Chen Hong felt a pang of heartache at such a large price difference. However, the market determines the price, which is something no one can control. The ordinary fishermen in the village, on the other hand, were all happy. Although their fishing skills were not great, their nets yielded a large catch. Even though the price of fish had dropped, their income had increased.
Chen Hong has been in a bad mood these past few days, so she decided to take a day off to adjust her emotions.
On the morning of the 3rd, I called my father and learned that he had gone to Jinan to work again. Chen Hong felt very sad and asked him to come here to help take care of the children, and she also wanted to try to help him get some rest. He's worked his whole life, it's time for him to take a break.
But he refused no matter what, saying he was capable of anything and that he was comfortable earning his own money. For two generations, Chen Hong had been unable to do anything about her father's stubbornness.
The old man spent his whole life working hard. According to the village elders, he learned his carpentry skills from his grandfather. Both grandfather and grandson were honest and hardworking craftsmen, and their carpentry skills were known to everyone for miles around.
But life is full of drama. Chen Hong's great-grandfather and father were honest and hardworking all their lives, only knowing how to work hard to earn money to support their family. But their grandfather, who was in the middle generation, was a "show-off" who loved to eat, drink and have fun all his life and didn't like to work.
He was supported by two generations of his family, but he frequently went out drinking and socializing. He had four apprentices in his lifetime, but all of them were taught by his eldest son.
So, as the year draws to a close, the apprentices visit each other's homes. The older generation goes to the master's house first, then to the junior apprentice's house, which makes the whole village laugh in private.
Grandpa Chen Hong continued to do as he pleased, living a carefree and easy life, accepting gifts, spending money, and drinking alcohol as always. Chen Hong's father had two brothers and one sister.
He was only thirteen years old when he started learning carpentry from his great-grandfather. That was in the 1960s. His father, who had only attended primary school for three years, followed his great-grandfather, carrying tools weighing over 100 kilograms, and traversing mountains to make furniture for people in mountain villages.
My second uncle was rather cunning. He went to junior high school but didn't graduate, but he managed to get a wife. The couple were both shrewd and didn't want to do any hard work. They fell out with my grandfather right after they got married and moved to live in the mill in the production brigade.
My second uncle resolutely refused to hand over his earnings to the family, choosing instead to live his own life. Only my honest father took over the responsibility of supporting the family from his grandfather after his great-grandfather passed away.
She helped her grandfather raise her second uncle, aunt, and younger uncle. It wasn't until her older brother was twelve and in junior high school, her second uncle left home early, her aunt got married, and her younger uncle was about to get married, that her father, who worked like an old ox, finally separated from the family.
Two years after the family separated, Chen Hong's family finally saved enough money to build a house and move out. By then, Grandpa had already built a house for his younger uncle and arranged his marriage.
Chen Hong often remembers how difficult life was when she was a child. Her family of five lived in a borrowed mud house of six or seven square meters for two years.
A mud-brick kang (heated brick bed) took up half of the house, and a large vat was placed next to it. All the family's grain was divided into bags and stuffed into the vat. Cooking was done in a corner of the yard, but it was impossible to cook on rainy days.
On rainy days, we could only cook indoors, filling the house with thick smoke, like we were smoking rabbits. Fortunately, the stove we used was a mud stove made by my mother using a bottomless enamel basin, plastering it inside and out with mud mixed with wheat straw, forming a triangular pile on top, and inserting six or seven thin steel bars in the middle.
The stove could be moved into the house anytime, and they could still manage to eat something. Back then, they felt very happy. Now, looking at the two-meter-wide bed in her home, Chen Hong really can't remember how her family of five slept on a one-and-a-half-meter-wide earthen bed for two years!
After growing up and starting her own family, she understood the hardships her parents had endured. But it wasn't until she was almost fifty and experienced the despair of having no money that Chen Hong finally understood what her mother had told her about the despair her father felt when he was a child, driven to drink pesticide by her grandparents over a mere 15 cents.
People only resort to extreme measures when they are truly forced into a corner.
Looking back now, I realize that my father was once so badly punished for forgetting that he and his apprentices had taken a bus and hadn't included the 15 cents for three bus tickets. My grandparents and the whole family interrogated him all night because he couldn't reconcile the 15 cents. They scolded him half the night for not being able to keep track of the 15 cents.
Dad didn't come home to sleep all night, and Mom assumed he was sleeping with Uncle at the old house. It wasn't until Grandpa came to call him to work chores like shoving manure in the morning that she realized he hadn't been home all night.
Grandpa realized something was wrong and mobilized everyone in the alley to search for him, only to find him hiding in a woodpile after drinking pesticide.
Fortunately, there wasn't much left in the bottle, and he was saved after a rescue effort.
The mother got anxious, went back to her parents' home, brought her family over, and they had a fight before the family divided. But they still had to pay five yuan a month for old age, with food expenses extra, and medical expenses split equally among the three brothers.
Five yuan in the 1970s had a purchasing power far greater than the 500 yuan Yu Hai gave them. In order to leave that bloodsucking home, Mom and Dad agreed to these conditions, which were extremely harsh for that era.
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