Chapter 175
The annual income of Pinganzhuang Brigade members does not need to be counted. Two years ago, only the Pinganzhuang Production Brigade could achieve an average household income of more than 2,000 yuan. This year, it is the average of the entire brigade, and many families actually earn much more than this income. At this time, the annual income of the vast majority of farmers in the country does not exceed 300 yuan per family, and some are still struggling to make ends meet.
Of course, the actual income of the Pinganzhuang production team members is the group of people who far exceed the average of the Pinganzhuang brigade. Because Pinganzhuang also has a weaving factory, the profits do not have to be handed over to the brigade, but only to the production team, and then all the members of the production team share the dividends.
The four production team leaders all knew that even though the vermicelli factory and the instant noodle factory both made money this year, the combined income of the chalk factory and the instant noodle factory would probably not be as much as that of the weaving factory - they made foreign money.
The Pinganzhuang production team has the most people working in the other two factories, and the production volume is also the highest in the entire brigade. After calculating all these factors, the other four production team leaders don't want to ask about the work points of the Pinganzhuang production team this year - if they find out, they will feel even more upset.
They did not ask how much money the members of the Ping'an Village Production Team had received. They knew it themselves. After receiving their dividends, they smiled and asked their neighbors whether their family had applied for a residential plot and whether they were building a new house this year or waiting until next year when they had free time.
Xia Juhua took a rough look and found that there were more than thirty families who wanted to build houses this year, and the remaining less than forty families all had more than two people working in the factory and had no time to arrange the construction. They would have to wait until next year when the work in the factory was less busy before they could find time to build.
Xia Juhua realized that it was already the end of 1979, and the news that the 19 farmers in that not-so-remote village in Province A were secretly working on their own would be taken seriously by their superiors. Starting next year, they would arrange for pilot projects to be carried out in various places to provide detailed data support for the land distribution to households.
When the news reaches Pingan Village, it is hard to guarantee that will still be as united as they are now. Xia Juhua thinks that it is time to plan Pingan Village carefully. She told Chen Qiusheng about her idea, and Chen Qiusheng also got excited: "Captain, when everyone are you going to build a house, I will build it with you."
Xia Juhua felt that her yard was still habitable and there was no need to renovate it, so she said, "I live alone, so I can live anywhere. Your homestead has been marked out, so why do you want to build together with me?"
Chen Qiusheng smiled and said, "My housing plot is in a good location. If anyone likes it, let them build it first. Cuiping and I have discussed it and are waiting for you to build it together. It would be great if our two families were neighbors."
Xia Juhua didn't want to discuss with him whether he had discussed the space with Zhang Cuiping or Zhang Cuiping had made up her mind. She just asked, "Do you think my idea is feasible?"
"If the production team sets up a house-building team, I think it will work." Chen Qiusheng knows that there are still a small number of people in the production team who have not entered the factory to work, and are managing the land of the production team. Compared with those who enter the factory and see cash every month, their income is still lower.
If a house-building team is formed, these people can use the idle time in winter to help members build houses together, and the money received from the construction can just balance the income of the members.
Moreover, Xia Juhua's suggestion that everyone's houses should look as consistent as possible is not inconsistent with what was built in the previous two years: more than 20 brick and tile houses have been built in the newly designated residential land area, with all the green bricks, green tiles and cement roads, which look no different from those in the city.
If all the production teams were really built like that, they would be the first in the entire Red Star Commune and even in the entire Pingde County! Not to mention the distant places, the girls and boys in front of us could find a husband to marry in all the villages and towns.
Xia Juhua was amused by him: "How old are you to think about these things? The children in our production team, do they still have trouble finding a partner?"
This is not Xia Juhua bragging. Now, no matter whether it is the girls or boys from Pingan Village, they are very popular in the surrounding areas. Many girls have Hongling's example. Even after getting married, they still stay in the weaving group to work. After work, they ride their bicycles back to their husband's house. The rate of turning back along the way is not low. If it is windy and rainy, the girls who marry out will stay at their parents' home and don't worry about getting wet or frozen on the way.
The young men in Pingan Village had no trouble finding wives. Those who found a good match in their own production team rarely went to other production teams to look for a wife. Even if they found a partner in another production team or brigade, the in-laws would bring the betrothal gifts to the girl back to Pingan Village, so as not to let the girl be looked down upon by her husband's family. The girls who were liked by the young men in Pingan Village had good family traditions, and there was no problem of using the betrothal gifts of the girl to marry a brother.
There is a saying in the surrounding villages that the girls in Pingan Village are valuable now. The dowry from their parents is more than that of other people, and they also have a good income from the weaving factory every month. The boys in Pingan Village are even more valuable, and their mother-in-law's family has to pay a loss.
There are plenty of people who are willing to find such valuable girls and boys, because Pingan Village has a good atmosphere and each family has a good family tradition: Pingan Village now has neither idle people nor lazy people. Everyone has endless work to do, so who has time to talk about their wives and gossip.
Even if a small conflict occurred in any family, as long as the production team knew about it, they would inevitably be punished: You like to talk nonsense, right? Okay, don't go to work for now, stay at home and talk as much as you want, and when you can't talk anymore and the production team cadres think you are qualified, you can go back to work at any time.
You don't want to support your parents, right? Okay, the production team will help you separate your family immediately. Your parents will be the five-guarantee households in the future, and the production team will help support them. But don't think of taking advantage of the production team. You won't get any dividends, and you won't have a job in the factory. There are many people who respect their parents waiting to work.
As for those who beat their children and wives, they should all go to farm. You are so tired every day that you just want to lie down on the kang and rest for a while. Do you still have the energy to beat your children and wife? You will be exhausted to death.
If we take a look at these typical cases, it would be strange if the atmosphere in Ping An Village is not right. The elderly in every family live a comfortable life. If they are not the elderly who cannot sit still, they can really have everything they want.
However, the elderly who receive such treatment cannot act like a troublemaker themselves, otherwise the production team will not favor you in everything just because you are old, but will cancel the subsidy and let you quarrel with your son and daughter-in-law.
The son and daughter-in-law quarreled with the old man and said they would lose their job opportunities and had to go back to the fields to do heavy work. The old man also lost his subsidy. The life of the entire production team immediately became unbearable. Who dared to make trouble?
When the houses for the five-guarantee households were built, the old people in the production team didn't want to make trouble anymore. They all wanted to live in that yard: the yard was four times the size of other people's residential land, and was built according to the regulations of the quadrangle courtyard. It was not a set of adobe houses but a brick and tile house with green bricks and green tiles.
The difference between this brick and tile house and the brick and tile houses of ordinary members is that each room has a fire wall, so as long as the stove outside is lit, it will be warm without lighting a stove inside.
Each old person has his own room. In addition to the big kang against the south wall, the kang cabinet, floor cabinet, table and chairs are all brand new, and even the hot pot and cups are complete. If it weren't for the sign of Ping'an Manor Nursing Home hanging at the gate, they would have nothing missing to welcome a new bride.
The furnishings in the house are secondary; the facilities in the yard are what attract the elderly the most: now only Grandma Qi and Uncle Dong live in the nursing home. Three-meter-wide land is reserved for them along the windows of each room, allowing them to grow some vegetables and kill time when they are bored.
In the remaining space, three diamond-shaped flower beds were built in the middle with broken bricks from building houses. Grandma Qi and Uncle Dong, who lived inside, had the final say on what flowers and plants to plant. A grape trellis was built near the vegetable field on the east side. There were no vines on it yet, but one could imagine how pleasant it would be to sit under it and work or chat when the leaves were green and shady.
In order to make it convenient for the elderly to chat, a square cement table was built under the grape trellis, with four cement stools on each side, ready for people to sit on them at any time.
A tree pit has been dug in front of the western vegetable field, opposite the grape trellis. Persimmon trees will be transplanted in the spring. It is not about how much we can eat, but just thinking about the scene of red persimmons hanging on the branches after the leaves fall in autumn makes people feel beautiful.
The rest of the ground was cemented, and a careful edge was built between the vegetable patch and the cement ground to prevent muddy water from flowing into the yard when it rained heavily. To provide a drainage channel for sewage, the ground near the west wall was slightly lower, and a small drainage ditch was made with cement. A small opening was left near the west wall near the gate, so that sewage could flow out directly.
"I'll move in when I can't hatch chicks anymore." Uncle Wu looked at the facilities in the nursing home and felt it would be a shame if he didn't move in: their place wasn't as big as the nursing home, and the yard wasn't as bright as the one in the nursing home.
Uncle Dong had already tidied up his room. Seeing that Master Wu was standing in the yard without entering the room, he went to the door and called him, "Master Wu, come in and take a look. This is much better than the small dark room I used to live in. Living in a room like this, I think I can live another ten or eight years."
"That's right." Master Wu bluntly said, "When Juhua asked you to move at first, you were reluctant to do so, as if you had some treasure hidden in your room."
Uncle Dong smiled uncomfortably: "I am an old bachelor, what treasures can I have? It's because I feel that my poor home is worth a thousand gold coins. It's the place where my parents left behind, and I can't bear to leave it for the time being."
The fifth master walked around the house and found that the bedding was all new. He said to Uncle Dong, "You've got a new quilt since you moved in. You should keep the house clean and stop making it look like a pig's nest."
Uncle Dong felt even more uncomfortable, and stammered, "It was not clean to begin with, and no one cleaned it up for me, so it became more and more..."
The Fifth Master looked at him disapprovingly and said, "Who should take over your house? I have to help you clean up every day, but you don't take care of your own house. Are you anyone's master?"
You are the grandfather, your daughter-in-law and granddaughter-in-law take turns to clean up for you every day, so you don't have to worry about anything when you go out. Old Uncle Dong replied to the fifth grandfather in his heart, and a smile appeared on his face:
The team leader said that he and Seventh Grandma could still take care of themselves, so they could cook for themselves. When more people came to stay, or they could no longer take care of themselves, the production team would send someone to take care of them.
By then, wouldn't he be treated the same as the Fifth Master? He had been single all his life, and thought he would die alone at home for several days before being discovered because of his stinking body. Unexpectedly, Xia Juhua built a nursing home for these childless people!
He doesn't have to worry about no one burying him after he dies, and he can live alone facing the sun every day. This is all thanks to Xia Juhua!
The seventh grandmother also felt that she was blessed by Xia Juhua. The old lady couldn't do other work in winter, so after cooking for herself and Uncle Dong, she kept knitting jackets and sewing shoe soles - Juhua had said that the women in the production team should sew some shoe soles when they had nothing to do, and when they collected more than a hundred pairs of shoes, they would mail them to the troops in the south.
In the past year, they have mailed several thousand pairs of insoles to the south. I wonder if the children dislike them or if they fit their feet. Qi Nai never stopped working. When the women in the weaving group saw that the coats she made were thick and smooth, they brought her scraps of cloth and old clothes from their homes and asked her to help them make the coats. Then they took them home and sewed them when they had time. Qi Nai felt that she was still useful to the production team and she was much more energetic.
With the appearance of a nursing home in mind, when Ping An Zhuang members built their houses again, in addition to making sure they were aligned and squaring, they also learned to build a small flower bed in their own yard, leaving space for planting trees and a small vegetable patch, and then smoothing the rest of the space with cement, so that people would feel the yard was neat and spacious as soon as they entered.
The chicken coop and firewood are placed in the backyard, so you no longer have to worry about stepping on chicken poop or tripping over firewood when you enter the yard. Not only does it make your family feel comfortable living there, but even if someone comes to visit, you don't have to worry about being rude by not cleaning up in time.
This made those members who had not yet planned to build a house anxious. After work, they did not rush back to their homes, but first walked around the west end of the village to see how far their houses had been built.
"Why are you digging such a deep trench outside the yard?" Li Changwang came home from work one day and found a deep trench dug outside his yard. He quickly asked Zhao Xianzhi, who had just got off work, "What are you doing? Don't dig the wall down."
Zhao Xianzhi looked at him with disdain: "I think you are confused. When building the house, the team leader said that we should leave a drain outlet so that all the dirty water of the production team can be discharged outside the village. When building the house, you left a drain in your house. There is no gutter on the street, so the dirty water will flow directly into the road?"
Li Changwang vaguely remembered that there was such a thing. There was indeed a 15-centimeter square opening under the west wall of his front door. But he was still worried about the wall he had built with blue bricks: "If water is poured on it every day, won't it damage the wall?"
Zhao Xianzhi looked at him as if he were a bumpkin: "You didn't listen carefully in the meeting, so you don't know what to do when something happens? The captain has already said that the gutters must be filled with cement and covered with cement. Will it soak the walls of your house?"
It's as if this is not the wall of your house.
Li Changwang knew that what Xia Juhua said was more useful to his wife than an imperial decree, so he did not argue with her and walked along the ditch to the village entrance. He found that the ditch did not lead directly to the Xihe River, but led to the deep pit dug by everyone to make adobe bricks.
This made him feel a little strange, but he was afraid that Zhao Xianzhi would laugh at him if he asked her again, so he walked back to the village entrance and found several people pointing at the ditch and talking about it. After listening for a while, he finally understood that these people had discovered the direction of the ditch, but they also didn't understand why it flowed that way.
It happened that Xia Juhua brought people to deliver food to the Seventh Grandma and her husband. A group of people rushed forward to help, and also to resolve the doubts in their hearts. Xia Juhua smiled after hearing everyone's questions: "What is the water of the Xihe River used for? I don't need to tell you more, right?"
Needless to say, it is thanks to the irrigation of the Xihe River that the wheat production in Ping'an Village has increased year by year in recent years. Everyone has talked a lot about the uses of the water from the Xihe River.
Xia Juhua just listened quietly, and waited until everyone had finished speaking before she spoke: "The water of the Xihe River is so useful to us. If we divert all the dirty water that everyone has used to the Xihe River, the river water will become dirty. Then can we still use it for irrigation?"
"But the river water keeps flowing. Once the dirty water enters the river, it will be washed away. How can the river water be dirty as well?" Some people think that what Xia Juhua said is too serious.
Xia Juhua didn't think that everyone would agree with her words immediately. Instead, she told everyone the things she had heard and seen in her past life: "The sewage from one family is not noticeable, but the sewage from more than 90 households in Ping'an Village is discharged into the Xihe River at the same time. It can't be washed away in one flush."
"The Xihe River doesn't just flow through Ping'an Village. Every household dumps dirty water into it. It's OK in the summer when there's a lot of rain and the river flows high. But from autumn to spring when the river flows less, the water can't flush it through. It won't take long for the river water to stink."
The Xihe River, where people could fish in the early 1980s, had turned completely black in the late 1980s. The sour and stinky smell stung Xia Juhua's nose when she got close to it. The memory is still fresh in her mind, so she still looks disgusted when she talks about it now.
Everyone looked at Xia Juhua's expression and thought that this was reasonable. However, some people felt that since Xia Juhua said that the Xihe River flows through more than just the Ping'anzhuang production team, and people from other places also dumped dirty water into it, it would not have any effect if Ping'anzhuang alone did not collapse, right?
Xia Juhua told everyone that she had contacted the commune, and the production teams along the Xihe River would try not to bring sewage into the river from now on. When the Red Star Commune saw the results, other production teams along the Xihe River in Pingde County would do the same.
“What if the villages upstream discharge sewage into the river?” After hearing Xia Juhua’s serious statement, some members began to worry that Pingde County was only in the upper and middle reaches of the Xihe River and that someone was discharging sewage at the source.
Xia Juhua was able to answer this question: "The source of the Xihe River is in the mountains, and there are only a few households at the foot of the mountain. They don't discharge much sewage into the river. Next are the dozen or so production teams in Guide County. After Pingde County has fully started collecting sewage, the county should coordinate with them."
Hearing that the county could step in to coordinate, the members of Ping'an Village felt relieved and turned to ask about the house-building issue that concerned them: the more new houses were built in the west of the village, the more jealous the members who had not built their houses became. They all asked Xia Juhua whether the house-building team would continue to exist. What if their family was building a house just in time for spring ploughing and the team was disbanded?
The production team had never discussed this issue. When other production team leaders asked Xia Juhua the same question at the team meeting, Xia Juhua asked, "Didn't everyone exchange work with each other when building houses before? Why do you all want to find the Ping'anzhuang house-building team now?" The wage of RMB 1.5 per person per day is not low.
Li Daniu said sullenly, "Those guys all think that the Ping An Zhuang construction team has built many houses, has experience, and can build neat houses. Besides, if they are paid, they don't have to rely on favors. They just need to keep someone at home to keep an eye on the house, and the whole family doesn't have to be delayed from going to work. So they all think it's more cost-effective to hire the Ping An Zhuang construction team."
Could it be that Ping An Village would have to hire another construction team? Xia Juhua felt that this development was beyond her consideration. But thinking about the infrastructure boom that had been going on all over the country since the 1980s, it seemed that this was not a bad idea, and she couldn't help but fall into deep thought.
Seeing that she remained silent after hearing what Li Daniu said, Li Changshun glared at Li Daniu fiercely, thinking that what he said made Xia Juhua unhappy: "Ping An Manor's own people are too busy to handle it, so they temporarily formed a house-building team. Why are you guys joining in the fun? If I were to ask you, there are more idle people in your production team than in Ping An Manor. Can't you just form a house-building team yourself?"
His voice was loud and it suddenly woke Xia Juhua from her thoughts. She just happened to hear Li Daniu say, "We would like to select some people to form a team, but the members think that the people from Ping'an Village have more experience. Our team has never built a house, so they can't trust us and don't want to use our people. What can I do?" Doesn't he want the members of his team to earn more?
Xia Juhua knew that the reason why other production team members were willing to find the Ping'an Village's house-building team was that the most attractive thing for them was that the house-building team could get cement from the production team, saving them the time and effort of looking for cement everywhere and having to rely on favors.
Li Changshun also thought of this problem and looked at Xia Juhua. What could Xia Juhua do? She had to say to Li Daniu and others: "Why don't you go back and tell the members that there is not much cement left in Pingan Village now, and it is just enough to build houses for the remaining families in the production team. Even if they hire the construction team of Pingan Village, they can't use the cement of Pingan Village."
As soon as he finished speaking, Captain Niu spoke up: "Captain, why don't you get some cement for everyone? Before, without comparison, whoever built a new adobe house would be looked up to by the villagers. But with the brick houses in Ping'an Village, you can see that no one has built adobe houses in the past two years. Everyone is trying hard to build brick houses."
What he said was not an exaggeration. In the past two years, many new houses have been built in Ping'anzhuang Brigade. The brick houses and adobe houses can no longer impress the members who have become more discerning.
But brick houses require more than just bricks and tiles, cement is also a big part of the cost. The cement in Pingan Village was some of the leftover cement from the village road repair that year, stored in the warehouse. The production team had bought some to prevent the cement from hardening, so Chen Qiusheng took the initiative to sell it directly.
Now each production team is about to usher in a large-scale housing construction boom. Xia Juhua is well aware that the Ping'anzhuang production team cannot provide so much cement. She knows that if she does not contact them, several production team leaders will block the door of the brigade every day.
Alas, we should implement the large-scale contract responsibility system as soon as possible. Xia Juhua finally put down the phone, and sighed in her heart: after the large-scale contract responsibility system, there will be large-scale production, and various materials will no longer be allocated by the supply and marketing cooperatives. She will not have to say good things to people on the phone.
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