Chapter 04 Chapter 4
Su Tianli returned to her home after five years away.
Su Dejun and Tian Xiu were both ordinary workers in a chemical factory, but because they were both working and had many children in the family, they were still allocated a two-bedroom apartment of 60 square meters.
The master bedroom belongs to them.
The second bedroom used to be for three sisters.
The younger brother Su Tiancai has lived with his parents since he was born. Later, when he grew up a little, Su Dejun used wooden boards to separate a small room for him to live in between the balcony and the living room.
The layout of the factory buildings in the 1970s was not very good.
The master bedroom is OK, with a small window.
The only window of the second bedroom opens into the living room.
A corner of the living room and the balcony was separated to serve as Su Tiancai's room.
So even in broad daylight, the living room was dark.
Su Tianli reached out to the wall relying on her body memory, and sure enough, she touched a thread.
As soon as I pulled it, the light came on immediately.
Su Tianli frowned immediately.
The living room was in a mess, and the air was filled with a faint fishy smell;
There was even a bunch of socks on the ground, and a colorful pair of what-the-heck...
As soon as the light came on, Su Dejun picked up the things in the middle of the floor at an incredibly fast speed and fled into the master bedroom.
Su Tianli: ???
She was frowning.
The air in the room smelled unpleasant, so she walked over and opened the door, leaving it wide open.
Su Dejun asked loudly in the master bedroom: "Amei, why did you come back suddenly?"
A-mei is the collective name Su Dejun gave to his three daughters.
It was also his protest against his wife naming their three daughters Youzi, Laizi and Qianzi.
Su Tianli also looked around the house while answering her father, "…The policy for educated youth to return to the city came out last year. I applied, but it was only approved this year. I returned after receiving the transfer order."
After not seeing it for many years, this house is more dilapidated, narrower and more cramped than it was five years ago.
——The curtains were gray and looked like the same curtains that Su Tianli wore when she left home five years ago;
On the dilapidated square dining table placed against the wall, there were two or three large bowls, one of which was pickled vegetables, one of which looked like taro cakes, and another of which looked like leftover rice. The wall on the side of the dining table that was next to the wall was covered in grease.
The floor of the living room is only clean in the middle of the living room and along the path leading to the living room from each room. The rest of the floor is dirty. The gray cement floor has turned into black dirt!
So dirty!
Come to think of it, in this family, only Su Tianli and the third sister Su Qianzi are hardworking people.
As a result, she and her third sister both went to the countryside to join the production team.
This home is...
Su Tianli glanced at the taro cake on the dining table and frowned.
In the past, her favorite snack to go with porridge was cured meat and taro cake, and she thought about it before going home!
But now looking at it this way,
She really had no appetite at all.
At this time, Su Dejun had probably finished packing in the master bedroom, and then he hurried out and asked Su Tianli, "Sister, what did you just say?"
Su Tianli repeated it again, then went to take a look at the second bedroom - after all, she would be staying in this house for a while.
There is still a bunk bed in the second bedroom.
Five years ago, Su Tianli and her third sister slept on the lower bunk, and her eldest sister Su Youzi slept on the upper bunk.
Now?
The upper bunk was filled with miscellaneous items.
It seemed that Su Youzi was sleeping in the lower bunk, with a quilt curled up on the bed.
The house was in a mess and filled with all kinds of miscellaneous items.
Mostly various skirts, pants, clothes, socks and so on.
Su Dejun was excited when he heard this. "What did you say? You, you are not coming back to visit your relatives? You are coming back with a job?"
Su Tianli said yes, hung the small bag aside, and began to tidy up the bunk bed.
Su Dejun was pleasantly surprised and chased after her, asking, "What kind of job can you be assigned to? Are you coming to our factory to be a cadre?"
Su Tianli said as she packed up: "I don't know yet. I just came back today. Let me rest for a day. Tomorrow I will go to the Youth League Station to handle the labor relationship transfer. I'll see where the Personnel Bureau assigns me then... It would be best if I could be a nurse at the Municipal People's Hospital! If you want me to be transferred back to the factory, it's not impossible. You have to see if the chemical factory's medical office is short of staff..."
At this point, Su Tianli naturally asked another question, "By the way, Dad, my eldest sister is staying on the lower bunk now, so is it okay for me to stay on the upper bunk?"
When Su Dejun heard this, he was so happy that he almost exploded. He didn't care at all about which of his daughters slept on the upper bunk and which slept on the lower bunk.
He waved his hand, "You can live wherever you like!"
Then he asked what he was most concerned about, "Amei, didn't you go to Jiangxi to farm? How come you suddenly became a nurse?"
Su Tianli pondered for a moment and then her expression changed.
She turned her head and looked at Su Dejun with angry, furious, and aggrieved eyes, and said, "Dad, I want to ask you... are you and Mom planning to disown me?"
Su Dejun was stunned, "Ah?"
Su Tianli clenched her fists, exerted all her strength, and shouted angrily: "Do you know that I almost died when I went to the countryside that year!"
If emotion is not enough, add sound to it!
Sure enough, Su Dejun was frightened again, "Huh???"
Su Tianli said angrily: "During the days when you signed me up to go to the countryside, I was sick with a high fever. You and mom clearly told me that I was going to the countryside in northern Jiangxi to join the production team! You also said that it was a land of fishing and rice, warm in winter and cool in summer, and the conditions there were amazing!"
"In the end you sent me to the Northwest!"
"There is nothing but yellow sand in the desert!!!"
Su Dejun was extremely shocked, "Ah!!!"
Su Tianli burst into tears. "When I left, my illness was not healed yet! It was not until more than a month after I left that I realized I was going to the northwest... My illness became more serious, and my cough worsened into pneumonia! I almost died!"
Actually, no.
She was indeed sick before leaving Guangzhou, but after following the team for ten days or so, her illness had almost healed.
Her companions knew she was young and took good care of her. By the time they arrived in the Northwest, she had completely recovered, but it was her other brothers and sisters who became sick again...
She also became a great hero in caring for the patients!
But she had just returned from the Northwest, and no one here knew what she had experienced in the Northwest.
All past experiences are given by oneself.
Don't believe it?
If you don’t believe it, go to the Northwest Farm and ask!
So Su Tianli was justified in what she said.
Of course, Su Tianli couldn't even cry. After all, she had lived a comfortable life at Farm 109 in the Northwest over the years and didn't feel wronged at all.
She doesn't even want to go back to Guangzhou.
It was her leader Wang Xuezhao who talked to her, "Lizhi, you still have to go back... If your dream is to revitalize the agricultural profession, I will definitely not let you go. But if you are working towards the medical profession, then our farm is really not suitable for you."
"When we went to the countryside, we responded to the call to 'make a difference in this vast world', but there is no soil to nourish your profession here, so you have to go back to the city."
In this way, Su Tianli became the first educated youth from the farm to return to the city.
Su Tianli continued to howl, "Dad, I sent several registered letters back, asking if you could send me some anti-inflammatory medicine because I was sick... I really didn't want to die alone out there! But you... not to mention that you didn't send me any medicine at all, you didn't even care about me for the past five years! Dad, you are so cruel and vicious! Do you really want me to die out there?"
Su Dejun was stunned.
After a long while, he finally cried out in surprise, "What did you say? You, you didn't go to Jiangxi? You... went to the Northwest?"
"How is this possible? We all thought you went to Jiangxi. Your mother and your brother wrote you countless letters, but you never replied! We thought you had become wild and didn't want to take care of the family anymore!"
Su Tianli burst into tears, "Who said I never wrote to you? I wrote countless letters! I also remitted a lot of money to you!"
Hearing this, Su Dejun's face changed, "What? You sent the money back?"
"Dad, didn't you receive it?" Su Tianli asked back.
When talking about money, Su Dejun's face turned pale, and he asked again, "How much money did you remit back?"
Su Tianli said: "My first year at the farm my salary was low and it was inconvenient for me to go out, so I sent you money once a quarter, about thirty yuan each time..."
This is true.
When Su Tianli first arrived at the farm, her base salary was 37 yuan a month. The farm provided food and accommodation, but she still had to spend money on toilet paper, medicine, clothes, etc. She could save 60 to 70 yuan in a quarter or three months. Considering that her family was really not well off, she would send half back home and keep the other half for herself.
However, she only remitted the money four times, for a total of 120 yuan.
Because her family treated her as if she was dead and there was no news from her, she became angry and stopped writing letters and sending money.
When Su Dejun heard this, it was no longer just a matter of one hundred and twenty yuan.
In his opinion, the thirty dollars his second daughter sent back every quarter, which was agreed to be ten dollars a month, may not seem like much, but it would be one hundred and twenty dollars a year.
That’s six hundred in five years!
Six hundred dollars.
Six hundred dollars in 1978... that was a huge sum of money, okay?
If Su Dejun had so much money in his hands, he could walk around the factory with his head held high!
Seeing that her father was so angry that the veins on his forehead were popping out, Su Tianli decided to add fuel to the fire.
She took out from her bag all the remittance stubs and registered mail receipts that she had prepared in the morning and handed them to him, "Dad, look! These are the receipts for me to send letters and remit money home over the years. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of them, and only these few are left."
Su Dejun took it and carefully looked at the amount and time on the remittance voucher. He became more and more angry, "How could this happen?!"
He was so angry that he kept walking around with the receipts, muttering, "This won't do... This won't do! This postal savings won't do. How can they swallow the hard-earned money of the people like this? No, I'm going to file a complaint! I'm going to call the police! I must get this money back!"
Su Tianli never stopped talking, and her hands never stopped.
She had been making the bed, and she was doing it very skillfully.
She knew her mother Tian Xiu and elder sister Su Youzi too well, so she had to make the beds before they came back at noon.
Otherwise, Su Youzi would act like a demon and his mother would favor him.
So, Su Tianli quickly moved all the debris piled on the upper bunk to Su Youzi's bed on the lower bunk.
The rest are just some small bits and pieces.
How to say it?
Su Youzi was probably too relaxed because of Tian Xiu's favor.
So Su Youzi used the upper bunk bed as a safe.
After Su Tianli cleared out the clutter on top and removed the dusty mat,
A new continent has emerged!
——The first thing that caught my eye was a few unsealed envelopes.
The envelope was bulging, obviously there was a piece of letter inside.
On the cowhide envelope was written the handwriting of a boy that Su Tianli was very familiar with: Classmate Su Youzi, thank you for your love, I think we are only suitable to be classmates.
Su Tianli blinked.
She didn't touch these things, but counted them with her eyes. There were about seven or eight such letters.
Obviously, these should be love letters written by Su Youzi to a male classmate, but they were returned by the boy, and the following words were written on the envelope...
Su Tianli thought: Who wrote the words on the envelope? They look so familiar!
But soon, Su Tianli no longer had the heart to gossip about these returned love letters.
Because she discovered something more important!
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