Chapter 90: Grandmother’s Story
Buying these items online wouldn’t be cheap, and the shipping fees alone would form a significant expense. But Jian Xingxia had a way—Uncle Lu and the others knew how to make them!
The villagers might be short on cash, but it wasn’t as if they lacked good materials. Having lived in the mountains for generations, they had left behind quite a bit of timber. After all, with so many mountains and so much land, growing timber was easy to manage. Especially after fast-growing timber was introduced, catching the wind of good policies, many of the nearby mountain peaks had been planted years ago. Through scientific planting and rational logging, Jinmen Town now housed several lumber mills. The villagers of Lu’an Village all knew a bit of carpentry, and they made all their own furniture.
Jian Xingxia listed everything out one by one.
Fortunately, the expensive part of renovation was the labor cost. The putty powder and paint were fairly reasonable. Combined with the tools and miscellaneous small items, it cost over 1,200 yuan in total. Her balance was left with a tight 1,245 yuan. With this money, she could only choose very sparingly between soft furnishings and furniture.
In the afternoon, Jian Xingxia tasked Lin Sanniang with helping Dahei clear the wasteland. She, meanwhile, rode her tricycle down to the village.
On the way, she saw some people heading into the mountains to watch the excitement. Jian Xingxia didn’t stop them; after all, judging by how aloof those two construction crews were, the villagers wouldn’t be able to pry any answers out of them anyway.
Particularly now that the gate barrier was up. When Jian Xingxia headed out, she noticed the construction crew had also enclosed the adjacent pedestrian walkway with iron railings and installed an electronic gate. When she passed through, the construction crew informed her that it could scan faces to unlock automatically, or a password could be pressed to gain entry. Jian Xingxia didn’t tell the villagers the password.
Hehe, let them go see for themselves.
Having a new tricycle was wonderful; it possessed strong horsepower. The distance was only two or three kilometers with barely anyone on the road, so Jian Xingxia reached the village in ten minutes.
The village was exceptionally lively too! Paving a road was a novel event no matter which village it happened in. The villagers who needed to work had gone down to the fields, and the remaining elderly men and women were gathered under the massive banyan tree, discussing it. These elders were hard of hearing and spoke with booming voices, completely failing to notice that Jian Xingxia had arrived. They were loudly gossiping away.
“Mark my words, Xiaxia’s grandmother definitely left her some money.”
“Otherwise, she couldn’t have bought this and that within just a few days of returning.”
“Exactly. Xiaxia’s grandmother helped us so much back in the day. If nothing else, during the natural disasters in the sixties when the whole village ran out of grain, wasn’t it Xiaxia’s grandmother who carried it down the mountain, bag by bag?”
“Yes, back then Xiaxia’s grandmother even told us to go into the mountains to gather mushrooms and dig up rabbit burrows. If it weren’t for her, who knows how many people in our village would have starved to death during those three years.”
“I don’t remember much about that time, but I remember in the eighties, when my kid went away to the city for university, we asked every relative and friend. Everyone was poor; we couldn’t even scrape together enough for a train ticket. It was Xiaxia’s grandmother who gave us two hundred yuan so the child wouldn’t suffer.”
“And that family—the one that moved away years ago. Didn’t someone get bitten by a snake, need an amputation, and require tiger bone? It was also given by Xiaxia’s grandmother; she even had tiger bone!”
“Wasn’t it? Just a few years ago, Xiaxia’s grandmother even leased several mountain peaks. She must have been wealthy.”
The elderly simply loved to ramble. Jian Xingxia stood quietly behind the massive banyan tree for a while, catching many stories about her grandmother.
But in her childhood memories, her grandmother hadn’t seemed like an exceptionally kind or affectionate little old lady. On the contrary, her grandmother was rather aloof, and occasionally even a bit fierce.
Previously, Jian Xingxia hadn’t known why, but now she understood. Her grandmother never visited relatives and lived all alone in the mountains. Even when Jian Xingxia’s parents were going through a divorce, she hadn’t wanted to take in her only maternal granddaughter, Jian Xingxia; her demeanor truly was aloof.
Later, once Jian Xingxia arrived, her grandmother treated her very well. There was only one exception: whenever Jian Xingxia was a bit mischievous and tried to sneak into the mountains, her grandmother would scold her very fiercely.
Sometime later, her parents divorced, and Jian Xingxia stayed with her father. In the beginning, when she called her mother and grandmother, her mother would still answer, though she was frequently away on business trips and would only return calls after several days. But her grandmother practically never answered the phone. Back then, the mountains didn’t have electricity, the signal was poor, and her grandmother rarely went down the mountain. One year, two years… as time stretched on, the frequency of Jian Xingxia’s calls dwindled significantly.
Most of the time, she waited for her mother to return from a “business trip” to call her. But little Jian Xingxia didn’t have her own phone. Although her father didn’t forbid her from speaking to her mother, her father had to work, she had to go to school, and her mother had to travel for business—the times they could coordinate were simply far too rare.
Until after the sixth grade, no more calls ever came.
Jian Xingxia gradually grew into a quiet, taciturn young girl who looked after herself with her own tender hands. Back then, she believed that her mother and grandmother no longer liked her. The sensitive pride of a young girl kept her from dialing that number that was so difficult to get through to anyway.
Until she graduated from university.
As Jian Xingxia listened to the village elders talk about her grandmother’s past, many hazy memories gradually became clear. She thought that her grandmother probably hadn’t been born aloof. It was because she carried a secret. In a tiny mountain village with no internet, no television, and not even books, her grandmother couldn’t comprehend any of it. She could only instinctively use herself to guard the secret.
Jian Xingxia’s tears suddenly spilled over. In the sixties, her grandmother was already able to give grain to the villagers, which meant she must have encountered those anomalous phenomena even earlier. Back then, her grandmother couldn’t have been very old. How terrified she must have been when she first encountered those people from strange lands. How was she supposed to understand concepts like transmigration, parallel dimensions, time dilation, and alternative realms?
She was so bewildered and helpless, yet in the end, she still chose to hire those seekers of help from other realms, staying in the tiny mountain village for the rest of her life to help them and guard their secrets.
The elders’ topic gradually shifted to the road construction.
“It’s about time it got paved. We told her to pave it early on, but she just refused.”
“Now Xiaxia has to pave it anyway and spend her own money, when back then it would have been funded by the state!”
“Young people nowadays have grand ideas, saying they want to set up a greenhouse too. Who knows what she’s trying to do.”
“I know! My family member came back and said it’s going to be some kind of fruit-picking greenhouse!”
“Picking what?”
“A picking greenhouse! The kind city folk like, where they go into the fields to pick vegetables and fruits themselves.”
“Oh, heavens above! They won’t even buy them pre-picked, yet they’ll come into the mountains to pick them themselves?”
“Old bachelor, you don’t understand. Young people nowadays don’t touch the soil, so they actually love this sort of thing. The year before last when I went to my daughter’s place for New Year’s—oh my goodness, during the holidays my grandson went to pick strawberries. Eighty yuan a catty!”
“What kind of strawberries? Eighty a catty? Are they made of gold?”
“To me, they just looked a bit larger than wild strawberries, but the taste wasn’t even as good! Eighty a catty—my two grandsons picked four catties, over three hundred yuan!” The old woman clutched her chest, her heart aching terribly.
Her subsidy for a mu of land was only 250 yuan. After deducting the various costs of seeds, fertilizer, and harvesting from the grain she reaped, she could only make a bit over a hundred yuan in profit at the end. Her grandsons picking four catties of strawberries equaled the annual yield of a mu of land.
“Ah, no wonder young people won’t stay in the village nowadays. Working outside, no matter how poor, they make three or four thousand a month.”
“While we guard a mountain peak here and can’t even make three thousand a year.”
“Who knows what Xiaxia is trying to do after coming back. I did hear from my second older sister that a few university students returned to their village a couple of years ago to plant grapes… and lost three to four hundred thousand yuan!”
“Sigh, we still need to talk to Xiaxia. She can’t just mess around blindly.”
Having heard up to this point, Jian Xingxia stepped out from behind the massive banyan tree.
