The day after Xuemei sent her express mail, this year's batch of educated youth arrived. At 5 p.m., Liu's father and Han Chen left work early, and Han Chen drove a tractor with Liu's father to the commune bus station to pick them up.
This time, Liujia Village was assigned four educated youth to go to the countryside. The people assigned were pretty good, three men and one woman, who were selected by Liu's father through a lottery at the commune.
After picking up the people, we went straight back to the educated youth home in Liujia Village. After discussion with the village cadres, the educated youth who came this time decided to let them live in the educated youth home built two years ago. There were enough rooms in the educated youth home, and each room and a small attic upstairs paid one yuan and fifty cents in rent to the team every month. Three boys came, so there were only two rooms left. Two people lived in one room and shared the rent equally. The electricity bill was shared equally by all the educated youth.
Unlike the other educated youth, Li Hua recently borrowed twenty yuan from the village committee to buy a small attic above the house she and Song Xiaoya lived in. While twenty yuan was a bit small, the village made it easy for them to take care of them. Their electricity bills were calculated separately.
Li Hua also spent 15 yuan to build a small kitchen and firewood shed behind the room where she and her daughter lived, and a pigpen and a small toilet next to the toilet at the educated youth institute. They were all made of mud bricks and thatched roofs. Li Hua started preparing the mud bricks for these rooms after the autumn harvest last year. It can be said that most of the new rooms she built this year were made of mud bricks she made herself.
Li Hua and her daughter have stopped eating with He Jing and Dai Dongfeng in the past few days. They cook and fry dishes in casseroles in the kitchen.
The newly arrived educated youth must eat with He Jing and her friends, so after the village discussed with He Jing, Dai Dongfeng and her friends, the four newly arrived educated youth each paid them two yuan, and from then on everyone would use the kitchen utensils together.
After arriving at the village, Liu's father asked Han Chen to stop in front of the educated youth's residence, and then Han Chen went to deliver the tractor. He took the four educated youth to choose rooms. There was only the middle room left for the girls, so it was mainly up to the three boys to choose.
After they chose their rooms, Liu's father took them to Liu the carpenter in the village and asked them to choose the furniture themselves. Now there was nothing in the three empty rooms of the educated youth institute, which was what was called a bare house.
Father Liu did not wait for them to choose furniture. He just told the three of them to go to Liu's house for dinner after they chose the furniture. He had already told them the location of Liu's house in advance.
The Liu family only entertained the newly arrived educated youth with dinner. The rations for the educated youth in the evening were prepared by the brigade (village committee), but the Liu family had to provide the dishes.
The four educated youths were busy until 7:30 before they finally arrived. They also brought some things with them, which Father Liu accepted. But after dinner, Father Liu explained to them the educated youths' subsidies, food, work points, and work situation, and gave each of them some loquats and plums to take back.
The loquats come from the loquat tree planted in the yard of our home. They have begun to ripen. After Xuemei came back today, she and Han Chen picked a few pounds of them.
The three siblings, Qingya, and their family, had a great harvest on their last trip to the mountains: they picked 15 or 16 pounds of plums, two pheasants, and brought back two loads of firewood. They'd already trimmed the pheasants' wings and tied them with straw ropes in the backyard, planning to eat one during the Dragon Boat Festival and the other during the summer harvest.
On the morning Qingya and her two siblings went to school, they were each asked to bring over a pound of plums. They also had the remaining half bottle of snail chili sauce they had made the night before divided into three portions using their lunch boxes. Ruirui and Feifei took one portion to school, while Qingya took two. One portion was for Luoyao. Besides the sauce, they also brought five pounds of plums, a few young pumpkins, some onions, ginger, garlic, and green peppers.
Ever since Qingya started attending high school in the county, Luo Yao would go to the No. 1 Middle School in the county every month whenever she was free. However, whenever Qingya went out to eat, if there was anything delicious at home, Qingya would remind her family to bring some over for Luo Yao to try.
In the fourth month of the lunar calendar, He Wenting went back to work in the village. However, because she didn't want her daughter to get tanned, but she also needed to breastfeed during the day, He Wenting didn't have many tasks in the village every day, only five or six work points a day. She fed her daughter before going to work in the morning, and then squeezed a large bowl of breast milk and left it at home, so that Grandma Liu could heat it up with boiling water and feed it to her daughter when she was hungry. Except for lunch, He Wenting would run home to feed her daughter once at 10:30 in the morning and around 4:00 in the afternoon every day. In this way, her daughter would not be hungry during the day. If she was too late, He Wenting would ask Grandma Liu to make malted milk for her daughter. Basically, her daughter didn't need to drink malted milk.
Grandma Liu stopped working this year and now feeds two pigs, three meals a day, and the chickens. To express their gratitude, He Wenting and Mingwen gave her some fabric, enough for her to make a coat.
Mingwen also felt sorry for He Wenting. On the day off every week, he would ask He Wenting to stay at home to take care of the children while he would go to the village to take on tasks on her behalf. He usually got off work early, and Mingwen would either go to the mountains to chop firewood or secretly go to the river to fish for He Wenting. Sometimes He Wenting had too many tasks to take care of, and he had to help He Wenting finish the remaining work.
Regardless of whether the farm work was busy or not, Wang Shuihua would take a few days off every month to take care of her daughter at home and help Grandma Liu, so that He Wanting could go back to work with peace of mind. In the village, He Wanting was treated very well for having a child, and was envied by many young wives in the village.
Many young wives in the village who have just given birth have to go to the fields with their babies on their backs before they even finish their confinement period. Some are forced by their mothers-in-law, while others do it voluntarily, which puts a heavy burden on the family.
Even in Li Deliang's family, sisters Li Fen and Li Li each carried a child on their backs as they went to work at the beginning of this spring. Li Fen carried her own son, Li Dabao, while Li Li carried Yi Jiao's son, Yi Xiaobao, their half-brother.
After all, the Li family has a temporary worker and a regular worker. Although Li Deliang and Yi Jiao separated but did not divorce, there are still many people in the village who envy their lives. After all, they have a fixed amount of money and tickets every month.
Yi Jiao went back to work at the beginning of the year. I heard from the villagers that Yi Jiao gave Li Li three yuan every month so that Li Li could take good care of her baby son.
At first, everyone was skeptical, thinking Yi Jiao was a cruel person. Ever since she and Li Deliang separated, she had ignored Li Fen and her son, never treated them kindly, and often treated them worse than the villagers. Therefore, they assumed Yi Jiao would never give Li Li money and was simply trying to use her for free.
But one time, Li Fen asked Li Li to borrow money, but Li Li refused. Li Fen angrily told her that Li Li received three dollars from Yi Jiao every month and lied to her that she had no money.
Li Li also exposed Li Fen's appearance of pretending to be poor, saying that she was in charge of Li Deliang's salary. She had so much money herself, but she still wanted to take advantage of her. It was too unsisterly.
The sisters Li Fen and Li Li had already become estranged due to their parents' separation. After this quarrel, the precarious sisterhood between the sisters completely fell apart and they became enemies, which also provided a lot of entertainment for those who loved to watch the show in the village.
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