Go back to the prosperous days and become a layman

Chapter 933 932 I'm relieved you're not doing well.
"Am I bad?" Tang Zhitong fell into self-doubt after hearing his sister-in-law's evaluation of him.

Some people really like twin sisters, but they don't have those kinds of thoughts themselves. How can that be considered bad?

Tang Zhitong felt somewhat wronged, but Jingmin had previously said that he was a bad person...

So be it. It's better than eating algae grown in urine. We have our own food, so there's really no need to force ourselves to eat something unpleasant.

The group sat chatting under the gate. Tang Zhitong ran inside again to add firewood, and extinguished the fire around 4 p.m. before starting to walk back.

The young couple dropped off Jingying and Jingmin before heading home.

When they reached the iron wheel handle, several children blocked one of the children at the entrance of the alley, which blocked Tang Zhitong's way home.

Although these children didn't fight, they kept talking. The one in the middle looked thin, but he had a lot of mouth to suck on and didn't lose out at all.

"You're spouting nonsense right after the holiday starts? Have you finished your homework? Get out of here!" Hearing those offensive words, Tang Zhitong slowly stopped, let Xiao Wang get off from behind, and then sternly shut the bunch of brats up.

In places like Tieluguba, most parents don't pay much attention to their children's education, and even if they do, it's only a very small minority.

As the saying goes, "One who stays near vermilion gets stained red, and one who stays near ink gets stained black." Even if parents strengthen their education of their children, with a group of foul-mouthed neighbors around, it will probably be difficult to completely change their children's ways.

Tang Zhitong's reputation gradually grew in the area, and the children dared not go against him. Although somewhat unwilling, they still grumbled and dispersed.

The child who was blocked was the slowest to move, standing at the very back of the group, his gaze towards Tang Zhitong filled with hatred.

"Is that Chu Chunxue's son?" Liu Jiaming's gaze made Xiao Wang very uncomfortable. She tugged at her husband's clothes and asked.

"Hmm, he looks like it." Tang Zhitong nodded. The reason she said he looked like it was because Liu Jiaming had lost a lot of weight compared to a few months ago, and he was almost unrecognizable.

"It seems they resent our family," Xiao Wang reminded her husband as they walked.

"It's alright, why would we be afraid of this little brat? Besides, we won't be staying here for more than a few days." Tang Zhitong didn't take Liu Jiaming seriously. What could an eight or nine-year-old child do?

"There's some truth to the saying that Mencius' mother moved three times to find the right environment for her son." Xiao Wang touched her belly; she'll be a mother in about six months, and she's experiencing some subtle changes in her mindset.

"Well, we'll educate the child properly later, he definitely won't go astray." Tang Zhitong smiled. Pursuing a better life is the right of every citizen, but some people insist that the whole world owes them something, and Liu Jiaming seems to be showing signs of this.

Back home, Fengzhi couldn't wait to show off: "Brother, I shredded all the corn you took out this morning!"

"That's great, Fengzhi has grown up and is now Mommy's little helper. Are you tired?" Tang Zhitong smiled and patted her younger sister's head. Good deeds should be praised; you can't dampen a child's enthusiasm.

Although Fengzhi sometimes gives the impression of being immature, she is far superior to those brats who blocked the alley entrance earlier in terms of behavior and morality.

"I'm tired, my arms hurt, my legs hurt, everything hurts." Fengzhi rubbed her arms and stomped her feet, looking very tired.

"A bowl of porridge or a bowl of rice should remind us of how hard it is to come by. A thread or a strand should remind us of the difficulty in obtaining resources. Knowing that we are tired is a good thing. From now on, we should cherish and be frugal in everything we eat and use." Tang Zhitong bent down and cupped Fengzhi's face, rubbing it gently.

"I finish every single meal, I never spill a single grain of rice," Fengzhi said, praising herself as she sensed her brother's good mood.

"Yes, you did the right thing. But why do you dislike clothes with patches? Every piece of clothing you wear was sewn by Mom stitch by stitch. If you dislike it, Mom will be heartbroken, right?" Tang Zhitong nipped the problem in the bud.

Fengzhi was starting to care about saving face, though it wasn't very obvious, but she still needed to take precautions.

"Oh." Fengzhi, whose thoughts had been exposed, was now somewhat reluctant.

Tang Zhitong flicked his sister's forehead and ignored her. In the following years, cloth ration coupons would shrink significantly, and patching clothes would become the norm. Even if Fengzhi was unwilling, she would obediently wear patched clothes.

Patched clothes were only worn in Beijing for a few years. Once the situation improved, the supply of cloth ration coupons would be increased. Other places would not have such good treatment and would have to wear patched clothes until the 1970s or even the 1980s. The rural areas were even more backward. Tang Zhitong remembered that he was still wearing patched pants the year Hong Kong returned to China.

"Is everything packed up over there?" Even a dilapidated house is worth a fortune. Knowing that the move was imminent, Zhang Guifang had spent the whole day packing up, putting as many small odds and ends as possible into boxes for easy transport.

"Okay, Wenwen, tell Mom about the new house." Tang Zhitong handed over the explanation to Xiao Wang, both to help the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law get to know each other and to find out what shortcomings the new house might have, so they could secretly make improvements later.

When Xiao Wang started talking about their new home, Fengzhi stopped pouting and snuggled in her sister-in-law's arms, listening to her describe all the conveniences of their new home.

Fengzhen was in a similar situation; she stopped writing and started eavesdropping.

"If you want to listen, go ahead and listen openly. You won't miss a minute of studying. After we move in, you and Fengzhi will live in the west wing. I'll buy you two desks then." Tang Zhitong placed his satchel on the square table and nudged Fengzhen's shoulder.

This push made Fengzhen blush bright red, but she was a woman who listened to advice, so she put the pen cap back on and leaned over.

Seeing the family enjoying themselves, Tang Zhitong smiled, went out into the yard and picked three eggplants, planning to stew them for dinner.

Xiao Wang was quite eloquent; his description made Zhang Guifang beam with joy, and Fengzhen and Fengzhi began discussing how to decorate their room.

"Anzi, when are you planning to move over there? I'm timing the sprouting process here." Zhang Guifang was eager to go back and continue clearing the land. The supply from the vegetable shop hadn't improved much, and they still had to rely on the produce from their yard for their own side dishes.

"I think it should be dry by the day after tomorrow, so let's move on Wednesday?" With a new house, Tang Zhitong had no regrets about the old iron wheel handle and couldn't wait to move there today.

As for the formaldehyde in the paint on doors and windows, there will definitely be some, but in the summer we sleep with the windows open, so as long as there is air coming in and out, the impact will not be too great. After all, it's not like the kind of custom-made houses with all glue that we'll see decades from now.

“Okay, I’ll start germinating them now.” Zhang Guifang had no objection to her son’s arrangement, and then got up to find the seeds.

"Fengzhen, you have exams these two days, so I won't take you to see the new house. On the day we move, you'll have a day off, so after school, have Jingying take you there. She knows where our new house is." Tang Zhitong said to Fengzhen as he put the chopped eggplant into the pot.

"Okay." Fengzhen nodded in agreement, accepting her brother's arrangements completely.

"Anzi, if you go over there tomorrow, please take the lock on our front door with you and change it. There's a chance someone else might have the key to that lock. It'll be safer if we change it," Zhang Guifang said as she came out of the inner room, holding a handful of seeds.

"Okay, I'll change it tomorrow." Tang Zhitong agreed readily, but inwardly he was somewhat skeptical. The birds over there were clean, and there was nothing in the yard except for the water tap. Who would steal it?
“After we move, we’ll have to change our grain ration book and non-staple food ration book. Do you know the procedures involved?” Zhang Guifang had endless worries for this family. “Yes, I’ll take care of those things. You just need to take care of planting the vegetables in the yard.” Tang Zhitong patiently replied to his mother while holding a wok.

"And what about the stone mill and stone roller in our yard? Should we move them over there too?" Zhang Guifang acted as if she hadn't heard what her son was saying, afraid that something might be overlooked and affect the family's life.

"Move everything over there. We'll need to hire a couple more handcarts." Tang Zhitong said this, but he was also worried. There weren't many moving companies these days, and even ten handcarts might not be enough to fit all the stuff in the house.

"Alright, go cook first." Seeing her son carrying the pot, Zhang Guifang stopped talking. She only stopped talking inside the house. After soaking the seeds in her hands, she ran outside to continue chatting with Tang Zhitong.

"Should those two jujube trees stay here? It's a bit of a shame."

"Why build earthen beds over there? They take up space and waste coal. I heard coal is hard to buy now."

"Are we really going to get our vegetables back from this yard?"

As a dutiful son, Tang Zhitong could only answer his mother's nagging one by one:

"Mom, leave these two jujube trees here. I'll cut a few more branches and plant them in the new yard later. The holes are already dug."

"Mom, we don't lack coal. We can buy coal over there. I have a receipt."

"As for the vegetables, I might not be as attentive as you are. I'll take a detour from here after get off work to check on them. If you're worried, when we move, we can take some vegetables from the yard with us, or share some with Grandpa Ma."

The mother and daughter chatted casually, and Tang Zhitong answered all of Zhang Guifang's questions one by one, which gradually put her at ease.

“Liu Jiaming has never been released from the detention center. He’s so pitiful. He’s lost a lot of weight. But as soon as he got home, he started arguing with his grandmother, hurling filthy insults. He was even worse off than before he went in.” Zhang Guifang said this while they were eating, listening to them arguing again.

“When we came back, we saw him arguing with other kids. He was using all sorts of foul language. He’s thinner, but he doesn’t look like he’s been reformed.” Hearing his mother-in-law’s words, Xiao Wang recalled the scene he had just witnessed.

"With his character, he'll be back in jail sooner or later. Society will teach him a lesson," Tang Zhitong interjected, only mentioning his character and not his financial situation.

Although juvenile detention centers only admit minors and the conditions are better, it's not a place to enjoy life, so it's normal to be a little hungry.

In fact, the predecessor of the juvenile detention center was the labor camp.

The labor camp originated in Russia. After World War II, they gathered homeless children together to form the "Gorky Workers' Training Corps" for re-education.

The head of the engineering and learning group was an educator named Makarenko.

He wrote a 600,000-word book titled "The Poem of Education" about his experiences and insights during his time in labor camps. In 1955, the Russian Communist Party made a film of the same name, and in 1957, the film was dubbed into Mandarin and shown in China.

At that time, relations between the two countries were very good, and many things in China were copied from Russia, so the re-education through labor system began to appear in China as well.

Five-person teams were established in major cities.

The so-called five-person group was composed of people drawn from public security, civil affairs, justice, labor and other departments. It was the leading and specific approval body of the domestic re-education through labor system at that time.

This organization has a lot of power. As long as the five people agree, they can be admitted without any extra procedures. This is a practice that was copied from Big Brother.

At first, there weren't many people sent to labor camps. But when things started to get really out of control, the authorities in Beijing came up with a plan: "We need to make the social order and political situation in Beijing as clear as glass, crystal, or a mirror."

Other places followed suit, and Shanghai's "ten-no city" emerged at this time.

In that city with a lot of 1s and 0s, a police station claimed to have solved 10,000 cases a day during that period. It was also in this place that a "Shaping Farm Dabao Operation Area" was established to house misbehaving young people and children.

In the past few years, the weather has been favorable and the supply has been plentiful, so even those in labor camps didn't have too much of a hard time.

In the past two years, hunger has been a constant companion in Sichuan. Ordinary people are struggling to get enough to eat, let alone the young people and children who have been sent to labor camps.

According to people who came from the Dabao work area, it was common to eat crickets, earthworms, dung beetles (the Sichuan and Chongqing term for dung beetles), and rats. They would stuff anything they could catch into their mouths, and the rats would even squeak when they went into their mouths.

According to the person involved, among these snacks, the dung beetle tastes the best.

Tang Zhitong wasn't sure if this was true, since he had never eaten dung beetles, but he had eaten crickets, and they weren't too bad to eat if you prepared them properly.

Gossip is a woman's nature. The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law chatted about the Liu family, such as the reason why Liu Zhangshi and Liu Jiaming quarreled.

Tang Zhitong didn't like either the grandmother or the grandson at all, and wished they would fight to the death. It was just a pity for Chu Chunxue, who had to deal with such a mother-in-law and son.

While listening to the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law chatting, Tang Zhitong pondered about Lao Wan. Lao Wan went in, and the food inside probably wasn't very good. Should she ask Zhang Xinping to help him cook?

After much thought, Tang Zhitong gave up on the idea.

Of all those who went in, it's hard to say there weren't any wronged, but most of them deserved their fate. As long as they weren't well-fed inside, Tang Zhitong was at ease. The Wan family was incredibly wealthy and had many children, so there were bound to be conflicts. As long as the eldest, second, and third sons were a little hard-hearted, Tang Zhitong figured that Old Wan and his son wouldn't have a chance to come out alive.

It's not surprising that Tang Zhitong would do something like this for the sake of wealth, given how powerful and wealthy this family is.

After the meal, Fengzhi was given the dishes to wash, while Fengzhen focused on reviewing her lessons, and Zhang Guifang began to tidy up.

Xiao Wang was no exception; he pulled Tang Zhitong back to the side room.

Perhaps because there was so much to pack for the upcoming move, Xiao Wang seemed to have forgotten about her plan to pack Tang Zhitong's belongings that morning. She took out all the clothes and bedding from the closet, wrapped them in sheets, and had her husband tie them up with rope for easy transport during the move.

The two were busy for most of the night, and apart from being a little tired, they got along well.

(End of this chapter)