Suicheng is not large, a narrow strip of 300 kilometers, with only 30% of it inhabited. For the past 50 years, it has been a poor and remote area, hardly deserving the name of a city. It was even skipped on the map. Later, it became a secondary hub area because a provincial highway was built nearby. When Ha Yue was born, this area had begun to develop into a place similar to a rural-urban fringe.
Where people move about, there are job opportunities.
They opened restaurants and hotels, and sold leather hats and jade bracelets to passersby from south to north. Many of these pioneers made money, and these "big bosses" shared their secrets to wealth with everyone at their New Year's Eve dinners back in their hometowns, inspiring ambitious young people to try their luck.
If we can transport gas from the west to the east, why can't we also make the wealthy people coming from the south rich?
Ha Jianguo and Zhao Chunni were one of the many young people who came to Suicheng from afar to seek their fortune.
With their blank minds and strong limbs, they thought very simply: doing business is good, making money off other people and enjoying the fruits of their labor is much better than farming, which depends on the weather.
However, fortune is like the Yellow River changing its course; not everyone is destined to get rich. Suicheng, this wretched place, didn't have many good years. After being a "hub" for less than five years, other nearby cities with better natural resources started a dazzling array of new projects, such as national highways, expressways, and overpasses.
With the country vigorously developing core cities, Suicheng is no longer a coveted, impregnable city. The truly visionary business owners have moved on to other places to invest and seek business opportunities. Suicheng is now desolate and deserted. Even Ha Jianguo and that woman have been driven away by poverty. However, there are still some stubborn people like Zhao Chunni who have stayed in this place that is neither a city nor a village.
Ha Yue's shop is a prefabricated steel building with its back to an unfinished building, and it faces the abandoned Suicheng Primary School across an asphalt road.
"Chunni's Convenience Store" is cold in winter and hot in summer. The trash cans outside always smell of expired spicy strips rotting. But it is this shabby little shop that allowed Zhao Chunni, whose husband ran away, to raise Ha Yue alone.
In Zhao Chunni's words, this shop not only didn't let her, Ha Yue, starve, but also supported her to study at the best university in the country for four years in Jicheng, a city with such a high cost of living. Just for this reason alone, Ha Yue cannot look down on this shop, look down on Suicheng, or look down on her mother.
Thanks to this illegal building in Suicheng, Ha Yue didn't become a beggar.
When Zhao Chunni was young, her temper wasn't much better than it is now. It seems that after her husband left, she was busy buying, selling, and managing goods all by herself. In addition, she never remarried, and when she was overworked, she became extremely neurotic. It was common for her to beat and scold her children in that era of both material and spiritual scarcity. However, Ha Yue was never beaten. Her mother's attacks on her tended to be more verbal humiliation.
Besides openly insulting her cheating father in front of her and ordering her not to mention Ha Jianguo's name,
She would talk about how Ha Yue was just as glib as her father who ran off with someone else in front of the neighbors. She would also accuse Ha Yue's classmates of stealing snacks from the store when Ha Yue invited them to play at her family's shop.
Whenever she brazenly shamed and saddened Ha Yue, she would add an irrefutable truth: "If I didn't still want you, you would have been begging on the streets long ago, just like your father!"
Perhaps it was because he didn't want to be called a beggar, or perhaps it was out of malicious revenge against his mother.
Gradually, Ha Yue began to deliberately take detours to avoid her mother's convenience store on her way home from school. At school, she also changed from being cheerful and smiling to becoming taciturn.
Not only did she no longer miss her father who had run away from home, but when she returned home, she also refused to say another word to Zhao Chunni. Every time she looked at her mother's displeased face, she silently vowed to escape from this home.
After ten years of hard study and diligent effort, she finally passed the exam and was admitted to Jicheng, leaving the sharp-tongued Zhao Chunni and the dilapidated and chaotic little shop far behind.
But today is not one of those days. Now, Ha Yue is twenty-six years old. She is no longer the girl who would secretly feel depressed and cry because of a word her mother said. She had been busy all morning, had a quarrel with her mother, parked her electric tricycle next to the big locust tree next to the corrugated steel house, and unlocked the door to enter "Chunni's Convenience Store". Surprisingly, she did not feel any resentment.
She was pleased that her heart was as hard as iron, and she couldn't be bothered to get angry with Zhao Chunni; this must be a sign of personal maturity.
Of course, this adult tranquility was easily shattered four hours later.
The phone rang loudly as Ha Yue was behind the counter giving change to a regular customer who had bought a bag of plastic-sealed chicken drumsticks.
She rolled up her sleeves and examined the hundred-yuan bill against the light to check its authenticity. Sunlight streamed through the banknote from the window diagonally opposite, illuminating the fine downy hairs on her profile.
Ha Yue's skin was originally very fair. Although it wasn't the "pink-white" skin that people online described, it was still at least a yellowish 1.5. Especially after graduating from Jicheng, her job required her to go to and from Wangjing SOHO from nine to five. At that time, she was determined to be a sophisticated urban woman and a proletarian fighter who would eventually become a high-level working-class woman.
She had just started working and didn't earn much, but she was well aware of the benefits of high-end skincare products. In addition, she had a first love boyfriend with exceptional taste and style, which greatly enhanced her aesthetic sense. Her ability to draw eyebrows and apply makeup was outstanding. Even with a natural beauty score of 7, she could transform herself into a 10-point beauty.
Unfortunately, everything in this world requires effort to achieve, and even a beautiful facade needs long-term nurturing to produce any real value. The myth that she once earned 50,000 a month with a three million dollar deal can no longer be replicated.
For the past two years, she has been running a small business in her hometown, earning only hard-earned money by running the shop. Every day, she faces neighbors who haggle over a few cents, as well as her pets and mother. No one watches her put on makeup, and she is too lazy to appreciate it herself. Not only has she given up the habit of wearing makeup, but she has also downgraded her skincare products to the Dabao brand sold in the shop.
Therefore, her skin tone became visibly "healthier," and even just a ray of sunlight could create the effect of a freckled sunburn makeup look on her face.
Ha Yue's thin eyelids lifted slightly. She picked up the phone with it tucked between her shoulder and ear. Her aunt's voice was sharp and shrill, forcing her to put down the money and move the receiver two centimeters away from her ear.
The young man across from me who was giving me extra food for lunch was a wind power engineer from the nearby area. He was a new energy management trainee graduate student assigned by the Jiangcheng headquarters last year.
Suicheng is located on the border, in a remote and desolate area. The harsh weather caused people to migrate outwards as if fleeing a disaster. However, it is precisely this natural geographical environment that has become an advantage for wind power generation.
Since wind power generation began to flourish in Zou Ran, Suicheng, most of the customers of "Chunni" convenience store have been employees of these power plants.
Their job is to maintain the operation of electric wind turbines. It's not too tiring. Because of the limited location of the wind turbines, most of the employees are also people from other places who have left their hometowns. They have to stay on the mountain during working hours. During their rest time, a small number of single men will choose not to go home in order to save on travel expenses, but will go down the mountain to relax in Suicheng City.
Lou Zhiyun, the electrical engineer in front of me, is one of them.
Lou Zhiyun made a special detour to Chunni's convenience store today to buy something because he had two movie tickets in his breast pocket.
Heaven bears witness, this was not a spur-of-the-moment thing. After developing feelings for Ha Yue, he inquired about her and found that the girl in front of him, who was about the same age as him, was still single. Although she was currently running a small shop without a license, she was actually the first female student in the history of the local high school to be admitted to Jida University.
Because of this, Lou Zhiyun took it upon himself to imagine Ha Yue as a new intellectual woman whose progressive spirit matched his own. Moreover, Ha Yue was different from ordinary literati who were entertained by actors; she was hardworking and diligent.
How simple and unassuming Ha Yue is! How virtuous and kind Ha Yue is!
She is truly one of the best marriage partners for men in the world today.
Lou Zhiyun had been pondering this for a long time, from spring to autumn. This time, he was determined to become friends with her first, and then slowly develop the relationship.
But before he could even deliver the pickup line he'd been preparing for nearly half a year to Ha Yue, he saw Ha Yue's usually smiling face turn serious and sharp as she asked into the phone, "Auntie, explain yourself clearly. Stop crying. What do you mean by 'the pig is lost and my mom is lost too'?"
Didn't I tell her never to go out alone?
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