Chapter 165 Popcorn: She Wants This Treatment Too
Improving the hair dryer is a time-consuming task, but replicating it only takes some time. Yao Xiaoyu received her hair dryer from Ye Junshu on the third day after finishing her shooting practice. Ye Junshu was a little embarrassed and said that due to various limitations, he could only give her a preliminary version first, and would give her a better one after the improvement was made.
"Then I'll wait."
Yao Xiaoyu had absolutely no sense of unworthiness. Considering the time and effort she spent covering for Ye Junshu, as well as the gold bars and silver dollars she lent out later, she was not afraid of Ye Junshu buying her a whole house full of appliances.
The toolbox and improvement plan effectively soothed Ye Junshu's anxiety about not being able to go out. Yao Xiaoyu didn't have a penchant for judging people based on their actions, so she stayed in the room for a while before leaving the hotel. Because she had sharp ears, she overheard two young girls discussing whether Ye Junshu had kidney deficiency and how to make her stay in the room for shorter and shorter periods of time.
Yao Xiaoyu: ...
The woman in the long dress nervously pulled her hat down further and quickly left the hotel. Little did she know that the receptionist, seeing her fleeing figure, was even more certain of her suspicions.
...
Yao Xiaoyu didn't have any plans for today, but Shanghai never lacks ways to pass the time. She went back, changed her clothes, bought a newspaper, and flipped through it, thus deciding what to do.
"Let's go see a movie."
Yao Xiaoyu said to Tao Xiaoxiao, and lightly jumped onto the rickshaw. The two of them arrived at Hongkou Grand Theater without any plan. This was the name that would be decided next year. Although the place had been almost completely renovated with steel bars, it still used the name of Hongkou Animation Theater from three years ago.
The building was demolished before the millennium due to road widening, but it still looks vibrant. Yao Xiaoyu didn't pay much attention to the movies inside; her attention was completely drawn to the popcorn at the entrance.
The popcorn was no different from modern popcorn, with a crispy, caramelized shell and a strong aroma of syrup and butter. If Yao Xiaoyu hadn't missed the iconic large paper bucket of popcorn, she would have thought she had traveled back to the 21st century. [1]
"Golden beads, smells good, looks good, and tastes delicious! Ten copper coins a serving, ten copper coins can buy a big serving!"
Yao Xiaoyu was initially surprised by the name, but after looking at the golden, round popcorn, she felt it was quite fitting.
"These are clearly corn kernels, how did they become gold beads?"
The neatly dressed vendor was enthusiastically hawking his wares when an elderly woman passing by took a closer look. She couldn't understand how corn could be associated with gold.
You can buy a lot of these things with just one copper coin. But if you take them off and put them in front of this movie theater, the price will skyrocket.
"Golden beads, fragrant and sweet, no mess and edible, only ten copper coins."
The vendor pretended not to hear the old woman and continued to hawk his wares. It wasn't the first time he'd heard such comments, but customers who bought this sweet but not filling food were not the kind of thrifty people the old woman was.
"Young man, how is this made? Can you show me? I want to make it for my kids at home someday."
After a while, the old lady curiously came over again. If it were a family secret recipe, she definitely wouldn't ask, but this kind of machine can't do many complicated things, and the syrup is made at home, so there's no need to keep it a secret. When there are many customers, the vendor will also make some popcorn on the spot and use the sweet aroma of freshly made popcorn to entice customers to spend money.
The old lady felt she hadn't caused the vendor any trouble: the popcorn inside was almost sold out, and she just wanted to peek while the vendor made a new batch to see how the corn kernels had grown so big.
The vendor finally reacted to this: he stared at the patches on the old woman's clothes for a few seconds, then let out a short laugh, without saying a word, but it made the old woman blush.
"Golden beads, made with machines imported from America, the only place in Shanghai that makes golden beads, you can buy a big batch for just ten copper coins."
As the vendor called out his wares, he glanced at the old woman out of the corner of his eye—homemade popcorn, indeed! This popcorn machine was definitely a foreign gadget; nothing in this country could compare. It was only because he hadn't saved enough for a ticket to go abroad that he would stay in this place full of lower-class people.
The old lady saw that the vendor was ignoring her and refused to leave. She just waited quietly for the vendor to make popcorn on the spot. The vendor, however, was unwilling to do as she wished. After selling the last batch, he put away the popcorn machine and refused to sell any more!
The customers behind thought the popcorn machine was broken. The vendor didn't mince words and quickly turned the old lady's onlookers into a shameful act of stealing the secret recipe. The old lady couldn't bear the condemnation of so many people and could only run away in a panic. The vendor pretended to thank everyone and then naturally started making popcorn.
Yao Xiaoyu and her companion watched the whole thing, then put the copper coin back in their hands. After buying movie tickets, they casually asked about the popcorn vendor. They thought they would only get vague information, but the staff inside seemed to have been influenced by the same practices and spilled the beans as soon as they were asked.
He said he grew up in Shanghai, but we've known all over the place that he's from Shandong.
The contempt in the eyes of the staff was impossible to hide; it wasn't out of respect for "Xiang Wu Ning," but simply because they looked down on his lying and his usual behavior.
"That's how it is all the time. It smiles so brightly at foreigners, it's like it's about to kneel down and lick their toes..."
The staff spoke haphazardly, their words scattered and disorganized, but they still managed to piece together the vendor's life story before the movie started. Even after sitting in the movie theater, Yao Xiaoyu's brows were still furrowed.
The peddler comes from a province where people are not as tall as scallions. Strictly speaking, he is still of the Kong family bloodline, but not so innocent. The woman that the Kong family members forcibly took was the peddler's mother. The peddler grew up with a bad attitude and did not think that his father was wrong. He even hated his mother for not competing for favor, which prevented him from enjoying better treatment.
While living with the Kong family, the peddler flattered everyone except his mother. People smiled kindly at him to his face, but privately they said that the child had gone astray: "Humans are such strange creatures. They want to break the stubborn bones, yet they despise the self-deprecating nature."
After the peddler's mother passed away, she could not be buried in the ancestral grave because she was not a legitimate concubine, and her family was unwilling to accept her daughter. In the end, it was only through the joint efforts of several compassionate women that the woman was able to be laid to rest.
The peddler always looked down on his mother, feeling that her existence was dispensable. It wasn't until he truly lost the protection of his blood ties that he realized he hadn't experienced much hardship. But regret was useless. After barely managing to stay in the Kong family for a few years, he was still humiliatingly kicked out.
He hated the Kong family and knew his mother's suffering, so he left in a huff, vowing to make something of himself, to let his mother be buried in the Kong family's ancestral grave, and to make his father understand how tragic it was to lose his son!
It's no exaggeration to say that when Yao Xiaoyu heard this, her face scrunched up like an orange peel—Oh, you hate the Kong family, so you let your father live a life of luxury, spending money like water, having women on both sides, and holding great power, only to admit a mistake at the end and continue to enjoy this good life.
You love your mother, so you insist on burying her in the Kong family's ancestral cemetery, completely ignoring her last wish that she never wanted to see any more members of the Kong family.
Yao Xiaoyu felt that if all hatred in the world was like this, then she would gladly accept it by changing her gender. What was it to possess a vast empire and enjoy boundless loneliness? She could do it. She could even add an annual talent show to use a stand-in to remember her deceased lover. As for whether the selected person had similar eyebrows and eyes, similar demeanor and mannerisms, similar elbow swings, or even similar gender, you didn't care. The point was that they would look alike.
In short, after making this oath, which sounds riddled with flaws, the peddler went far away. He was probably lucky enough to avoid being kidnapped by human traffickers, abducted into slavery, or becoming a bandit. Although it took him a long time and he looked haggard, he still made it to Shanghai with all his limbs intact... and became a beggar.
The homeless children are still children, and although the vendor wasn't very tall, he was already past that age. The middle-aged man had the hardest time to support himself. He had done many things, but he always teetered on the brink of starvation. One winter, he collapsed from hunger on a street corner. A foreigner told him to kowtow to a dog and he would give him a meat bun. He did so, and from then on, he had the idea of going abroad.
When Yao Xiaoyu heard this story, she couldn't understand the vendor's thought process at all, and could only attribute it to a twisted loyalty.
The street vendors only gradually stabilized after they started pulling rickshaws. As for how they started selling popcorn later...
"Given similar conditions, he bribed others but not others, so of course we chose him."
The staff didn't care about the amount of money the vendor had, since we live in a society that values personal connections. The key issue was that the way the vendor saved money wasn't exactly honorable—he encouraged people's sons to marry off their mothers to raise money for the bride price, taking a cut in the process.
If they had found a good family, that would have been fine. But peddlers, driven by profit, would bring in anything, no matter how dirty or smelly. A woman who used to be neat and tidy in her own home is now thin and ragged, her eyes vacant.
After the vendor became a popcorn seller with this unscrupulous money, he didn't treat all customers equally. In his eyes, everyone, including animals, was divided into different classes. If he encountered a foreigner, his service would be extremely enthusiastic, and his smile would be as bright as possible; but if he encountered an ordinary person from Shanghai...
"That old lady was alright. Earlier, a man argued with him, and he pushed him down the steps. The child was so scared that he lost his voice."
The staff member remarked with a sigh, but the vendor's fate wasn't much better. After the man got up, he knocked out three of his teeth, and his face swelled up like a pig's head for half a month.
...
The movie was about to start, so Yao Xiaoyu temporarily put aside the letter of complaint she was preparing and focused on watching the first movie she had seen since arriving here.
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Author's Note: Guess who the main character of the movie is. Hint: A very famous silent film comedian.
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