NOVPUB
Chapter 103: Chapter 99 Gaijiatun’s Richest Man
What came with the letter this time was not twenty-seven RMB, but a full fifty. Shen Yunfang raised an eyebrow, then examined the two pieces of paper inside the envelope.
One was the letter, and the other was surprisingly an IOU, one for five hundred RMB.
Shen Yunfang’s mouth quirked into a smile, at least he had the sense. She had already made up her mind to kick Li Hongjun to the curb, not wanting to have anything to do with such a bothersome person and his troublesome family. But as she flicked the IOU with her fingers, she thought since Li Hongjun was being so sincere, she might as well continue to consider him—reluctantly.
Only then did she begin to read the letter.
Dear Comrade Shen Yunfang,
I have fully understood the situation. You did the right thing, and on behalf of my mother, I sincerely apologize to Comrade Yunfang...
Shen Yunfang chuckled. At least the guy could say something reasonable. If he dared to disagree with her, she’d see if she’d still bother with him.
In the letter, Li Hongjun mentioned that his dad was not sick at all, and that it was all just an excuse his mom made up to ask for grain. He warned her not to be fooled and said she should just live her life, that he would take care of his parents. He also made it clear to his family about the five-hundred RMB debt. He personally wrote the IOU, which was legally binding.
He emphasized in the letter that he would definitely not call off the engagement, telling Shen Yunfang to strike that thought from her mind too. He insisted that he could make his own decisions, and even what his parents said didn’t count. And he told Shen Yunfang to relax and not let this matter affect her plans to visit him during the New Year.
Shen Yunfang laughed aloud. This guy really knew how to charm. Even now, he was trying to coax her into visiting him.
She also hadn’t expected that Li Hongjun, being who he was, had actually gotten a promotion. Now he was a company commander, and his salary had increased to fifty-eight RMB. He had made it clear to his family that he would no longer send money home every month, preferring to pay off his debts first, and only then would he discuss contributing to the household again.
Shen Yunfang could imagine just how much his mother must have scolded him, drenching him in dog’s blood. She hoped he could withstand it.
Shen Yunfang carefully stored away the five-hundred-RMB IOU in her space, then took out a notebook and pen to write back to Li Hongjun. But after only writing a few words, she threw the pen aside and crumpled the paper, tossing it away.
She couldn’t write back to him right now; she had to make him sweat a little. She wasn’t that easy to coax. She thought about how much she had been scolded by his mother, and even if she couldn’t retort, she had to let out her frustrations somehow.
Having decided this, Shen Yunfang put away her notebook and then took out all her money to count it.
When Li Hongjun left, he had tossed her one hundred and twenty RMB. Later, with buying grain, jars, ducklings, goslings, and so on, she had spent quite a bit, leaving her with just under fifty. Then she earned two hundred and ten from selling wild boar, but after that, she had bought plastic sheeting and a towel quilt, leaving her with nearly a hundred in hand.
Normally, selling eggs brought in about three RMB a month, hardly enough to buy kitchen necessities, making it impossible to save any money. Essentially, she was living off her capital every month.
This time, selling pork brought in a total of two hundred ninety-five RMB.
With the two hundred or so RMB Li Hongjun had sent over the year, she now had almost seven hundred RMB in savings.
In the twenty-first century, this amount of money might not mean much—it might not even cover a meal out with colleagues or friends. But in her time, the RMB was very strong; an ice pop cost only a cent or two. With this much money, one could buy many things, even afford to build several large tiled houses.
With these eight hundred RMB, she might not know about other places, but in Gaijiatun Village, she could certainly be considered the richest.
Thinking of this made her secretly gleeful. Her labor over the year had indeed been fruitful. Hmm, next year would definitely be even better than this one.
The harvest had been good this year, and if she continued with the same feeding method, she figured she could raise two more pigs. If she was willing to spend a bit to buy bran and other feeds from others, she could raise even two more.
Of course, this was just her speculation; she would have to see how many she could actually raise after next spring arrived.
Next year, the young hens at home would also start laying eggs. With over fifty hens laying daily, at six cents an egg, she did some rough estimates and calculated almost seventy RMB a month. If she fed them well and they laid from the beginning to the end of the year, she could earn a handsome sum just from selling eggs.
Of course, talk without action wouldn’t suffice. In order to ensure the little hens had a warm winter, Shen Yunfang led the sheep up the mountain every day to gather as much firewood as possible before the snowfall. 𝓃ℴ𝓋𝓹𝓊𝓫.𝒸𝓸𝓂
Late in November, the flurry of a heavy snowfall marked the beginning of the winter of ’73.
The villagers of Gaijiatun Village entered the most leisurely time of the year, the cat winter season, and Shen Yunfang no longer needed to take the flock of sheep up the mountain daily. Instead, it was sufficient to feed them dry grass in the morning and evening.
She turned all her attention to her home.
The western room had already begun to warm with the heated kang, and the inside was warm and humid. The chives and mushrooms were growing exceptionally well. There were nearly six hundred pounds of mushrooms in the space, not to mention the chives, which she had been planting intermittently since March. Although she planted only a little each time, over the course of these many months, the space had accumulated several hundred bunches of chives, each weighing about a pound.
She had already thought it through. She wanted to take advantage of the New Year’s trip to see Li Hongjun and scout out the big city to see if there was an opportunity to sell these stocks. If she cleared out some space, she could continue planting next year, and of course, if there was a considerable amount of money to be made, her enthusiasm would be even higher.
Moreover, the little hens at home also gave her a pleasant surprise. She had not expected that just as they were about to enter the cold winter, these little hens started laying eggs as if they had been injected with chicken blood.
One day, after mixing the chicken feed, she went to the backyard coop to feed them, and looking at the extra layer of wooden boards added above, she silently congratulated herself on her foresight. Had she not insisted on adding a wooden board on top of the plastic shed, she would have had to frequently come out to shovel snow.
She knew that the plastic shed roof couldn’t withstand the weight of the snow, but now with the wooden boards on top, during snowfall, she only had to occasionally come out and sweep it off.
While congratulating herself, she heard the little hens clucking excitedly one after another.
Shen Yunfang thought something was wrong, but when she checked the nests, she found a small, white egg in several of them. She quickly picked them up for closer inspection: they were indeed eggs, just a bit smaller than usual.
She had seen this before. When hens first start laying, the eggs are smaller, but they improve after a few days.
Home-raised, common hens are usually kept in the spring of the first year and lay eggs in the following spring. Perhaps it was because Shen Yunfang fed them well, adding earthworms and keeping them in the warm, spring-like plastic shed that they started laying eggs so impressively.
At this point, she inwardly lauded her own foresight. During her spare time these days, she had woven a nest for each little hen out of straw and lined them up on the ground—one for each chicken, no need to fight or squeeze—and now they were coming in handy.
That day, she harvested fourteen eggs from the nests, and from then on, she took delight in visiting the backyard coop first thing every morning to collect eggs from each nest. The second day, she collected twenty-eight eggs, thirty-seven on the third day, and after a week, the daily harvest stabilized at around fifty eggs, without any slacking.
As such, Shen Yunfang, the hostess, couldn’t be stingy either. To maintain the chickens’ nutrition so they could lay eggs daily, she added an extra handful of cornmeal when mixing the chicken feed, utilizing the stock from the space, providing them with fresh wild vegetables every day, and even sparing a grain of Essence of Life from her own share, which she crushed and mixed into the feed to prevent the hens from getting sick. If the hens stopped laying eggs for even a day, it would not be worth her investment.
By January of ’74, she had saved several baskets of eggs in her space, totaling more than two thousand. She hadn’t sold any eggs since it started snowing, planning to wait and see if she could get a higher price in the provincial capital.
After a heavy snowfall on one occasion, Shen Yunfang finished all the chores at home and reverted to old habits. She donned all the thick clothes she could find, grabbed a basket, and headed for the back mountain.
This year, confident in her newfound skills, she had no intention of simply catching sparrows and wanted to venture deeper into the woods to see if she could catch a hare or something.
Unfortunately, the reality was a heavy blow for her.
The woods were full of wild hares and pheasants, and she even saw a silly roe deer, but although she had grown stronger, she hadn’t gotten any faster. These creatures, whether they had four legs or wings, she couldn’t catch up with them. Considering that her strength was still insufficient to contend with a wild boar, she wandered around the forest for a while and then reluctantly returned to catching sparrows.
After catching sparrows twice, Shen Yunfang didn’t go again. Each time it took two to three hours, and she could only catch about a dozen sparrows, which were hardly enough for one meal, not to mention she nearly froze, making it seem somewhat not worth the effort. Additionally, her economic situation was no longer as dire as the previous year—with the space providing both chicken and meat, she really wasn’t missing that bit of protein. So, she stopped wasting time on it.
Furthermore, she decided that to go hunting, she needed to learn a new skill—slingshot shooting. With her strength, if she could improve her accuracy, then she could have whatever she wanted at her command. The thought of her future dominance over the entire mountain made her uncontrollably want to throw her head back and laugh.
For that reason, she had specifically traded some sugar with Ergouzi for a slingshot and had even hung a homemade target on the wall at home. Whenever she had time, she would practice tirelessly, embodying a spirit that feared neither hardship nor fatigue.
