Ideals and Youth: I Too Had a Youth (Part 10)...
Wu Guiyun thought Ye Xiqing was joking with her, but who knew that Ye Xiqing really stopped farming the following year.
After clearing the stubble, they left the land to dry, and didn't even plant a garden anymore.
Wu Guiyun was extremely shocked, "This is outrageous!"
Even though we don't have to pay grain anymore, each person still has to pay twenty yuan as a discount. For the two of them, that's forty yuan, which is no small amount!
Ye Xiqing smiled and said, "Don't worry, the moment of witnessing a miracle is about to begin."
Wu Guiyun asked her what miracle it was, and Ye Xiqing was about to open her mouth when she suddenly realized that the miracle could not be revealed at this moment.
The magic of the fields, the display of miracles, always takes a year to develop.
Ye Xiqing then changed her mind: "Come again next year, and I'll show you again next year."
Wu Guiyun: ...
So, how are you going to spend this year...?
Ye Xiqing remained relatively calm. She was able to make ends meet, thanks to her incredibly hard work in the past few years, and she still had some money in her hands.
Logically speaking, with only two acres of land, it would be difficult for Ye Xiqing to save money.
The idea behind making money through farming in rural areas is not based on the premise that there are fewer people, less food, and therefore more surplus grain.
Rather, with more people comes more land. The harvest from one or two acres is enough to feed the whole family, and the harvest from the remaining several acres can all be sold for money.
A few acres of land cannot occupy all the labor force. The freed-up labor force can do other work. Large collectives are definitely more profitable than small collectives.
Ye Xiqing went out to work independently because the collective system had become so outrageous in the end.
As the most important woman who produced the population and gave birth to the collective, she not only had to be the last to receive the collective benefits, but she was also unwilling to acknowledge her contributions.
If you can't even get verbal respect, then continuing to associate with this group is just plain stupid.
She adopted a sunk-cost mentality, avoiding involvement in major decisions, and cut her losses to survive.
It's impossible to believe that an individual is more productive than a group.
The advantages of going out to survive alone are obvious: more freedom and autonomy, and you won't have your personal value swallowed up by a large, organized group.
However, there is a price to pay: you have to start from scratch and build your own foundation. As the saying goes, the beginning is always the hardest.
Ye Xiqing started by weaving bamboo baskets, but sales slowed down, so she switched to selling sesame salt.
Ye Xiqing only learned about sesame salt in the previous world.
Roasted sesame seeds can be ground together with salt and eaten as a dip for dry rations, offering both the aroma of sesame and a salty flavor.
In an era of flavor scarcity, its status was comparable to that of instant noodle sauce.
The market sells better in the second half of the year than in the first half. So Ye Xiqing went to the market to sell sesame salt in the first half of the year and to sell sieves in the second half.
Selling sesame salt is more profitable than selling a strainer, since a strainer is an inanimate object that can be used for several years once bought, while people want to eat every day.
Ye Xiqing's family can live without a jar, but they can't live without instant noodles. Many people are like her, unable to control their appetites.
As for why she didn't grind sesame oil along the way, even someone as poor as Zhao Zhenniang had a mill, but she didn't.
In the summer, when Ye Xiqing could still stretch out her hands, she would carry a basket of small millstones and another basket of sesame seeds and salt to the market to grind them fresh.
Sesame salt is easy to sell in summer, but it also spoils easily, so it can only be ground and sold fresh, and we dare not make too much.
When winter came and they couldn't even stick their hands out, they continued selling sieves.
In most households, even if the sieve is rusted so badly that it's not until the New Year, people tend to put it off, thinking they'll just keep using it a little longer.
In the days leading up to the Lunar New Year, not only was the grain harvested, but we also had money in our hands.
As the Lunar New Year approaches, there's a custom of bidding farewell to the old year and welcoming the new, replacing all old items for good luck, making selling sieves a perfect occasion.
Ye Xiqing worked hard for three years, and later even selling sieves felt like a leisurely activity.
After all, the sieve isn't heavy at all, and you can even weave it indoors. Apart from being a bit cold, it's perfect. It's so comfortable.
However, Ye Xiqing's efforts did have some effect.
In other eras, people might criticize those who say that hard work leads to wealth, saying that it can't lead to any kind of wealth!
But in the 1980s, while it didn't guarantee wealth, it certainly increased the probability of it. At least Ye Xiqing became quite wealthy.
Not only did they have water vats, flour vats, pickle vats, and all sorts of other vats at home, but they also had money to send their daughter to school.
With the remaining money, plus the money from selling grain the year before last, we can leave the land fallow for a year without any problems.
After half a year of school, it was finally time for winter vacation. Xiao Ya wanted to go with her mother to sell sieves, but Ye Xiqing had already stopped selling sieves.
Zhou Xiaoya, who changed her name to Bao Zhiying, and Wu Guiyun had the same thought: "Mom, is our family over?"
Zhou Xiaoya's original name was Zhou Zhiying, a name given by her cultured father, which was quite good. Ye Xiqing didn't change her given name, but simply changed her surname.
These days, due to inadequate supervision and lax household registration management, it's very common for children to change their names before starting school if they don't like the sound of their names.
Because children in rural areas are named very casually, with names like Er Gou (Second Dog), Lv Dan (Donkey Egg), Xiao Ya (Little Girl), and Da Ya (Big Girl), and even their nicknames are recorded when registering their household registration.
It's fine to just call someone by their name at home, but once they start school, if the teacher calls out their name and they don't like it, their classmates will laugh and they'll cry and want to change it.
Therefore, changing a child's name is a very common service provided by the household registration department.
But when the clerk looked at Ye Xiqing, who was holding a child and had not changed her name, she was very puzzled. Why?
To be honest, it's just endless wrangling. Changing a name is easy because it's not a big deal.
If she changed her surname, the clerk was afraid her ex-husband's family would cause trouble, so she didn't dare to process her application.
So Ye Xiqing covered her eyes and said sadly, "The previous one married a heartless man and ran off with someone else."
"He doesn't want me anymore, so I won't stay with him. I'll remarry!"
"But the new master didn't want children with a different surname, so I changed the child's surname."
Oh, I see. If that's how it is, then it'll be easier to fix.
After Bao Zhiying started school, she became very concerned about her image and refused to be called by her nickname, insisting on being called by her full name!
Ah, Ye Xiqing understood: "Xiao Ying."
Bao Xiaoying: ...
Something feels off.
In any case, she's grown from a little girl into a young girl named Ying.
She can now go to the market with her mother and eat radishes, but her mother no longer goes to the market or grows radishes.
Xiao Ying fell silent. This wasn't right.
Not only Xiao Ying didn't understand, but Wu Guiyun didn't understand either, why was she watching Ye Xiqing every day?
Ye Xiqing didn't actually not plant anything at all.
She cleared out an acre of land, turned the soil, composted it, and then left that acre of land empty.
The remaining acre of land was entirely planted with sunflowers, regardless of what they looked like; they were left to their own devices, to grow however they pleased.
For the two vacant plots of land, she had someone dig two more hand pump wells, bought a large roll of hose, attached it to the wellheads, and used the hand pumps to manually pump water to irrigate the land.
Everyone knows that Ye Xiqing exchanged land with the Cheng family for land on the dry ridge road.
Even when she only had two acres of land, she never thought of digging a hand pump well at the edge of the field for manual irrigation.
It's too much work. With that kind of energy, I don't know how much I could sell for sesame salt. Those few acres of land are just the bare minimum, enough to eat and enough to pay the grain tax.
She made money by selling sesame salt in the first half of the year and sieves in the second half.
Now, Ye Xiqing has changed her usual ways, tending to this piece of land as if it were her ancestor.
The soil must be properly tilled, the soil properly nourished, and the water properly applied; no negligence is allowed.
Even in the courtyard, they only prepared small plots of land and didn't plant any new vegetables.
When she finally started planting, Wu Guiyun immediately came to see what precious things she was planting.
When Ye Xiqing took out the seeds, Wu Guiyun fell silent: Chives? Chives?
For a moment, Wu Guiyun felt a sense of absurdity.
Ye Xiqing made such a commotion, anyone who didn't know better would think she was growing Ganoderma lucidum, but who would have thought it was chives!
Chives are called a vegetable because there are so many ways to cook them, resulting in delicious flavors.
At other times, it's not a vegetable, it's grass.
You don't need to plant it at all. Just give it a wall base and it will grow on its own. A few clumps are enough to feed you for the whole summer.
This is why there's a saying among the people that "chives are cheap in May and June"—they're so easy to grow and sell for as little as two cents.
Even if you can harvest chives several times, you still can't get a good price for them.
Even if one acre can yield five or six thousand catties of chives, it's not much different from growing corn.
And don't think that just because chives are small and don't need to be planted every year, harvesting chives is easy.
It doesn't need to be planted anymore, but you have to squat on the ground all day taking care of it.
Anyone who has spent a whole day crouching and squatting in the fields knows what it's like; don't oversimplify it!
Ye Xiqing understood; she understood everything. After three years of farming in the countryside, she was no longer the novice she used to be.
But wait a little longer, wait a little longer, she still has a secret to reveal!
It hasn't even been a year yet.
...
Ye Xiqing planted several rows of chives in the yard, but not to grow chives, but to cultivate seedlings. Chives are actually a root crop.
The chive seedlings were tended to like ancestors, and there were some results; the seedlings grew very strong.
Once the chive seedlings had grown and the chive patch had been properly composted, Ye Xiqing began asking villagers who had free time to help her transplant the chives.
After so many years, Ye Xiqing is no longer the marginalized person who had to ask her family to intercede for her to build a house. Over the years, she has had many social interactions with the villagers, and everyone has come to accept her presence.
Even the eldest and second eldest sons of the Zhou family started to establish diplomatic relations with her. In the end, the Zhou family split up. After the split, they had no more enmity with Ye Xiqing. On the contrary, the brothers were like oil and water, and they didn't even greet each other when they met.
In comparison, Ye Xiqing's relationship with those two families was actually better.
Occasionally, I would drop by to exchange some items, or ask her to help me buy small things that weren't worth the trip when she went to the market.
Because of these social interactions, quite a few people came to help Ye Xiqing transplant the chives, and they were planted in just a few days.
When you don't treat chives as vegetables, they grow freely and grow however they want. But when you treat them as vegetables, you have to worry about them often.
After almost a summer of hard work, the chives finally saw results.
But the first year's chives aren't for eating; they're for leaving a stubble. Don't harvest them in the first season; let the roots grow strong so that you can harvest them continuously the following year.
At this moment, the chives were unaware of what was happening. They thought they had found fertile soil and took root vigorously, not knowing that this was the last of their complete lives.
Once the leek roots had recovered, Ye Xiqing began traveling around, sometimes for several days at a time.
The town had a bus service, but in the days before the concept of overloading existed, they would crammed in as much as they could fit. Every time I rode the bus, I felt like my brains were being squeezed out.
She was always out and about, and she couldn't keep leaving her child with Wu Guiyun forever, so she brought her own mother to help her look after the child.
That evening, Wu Guiyun was asked to bring her child to stay at her house so that her mother could keep her company. She was also told not to leave for dinner and to eat at her house.
On her side, let her in-laws take over for now, since she has a lot of family members.
Unexpectedly, they ended up living together, but Wu Guiyun was still happy to do so. Everyone in the village knew that no one was as close as the two of them.
Ye Xiqing had been both idle and busy all year. When another spring arrived, the sun was rushing back and the weather was destined to get warmer day by day, she could finally reveal the secret to Wu Guiyun.
Leeks are indeed cheap in May and June, but what if they were available for sale in March or April?
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