Chapter 71 (Watching the Shop)
After the weaving fair, the tailoring workshop experienced an explosive surge in orders.
Tailors usually take jobs from clothing shops, first the Gu family's own clothing shop, and then other clothing shops outside the town. They will report various sizes and make anywhere from thirty to a hundred pieces at a time.
It's quite rare to have over a hundred individual travelers.
The person in charge of this area is a tall, thin woman named Zhang, who doesn't talk much. Every day, she just needs to determine the job she has taken on, including the location, the size, the number of pieces, the deadline, and any special requirements. Once that's settled, she distributes the job information to her subordinates, who then break it down into pieces and assign them to different rooms to be completed.
There were so many people gathered in front of the house. At first, she counted a few, but as more and more people gathered, she quietly put her hands down. Normally, she would say at most ten words a day, but this morning she said ten times that.
One person can choose not to answer, but if there are a hundred or so people, even if you don't want to answer, you'll be drowned in a sea of criticism.
All she wanted to do was shout that the net she had woven on Qixi Festival was too big, and she was about to become the Weaver Girl.
“Yesterday I went to the weaving workshop of your tailors and met two sisters with different surnames. They said they wanted to come here to make clothes, the same kind, but the three of us are all different in size.”
Zhang Niangzi was frantically writing down her thoughts, and ink was splashing all over her sleeves. Hearing this, she quickly looked up and saw that the three of them were standing in a U-shape.
She nodded and took notes, "Go over there and get your measurements taken first. We'll come back later and make yours together. You can choose the fabric."
"And here's mine. I went back and forth to several tailor shops before, but I wasn't very satisfied with the clothes. I felt the workmanship was just so-so. I came here yesterday and I think your tailoring is quite good. Make me a set first, and then make one for my daughter," a woman called out from across the crowd. After calling out, she asked, "How much?"
"Later, later," Zhang Niangzi was calculating frantically.
In half a day, there was a thick stack of papers. Before she could even finish counting them, Zhang Niangzi ran frantically to find Gu Niangzi, stuffed them all over her, and sat there "weeping bitterly."
Gu Niangzi pushed all these orders to Lin Xiushui's side, saying, "Zhang Niangzi over there wants you to go and help her."
“There’s still this work,” Madam Gu pointed with her hand, “I’d like to share most of it with you.”
Lin Xiushui was surprised and confused. She blurted out, "Ah, no? You're making it for me?"
She herself had quite a few orders yesterday, so she quickly picked them up and flipped through them. Underneath the various requirements and dimensions, large characters were scribbled haphazardly. From the inkless brushstrokes, one could vaguely make out the three characters: Lin Xiushui. After that, there was simply the character for "water" or "forest," with the character "Xiu" not even bothering to add a few more strokes.
Who specifically asked her to make clothes?
“We don’t want to take on one or two individual customers, but there are so many people, and we’ve already set up our signs. Fortunately, I think it’s not bad,” Madam Gu poured Lin Xiushui a cup of tea, straightened her skirt, and slowly sat down. “The jobs we take on in our tailor shop are pretty much the same. Everyone is making the same clothes over and over again. It just so happens that these jobs look quite interesting, so we can take on more of them.”
Madam Gu wasn't very satisfied with the clothes the tailor was currently making. She felt that making the same things every day, things that could be done even with one's eyes closed, would only make people lazier. She preferred something new and challenging, something that could wake everyone up.
"Go help out there first, we'll talk about the rest later."
Lin Xiushui followed Gu Niangzi's gaze and saw Zhang Niangzi's apprentice pacing back and forth by the door. As soon as she saw Lin Xiushui looking over, she immediately put her hands together, held them up in front of her nose, and bowed to Lin Xiushui.
"Let's go," Lin Xiushui closed her notebook, grabbed her paper and pen, and followed the others out the door. Unlike Zhang Niangzi, when faced with so many people, she was thinking about the time when her business was booming, with hordes of people coming to her for mending.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the crowd, people felt a surge of activity.
Lin Xiushui shrugged, went inside, poured a full teacup of water, took a few sips, then asked the waiter to borrow some umbrellas and chairs, inviting the ladies to sit down and speak to them one by one.
When Zhang Niangzi saw her arrive, she immediately breathed a sigh of relief. She wouldn't reply at all. Lin Xiushui, on the other hand, was very assertive. She immediately told everyone to sit down and then speak one by one.
"Yes, Steward Lin, this is my daughter. You met her yesterday, right? She'll be turning 18 next month, and we're worried about what clothes to wear." A woman pulled up a very thin young woman. She was extremely worried. "She's too thin, and the clothes she wears aren't very good. We'd like to make something that fits her well, preferably something that will make her look healthier."
Lin Xiushui put down her pen and carefully observed the person's face. She had learned from the tailor Jin how to judge a person's figure by measuring their size with fabric. After thinking for a moment, she replied, "Your waist is too thin. We can make a pleated skirt, or we can widen the fabric to make a thousand pleats. In our tailoring workshop, there is a woman named Li Erniangzi who makes skirts. Her three apprentices are all very skilled at this, and they can make very beautiful pleats."
"You can also choose the fabric yourself. Here, these are the first fabric styles our tailors have made this year. This orange-red fabric is silk with a thick sole, so it can still be worn when it gets colder in a month. She's slim, so she can wear a ru (a type of traditional Chinese jacket) and then another layer on top. As for the color, red would actually be suitable."
Lin Xiushui explained in great detail. When others asked her for advice, they were often unsure of what to do. Having worked in the tailoring industry for a long time, she could easily help others with her words. She could talk about everything from head to toe, which eased the anxiety of the mother and daughter who were preparing for their coming-of-age ceremony. They agreed to go to the side and slowly choose fabrics while waiting for their new clothes to be made.
Watching from the side, Zhang Niangzi had a million thoughts running through her mind, but in the end, she could only say a few words: This is amazing.
She spent so much time and effort, but they said if she couldn't speak well, they should find someone else.
For Lin Xiushui, this was similar to setting up a stall, or even easier. Clothes couldn't be made immediately after being ordered, but mending required identifying the flaws as soon as the garment was received and discussing them with the person while mending.
She could even slowly drink some water and scan the person who came in, getting a general idea of what kind of person they were.
Behind her was an old lady. Lin Xiushui was certain she had never seen her before. The old lady was very kind. She said, "My daughter brought me here. She said the people here are nice and asked me to come and make a dress that fits me."
“I’m sixty-five this year, and my legs aren’t very good anymore. I can’t squat down, so I don’t wear skirts anymore. I only wear underwear and trousers. I’m afraid of the cold, so at most I’ll wear a waist band or an apron,” the old lady said. Although her temples were gray and her eyesight was poor, her speech was very clear.
“I haven’t worn a skirt in a long time. I’ll be sixty-six next year. I see that the scholars and officials living next to me all hire painters to paint their portraits and hang them in their homes. They call it a portrait. I want to have one painted too.”
The old lady's wish was to have a portrait painted of her before she turned sixty-six, wearing a dress she hadn't worn in five or six years.
Lin Xiushui knew a little about portraiture. It used to be popular among the literati, who liked to hire painters to paint their portraits. After the painting was finished, they would write poems, which were called portrait praises or self-praises. The best paintings captured both the spirit and the form.
She asked first, "Grandma, what kind of dress would you like to wear?"
The old lady said, "I can't really say what kind of skirt it was. I used to wear a skirt with eight panels."
Most pleated skirts are six, eight, or even twelve panels wide, but when you sit down, the pleats spread out, and they don't look very good in paintings.
Older women are actually better suited to wearing three-pleated skirts, which are made of four square pieces of fabric pieced together, with only three pleats and the rest being plain. Recently, another type of skirt called a pleated skirt has also become popular. This type of skirt doesn't use much fabric; it's made by overlapping two pieces of fabric, leaving a smooth surface in the middle, and adding several pleats to the left and right ends of the overlap. It has a lining inside, which isn't made of quilted silk or cotton, so it feels a bit heavy when worn. When sitting down, the pleats on both sides will naturally drape down.
After discussing it with others, she decided she wanted this kind of dress.
Lin Xiushui stood up and pushed the stool back with her leg, making a creaking sound, which made the people sitting turn around to look at her. The old lady also became nervous and fumbled for the cane next to her.
"Is this something that can't be done?" The old lady tried to stand up, and several other women who were sitting also stood up and gathered around to look.
Lin Xiushui simply bent down, opened the drawer on her right, took out two cloth rulers, and turned around, almost startled to find a group of people gathered around, all turning their heads to look at her.
"What's wrong?" Lin Xiushui asked curiously, straightening the measuring tape. "I'm taking my measurements."
"Oh, measuring, measuring is good," the person at the front chuckled dryly, looking disappointed, and put down his tiptoes, no longer interested in watching the show.
"It's for taking measurements. I thought it was a body search."
"Seeing this measuring tape," a woman nudged the three people in front of her, insisting on squeezing through sideways, and slapped her thigh, saying, "Do you know my sister-in-law? Before buying cloth, she takes five measuring tapes. She measures every piece of cloth in the shop, but when she gets back, she still finds that she has more than half of the cloth missing."
"My mother-in-law was furious. She grabbed her ear and demanded to know exactly how she bought it."
"Guess how you bought it?"
As everyone chattered, the woman put her hands on her hips, pouted, and said, "What? She came back saying that measuring cloth foot by foot was too troublesome, so she simply tied all five cloth measuring tapes together into one long tape and measured wherever she could reach."
“My mother-in-law said she bumped her eyes into a group of shrimp in the river, which is just nonsense.”
Everyone burst into laughter upon hearing this. Lin Xiushui, who was measuring the old lady's waist, also laughed so hard her hands trembled. She was most afraid of encountering talkative people who would interrupt her while she was working.
One person has one mouth, a hundred or so people have a hundred mouths, chattering away.
One task after another, Lin Xiushui sat down and stood up again, her head buzzing after drinking a bellyful of water.
Skirts, trousers, jackets, made of gauze, satin, silk, or gauze, for the fat, the short, the tall, and the thin.
She decided to hand out autographs to everyone, one by one.
After seeing off the last one, Madam Zhang slumped onto the table and said, "I can't go on anymore, call a doctor for me."
"What doctor?" Lin Xiushui was sorting through a pile of papers, patting and pressing them down, before finally leaning back in her chair and rubbing her forehead.
"Dr. Xiang".
Lin Xiushui turned to the side and asked curiously, "What kind of doctor is that?"
Madam Zhang said slowly, "Perfume will do, bathing won't work, we can bring in a few more doctors—copper coin doctors, gold and silver coin doctors—and if all else fails, we can even have a doctor who eats us."
"Deep-fried abalone snails, candied melon, cheese noodles, shredded chicken noodles, deer pear syrup, Wuling Dashun powder..."
Lin Xiushui reached for a bowl on the table behind her, poured a glass of water, and handed it over, saying, "With my wealth, I can only afford to hire a water doctor for you."
"Stingy."
Being stingy is fine, it's not about making money for her. Lin Xiushui got up, picked up the paper, and pulled Zhang Niangzi along, "Come on, let's go ask for money."
"Could you use a different word? I don't want to beg for food."
Lin Xiushui rephrased it, "Go get the money."
Madam Zhang sighed, "It's even more like it now. Next time you say you'll spend money to go, I'll go with you without hesitation."
"Spend your money."
Zhang Niangzi didn't speak, and she immediately stepped out the door and started dreaming.
The two hurried along the path of the tailor's workshop, waiting to ambush Gu Niangzi just as she finished work.
"I want to go home too," Madam Gu really wanted to leave. She worked at the clothing shop in the morning and as a tailor in the afternoon, and all she wanted was to go home.
“I want to go back too,” Lin Xiushui chimed in. When Madam Gu went to the right, she went to the right; when Madam Gu went to the left, she went to the left.
Madam Gu simply stood there and said, "Alright, alright, you say it."
Zhang Niangzi, eager to retort, quickly said, "There are a total of eighty-seven jobs here, each with a different deposit, totaling a little over one hundred and thirty-eight strings of cash."
She spoke slowly, “We’ve been busy all day, talking more than we’ve made money, we’re really exhausted.”
“Hmm,” Madam Gu said without showing any surprise. She simply stood there, glanced at the two of them, and uttered two words, “Then add some food.”
Zhang Niangzi exclaimed, "No, that won't work!"
“That won’t do. Let’s give Madam Zhang some more money,” Lin Xiushui followed up.
Madam Zhang turned her head in surprise to look at her, and five words popped out: "What a good person! What a good person!"
There are still orders tomorrow, orders for more than a hundred people. Each person earns between three and five strings of cash. The tailors can earn at least five hundred strings of cash. Everyone has their own calculations in mind. After deducting the cost of fabric, labor, etc., they can still make at least tens to hundreds of strings of cash.
Madam Gu was satisfied, but said only, "Add them, add both."
"I'll add more tomorrow, I'm going home now."
Lin Xiushui slipped away faster than anyone else. After Gu Niangzi finished speaking, she said goodbye to everyone and ran off in a flash. She still had other jobs to take on.
After disembarking from the boat and hurrying ashore, Lin Xiushui was stopped by someone. She didn't recognize the face, but found herself holding a bunch of lush, broad green leaves.
The man said, "You should wear catalpa leaves on the day of Liqiu. Ah Qiao, take these and wear them on your head. Wear a lot."
Lin Xiushui couldn't hold it all in one hand, so she used her clothes to cover it and hurriedly said, "There aren't enough heads to wear."
The person was taken aback by what she said, then thought it made sense and leaned forward, saying, "How about I lend you one?"
Lin Xiushui shook the leaves in her arms, put them in the hair for the person, thanked them, turned around, crossed the bridge, and hurried back to her rented house.
He went inside and put the leaves down. He then said to Zhou Niangzi, who was mending clothes, "Sister Zhou, could you help me get Xiaohe here first? I have some things to do."
"Okay, I'll go pick it up right now."
Lin Xiushui had a bunch of tasks to do, which she jotted down in a jumbled list. She needed to organize them first and see if she could do them.
She was still calculating until very late, even after Wang Yuelan had returned from the brocade workshop.
A crowd of people looked over. Lin Xiushui, who originally intended to walk straight, turned several corners and quickly nodded, heading towards Madam Gu.
Madam Gu was doing the accounts when she saw someone come in. She didn't even look up, but she could tell who it was just by the sound of their footsteps. Lin Xiushui's footsteps were always very light and quick.
"Sit down. You deserve all the credit for taking so many orders," Madam Gu said, pausing on the accounts she was about to calculate and placing her hand on the abacus. "Our clothing shop has also sold a lot of clothes."
Many of the garments were from a large portion of the clothing store, and they were all bought up. Many people had been picking and choosing from several clothing stores, and the clothes were all about the same, so after the weaving event, they chose their store, creating a rare and spectacular scene.
Before readily offering more money, Madam Gu asked Lin Xiushui, "What do you want?"
Lin Xiushui had just sat down and placed her hands on the table when she heard this. She looked at Gu Niangzi's abacus. Back when they were in the clothing shop, she and Xiao Chun'e used to judge the mood by Gu Niangzi's expression.
Later they discovered that whenever Madam Gu picked up the abacus to calculate money, she was in a good mood and made a considerable amount of money that day.
Upon seeing the familiar abacus again, her eyes lingered on it. She fiddled with the edge of the table, and after considering both money and other requests, she said, "I want some fabric from the tailor shop so I can pick out a few bolts first."
Of course, she wanted a stable supply of fabrics. She said that when she wanted to open a shop, she had considered all the possible paths ahead.
"You can choose ten bolts of cloth a month, with no restrictions on the material," Madam Gu decided.
Lin Xiushui was surprised. No restrictions on material? A single bolt of fine silk or satin would cost five strings of cash. She stammered, "Really?" "Any kind of fabric is fine?"
"Really?" Madam Gu said, "Are you sure you only want the cloth?"
"Of course," Lin Xiushui nodded vigorously. "Fifty strings of cash might not even buy ten bolts of good material."
She suddenly felt that a great "scene" was unfolding before her. Madam Gu said, "This matter is this matter, I'll give you an extra five taels of silver."
Lin Xiushui sat there, trying not to laugh, but the corners of her mouth couldn't help but curl up. She wanted to hum a song. She had earned twelve or thirteen strings of cash from the Qixi Festival market and various other transactions. Her tailoring work was also profitable. The money she had saved was enough to buy a small shop on the street.
Once she had earned the money and counted it out, which amounted to over seventy strings of cash, she went to find Zhang Yalang and went with him to look at shops along the street.
We'll hold off on buying for now, but we'll take a look. When we're tired, we'll think about the shops she wants to buy, and then we'll be overjoyed.
As soon as she arrived, Zhang Yalang put down his teacup, which was about to touch his lips, and took out a rolled-up book of geomancy from the cloth bag beside him. He quickly said, "Young lady, come and take a look. You said the shops in front are too small, but these shops are better."
"Look, this shop just said it was moving a few days ago. It's right next to the South Goods Market. To the left is the Xu Family Fan Shop, and to the right is the Qi Family Color Shop. The shop is much bigger than the one you looked at before, and the price has doubled to 140 guan."
Lin Xiushui ordered a cup of tea, took a sip, and saw an old woman next to her doing tea art. She was holding a teapot and brewing tea, and the tea foam gradually formed the shape of a bird. She heard that she could make many shapes of flowers, birds, insects and fish. She watched for a long time without replying.
Seeing how composed she was, and how she remained unfazed even with 140 strings of cash, Zhang Yalang was overjoyed. He pointed to the largest shop on the map and said, "Why don't you take a look at this one, young lady? It has two floors, with three large rooms and two small rooms inside. The price is negotiable, 320 strings of cash."
“Zhang Yalang, I don’t want to go to jail anytime soon,” Lin Xiushui almost choked, coughing a couple of times. “I didn’t rob anyone, how could I suddenly have so much money overnight? Of course, if you sell it for twenty guan, I might buy it.”
The two couldn't reach an agreement, and Zhang Yalang didn't want to act like a fool.
Zhang Yalang changed the subject, saying, "How about the sixty-string one?"
"Don't underestimate people, first look at the one with seventy strings of cash."
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