In 1993, elementary school students still had classes on Saturday mornings. After finishing three periods, Zhu Yun Xuan packed up his things and went home, only to see Xiao Hui riding her bicycle, bringing Li Rui along behind her.
It was obvious to everyone what she was trying to do.
Li Rui was going to spend the night at his house, and Jiang Yue Xiu was completely supportive of the idea. In fact, she couldn’t really understand Li Rui’s parents. In her opinion, a six- or seven-year-old child, even if they were no longer co-sleeping with their parents, should still be kept close for peace of mind. Take Zhu Yun Xuan, for example: now that the weather was getting cooler, she constantly worried that he’d catch a chill at night. And every evening before bed, she had to ask him what he did during the day just to feel reassured.
Li Yue had called the day before to inform them that he would come over to pick up Li Rui on Sunday. So the next morning, Xiao Hui would come by again to fetch Li Rui. Before she left, she said a few more things and then took out a few beautiful pencils with erasers on the end and gave them to Zhu Yun Xuan.
Zhu Yun Xuan accepted them with a beaming smile, but no matter how he looked at Li Rui, he just couldn’t bring himself to like him.
“Auntie, thank you for having me,” Li Rui said to Jiang Yue Xiu with a smile. He was dressed in a clean white shirt, looking neat and quiet, but the image was somewhat spoiled by the fact that he was holding a hen by the legs, bound with straw and wrapped in a plastic bag.
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Jiang Yue Xiu said quickly, and she called for Xiao Hui to take the chicken back. But Xiao Hui hopped on her bike and pedaled away in a flash.
“Auntie, if you don’t even accept a chicken, I really won’t dare stay over,” Li Rui added again.
Zhu Yun Xuan continued to eye him sideways. In truth, Li Rui staying over and stealing some of his parents’ attention wasn’t really a big deal. He wasn’t the same Zhu Yun Xuan as in his past life who couldn’t tolerate his parents being good to any other child. But the fact that Li Rui wanted to sleep in his bed, that was what really annoyed him!
Unfortunately, he couldn’t object, or else he’d look like he was being unreasonable. After all, two six-year-olds squeezing into one bed for a night wasn’t out of the ordinary at all.
Although the weather had cooled slightly, it was still fine to wear just a light shirt. Jiang Yue Xiu had already finished cooking before picking up Zhu Yun Xuan. She had prepared braised dried tofu, stir-fried cabbage, and some steamed salted pork. When she saw Li Rui was staying for dinner, she also fried one sunny-side-up egg for each of the two boys.
Zhu Yun Xuan polished off a full bowl of rice in one go, and then he and Li Rui carried stools to the main hall and started on their homework with the doors wide open. Jiang Yue Xiu, meanwhile, poured hot water and started preparing the chicken.
The feathers were removed using hot water, but not boiling, so that once the chicken had been soaked, all it took was a swipe of an old spatula to scrape the feathers clean.
The hen still had an egg with a shell inside her stomach, along with several others that only had egg yolks. Jiang Yue Xiu felt a bit regretful when she saw the egg that had been bought along with the hen, and she tried to teach Li Rui to check the hens’ bottoms when buying chickens, to see if they had eggs inside that were about to be laid, before making a purchase.
“Mom, the chicken was bought by Aunt Xiao Hui,” Zhu Yun Xuan, noticing his mother’s lecture on what makes a free-range chicken, quickly spoke up to help Li Rui. Even though he felt a bit annoyed about Li Rui sticking around and wanting to spend the night at his house, he really didn’t want to imagine Li Rui checking the chicken’s backside…
“I see,” Jiang Yue Xiu smiled and nodded. At this point, she also realized that they probably weren’t lacking in money. “By the way, Rui Rui, do you want to eat some water bamboo? How about some loofah? We can dig up some taro from the garden too…”
“Auntie, I’m not picky,” Li Rui quickly answered. As long as Jiang Yue Xiu made it, he’d eat it, even if it tasted terrible!
“I haven’t had much to do lately, and I’ve finished the clothes I was making for your mother. How about we go catch some snails this afternoon? It’s been raining a lot lately, and the river water is clear now. If we wait until evening, the mud will settle, and we can fry up some snails to eat.” Jiang Yue Xiu thought for a while, then came up with another idea. “It’s a shame. If you came over in summer, you could swim in the river.”
In the countryside, children would always swim in the river in summer. Even after Zhu Yun Xuan was reborn, he went swimming a couple of times. Most kids around his age would have parents or grandparents watching them as they swam, with each child using an old tire as a flotation device.
Zhu Yun Xuan had a black old tire that his father specially brought back from town and patched up using his skills for repairing bicycle tires. When compared to the colorful swimming rings, it was like the difference between a tank and a sedan.
Older children would use wooden door bolts or foam blocks to float, and eventually, everyone, except the particularly timid, would learn to swim.
There was a river right in front of Zhu Yun Xuan’s house. Jiang Yue Xiu took a bamboo basket and went down to catch some snails. The water plants along the riverbank, as well as the slate tiles submerged in the water, were covered in snails. These days, everyone was happy to catch a few snails to add to their meals, so they weren’t very plentiful. Years later, after the water became murky, several factories opened nearby, and every household installed flush toilets. Although there were now many snails, no one dared to eat them anymore.
A lot of memories from his past life became incredibly vivid at this moment. Zhu Yun Xuan took off his shoes and waded into the river. He casually flipped over a stone by the riverbank, and in no time, he actually caught a crab!
This type of crab was called a “stone crab” by the locals. It was very small, had little meat, and was mostly caught by children. Zhu Yun Xuan particularly enjoyed catching these creatures.
In truth, he wasn’t very skilled at catching crabs. His skills in fishing for lobsters and digging for loaches were even worse. Compared to the kids in the village who spent their days in the mud, they could catch a dozen loaches, but he might catch just one… However, the other children’s parents weren’t willing to waste oil and salt for the little things their kids brought back. But Jiang Yue Xiu didn’t mind. Even if Zhu Yun Xuan only brought back a single loach, she would drizzle a few drops of oil, add some soy sauce, and a clove of garlic, then steam it while cooking rice for him.
“Mom, I caught a stone crab! Can you steam it for me later?” Zhu Yun Xuan carefully held the crab by the back, making sure its pincers didn’t snap at him.
“Alright, you go ahead and put it in the house first,” Jiang Yue Xiu immediately agreed, then asked Zhu Yun Xuan to get a sickle and a bamboo pole. She had planted loofah along the riverbank, but the mulberry tree, which hadn’t been trimmed, had grown so tall that she couldn’t pick the loofah without tying the sickle to the bamboo pole.
“Got it!” Zhu Yun Xuan grabbed Li Rui, who had been standing by the stone steps along the riverbank, and ran back home. Before long, the two returned, carrying the bamboo pole.
Li Rui felt somewhat out of place here, not being able to do much. He even found the leeks in the garden quite intriguing. Zhu Yun Xuan was tying the sickle to the bamboo pole with a rope while chatting with him. “If you’d come a few days earlier, that mulberry tree would have been full of mulberries! You know, my dad left that tree specifically to grow mulberries for me. Normally, mulberry trees that have their leaves trimmed every year produce tasteless berries… And the peaches are all gone, they’ve been gone for over a month. The jujubes are also gone already. I was hoping for a typhoon when the jujubes ripened so I could pick them after school break and eat them!”
“I remember Lu Xun wrote about his wet nurse making wine with mulberries,” Li Rui replied. The countryside was actually quite beautiful, and there was hardly any pollution here.
“I haven’t tried that, but I know every time I eat mulberries, my mouth turns purple, and my mom would make me change into black clothes because she was afraid the mulberry juice would stain my clothes,” Zhu Yun Xuan said, laughing.
After more than half an hour of gathering, Jiang Yue Xiu had enough snails for dinner. She used the sickle to cut off two tender loofahs, then headed back home. Loofahs were great, if you planted just two, the whole family could eat for two to three months. The older loofahs, hanging on the tree, would often only have coarse fibers and seeds left. After taking out the seeds, the fibers could be used for scrubbing dishes, which was eco-friendly and worked better than modern metal scrubbing pads.
After placing the snails in water and adding a few drops of vegetable oil to help them expel the sand and mud from their stomachs, Jiang Yue Xiu went out again to dig up some water bamboo.
“Your family really grows a lot of things,” Li Rui said, noticing the water bamboo and wondering if it was grown in their own garden. To be honest, this was the first time he’d seen many of the plants growing in the field. He also noticed the stone crabs and snails in the basin. At first, he thought the stone crabs were small crabs and the snails were just small rice snails…
“These days, many people don’t buy vegetables from the market, they grow their own. You can dig a hole in the rice paddy head and plant some water bamboo. But the kind of water bamboo we grow here isn’t very good, many of them have black spots inside. Don’t worry, though, it’s safe to eat, not toxic,” Zhu Yun Xuan replied, solving math problems from his Olympiad book. Li Rui sat beside him, writing a novel in his notebook.
Both of them had adult souls, so their self-control was pretty strong. They didn’t get distracted at all.
“Actually, the countryside is great, everything is all natural and pollution-free,” Li Rui smiled, noticing that many of the snails had already climbed up onto the surface of the basin.
“But work here is very hard… By the way, we’ve also planted water chestnuts by the field head, but sadly, we can’t eat them yet.” Zhu Yun Xuan’s family grew so many things because of his uncle, Zhu Cheng Gong, who used to specialize in farming and doing small jobs for others. From time to time, he would take vegetables to town to sell, which meant their home had a wider variety of crops. Naturally, Zhu Cheng Cai’s family also grew some of these.
“When they’re ripe, your mom will definitely let you bring some to me, right?” Li Rui wrote a passage, then added, “On Monday, during self-study, I’ll go to the reading room to write my novel and see if there are any magazines or publishers I can submit to.”
Zhu Yun Xuan didn’t respond, silently working through his math problems, occasionally sketching on a piece of scrap paper, leaving behind some shapes and figures.
The thick stack of scrap paper was brought back by Feng Xian from the textile factory for him. At this moment, Zhu Qiu Yue was on the drying ground, drawing with the neighboring girls using red bricks. They drew the bedroom, the living room, and most importantly, the dining table. They drew several circles to represent bowls and then moved a small stool to sit beside them, pretending to eat by piling small grass and flowers inside the circles.
The dinner was quite lavish. The chicken was made into white-cut chicken, and besides some vegetables, there was a large bowl of snails cooked with green onions and ginger. Jiang Yue Xiu had cut off the tails of the snails using special scissors she kept for trimming mulberry branches. With a strong suction, you could pull out the snail meat from inside. Zhu Yun Xuan and Li Rui, being young, often couldn’t suck the meat out, so Jiang Yue Xiu had prepared two long and thick sewing needles for them to pick out the snail meat to eat.
By the time the two kids finished, they had hardly eaten any rice at all.
Zhu Yun Xuan’s house only had a black-and-white television that Zhu Cheng Cai bought when he got married. He and Jiang Yue Xiu told Li Rui and Zhu Yun Xuan to go to their room to watch TV. However, Li Rui and Zhu Yun Xuan had already lost interest in the TV and preferred to go to their own room to solve problems. This made Jiang Yue Xiu and Zhu Cheng Cai praise them again. When they looked at their son, they felt so proud their mouths nearly reached their ears.
As soon as the parents left, Zhu Yun Xuan widened his eyes.
“You sleep inside, and I’ll sleep outside.” He looked at his bed and thought it was a bit small.
“Okay.” Li Rui put his notebook and pen into the drawer of the bed. This bed had been around for a while, hadn’t it? He glanced at it a bit longer and then looked at Zhu Yun Xuan. “Don’t worry, I’m not in the condition to do anything to you right now.”
After saying this, his face couldn’t help but turn a little red. Saying something so openly flirtatious to Zhu Yun Xuan…
“Be careful, or I’ll ‘do’ you!” Zhu Yun Xuan pounced on Li Rui. He had ignored some of Li Rui’s soft and probing remarks earlier, but now that Li Rui was teasing him, he immediately fought back.
Li Rui’s face turned even redder, and for a moment, he couldn’t find any words to say.
Zhu Yun Xuan coughed twice, quickly letting go of him. He covered his entire body with a towel and blanket. “Time to sleep!”
“Okay.” Li Rui laughed, suddenly feeling the need to complain to Jiang Yue Xiu more. If only he could sleep at Zhu’s house more often.
However, he still had to remain as calm as possible when facing Zhu Yun Xuan. If he kept going like this, it would be too embarrassing!
In his past life, he hadn’t even been in a relationship, and now he was in this awkward situation.