However, by then people had long since stopped using radios.

Wealthy families in the village, such as Sun Guoan's family, had already bought black and white televisions.

Although not many channels could be received, everyone would still finish dinner early in the evening and then take their small stools to his house to watch TV.

Chen Guizhen would allocate places according to the quality of the relationship.

Of course, people like Xie Zhuo, who don't get along well with their family, won't be barred from entering, but they generally won't be treated well either.

Therefore, Xie Zhuo has never been there.

He just sat there listening to a broken, secondhand radio.

Because it's secondhand, it's cheap, but it also has many problems.

Back then, no one in the production brigade knew how to repair radios; only people in the city could do it, but the cost of repairing one was almost the same as the cost of buying another one.

So Xie Zhuo figured out how to repair it on his own.

Unexpectedly, after disassembling it twice, he actually figured out a trick.

Later on... when some people in the village had broken radios, they heard that he could fix them, so they all brought their radios to him for repair.

So when Lao He showed him the two radios, he only fiddled with them a few times before he roughly figured out where the problem was.

And it's not a big problem; he can definitely fix it.

But he couldn't say this directly to Lao He's face. He only said that although he had never done it before, he could think about it.

Upon hearing this, Lao He felt that he must have a solution.

After all, when he first showed the watch to Xie Zhuo, he said the same thing.

I've repaired twenty or thirty watches for him now.

“It’s alright,” Old He patted the radio. “Anyway, they’re just junk until they’re fixed. If they are, that’s their good fortune.”

This metaphor...

The two radios were talking as if they were talking about real people.

Finally, the two agreed on the delivery time and the price for repairing the radio.

Eighty yuan per unit.

The price of a normal radio is between one hundred and one hundred and twenty. Xie Zhuo raised an eyebrow and looked at Lao He.

Old He chuckled, "I don't need tickets when I sell these."

Xie Zhuo understood.

In those days, you needed coupons to buy anything, and industrial coupons were the most scarce. Many people saved up for a long time to buy a radio, but they could never get coupons. Even if they had the money, there was nothing they could do.

Radios like these, which don't require tickets, can only be bought through connections.

Xie Zhuo was never a talkative person, so he didn't ask any questions. He put the radio in the basket, covered it with the mushrooms he had poured out, and then went out with the basket on his back.

On his way back, he encountered two people peering into his basket, but after seeing what was inside, they lost interest.

Many people excitedly ran into the city, only to find that they hadn't sold anything.

Nothing surprising.

Xie Zhu lit the oil lamp, found some tools, and then laid a white cloth on the table before placing a radio on it and starting to disassemble it.

This was his old habit.

The structure of a radio is not complicated.

It seems simple in later times, but it is complex in this era, not in terms of craftsmanship, but in terms of human psychology.

After all, the cost of damaging one is too high.

Xie Zhuo neatly placed the small screws and parts he had removed onto a white cloth, and then carefully searched for them based on his previous experience. Sure enough, he found that a small section of wire was broken.

His men quickly connected the wires, then reassembled the parts in order, and finally turned on the radio.

Even though you can only hear a hissing sound and not receive a signal, the fact that you can make a sound means it's fixed.

It took Xie Zhuo three whole hours to take apart the two radios one by one and put them back together exactly as they were.

After he put the radio back into the camphor wood box and carefully locked it, he went to the yard to wash up before lying down on the kang (a heated brick bed). By the moonlight, he could see that the hands of the small grandfather clock beside his pillow were pointing to the two o'clock position.

It's 2 a.m. again.

After staying up for two nights in a row and working a full day of farm work, Xie Zhuo was also starting to feel the strain.

I fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as I closed my eyes.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw the two little brats sitting on the wooden threshold of his doorway eating.

Hearing the noise inside, Da Bao and Xiao Bao both poked their heads in and said in their childish voices that someone was coming.

Xie Zhuo had not yet gotten off the kang (a heated brick bed).

Hearing their words, he bent his arms to prop himself up and looked into the yard through the glass.

There was nothing there.

“They’re outside the gate,” Da Bao said. “We didn’t open the gate.”

“We didn’t open the door,” Xiao Bao added.

Xie Zhuo felt like he was still half asleep, and couldn't help but laugh when he heard Xiao Bao's words, "Are you a little tagalong?"

Xiao Bao snorted.

Xie Zhuo got dressed and went to open the gate to the yard without even washing his face.

The people outside seemed very anxious; he had practically smashed a hole in the door.

Xie Zhuo's expression was not good.

However, when he saw the face of the person who approached him, his expression froze for a moment.

Did you go to the wrong door?

The person standing at the door is Sun Jiarou.

Sun Jiarou seemed to have not slept all night; her braids were messy, her eyes were bloodshot, and you could see the blood vessels in the whites of her eyes. She was staring intently at Xie Zhuo.

Xie Zhuo's face returned to its expressionless state, and he did not speak first.

"Did you give Xu Yan six hundred yuan?" Sun Jiarou asked in an accusatory tone.

Xie Zhuo frowned. "I gave it to you, so what?"

"You really gave it to me?" Sun Jiarou looked somewhat aggrieved.

Xie Zhuo stuck his head out and saw several people pretending to splash water and looking in his direction.

“They gave it to her,” Xie Zhuo said, somewhat bewildered. “They not only gave her six hundred yuan, but also all of our Xie family’s assets.”

No sooner had he finished speaking than Sun Jiarou suddenly screamed as if she had gone mad, "Why! Why are you giving her so many things!"

"When we were engaged, your family only gave us a basket of cornbread. But when it came to her, you wanted to give her everything you could. Why should you give her that?"

Sun Jiarou's repeated use of "Why should I?" made Xie Zhuo laugh.

He actually smiled.

However, the smile didn't reach his eyes, and it was tinged with sarcasm. "Why do you say that? Because she's my wife, Xie Zhuo's wife!"

"You look down on that basket of cornbread now?" He continued to look at Sun Jiarou, his smile slowly fading. "If it weren't for that basket of cornbread back then, would you still have the chance to stand at my doorstep and act crazy so early in the morning?"

Sun Jiarou fell silent.

But the expression on her face was still complicated, as if she didn't believe he would treat her this way, or as if she felt that what she was seeing was all fake.

After a while, Xie Zhuo heard her muttering in a somewhat dispirited manner.

"You're wrong, you're all wrong. You can't marry her. The person you love most is clearly me. You'll even call me out during the autumn harvest..."

Xie Zhuo didn't hear what was said next.