Chapter 10 Record of Moving to the City in the 90s. 10

Now that the Jiang Family had been completely dealt with, Su Huandan felt that everything at home was going smoothly.

After the Lantern Festival¹, Su Dakui hurried back to the city. As for the family’s farmland, he told Jiang Chunhua to lease it all out directly, in one large contract, for three years at a time.

In the end, the land was leased to Auntie Liu, who lived in front of their house.

She still had a youngest son who wasn’t married yet, so of course she had to think of ways to earn a little more.

The rent for the land would be paid at the end of each year.

Her family also had a private plot² for growing vegetables. That one wasn’t leased out. Instead, they simply let Auntie Liu’s family farm it.

“Auntie, once my third girl finishes middle school, our whole family will be moving to the city, so I’ll have to trouble you to keep an eye on our courtyard. As for the private plot and the vegetable patch in the yard, if you have time, you can plant them too.” If she really planted them, she could make a bit of money just from selling vegetables in the summer, couldn’t she?

If people in the countryside wanted to earn extra money, they either grew vegetables or raised poultry and pigs and the like.

Auntie Liu was also an honest, decent person. Even though the Su family was planning to move into the city as a whole, not a word of it leaked out from her household.

No one else knew. They all just thought Su Dakui must have made a lot of money, since this year he wasn’t even having his wife and children work the fields.

For a while, rumors spread all over the village that Su Dakui had struck it rich.

How outrageous did the rumors get?

They got so outrageous that Old Man Mu, who had always wanted to leech off Su Dakui, started getting restless again.

Egged on by his wife, the old man also went to file a complaint against Su Dakui.

The result was even more ridiculous than what happened on Grandma Jiang’s side.

Old Man Mu had never raised Su Dakui. Ever since Su Dakui’s birth mother died, he had been taken back by his maternal grandfather, cut ties with Old Man Mu, and even changed his surname. Not only the elders in the village knew about this, even the younger people did.

So there was no way Old Man Mu could make anything of it.

After putting on that little farce and becoming the village laughingstock, Old Man Mu turned around and beat the wife who had stirred up the trouble.

After school started, Su Huandan began going in and out of the offices of teachers from every subject.

There were parts of elementary school math she still didn’t understand, and there was even more she didn’t understand in middle school physics and chemistry.

As for English, a subject that mostly relied on memorization, she made good progress in it, except that her spoken English was poor.

As for the speaking problem, the teachers didn’t have any especially good solution either. There was no English-speaking environment, and even the teacher’s own spoken English was pretty shaky. He was excellent at written exams, but not good at speaking.

In the final semester, there were also mock exams, and with every practice test, Su Huandan’s grades kept improving.

Right up until the Senior High School Entrance Examination³, her classmates still couldn’t understand how crazy girl Su Huandan had suddenly become one of the teachers’ key students.

The Senior High School Entrance Examination was held at their own school, but the proctors were teachers from other schools.

Cheating was very difficult. There were four proctors total, front and back, and they were truly stern and conscientious.

After three days, all the subjects were finished, and then everyone started comparing answers.

Su Huandan was definitely going to get into high school.

That made Jiang Chunhua so happy she could hardly contain herself.

That very day, she stewed a chicken.

After the Senior High School Entrance Examination was over, the family began packing up and getting ready to move to the city.

The date had already been set. In mid-August, Su Dakui would find a vehicle to come pick them up.

They weren’t taking the furniture or the stove and cookware. They would still come back from time to time, after all. It wasn’t as if they were selling the courtyard. They just needed to bring personal belongings, along with the family’s grain and daily necessities.

At the beginning of August, the admission notice arrived, from County No. 1 Middle School⁴.

With that admission notice in hand, the whole family was picked up by Su Dakui and taken away.

Su Dakui came to get them at night. After hearing the commotion, the villagers all found it hard to believe.

Was money in the city really that easy to earn?

Su Dakui was actually bringing his whole family into the city just like that?

After the Su family moved to the city, another wave of enthusiasm for migrant work started up in Shangsha Village.

Even if they couldn’t do as well as Su Dakui and bring the whole family into the city for a better life, then during the slack farming season, going into the city to work and earn a little extra would still make life easier at home, wouldn’t it?

The city was very far from Shangsha Village. It was across provincial borders, and not just one, but two. The city was right next to the capital.

Even by train, the trip took two days and one night. Driving was worse, because they had to rest at night and the road conditions were poor. It took them eight full days to arrive.

Once they got there, Jiang Chunhua couldn’t stop muttering, “Riding in a vehicle isn’t any blessing either. My whole body’s about to fall apart.”

With the bad roads, all that bumping along, and eight days of travel, of course her whole body felt like it was falling apart.

Jiang Chunhua had only known that Su Dakui was working in the city. She had never realized Shangsha Village was this far from it.

No wonder he could only go back a few times a year. It was such a long trip, and round-trip tickets cost quite a bit too. Saving a little money was the right thing to do.

The Homestead Land Su Dakui had bought was in Yuanyi Village on the western outskirts of the city, and the truck he had hired belonged to the eldest son of the Yuanyi Village chief.

“Brother Su, if you need a vehicle, just say the word. No rush about the money, you can pay anytime. Sister-in-law and the girls have only just arrived home, so settle the family in first.” After saying that, he drove off at once.

Su Dakui raised his voice and called out his thanks. Then he turned around and happily pointed at the new home as he said to his wife and daughters, “This courtyard is the very last one in Yuanyi Village. It’s got the biggest yard, and the house is brick and tile, so it’s still livable. As for the other three courtyards, those houses would barely pass even as storage sheds. If people wanted to live in them, they’d have to rebuild them from scratch.”

It was called the biggest courtyard, but in truth, it still couldn’t compare to a countryside yard. Those were what you really called big.

Here?

Even counting the footprint of the house, it was only about seven hundred square meters.

But the blue-brick, gray-tiled⁵ house looked neat and tidy.

On the left was a river, about six meters across, and the current looked quite swift. On the right, separated by a narrow alley, was another courtyard. They had already seen it on the ride over. No one lived there, and it looked desolate inside.

While they carried things in, they also started tidying up. The rooms were a little dirty and messy. Su Dakui had been living here alone before, and when a man lived by himself, expecting the place to stay clean and orderly was just wishful thinking.

In this era, there really weren’t many men who cooked, did housework, or washed clothes.

Jiang Chunhua went to the stove to make a meal. They hadn’t had a proper satisfying bite to eat in eight days, so they absolutely couldn’t keep suffering now.

The three Huandan sisters busied themselves cleaning up the rooms.

The layout inside the house was all rather compact: one kitchen, one living room, and three bedrooms.

The small bedroom near the kitchen would be where their parents lived from now on. The other two bedrooms were the same size, except one faced the sun⁶ and the other didn’t.

As the older sister, she took her own luggage straight into the bedroom on the shady side.

Su Huandan didn’t stand on ceremony either. She didn’t like staying in rooms that didn’t get any sun.

But this courtyard wasn’t the one her dad had bought in her previous life. She had no idea whether the courtyard they had lived in back then had been bought by her dad in this life or not.

Once everything had been tidied up, Jiang Chunhua had lunch ready too.

The whole family hurriedly filled their stomachs, and only then did they finally have time to sit down and talk properly.

“I didn’t see many families living in this village,” Jiang Chunhua said. She had noticed it on the way in. Yuanyi Village was huge, but unfortunately most of the courtyards were desolate, overgrown with weeds, nothing like places where people actually lived.

Su Dakui took a sip of tea and narrowed his eyes slightly as he looked at the concrete ground outside the door. “There used to be three big factories near Yuanyi Village. It is a rural area, sure, but back in the early days, the people in the village were all factory workers. The ones who were doing well all bought apartments and moved out. As for the houses in the village, the ones they could sell were sold, and the ones they couldn’t sell were just left sitting there.”

Translator’s Notes