” Shi Zhen said, taking out the box containing the money and starting to calculate today’s income and keep accounts.
He also took this opportunity to chat with Guan Baiyu.
In his previous life, Shi Zhen read some books on education. It was emphasized in those books that he must communicate more with adolescent children.
So he took some time to chat with Guan Baiyu every day.
Such chats could allow them to understand each other and broaden Guan Baiyu’s horizons.
Guan Baiyu grew up in the countryside. When he saw him doing well by selling cooked food before, he said that he wanted to stop studying and sell cooked food as well… Shi Zhen chatted with him a bit and was able to dispel this idea.
Today, Shi Zhen talked about big cities with Guan Baiyu. “Big cities are completely different from here. There are many dozens-of-storey buildings over there. People living there take elevators to go up and down instead of stairs… When you go to a big city to study in the future, you’ll be able to see it.”
Guan Baiyu heard a lot from Shi Zhen and already knew how good big cities were, but studying cost money.
He knew that Shi Zhen wanted him to continue studying, so he said, “Brother, is the stall very busy now? I will go with you to man the stall tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
Shi Zhen said, “Qian Qilai can handle the stall alone. Xiao Yu, your grandparents’ biggest wish was to have a college student in the family. I definitely can’t do it. Now it’s up to you. Why don’t you stay at home to keep an eye on the stove on the weekend and study on the side?”
Watching the stove’s fire was really easy. Guan Baiyu nodded. “Okay.”
Of course he couldn’t just watch the fire tomorrow. He could also do other housework, such as cooking.
He also had to go out for a while…
Thinking of Yan Jiangtao’s false accusation of cheating and pouring vegetable soup on his schoolbag today, Guan Baiyu’s heart became angry again.
There was no way he could just let these two things go.
When he was in school, it was no good for him to make a big deal out of it, and it had no impact on Yan Jiangtao – for a person who didn’t want to study, whether he cheated in the exam and got zero points or was criticized by the teacher, it was nothing.
But he could cause trouble elsewhere.
Having been deskmates with Yan Jiangtao for more than half a year, Guan Baiyu had a deep understanding of Yan Jiangtao. Yan Jiangtao was very afraid of his father.
And Yan Jiangtao’s father loved face very much.
For those who came from poverty and lived without dignity before and now finally had money and were highly sought after, who didn’t care about face?
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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What he sold now was too easy to imitate, so he had to innovate.
After buying a cycle rickshaw, he planned to call his family members over to help. If there were more people, they could do more business. This would improve the living conditions of his family members.
Life in their village was really hard. It was difficult to grow food on the mountains. Without extra food, it was impossible to raise chickens and pigs.
They rarely had the opportunity to eat meat and fish. Without foods like meat and fish, people would easily get hungry and need to eat more food, but they didn’t have more food.
When Shi Zhen was a child, he often went hungry.
So after he got rich, he, like other people of his age, loved to eat and wanted to eat meat all the time. They also didn’t like to see food being wasted. Even if they were full, if they saw food leftover, they would find a way to stuff it all into their stomachs…
When Guan Baiyu died, he weighed one hundred and eighty catties.
If he wasn’t tall enough, he would look really out of shape.
But after Guan Baiyu died, he lost weight and his interest in eating became less and less day by day.
Shi Zhen was not picky about food. The only thing he didn’t like to eat was potatoes.
People in his village often ate potatoes as both a grain (staple food) and as a dish. The cooking methods were also very simple… He had to eat potatoes back then, but later when his living conditions improved, he stopped liking them.
But Guan Baiyu liked to eat potatoes.
It was precisely because life was so bad when he was a child that Shi Zhen came out to work without hesitation when he was eighteen years old.
But in his last life, due to various reasons, although he became prosperous, his family did not enjoy much happiness.
When he was at home, he would help his father with farm work, but once he left, his father would not be able to handle it all alone.
The stepmother had to go help.
However, when she went to go help with the farm work, his stepmother accidentally broke her leg.
People in their village generally didn’t go to big hospitals, so his stepmother went to a nearby village and found a doctor who was good at treating bone injuries. After seeing the doctor, her leg was wrapped up.
However, it didn’t take long for the injury to worsen. The doctor couldn’t do anything more and told them to go to a big hospital. His father carried his stepmother to a big hospital and learned that amputation was necessary.
At that time, he and Shi Xinghuo were still working on the construction site. Not only did they not get paid, they had no contact with their families.
What about his family? His father and his stepmother had four children in total. The mountains were poor and they had no savings at all.
Finally, in order to have the surgery, they found a match for his stepsister, whose family was willing to give a bride price of 1,500 yuan.
In their place, the bride price was usually only seven or eight hundred yuan. A bride price of 1,500 yuan was definitely a sky-high price.
His stepsister was one year older than him. Like his stepmother, she was not very good-looking and didn’t talk much. She usually only knew how to work.
In her situation, the family was willing to spend a lot of money to have her marry into their family. There was no doubt that the reason they valued her was not her appearance or talent, but… there was something wrong with the man who married his stepsister.
The man had serious liver disease.
At that time, although he knew about his stepsister’s marriage, he didn’t know that the man his stepsister married was problematic. However, when he became rich and returned to his hometown in fine clothes, his stepsister came to him to borrow money to treat her child’s illness. Only then did he understand the whole story.
But it was already too late. His stepsister was also infected with liver disease*, and even the children his stepsister gave birth to were also sick.
The whole family had liver disease and could not do heavy work, so he spent money to support them.
And the other daughter his stepmother brought to his family, his younger stepsister, and his biological younger sister, all had unsatisfactory lives in his previous life.
The relationship between these three people and him was not good either.
As for his stepmother? Even though he later gave her a lot of money, she lost a leg and her daughters were all in unhappy marriages, and she even died early.
His father was the same. After he got rich, he couldn’t control his diet. He loved sweets more than fatty meat. He also had the three highs*… He (the dad) also died of illness before his (Shi Zhen’s) death.
Shi Zhen didn’t want his family to make the same mistakes again, so the first thing he had to prevent was his stepmother breaking her leg.
This originally happened this summer, so he planned to bring them here in May or June to work with him.
His father was forty-five this year. His stepmother was older than his father and was forty-nine this year. Although they looked very old due to years of hard work and poor food, as long as they took care of themselves, their health would improve. They could also do some small business when they came here.
No matter how hard it was to run a small business, it was still better than farming in the mountains.
His older stepsister was nineteen this year, and his younger stepsister was seventeen. The two of them could start small businesses or find jobs when they came here. As for his younger sister, she was one year younger than Guan Baiyu, and he wanted her to go to school.
Shi Zhen thought a lot that night, and fell asleep while thinking about things.
People who did manual labor would not suffer from insomnia even if they couldn’t help but think too much.
The next day, Shi Zhen went to town early in the morning to set up his stall as usual. Then he discovered that there was a stall similar to his at the entrance of the farmers’ market, selling exactly the same things.
Shi Zhen had anticipated this situation, so he didn’t pay much attention to it, and he didn’t lower the price of his own goods to engage in a price war. They were all small businesses, making some hard-earned money. If they lowered the price, they really wouldn’t make much money!
Shi Zhen didn’t lower his prices, and the same happened over there.
The people who imitated him and set up a stall selling pig head meat, braised eggs and braised dry tofu, were a middle-aged couple. The prices of the items in their stall were exactly the same as Shi Zhen’s, and they also looked about the same.
Shi Zhen even had an impression of that man – he had come to him to buy things several times.
Shi Zhen was not surprised at all that someone was trying to steal his business, but Qian Qilai was very angry. “Master, they are copying us!”
“Cold-cut pig head meat and braising food are not my original methods,” Shi Zhen reassured him. “If you can make more money running this kind of small business than working, then there will definitely be others who will follow suit. When new people can no longer make money by opening this kind of small business, then there will be no new people doing it. The market will be balanced by supply and demand.”
Qian Qilai was confused when he heard this.
Shi Zhen said, “Okay, let’s just operate our own stall…I’ll buy a coal stove and some plastic tarps… The weather has been good recently and it hasn’t rained, but in the next few days, it might rain every day, and then we will need to use plastic tarps to build a shed.”
It would be the Qingming Festival* in a few days, and it would rain frequently in J City at that time.
Wait, it was the Qingming Festival. Could he wholesale some fake flowers to sell?
Local people liked to burn some silver ingots folded from tinfoil when visiting graves during the Qingming Festival. He could also get some to sell.
These were all small businesses and couldn’t make big money, but they could still make money.
Shi Zhen thought so and did not delay what he had to do.
He went to buy two coal stoves, asked where to buy charcoal briquettes, and bought a large bundle of plastic tarp.
If it rained, they could build a simple shed with bamboo poles and cover it with plastic tarping to keep out the wind and rain.
Shi Zhen had a good mentality, but Qian Qilai was very unhappy. After the new stall opened, the amount of things they sold was almost halved.
Many regular customers who used to buy things from them would go to the stall opposite to buy something for a taste – things sold in different shops always tasted different.
When Shi Zhen came back after shopping, he saw Qian Qilai’s unhappy face, and immediately said, “Don’t worry, we can sell other things in a few days.”
Qian Qilai was still uneasy. “Master, why don’t you give me a salary of five yuan a day…” His master’s future income might be halved…
“I said I would give you ten yuan a day, so it’s ten yuan,” Shi Zhen laughed. “I can’t let the horse run and not let it eat grass*.” He also wanted to do other business!
It wasn’t like Qian Qilai really didn’t want the higher salary, so he didn’t object. He couldn’t help but glare at the couple opposite them again.
The middle-aged couple looked a bit awkward.
It was obviously their first time doing business, so they were a little embarrassed to shout to attract customers. However, because they were new here and there were some people who knew them and came to support them, business was okay.
Just… when someone he knew came to buy something, the middle-aged man would sometimes blush and become speechless.
Shi Zhen thought it looked funny.
He hung the coal stoves he bought on both sides of the bicycle, said goodbye to Qian Qilai, and prepared to go home first.
On the other side, Guan Baiyu braised a pig head, put it in a basin, put rice in the pot, steamed some vegetables, and left home.
He planned to find Yan Jiangtao’s father.
Guan Baiyu didn’t know where Yan Jiangtao’s home was, but he knew the general direction.
In addition, Yan Jiangtao’s house had loom machines, which should be very famous. If he asked for directions, he would definitely be able to find the place.
Guan Baiyu put on his shabbiest clothes, picked up the book that Yan Jiangtao had damaged yesterday, and ran toward the village where Yan Jiangtao’s family lived.
***
T/N: Lots of backstory on Shi Zhen’s family in this chapter. This all becomes relevant later on.
*Since it’s transmissible and severe, it’s probably some form of hepatitis.
*Three highs (三高 san gao) – high blood pressure, high blood glucose/sugar and high blood cholesterol levels.
*Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, is when Chinese families go to visit the graves of their ancestors. Most people clean the graves and make offerings. It is the 15th day after the spring equinox, so between April 4-6 in any given year.
*Can’t let the horse run and not let it eat grass – Chinese saying that means you must feed someone if you expect them to work.
Nice to find out more about his family.
Thanks for the update