Chapter 50: Coming Prepared
Jinmen Town was vast but sparsely populated, and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. The bus station still retained its old layout, serving a dual purpose for both passengers and freight, with only a dated waiting hall separating the buses from the cargo trucks.
Buses from the city ran once an hour, which was reasonably convenient. However, the minibuses heading from the town to the various villages only ran once every two hours. Jian Xingxia had been waiting for an hour already and hadn’t seen a single minibus with a sign that read “Lu’an Village.”
If it weren’t for the electric tricycles, the villagers would likely find it nearly impossible to go anywhere. The challenge wasn’t the road leading to the big city, but rather these last ten to twenty kilometers from the town to the village.
Jian Xingxia was calculating how many more times she could sell chestnuts and whether she could quickly save up enough money to buy a tricycle of her own.
Just as she was pondering this, a taxi displaying a “Xiangshan City” roof sign pulled up. Jian Xingxia’s attention was instantly drawn to it. She couldn’t think of a single other person who would take a taxi for over a hundred kilometers from the city all the way to this town.
Sure enough, the taxi couldn’t find a designated parking spot, so it pulled up haphazardly right in front of the bus station entrance.
Wearing a massive, floppy-brimmed sun hat and sunglasses, dressed in a bright yellow princess dress with puff sleeves, and stepping out in high-heeled sandals, Liang Chengcheng climbed down from the car.
The driver attentively helped retrieve her luggage from the trunk and set it down by the roadside. It was a massive, 28-inch oversized suitcase.
Liang Chengcheng walked over to the side of the road and opened her phone to scan a QR code. Jian Xingxia could visibly see the driver’s smile grow quite a bit brighter.
Since the taxi couldn’t park for long, the driver looked rather reluctant to leave and handed a business card to Liang Chengcheng before setting off. “Miss, whenever you need a car again, as long as it’s within Xiangshan City, you can give me a call.”
Liang Chengcheng accepted the card and smiled without saying anything. She simply held her phone to her face and began making a call. She was generous enough to cover the round-trip fare and the highway tolls, so it was only natural for the driver to be so attentive. But if Liang Chengcheng ever needed a car again, she wouldn’t bother having someone drive all the way out from the city; as long as the pay was right, drivers were available everywhere.
The driver drove off reluctantly.
Liang Chengcheng spoke into the phone, “Xiaxia, I’ve arrived. Where are you?”
Jian Xingxia shouted, “Look right across from you! The little blue tricycle!”
Liang Chengcheng lowered her sunglasses, scanned the area, and instantly burst into a smile. Dragging her suitcase, she dashed straight toward Jian Xingxia.
Jian Xingxia panicked and quickly jumped down from the tricycle to meet her, making sure to watch the oncoming traffic on both sides for her. “Slow down! There’s no rush!”
Once across the street, Liang Chengcheng threw herself forward and gave Jian Xingxia a massive hug.
“You terrible Xiaxia, you completely lost your heart after graduation. If I didn’t look for you, you just wouldn’t look for me, huh?”
Jian Xingxia smiled as she steadied Liang Chengcheng. “I’ve truly been busy. Once you see it for yourself, you’ll understand—with the environment back in my hometown, people don’t even remember that cell phones exist.”
“I don’t buy that.” Liang Chengcheng pushed her sunglasses up.
Together, the two of them lifted Liang Chengcheng’s massive suitcase onto the back of the tricycle. Liang Chengcheng didn’t want to sit in the back bed, so she squeezed onto the front bench seat next to Jian Xingxia.
Jian Xingxia drove slowly. The two of them chatted while catching the breeze as they headed toward Lu’an Village.
Along the way, Liang Chengcheng poured out a massive stream of complaints, detailing every ounce of hardship faced by a corporate beast just entering the workforce. It had to be said that even though Liang Chengcheng came from a wealthy family, she was quite capable of enduring hardships. When she was told to go to the grassroots level, she went without complaint, working overtime every day with her colleagues and taking the subway home late at night. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, but she thoroughly detested idiotic leadership and management.
“He didn’t even understand what kind of anniversary proposal he wanted himself, yet he changed it eight times in a single day! When we finally got to clock out—it wasn’t because the proposal was approved, it was just because that moron wanted to go to sleep that he finally let us off work.”
“I had just gotten home when the moron sent me a WeChat message, telling me to make a proposal based on his new idea, but the budget was only two thousand yuan! My god, the anniversary of a global catering giant versus the celebration of a tiny branch of my family’s business—how am I supposed to blend those two concepts together?!”
Liang Chengcheng was absolutely furious. “Other companies invite A-list celebrities, but who can I invite? With two thousand yuan, I can only afford the elderly security uncle from our store who likes to sing. No, wait, I probably can’t even afford him. Uncle’s retirement pension alone is three thousand a month, and we had to rehire him.”
Jian Xingxia listened with great amusement. Having entered the workforce much earlier than Liang Chengcheng and the others—and as a part-time worker and intern at that—the messy situations she had encountered were only greater in number and intensity. But since she was used to it, she rarely spoke about it to others.
After her long rant, Liang Chengcheng felt thirsty. Jian Xingxia reached over and fished out a bottle of water. “I just bought it at the supermarket. It’s still a little cold. There’s also orange juice and cola in the back.”
The bitter resentment on Liang Chengcheng’s face vanished instantly, replaced by wide, sparkling eyes. If Jian Xingxia hadn’t been “driving,” she would have thrown herself over to use her ultimate cheek-to-cheek cuddling technique.
“Xiaxia, you’re the absolute best. I knew it—any place with you, even if it’s the middle of nowhere, will be kept perfectly comfortable.”
Jian Xingxia smiled but didn’t say a word. It was all forged through the trials of life. During the years she wandered through several cities with her father, whenever her clothes grew too small or her pants too short, when the blankets weren’t enough, when her shoes pinched her feet, when the windows leaked air or the door locks broke… she had resolved it all on her own.
Her father didn’t have much money, and he had even less time and energy to look after her. If he happened to remember, he would give her fifty or a hundred yuan. If he forgot, Jian Xingxia would eat dried noodles tossed with soy sauce for half a month, and he wouldn’t have a clue.
Later on, Jian Xingxia learned how to utilize limited resources to take excellent care of herself. When her father went on a business trip and left her with just two hundred yuan, she had a fixed cost of five yuan a day for the student meal at school. For 22 days a month, that would cost 110 yuan.
With the remaining 90 yuan, she would buy the cheapest dried noodles, which cost 30 yuan for fifteen catties. Then she would weigh out three catties of eggs for 20 yuan, which yielded about thirty eggs.
With the remaining 40 yuan, every few days she would buy vegetables when the wet market was closing up. Occasionally, she could even salvage slightly wilted greens that others didn’t want; aside from being a little limp, they were perfectly fine and entirely edible, costing her less than 20 yuan a month.
With the final 20 yuan, she would buy a massive bag of small oranges for ten yuan, or a massive bag of apples for fifteen yuan. They were generally small in size or poor in appearance, looking quite ugly. But a young Jian Xingxia had researched it—the nutritional value was exactly the same, and they could supplement her vitamins just as well.
When there were a few yuan left over at the very end, she would buy a bottle of a drink and a tiny bit of snacks. She wouldn’t eat them; she would just keep them in her backpack. That way, after every PE class when everyone was chugging mineral water and drinks, she could pull out a bottle too. When others shared snacks with her, she could return the favor once or twice.
Along the road, Jian Xingxia gave Liang Chengcheng a gentle warning. “The location of our village is a bit remote. Although it’s only a dozen or so kilometers from the town, because there are mountains separating us in between, it feels very far away.”
Back when they were at school, although it was also remote, if they looked out from the dormitories or the library windows, they could still see the silhouette of the city, and at night they could see a mesh of bright and dim lights. But the village was different. It was surrounded entirely by grand mountains. Once you wound around two mountains, the city was virtually cut off from view. At night, aside from the starlight and the sporadic streetlights on the mountain roads, there was almost no light at all. Jian Xingxia was worried Liang Chengcheng might think she was trying to human-traffic her.
Liang Chengcheng giggled. “It’s fine, I researched it before coming. Lu’an Village, right? Registered population of 1,400 people, but as of the end of last year, the permanent population was 287. The downside is inconvenient transportation, and the main road was only paved the year before last.”
“As for the upsides, the mountain forest environment and climate are excellent. The primary economic crops are tea leaves, tea oil, and citrus fruits. In recent years, under the poverty alleviation policies, they have gradually rolled out the cultivation of short-cycle medicinal herbs like honeysuckle and Solomon’s seal. They’ve also utilized the mountain advantages to grow relatively high-priced specialty fruits like alpine grapes and kiwifruit…”
Jian Xingxia listened, utterly dumbfounded.
Good grief, Liang Chengcheng had truly come prepared!
