Chapter 8 Chapter 8 Tastes better than Gouzi’s malted milk…
The two children took Su Yan to the canteen to get food. The canteen was behind a poplar forest, some distance away from the factory building. When they entered, the canteen was not empty. The canteen chef saw the two children and said, "Xiaogang, Yanzi, are you here to get food again?"
The two children greeted him with a smile: "Hello, Grandpa Feng!"
The canteen chef saw Su Yan and asked, "Who are you?"
Su Yan said, "I'm Lu Yingzi, and I just got back this morning." The chef smiled and asked, "Have you gone to the office to sign up for meals? If you haven't, the meals prepared in the cafeteria are limited, so there's no extra and we can't serve your meal."
Su Yan looked at the food in the iron basin. It was a watery, clear soup without a speck of oil. There was a vegetable soup, a steamed bun, and boiled tofu. The spoon for serving the food was pitifully small. Su Yan said, "It's okay. You can serve the food to the two children. You don't have to hit me."
The two children's meals were ready, but not even a full lunch box. Instead, they filled half a bowl of vegetable soup. Su Yan, along with the two children, encountered workers in blue overalls arriving for lunch. However, no one came forward to greet Su Yan, as if they hadn't noticed her and the other two. Su Yan felt strange. If these people didn't recognize her, they should have recognized Lu Gang and Lu Yan, the two children.
After they passed the cafeteria, they saw people pointing and talking at them. A child wanted to come over to say hello to Lu Yan, but his mother stopped him: "What are you running around for? If you get to the cafeteria too late, you'll starve to death. Who do you think you are? You can eat in the cafeteria for free every day like others, without paying a penny?"
Su Yan was not someone who would swallow her anger. She handed the lunch box to Xiao Gang and walked over: "Sister, what is your name?"
The older sister smiled and said, "Oh, you're back from college. You've been in the big city for a few years, and now you don't even recognize your old neighbors. You really are forgetful!"
Su Yan smiled: "I have a bad memory and I can't remember all those random people. Let me tell you, it was Director Lin in the office who agreed to let Xiaogang and Xiaoyan go to the cafeteria to eat. If you have any objections, go to the office and tell him. Also, I'm back now. I haven't settled down today, so I won't go to the cafeteria to eat after I settle down tomorrow. I'm not like others who take advantage of the company by taking advantage of loopholes. If I don't eat a steamed bun, it's like someone has died in my family." After she finished speaking, she turned around and took Xiaogang and Xiaoyan away, leaving the older sister standing there with a pale face.
This is the brilliance of an argument. If they hit you with a stick, they'll leave. Even if you want to fight back, they'll already be gone, leaving you feeling angry. Aunt Su Yanzu'an has never lost when it comes to taunting people!
Xiaoyan was completely stunned. "Aunt, you're right. Aunt Wang always says that my family takes advantage of the company, but in fact, she often takes Wang Ke to the cafeteria to eat for free."
Xiaogang was most worried about food: "Aunt, are we really not going to the canteen to get food tomorrow? What will we eat then? We've eaten all the cornmeal a long time ago, and my mom took all the wages of my dad, grandpa, and grandma. Now we have neither money nor food coupons at home. Aunt, you were just fooling Aunt Wang, right? Let's go to the canteen early tomorrow to get food, so we don't run into them, right?"
Su Yan opened the door with her key. It was on the first floor, and the room felt very cool as soon as she entered. She opened the lunch box and fed the two children. Then she said seriously, "I asked Uncle Xu, that is, Grandpa Xu. Originally, family members could also go to the cafeteria to eat, as long as they paid a symbolic fee. Now is a difficult time, and family members are not allowed to go. We are not employees of the machinery factory, so we should not go either."
Xiao Gang retorted: "But Director Lin said that we can go..."
Su Yan nodded. "I know Director Lin did say you two could go to the cafeteria for dinner. But that was because Grandpa and Dad passed away, Grandma was sick, and Mom went home. At that time, Auntie was still in Shanghai and there were no adults at home. You two were too young to cook, so we made an exception and asked you two to go to the cafeteria for dinner. Now that Auntie is back, we can cook for ourselves, so we can't go. If we continue to go, more and more people will be dissatisfied like the auntie today."
Xiaoyan finished the steamed bread in two bites. She seemed to understand and asked, "Can you cook for yourself?"
Su Yan nodded: "Yes, I cook for myself. To be more precise, my aunt cooks for me. But my aunt doesn't cook often, so it might not be very delicious. I'll ask you two to make do with it."
Xiaogang looked uneasy: "But do we have cornmeal at home?"
Su Yan opened the package on the table, revealing a bundle of noodles. The two children cheered: "Noodles, Auntie, it's noodles!"
Su Yan raised her finger and said, "Let's do this quietly. We can't let anyone else know, okay?"
The two children nodded vigorously, their mouths watering. "Okay, Auntie, let's eat quietly and don't let anyone know, otherwise they will come to our house to search for gold bars again."
Su Yan asked: "Do we have any gold bars at home?"
The two children looked at each other and shook their heads: "No!"
Su Yan smiled and rubbed the two children's heads: "Very good, no matter who asks you in the future, you must answer like this, understand?"
The Lu family's small kitchen was in the living room. Su Yan wanted to get something out of the space, so she asked her brother to take her sister to the room to recite a Tang poem. They could only eat noodles after they had memorized it.
Su Yan lit the stove and cooked three bowls of noodles. Outside the kitchen was a yard where someone had cleared the land and planted some vegetables. It must have been Lu Yingzi's mother or father. She opened the kitchen door and picked a small cabbage. However, someone had plucked the leaves from the vegetable patch, leaving only a few heart leaves.
Su Yan thought, the choy sum inside is just tender, so she washed it, put it in the pot, and blanch it for ten seconds before taking it out. Su Yan searched the cupboard, but there was only salt and chili peppers. She had to find beef sauce and sesame oil in the space. There were green onions growing in the flower pot on the window. She picked a few, chopped them finely, and sprinkled them on the noodles. She scooped a large spoonful of beef sauce on each side of the noodles, added sesame oil, and sniffed it. "It smells so good! This must be at least 20 yuan a bowl, right?"
Su Yan brought the noodles to the sleeping room, locked all the doors, put the various seasonings back into the space, cleaned up the kitchen, and then called the two little ones to come and eat.
My sister shook her head and recited: "When the sun is at its highest, I hoe the field, my sweat dripping down to the soil. Who knows that every grain of rice on the table is the product of hard work?"
Su Yan asked the two of them to go out for dinner and sternly told them: "Don't tell anyone about our family eating noodles at home, understand?"
However, the two children clearly understood the seriousness of the matter much better than Su Yan. They nodded and said, "I know. We can't even tell Grandpa Xu or Mom. If we tell them, they'll come and search our house again."
Pushing the door open and entering, the two children were stunned to see a large bowl of beef noodles. The younger sister leaned over and sniffed hard: "Brother, it's meat sauce, it's meat sauce!" She picked up the chopsticks, carefully picked up a little and put it in her mouth, revealing an intoxicated expression: "It's delicious, and there's sesame oil!" At the same time, she turned to Su Yan and said: "Auntie, I haven't eaten meat for a year. I had pork dumplings during the Chinese New Year two years ago, but they were not as delicious as this meat sauce."
Su Yan felt sad when she heard this. She patted her head and used chopsticks to mix the noodles for her: "Eat it. If you don't have enough, Auntie will cook more."
The two children picked up the chopsticks and ate voraciously. Before they had swallowed the noodles in their mouths, they picked up more noodles with the chopsticks and brought them to their mouths.
Even Su Yan herself felt that this ordinary bowl of boiled noodles, but with a little beef sauce and sesame oil added, was even more delicious than the seafood feast she had eaten before.
The two little ones ate to their heart's content. Su Yan calculated that she had taken out two pounds of noodles from the space, and now half was left. The three of them had eaten nearly a pound of noodles, so each of them had eaten three taels of noodles. Su Yan was a little surprised. She used to eat beef noodles, but she couldn't even finish two taels of noodles. Now, she adapted to the local customs. After a day or two of hunger in the 1960s, even her appetite had increased. She poured hot water from the thermos and told the two little ones to wash up and go to bed for a nap. After washing their faces, the two little ones refused to go to bed and wanted to help Su Yan clean up the kitchen. Children of poor families grow up early. The two children were only five or six years old, but they were already doing housework well. One was washing dishes at the sink, and the other was wiping them with a clean rag and putting them in the cupboard.
Su Yan cleaned up the floor, took two bowls, and went to the other room. She locked the door and pulled out two bottles of strawberry-flavored milk from the space. She opened the packaging, poured the milk into the white porcelain bowls, and tossed the packaging back into the space. There was a lot of milk in the space. Su Yan's mother had always required her to drink two bottles of milk every day since she was little, but Su Yan didn't like it. After the space was created, she threw all the milk in there, lying that she had already drunk it. Over the years, there were hundreds of cartons of milk, enough to last the two children five or six years.
When Su Yan brought in two bowls of milk, the two children had already taken off their clothes and lay in bed. They were still asleep, their eyes narrowed slightly. When they saw Su Yan come in with two bowls, they jumped up and said, "Auntie, did you make two more bowls of noodles? You should save them for dinner. If you finish them, there will be nothing to eat at night."
Su Yan said, "This is milk. Drink it and go to sleep! You are growing now, so you need to supplement more protein."
Xiao Gang brought it over, took a sip, and smiled: "Auntie, this milk is really delicious, like sugar water, really delicious."
Xiaoyan's bowl was smaller, and Su Yan was worried that she couldn't hold it properly. "Brother, is this the kind of milk your Husky drinks? The director ordered it for him at the dairy factory, and it costs five yuan a month."
Xiaogang shook his head. "It's much better than his. His isn't sweet. Ours is better than sugar water. No, it's better than Gouzi's malted milk."
The two children were engrossed in their discussion, and Su Yan felt a strange feeling in her heart. As a child, she had tried every possible means to escape the milk she was supposed to drink, but now these two children wanted it but couldn't. She didn't know what would happen to her strong woman mother if she disappeared. She was divorced, her grandparents had passed away, and even her only relative had disappeared inexplicably. She didn't know if she was very sad or if she was doing well.
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