When Aunt Chu got back, she bragged to Uncle Lin that her wife had taken her to a place in Shanghai and that they had even gone to see the sea.

Uncle Lin said it was great, but he was secretly envious.

Aunt Chu told him with a smile that Huanhuan said she would take him with her when she went out to buy goods during her winter vacation.

Immediately, Uncle Lin perked up and started looking forward to the winter vacation.

In the autumn of 1980, Zhao Fugui turned 55 and officially retired. Now, their jobs are considered sinecure, and they applied for retirement themselves when they reached retirement age.

After retiring, he can help his wife manage their daughter's clothing store business.

The shop's business is getting better and better, and sometimes my wife can't handle it all by herself.

The clothes that Zhao Huanhuan brought back during the National Day holiday also started to sell well.

Especially the clothes with lambswool collars, which sell for seventy or eighty yuan, and the leather jackets for one or two hundred yuan. Wealthy people are really willing to spend money.

Before winter break even started, all twenty-odd items Zhao Huanhuan brought in were sold out, and she ended up wearing denim jackets instead.

Seeing that it would delay her earning money, Zhao Huanhuan simply took a few days off and asked her father to buy three train tickets to Shanghai. In mid-November, she took her two fathers to Shanghai again.

This time, she brought about 12,000 yuan in payment for the goods.

She mobilized all the money she could. If she could sell all the goods worth 10,000 yuan, she could earn more than 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.

This was a good opportunity, and she decided to take a gamble.

Unexpectedly, the thick clothes she brought back sold exceptionally well.

On this trip, she plans to bring back a batch of clothes that people can wear during the Chinese New Year to try out different styles. If they sell well, she will come back again during the winter vacation.

This time, I took both fathers with me to broaden their horizons.

It takes a day and a night to travel from Yuancheng to Shanghai by train. They will be traveling tonight and will arrive tomorrow night.

Then we'll find a hotel to rest for the night, take the dads out for a day the day after tomorrow, and go shopping for goods the day after that. In the evening, we'll take some goods to the train station to catch the train home.

Time was tight, but Zhao Huanhuan felt very happy. This feeling of returning to the business world and striving for her career felt so familiar to her.

Zhao Huanhuan brought in a lot of goods; they themselves brought three bags of sweaters, shirts, and other innerwear items.

The jeans, along with the lamb wool down jackets, casual wear, and suits she brought in, were all shipped out in bulk to the freight department.

By the 1980s, freight transport between major cities had become quite mature, with several transport teams owning many large trucks and helping people transport goods to make money.

After returning home, the three handed over the goods they had brought to Zhang Jinhua for storage, then went home to wash up, rest, and go to sleep.

After all, it's not good to rest on a train.

Although the fathers from both families were a bit tired, they felt it was worthwhile to go on the trip with Huanhuan, and they also learned a lot.

Zhao Huanhuan said that she would take them to Guangzhou again next summer during summer vacation, saying that there was a wholesale market there and they could check out the goods there.

Some people with quick minds saw that Zhao Huanhuan's store was doing very well and also had the idea of ​​opening a clothing store. However, not many people were able to make the business successful, but some did manage to do so.

Jeans were becoming increasingly popular, worn by almost both men and women. Seeing how well her store was doing, Zhao Huanhuan rented another storefront in the summer of 1981 and opened another clothing store.

Mr. Lin volunteered to go and look at the shops over there.

Zhao Huanhuan originally planned to hire someone, but her father said he would go and look, so Zhao Huanhuan agreed. She also tried her best to make the store there more focused on men's clothing and less on women's clothing, while her mother's store focused more on women's clothing and less on men's clothing.

In addition, she took both sets of fathers to Guangzhou during the summer vacation and brought back some trendy bodycon pants, tutu skirts, white sneakers, etc., which further expanded the store's business.

When autumn came, Zhao Huanhuan's parents were too busy running their own shops, so she hired a shop assistant for each of them.

Of course, to avoid trouble, Zhao Huanhuan hired a girl who had stopped studying after graduating from junior high school for her mother's side.

On the other hand, Dad hired a young man who had stopped studying.

When she and Lin Yuan weren't busy, they would also go to the store to help out.

The Lin family elders still run their small shop, take An'an to and from school, cook for her, and accompany her in her studies.

...

In the summer of 1983, Zhao Huanhuan graduated from university.

After graduation, she was originally assigned a job at the city's No. 1 Textile Factory.

When Zhao Huanhuan took a look, she realized that it was her former workplace.

However, back then she was a temporary worker, but this time when she entered the factory, she was a college graduate and a permanent employee, and she was assigned the position of workshop director after entering the factory.

The position that Hou Ying had worked so hard to obtain.

The leaders all knew her. After they found out that she had returned, they didn't send her to the workshop for training. Instead, they directly gave her the position of workshop director, asking her to teach everyone what she had learned during her studies.

Zhao Huanhuan agreed and devoted herself to teaching the hardworking and studious workers.

As for those who only think about seducing their superiors to climb the ranks, she disdains teaching them.

This factory has some deep-rooted problems that she dislikes, and people who don't come in really don't know that.

She wouldn't have accepted the assigned job in the factory if it weren't for the opportunity to gain practical experience.

However, Zhao Huanhuan did not intend to work in the factory for long; in the original book, the factory did not last until 1990.

The internal problems are too numerous and too serious, and they are beyond her ability to change or shake them; that is the ultimate direction of society.

She joined the factory to put her knowledge into practice; she wanted to open her own textile factory, and there was still much to learn, especially the entire process, which she had to understand herself.

The main business of the textile factory is spinning, weaving, and dyeing.

Spinning is the process of processing cotton into cottonseed oil or cottonseed cake through machines. Then, it goes through several processes such as cleaning, opening, dusting, brushing off the outer fibers, and yarn forming.

Then it will be sent to the textile workshop for weaving, making cotton fabrics, and the patterns are printed on.

In her later years, Zhao Huanhuan had witnessed even more advanced technology, which involved weaving acrylic, spandex, or nylon fibers together with cotton fabric. This altered many properties of pure cotton, creating numerous possibilities for fabrics and enriching people's lives with a variety of other materials.

Many later fabrics, such as sports cotton, Lycra, and mercerized cotton, evolved from cotton textiles.

What Zhao Huanhuan wants to do is to be the first person to lead the fashion trend.

Therefore, while working at the factory, she was also building connections, waiting for her opportunity to come.

The opportunity Zhao Huanhuan was waiting for was to take over a factory that might go bankrupt.

Following the course of history, starting in 1985, these state-owned factories began to be corrupted from within, and within a few years, the major state-owned factories were emptied out.

Zhao Huanhuan wanted to wait to take over a state-owned factory, buy it, and renovate it herself.

But she didn't get that opportunity. She entered the factory in 1983, but only stayed there for a little over a year before being fired at the end of 1984.

The reason is simple: her integrity and ability scared some people and threatened their interests.