Chapter 3: Yet Familiar to the Eye

Let Weidong put away the nine yuan and eighty-five cents that the old man had scraped together for change.

He casually asked about pork prices in the county; it was seventy cents a jin, but you needed a ration ticket for the planned supply. Yet, in the county town, the price of cured meat had already reached four yuan.

He knew right away there was a way forward.

After gulping down his noodles, he jumped up and headed home.

A rural kid in these times didn’t consider twenty or thirty li of country roads any hardship at all.

Striding quickly under the moonlight, the young man’s mind was busy calculating how much cured meat his family had left and was certain he’d need to collect more from the surrounding villages.

It was embarrassing to bargain in his own village, so he’d look elsewhere.

His thoughts made his steps brisk; sticking to the gravel road, he wouldn’t get lost, and when he crossed the village’s basketball court, only a few barking dogs greeted him.

Weidong pushed open the side annex’s ancestral door, called out that he was back, and was about to go to the kitchen to check the cured meat hanging from the rafters.

But unexpectedly, Erfeng appeared, wrapped in his shirt, peeking sleepily into the main room. “You’re back? How’s your father? Everyone was talking about it at the threshing ground this evening…”

Girls change so much at eighteen. The one who used to have two runny noses in primary school, still a bean sprout of a girl in middle school—how did she suddenly become so charming?

Rural homes had the weakest of incandescent bulbs, just enough to shed a bit of light.

But the bright moon hung on the treetops, illuminating the girl leaning on the door. The light and shadows on her body curved and wound like the hills he’d climbed earlier.

The old, almost sheer undershirt stretched taut at the waist, showing a slender, delicate form. The homespun shirt on her shoulders was old too, but at this moment it seemed finer and lighter than silk.

Weidong glanced at her. He hadn’t been out of breath after walking thirty li, but now his breathing grew heavier.

Erfeng seemed to sense his gaze, shyly ducked back into the doorway but didn’t leave. Her big, dark eyes still watched him, reflecting the moonlight.

But Weidong only looked once before turning away, his voice low and steady: “My father’s paralyzed from the fall. He’ll have to recover at home. Life’s about to get much harder. I won’t be able to keep studying, and I’m not willing to stay a farmer. I have to go out and do business, make money…”

Even Erfeng was startled. “Do business? You’ll have your tail cut off!”

Indeed, anyone who tried to make money on their own, or worked a private plot in the seventies, would be accused of having a capitalist tail.

This wasn’t just about punishment; it was a matter of cutting off that tail from your very soul, a process more painful than prison.

Weidong nodded coldly, following her lead: “That’s right. I might even end up in jail. But I have no choice now. So don’t hold yourself back—find a husband and get married soon. Go home!”

He grabbed a basket from under the eaves and went to the kitchen to pull down several strings of old cured meat from the rafters.

In eastern Sichuan, houses were still built from adobe bricks more than a foot thick, with wooden beams and tile roofs—just as they had been for centuries.

The old man, a former soldier, had been bold and perceptive enough to leave the land before any other young men in the village, heading to the city to labor as a bricklayer.

He’d always wanted his son to graduate from university and then build the family a fine brick house.

But now, all Weidong cared about was getting his father back on his feet.

There was no room left for youthful romance or thoughts of starting a family.

Especially since, in his previous life, after he got out of prison, he’d heard that Erfeng had been married off by her parents. What was the point in saying anything more?

This match wasn’t even worth considering.

Reaching up to fetch the three scrawny strings of cured meat left only made him more determined—he’d do whatever it took to earn money and take his father to the provincial hospital!

Maybe, just maybe, he could change his family’s fate by following the right leader.

He glanced back at the girl sitting dazed on the threshold, then simply closed the door and settled for the night in the haystack.

Before closing his eyes, he wondered if he’d wake up back in the security guard’s dormitory at the tax office.

But, just as when he was a security guard, he opened his eyes before dawn, still by the kitchen stove.

He ladled some water from the vat, washed his face and filled his belly, then grabbed the basket and slipped out the back door.

He followed the ridge, collecting cured meat.

In these hilly villages, fields were scattered and broken up, so people rarely lived close together. Typically, two or three households clustered every few hundred meters, sometimes farther, with more gathering near the roadside or village entrance; some lived alone on the slopes or the hilltops.

Weidong figured he should try selling once to see how it went, so he started by asking a few nearby families.

Everyone knew his father was hurt, so when he offered cash to buy cured meat to sell in town, families eagerly pulled down their own meat for him. Two even refused to take money.

He estimated the weights and left cash at one yuan a jin regardless.

In reality, the price farmers got for pigs at the slaughterhouse was lower than the county’s retail price.

Weidong thought even the fifteen-cent noodles he’d eaten earlier now felt extravagant.

So he only took three boiled sweet potatoes as rations from a friend’s house, and packed his basket with about sixty jin of cured meat for the town.

It felt just like hunting monsters in an online game, gathering all kinds of odds and ends in the wild and bringing them back to town to turn in for a quest.

If he could follow the richest man in town, it’d be like joining a guild and catching a ride with a super spender—he’d soar instantly.

Carrying the heavy load along the mountain path, Weidong felt no fatigue; thoughts like these kept him energized.

Near the town, he bought several dozen eggs from a roadside farm for a dime per ten, mainly for the cloth bag they came in and the bag full of rice husks.

Weidong wasn’t especially cunning or scheming, but forty years as a gatekeeper had shown him enough of the world.

All the way, he pondered how not to get caught.

Before entering town, he took a break, sorted the eggs, poured the rice husks into the basket filled with cured meat, covering the meat, then buried the eggs inside.

It was an old country trick to keep eggs from breaking.

Now it looked as if his whole basket was eggs.

He no longer had to worry as he walked through town, heading straight from the edge of the county to the long-distance bus station for a forty-kilometer ride to the prefectural city.

The fare was one yuan seventy.

Only after boarding did Weidong nonchalantly tear the old pillowcase bag into strips and wrap them around his head.

As a student, he’d looked down on old farmers with their headscarves, but now he wanted to look as honest and guileless as possible, to avoid suspicion.

In those days, doing business was practically the work of criminals.

People were highly vigilant.

Fortunately, the county was full of rural folks with baskets; the bus was crowded with baskets, too. When the conductor saw his eggs buried in husks, he wouldn’t let him put the basket on the roof, but told him not to block the seats either—he had to hold it by the steps, in case the eggs broke and made a mess.

Weidong agreed with feigned fear and nervousness.

By the time he reached the city, it was nearly noon. This was where he’d spent most of his life.

In his last life, after being caught, he was sent here to be detained, and when released, he lingered here, too ashamed to return home, his wife gone, taking odd jobs—never expecting to stay for a lifetime.

This city, perched above the upper reaches of the Three Gorges, had long been a place where travelers paused before entering Sichuan or heading a thousand li downstream to Jiangling. A hub of trade since ancient times, it had become more prosperous than even Baidi City at the mouth of the gorges—a true land-water port, earning its name.

The richest man he wanted to find supposedly came from a family with a tradition of business, which is how he managed to thrive in the eighties, when everyone was starting from scratch, risking everything to carve out a path.

Following that man couldn’t be wrong.

The wide river below was the only exit from the Sichuan Basin’s southeastern corner, the Three Gorges gap. Upstream was the provincial capital, though not yet in this era.

But Weidong was used to thinking of it that way. He’d only been there once, to buy sunflower seeds.

At this time, the prefectural city didn’t even fall under the provincial capital’s jurisdiction.

Nor did it look like much of a city—everywhere shabby and run-down, with slogans painted on the walls.

So, with his basket and headscarf, the young man was unafraid of meeting anyone he knew. He resisted the urge to revisit the tax office in search of the city’s richest man, heading straight for the wharf to buy a ticket for the boat.

Five yuan twenty.

The cheapest motor launch from the county.

On the broad river, there were huge, four- or five-story “East Is Red” passenger liners—state-owned, costing more than ten yuan and offering beds.

This two-and-a-half deck vessel, its gunwales nearly at water level under the weight, was a local transport company’s passenger-cargo ship.

Besides a few bunks upstairs, the deck and hold were filled with long wooden benches, packed with people, livestock, and goods.

Pigs grunted, chickens crowed, ducks quacked; curses flew as people stepped in droppings, quarreled over space—the noise was deafening.

Weidong was simply relieved to have made it through, hugging his basket in a corner.

The thick steel hull vibrated with the roar of the engine; if not for the headscarf, his teeth would have rattled loose in no time.

In his past life, when his uncle took him out of the county, everything dazzled him—he remembered nothing, it was all a kaleidoscope of wonders.

Now, Weidong was surprised to find himself looking at everything with a critical eye.

His instincts muttered: “Damn, there were already so many shrewd folks back then? That guy’s a trader, you can see the cunning in his face. That’s a student, still reading. That woman looks wild—her pants aren’t clean…”

Forty years as a security guard had made him sharp-eyed.

He hadn’t realized just how much he himself had changed.