Chapter 111: Extra — “Yan Xiang’s Daily Life at the Broadcasting Station”
Mom didn’t have a watch, but Yan Xiang could tell how much time it took to walk this road based on his feelings.
When he first told Mom, she was very surprised, then she patted his head and sighed with a smile, “Sigh, Genius Mengbao.”
Genius Yan Xiang understood.
What did “Mengbao” mean? Did it mean eating too full?
He and Mom walked that road hand in hand every day.
Humming songs.
The sun was bright, and the morning breeze was clear and crisp.
Mom would greet the people she knew loudly, calling out “Sister-in-law” or “Big Sister.”
Everyone had smiles on their faces, and some people in a rush would turn their heads to shout to Mom, “The Li family said there’s pork knuckle today! Hurry up! I’ll go ahead and help you queue!”
Mom would quickly pick him up and jog to catch up.
Pork knuckles were too hard to get.
You had to fight tooth and nail for them.
Mom was very happy when she managed to get a pork knuckle. That night, the family ate braised pork knuckle.
Mom also sliced a bowl and took it to Uncle Zhao.
Yan Xiang kindly reminded Jun Jun to brush his teeth after dinner, but Jun Jun stuck his tongue out and made a face at him.
Later, when Jun Jun’s teeth went bad and he cried from the pain, Yan Xiang wasn’t surprised at all.
Hmph.
Every day after buying groceries, they would leisurely head home in the sunlight, and only after tidying up the house would Mom take him to work at the Broadcasting Station.
Yan Xiang had heard Mom exclaim more than once, “What a heavenly job.”
Yan Xiang: “?”
He didn’t quite understand.
But Yan Xiang loved the Broadcasting Station.
From the gate of the Town Committee Residential Compound, he would start his day of greetings: “Hello, Uncle!”
The uncle in the guardroom would wave at him with a smile, “Yan Xiang is here.”
Along the way, he would politely greet every uncle and auntie he knew.
Some even heard his voice and would specifically open their windows to shout at him, “Hey! Little Yan Xiang! You haven’t said hello to me yet!”
Yan Xiang would politely stop and greet them earnestly.
He didn’t understand why those adults would laugh out loud. But those laughs sounded cheerful and put him in a good mood.
Moreover, they would often fish candies out of their pockets, “Here you go.”
The Town Committee Residential Compound was a great place to earn candy!
As long as a kid was polite, they would get candy!
The thing Yan Xiang was proudest of was that he actually had his own desk at the Broadcasting Station.
But unfortunately, Brother Gangzi, Brother Huazi, Sister Yingzi, and Jun Jun, none of them would believe him. They said he was bragging.
This made Yan Xiang very annoyed, but he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t exactly bring them to work with him.
Yan Xiang could only focus on doing his own job seriously.
A serious day started with going to the Library to pick out a book.
The Library was practically a treasure trove.
It’s just that the librarian was a bit lazy. He was always dozing off at the desk and often couldn’t be found.
He only cared about keeping the Library clean, but was often sloppy about organizing and classifying the books.
Yan Xiang had no choice; as a very, very big kid who was working at the Town Committee, Yan Xiang felt duty-bound to take on the responsibility of classifying the books.
Many books could be classified at a glance.
For those he couldn’t figure out, he would ask Mom.
He would quietly put the misfiled books back into their proper categories. Not a single adult noticed until he left the Broadcasting Station with Mom to go to the county.
Many years later, Yan Xiang finally told Mom about this.
Dad didn’t believe it and said, “How old were you back then? Don’t brag.”
Mom was surprised, but not shocked. She wasn’t shocked at all.
Yes, she was never surprised by anything he did.
She would only pat his head and smile.
But she didn’t mention the word “Mengbao” after that.
Choosing a book from the Library was how Yan Xiang’s day began.
His favorite books were the ones with both text and pictures.
Because he hadn’t seen many of the things represented by the nouns in the text. The illustrations helped him better understand what those nouns meant and how those principles were realized in reality.
Among all the books, the one that fascinated him the most was that set of “militia training manual,” because it used very simple and straightforward language, accompanied by a large number of explanatory pictures, progressing from shallow to deep, from the most rudimentary conditions all the way to imperialist missiles flying through the clouds above the blue sky.
This was so fascinating.
This set of books was too important in Yan Xiang’s childhood.
When he was at the Broadcasting Station, he read them over and over again.
The way he read books seriously often made the uncles and aunties at the Broadcasting Station laugh.
Yan Xiang could never quite understand these laughs from the adults, but there was no malice in them.
Uncle Tianming was also someone who liked to read. According to Yan Xiang’s understanding, his job at the Broadcasting Station was reading books and watering flowers.
Every day when he arrived at the Broadcasting Station, he would carry a kettle to get hot water and brew tea. Then he would go water his precious flowers.
Everyone had a pot of flowers on their windowsills or desks. Later, Mom also had a pot of flowers, which she didn’t take with her when she left.
She thought she would come back.
But she was never able to return to the Broadcasting Station.
That pot of flowers went to Uncle Tianming, and it was said that Uncle Tianming took very good care of it.
After watering the flowers, Uncle Tianming would begin his day’s work—reading.
He would read for the whole day, from the start of work until the end.
Yan Xiang thought this job was amazing.
When he grew up, he wanted to have a job like this, a job dedicated to reading.
Auntie Hu’s job was cleaning.
Auntie Hu was a diligent person; she wiped every desk until it was sparkling clean, leaving no corners of the office uncleaned.
But whenever she wanted to go check out the broadcasting room, everyone’s expression would change.
The Broadcasting Station had to be locked after broadcasts ended.
This rule had always existed, but Uncle Tianming said that in the past, everyone was too lazy to lock it. It only started to be strictly enforced after Auntie Hu came to work at the Broadcasting Station.
But the melon seeds Auntie Hu roasted were especially delicious.
Sometimes, Auntie Man and Mom wouldn’t leave immediately after finishing their afternoon work, and everyone would gather together to crack melon seeds.
They usually only started cracking them in the afternoon, because the Uncle Station Master said that the morning should look like a morning, and melon seeds should be cracked in the afternoon. Starting to crack them first thing in the morning was too unseemly.
So in the afternoon, everyone would gather around to crack melon seeds and drink tea.
Auntie Hu always had endless stories about the Residential Compound.
Everyone listened with great interest.
At times like this, Mom was just like everyone else, sitting with her legs crossed, cracking melon seeds.
The afternoon sun shone through the glass window onto her face, her brows and eyes relaxed, with a smile on her lips.
Sometimes when Yan Xiang saw this, he suddenly understood the word “contentment.” The definition in the dictionary was personified on Mom’s face.
The switchboard room was a different world.
The switchboard room was also a magical place where you could hear voices from very far away.
The aunties’ daily work was eavesdropping.
Sometimes they would rush over excitedly to call people: “Hurry up and come here!”
Uncle Station Master and Uncle Tianming were too embarrassed to go over, because they said, “They are all female comrades.”
Although they really wanted to, they could only watch longingly.
Mom and the aunties had no such concerns; they would dash over immediately, listening with great relish to conversations that were not meant to be known.
At that time, many people didn’t know at all that the phone calls they made were being monitored by the switchboard operators the whole time. They would say many things on the phone, thinking no one else knew.
Only those who had come into contact with the switchboard room knew that this was how it was.
Every time, Mom and the aunties would walk out of the switchboard room looking very satisfied, and then retell what they had heard to Uncle Station Master and Uncle Tianming.
They would also listen with great interest.
Mom once told everyone a very scary story:
When a man was making a phone call, the operator connected him to the wrong line, and he ended up hearing a conversation between two people on the line.
A “Section Chief Wang” said he had already bought a train ticket for a certain day and was about to go from Place A to Place B and Place C; once he finished going to all of them, he could go back.
Section Chief Wang also mentioned “payment for goods” and the number “ten thousand.”
The man didn’t react at the time and hung up the phone. But immediately after, he suddenly realized that there was a “Section Chief Wang” carrying a huge amount of money from Place A to Place B.
This man was tempted by this huge sum of money. He was in Place A.
He checked based on the information he heard on the phone and found that there was only one train to Place B that day.
The man found a way to apply for a business trip to Place B and bought a train ticket for the same day.
On the train, through observation and striking up a conversation, he successfully found this “Section Chief Wang.”
He gained Section Chief Wang’s trust, the two quickly became acquainted, got off at Place B together, and checked into the same guesthouse.
The man quietly killed Section Chief Wang, wanting to steal the “ten thousand yuan” from him.
As a result, he only found a document with an official seal in Section Chief Wang’s briefcase, which was for the payment for goods owed by Factory A in Place A to Section Chief Wang’s unit, directly transferred to pay the amount Section Chief Wang’s unit had to pay to Unit B in Place B.
He became a murderer for this “ten thousand yuan” that didn’t exist at all.
He collapsed on the floor, stunned.
Yan Xiang thought this story was terrifying.
Auntie Hu, Auntie Man, and even Uncle Tianming felt the same way.
But Uncle Station Master, with his extensive life experience, raised many questions, believing it was full of loopholes and the logic didn’t hold up.
Finally, Mom shouted with a headache, “I said it’s a story! It’s a novel, not real!”
Uncle said, “Hey, this author doesn’t write well. If it were me, I’d write it like this, like this…”
He even really started writing.
But until he got off work that day, he hadn’t written it out, and kept scratching his head at the manuscript paper.
For several days afterward, he kept muttering, “This is hard to change, hard to change…”
Mom quietly told Dad that she really didn’t expect the Station Master to have a literary dream.
Dad asked what the story was, and Mom told it again. After hearing the story, Dad also raised many questions, much like Uncle Station Master.
Mom: “It’s a story! A novel! Not real! Of course made-up things have loopholes!”
Dad took the opportunity to educate me, “You see, as long as something is fake, it can definitely be seen through. So, can children tell lies?”
Aside from having his own desk, the thing Yan Xiang was particularly proud of at the Broadcasting Station was that he really had work to do.
When Uncle Station Master needed someone to run errands in the past, he would randomly assign anyone in the office.
But one day, after Grandpa Station Master finished writing on a piece of paper and picked it up to call someone, he suddenly adjusted his glasses and looked at Yan Xiang.
From that day on, he decided to assign work to Comrade Little Yan Xiang too.
“Yan Xiang, I have a task for you. Take this to the Logistics Department. Do you know where the Logistics Department is?”
When Yan Xiang received his first task, he was extremely excited, standing up straight, “I know!”
“Hand this to Officer Sun of the Logistics Department and tell him it’s from the Broadcasting Station. It must be handed to him personally. If he’s not there, you can give it to someone else, but you must get the item back on the spot. If you can’t get the item back on the spot, you must ask clearly who that person is and tell me who you gave it to when you get back. So that if it gets lost later, we can find the person responsible,” the Station Master said.
Yan Xiang promised he would definitely be able to do it, so Uncle Station Master handed him the note.
Looking back later, it was probably just a work order to apply for a few folders and bottles of ink for the Broadcasting Station. But to Yan Xiang at that time, it was more precious than an imperial edict.
He carried it carefully all the way there, and carefully held and carried the items back all the way. Because the aunties in the Logistics Department told him, “Don’t run, it would be troublesome if you fell and the ink bottle broke.”
How could Little Yan Xiang make the kind of mistakes that ordinary children would make?
He was the genius Mengbao! A kid who ate well and had lots of strength!
He safely and successfully completed the task Uncle Station Master gave him.
After the first time, he gained Uncle Station Master’s trust from then on.
After that, all the errand work at the Broadcasting Station was given to Yan Xiang.
Later, after going to the county with Mom, Yan Xiang couldn’t continue “working,” and he always missed his time at the Broadcasting Station.
But it didn’t matter; a talent should shine and radiate heat wherever they go.
Yan Xiang later successfully became a teaching assistant at the County Government Kindergarten.
Assistant Teacher Yan was very prestigious.
His words were even more effective than the teacher’s.
When Yan Xiang later wrote about these things in his memoirs, he couldn’t help but smile.
[My childhood seemed different from others’, yet it also seemed the same as every other child’s.]
[I was different from other children, yet like other children, I had a happy childhood.]
