6
Making Money: Questions and Answers
Wang Xiao’s wish came true. The elderly lady indeed bought their braised food, muttering, “Let me see what this provincial city’s dried tofu tastes like.”
Wang Xiao’s hope was dashed because the old lady showed no interest in the chicken feet, not even glancing at them, directly asking only for one yuan’s worth of braised dried tofu.
She wasn’t disappointed either, skillfully picking the food and filling a bowl with braised broth as requested by the customer. Hmm, good taste—this braised broth goes really well with noodles.
A successful start—one deal done, and the next one followed. By the time the sisters had pushed their cart halfway through the village, the full steel pot of braised dried tofu was already nearly half gone.
Chen Jingjing grew anxious: “Why doesn’t anyone want the chicken feet? They’re delicious.”
Wang Xiao comforted her: “It’s fine, the adults haven’t returned yet.”
As they spoke, they ran headlong into their uncle and aunt returning from the fields. Aunt Guizhen, who had bought them braised dried tofu last night, grinned widely at them from afar: “I spotted you two from over there and wondered why braised food sellers had come. How is it you two?”
The uncle and aunt were also baffled. They had left early in the morning and even had lunch in the fields, never returning home, completely unaware of what mischief the two girls were up to.
Wang Xiao cheerfully lifted the lid of the steel pot: “That’s right, we made it. It’s a century-old recipe from the provincial city—really tasty.”
Whether it was delicious or not, no one knew yet. But as for its aroma, anyone with a nose could smell it.
Goodness, it was so fragrant that even those with throats dry enough to smoke couldn’t help but salivate.
Chen Jingjing instinctively puffed out her chest with pride. This was nothing compared to when her sister had just finished cooking—that was truly aromatic. Now that it had cooled, the fragrance had faded by at least half or more.
Wang Xiao had already picked up a chicken foot and held it to Aunt Guizhen’s mouth: “Auntie, try it—it’s really good.”
Aunt Guizhen wanted to refuse, but her hands were dirty, and she didn’t dare touch the city-born college graduate cadre, so she had no choice but to open her mouth and let a fragrant, spicy, and savory chicken foot be slipped in.
Goodness, the meat was so tender it practically melted, sliding down with a gentle press. Delicious, truly delicious.
The family working in the rice fields, seeing her expression, immediately smiled and offered: “Alright then, we’ll save some trouble and add a dish tonight. How much are these chicken feet?”
Uh, Wang Xiao actually didn’t know.
She lacked a thorough understanding of prices in Zhou Town in 1990. Chicken feet cost about the same as tofu, so braised chicken feet and braised dried tofu should probably be sold at the same price. But their processing methods differed, and the actual yield per pound varied, so maybe that calculation wasn’t right.
In the end, it was the farmers who helped her set the price: same as pork, two yuan and thirty cents per pound.
It wasn’t that they were inflating the price for her; it’s just that braised food naturally commands a premium. For example, Tiger Skin Phoenix Claws and salted goose sold in town both cost three yuan per pound because ordinary households don’t know how to make them—the skill itself is valuable.
Wang Xiao noted that she’d learned something.
She proactively rounded down the price: “Let’s make it two yuan, two yuan per pound. This is my first time selling things, after all.”
The uncle and aunt quickly chimed in: “Yes, yes, two yuan.”
Although the couple found it strange that their college-educated niece had become a street vendor, as long as she wasn’t throwing tantrums about returning to the provincial city to be someone’s stepmother, even if she wanted to tear down the house, her elders wouldn’t say a word—let alone just selling a little food.
The host family was quite generous, taking out five yuan to buy chicken feet.
However, since Wang Xiao hadn’t prepared plastic bags for packaging and was not using an electronic scale but rather a traditional lever scale, it was Uncle Husheng—a former butcher—who relied on his sharp eye to determine the quantity: a medium-sized blue-patterned bowl filled level was worth two yuan’s worth of chicken feet, while a large soup bowl filled to the brim was worth five yuan’s worth.
Wang Xiao agreed without hesitation—this method was convenient.
To be honest, she wasn’t very skilled at using the scale yet.
They had been discussing by the roadside for quite some time, and since this path was the main route for villagers heading to the fields, many people returning from work noticed them and gathered to see what was happening.
Aunt Guizhen enthusiastically acted as a live promoter, lavishly praising the braised chicken feet. Encouraged by the onlookers, several host families dug into their pockets and expressed their desire to buy chicken feet as well.
As a result, the braised chicken feet in the steel pot were the first to sell out completely.
No wonder—chicken feet were much heavier than fried tofu, and there were fewer to begin with.
The two sisters had no time to heed calls to go play or eat. Instead, they hurriedly pushed their cart through the remaining half of the village, selling off the braised dried tofu from the steel pot, and then rushed home to refill it with a second batch.
This time, they went to the neighboring village. Without their ready-made promoter, the braised dried tofu in the pot sold out, but the braised chicken feet remained largely untouched.
By the time the two returned home, the sky had already turned gray. Their uncle and aunt, back from the fields, had finished their work on the family’s private plot and immediately called out to them, “Alright, alright, hurry up and come with us to eat.”
Chen Jingjing, now fully immersed in the task, had no desire to eat and worriedly said, “No, we still have a pot of braised food left.”
What?
The adults were stunned. At home, the inner pot of the stove was generally unused except during festive occasions or banquets. So, when they returned and saw the outer iron pot empty, they had assumed all the braised food was sold out.
Wang Xiao was also frustrated—it wasn’t that the market was saturated, but that she had been too slow. In over two hours, they had only managed to cover two villages. If they had moved faster and reached four or five villages, the braised food would surely have sold out completely.
Chen Jingjing was extremely anxious, “There’s a whole big pot left. If we don’t sell it, we’ll lose everything.”
“It’s fine,” Wang Xiao reassured her, “We’ve already broken even.”
More than breaking even—she pulled out all the cash she had collected from her pocket. There were notes of ten cents, twenty cents, one yuan, two yuan, with the largest being a five-yuan bill and the smallest a five-cent coin. Added together, wow, it came to exactly 19.8 yuan.
Given that the cost of buying tofu, chicken feet, and dried chili peppers (ingredients like star anise, sugar, and soy sauce were readily available at their uncle’s house) totaled 10 yuan, the gross profit from selling braised dried tofu and braised chicken feet so far today was 9.8 yuan. And there were still chicken feet left in the steel pot, plus another pot of braised food in the inner pot.
Their uncle, a supply department head, only earned a monthly salary of 37 yuan.
How terrifying, and how profitable.
The three family members were utterly dumbfounded.
Only Wang Xiao remained unfazed—this was just the beginning.
She had no intention of waiting until the next day to sell the remaining braised food. After all, braised dried tofu could be reheated, but the braised chicken feet, having simmered until the collagen melted into the broth, would become overly soft and lose their flavor if cooked again.
Besides, it was still early—why not continue earning money? Stay at home watching TV and waste life? As a relentless entrepreneurial hustler, she’d rather die than do that. She felt anxious even for a minute without making money.
So she followed her uncle’s family for dinner and then decided to sell Braised Chicken Feet in town.
Because villagers didn’t have the habit of eating midnight snacks, but the town did.
How could Zhou Town, which had twenty or thirty factories, not have a night market? The night market stalls were quite lively. Some sold small wontons, some sold minced meat noodles, and others sold pear baked with rock sugar and sugar-fried chestnuts. The sweet aroma could be smelled from far away, giving it a particularly stylish vibe.
She brought the coal stove, which had already gone out but retained residual heat, and the aluminum pot to town. Together with her aunt and cousin, they completely sold out a whole pot of Braised Chicken Feet.
Really, the young people who ate midnight snacks after work were quite willing to spend money. They wanted to try anything new they saw.
Many who were already eating noodles from bowls, upon smelling the spicy aroma of the braised food, still bought a chicken foot to try. As a result, quite a few came back to buy more after finishing. Fortunately, her aunt had bought plastic bags from the store; otherwise, the midnight snack stall owners wouldn’t have had enough bowls to lend.
When her uncle finished drinking and returned home, planning to pick up the three from the street, he was startled upon entering the house to see his wife staring blankly: “What’s wrong? Who caused trouble?”
He hadn’t joined them in selling braised food on the street because rural banquets inevitably involved drinking in the evening. Unless it was an emergency, leaving the table early would be disrespectful to the host.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Wang Xiao was the calmest. After all, as someone who had transmigrated with assets over ten million, she wouldn’t lose her composure over just over twenty yuan.
But her aunt grabbed her husband’s arm, her voice trembling: “Yidong, 29 yuan—that’s more than my monthly salary.”
She worked at a garment factory. Unless business was particularly good and required continuous overtime, she usually earned just over twenty yuan a month.
Her husband was better off, being at least the supply and sales section chief at a chemical factory, earning 37 yuan a month.
Now, her niece had earned more than her monthly salary in just one day.
And there was still a large aluminum pot of Braised Dried Tofu. Making another eight or nine yuan was absolutely no problem—that would completely match her husband’s monthly income.
“It brings in money that fast?” Chen Yidong was also surprised. He knew that doing business could be profitable if done right, but he hadn’t expected it to be this profitable. And it wasn’t anything extraordinary—just Braised Dried Tofu and Braised Chicken Feet.
Well, they were truly delicious. When they were drinking earlier, they had even used the broth to mix with noodles to fill their stomachs.
“It makes money, it definitely makes money!” Qian Xuemei emphasized. “Look at the guy selling Braised Dried Tofu. He just makes tofu and sells Braised Dried Tofu, plus Spiced Dried Tofu and Stinky Tofu, and he still managed to build a three-story house for his son. Last time I went to Jiaozuo Village for a banquet, I saw it—such a spacious building. I heard they didn’t even have any external debt.”
Their own two-and-a-half-story house had taken the couple almost ten years to save up for, and they still had nearly a thousand yuan in debt that they could only repay by the year-end bonus at the earliest.
Chen Jingjing also snapped back to reality. She had plenty of authority to speak on whether selling braised food was profitable. She couldn’t help but lament: “Sis, we should have bought more chicken feet to braise. Really, otherwise we could have sold at least half a pot more tonight.”
When they were leaving, several people had come over to ask, very disappointed that they couldn’t buy more.
Wang Xiao brushed it off with a laugh: “I bought all the chicken feet available this morning. The market doesn’t sell many chicken feet.”
Actually, even if there were more, she couldn’t have afforded them. Because the 10 yuan in her pocket today was all the assets the original owner had left her.
Logically speaking, as a college graduate, even if the original owner had only started working in July with the minimum internship salary of 64 yuan per month, she should have no problem saving at least a hundred yuan after more than three months—since she lived and ate at home without contributing a single cent to household expenses.
But she was unconventional. She eagerly pursued a divorced man to become a stepmother, pouring her heart and soul into it. Her own parents had never enjoyed even a scallion’s worth of filial piety from her, yet her cheap future mother-in-law and stepdaughter were already fully outfitted by her. Oh, and when she ran short of money, she even asked her mom for pocket change, effectively helping her parents “show filial piety” to her future in-laws.
This was what Wang Xiao despised most about love-struck fools. If you want to ruin yourself, go ahead, but why use your family’s money to do it? Did you earn it? No sense of proportion at all.
Forget it, what’s done is done. It wasn’t her mess to begin with, so why bother sighing over it? Just a couple hundred yuan—small potatoes. She could earn it back in no time.
Qian Xuemei also lamented, “If we’d taken the Braised Dried Tofu to sell along with the rest, it probably would’ve sold too.”
But it was already 9 p.m. Rural areas didn’t have much nightlife to speak of, and the town’s night market was likely winding down.
“No rush,” Wang Xiao said calmly. “Tomorrow at noon, Jingjing and I will take it to sell in Li Family Village and Yangliu Village. It’ll sell. People need to eat lunch too.”
Qian Xuemei couldn’t help offering advice: “You two should head toward the fields. Some folks harvesting rice won’t have time to go home for meals and might want a treat.”
Really, working in the fields in October made you sweat so much it could crystallize into salt. Greasy, strongly flavored dishes were hugely popular—someone would definitely buy.
Wang Xiao grinned. “Alright, Aunt, we’ll follow your suggestion.”
Haha, anyone who’s ever earned money knows how sweet it is.
See? Her new sales team was already nurturing two core members.
Wang Xiao, who only has eyes for money: Cheat on emotions? Whatever. Cheat me out of money? I’ll beat you to a pulp!
Annoying aside.
Due to Jinjiang’s comment display order system, Ah Jin only now saw so many questions back in Chapter 6, so let’s address them all at once.
First, Zhou Town has a prototype—it’s my hometown. Prices back then were exactly as described. Ah Jin consulted many elders to confirm this level.
If you ask me to post price data from Zhou Town’s prototype era, I honestly can’t find any.
For a long time, townships were overlooked entities. Most records are oral histories, including historical worker wage statistics that only counted urban workers and state-owned factories.
Township enterprises at the time were called commune-run factories, with wages much lower than state-owned ones. Due to the household registration system (ever heard of “rural to urban residency transfer”? In All Is Well, Su Mingyu’s mother married her father just for an urban hukou), the gap between urban and rural registration was vast, and income disparity was huge. Farmers easily accepted wages of 20-30 yuan because, compared to the uncertainty of drifting to big cities as undocumented migrants (risking detention and unemployment), working near home—where they could tend to fields, elders, and children—better suited their needs. (Actually, even now many farmers working locally earn very low wages.)
Compared to most farmers back then, Zhou Town residents were already quite fortunate.
In the first half of 1989, the central government implemented various measures for economic rectification. Many planned projects were halted to cool down investment, which helped alleviate the rapid rise in raw material prices. However, project suspensions meant that migrant workers who had moved to cities for construction jobs were left without work and had to be sent back to their hometowns. This led to a massive wave of 5 million migrant workers returning to rural areas. Subsequently, the central government issued directives to strictly control the blind influx of migrant workers into cities.
As for food prices, according to the “Tianjin Price Records,” in 1990, one jin of pork cost 2.3 yuan in Tianjin, while one jin of mutton cost 2.98 yuan.
The price of braised food wasn’t recorded in the price records, but considering today’s prices for one jin of salted duck compared to one jin of pork, it’s normal for it to be more expensive than pork. Back then, it wasn’t cheap either.
Contrary to what many might think, meat prices in rural areas weren’t necessarily cheaper than in cities at that time. This was because farmers typically raised pigs only to slaughter them for the New Year, unless they were specialized large-scale pig farmers. The meat consumed daily in rural areas was supplied by meat processing plants or vendors, and due to transportation costs, it could even be more expensive.
Many might assume that wages in 1990 weren’t that low, given it was the 1990s. In the 1980s, a monthly income of a few dozen yuan was normal, and by the 1990s, it should have been a few hundred. However, 1990 was a unique point. After the failed price reform in 1988, reforms entered a “late spring chill” phase in 1989. Before Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992, national policies focused on stability. The economy was effectively in a depression: wages hadn’t increased for years, many units could only pay partial salaries, and numerous factories had suspended operations or production.
If you think of 1990 wages as equivalent to 1980s wages, does that make it easier to accept?
Interestingly, after the overheated price increases in 1988, the following years were spent stabilizing prices. During this period, it was a classic case of everything rising except wages.
A major reason for the prosperity of township enterprises, represented by Zhou Town in the text, was their small scale and relatively flexible operations, which spared them the pressure of triangular debts. Additionally, they had low land costs, didn’t bear responsibilities for employees’ healthcare, children’s education, or housing, and paid low wages, resulting in low labor and production costs and a pricing advantage.
It was only after policies changed that township enterprises collapsed in large numbers, forcing people from Zhou Town to migrate to cities for work.
As for the mention of the female protagonist selling Braised Dried Tofu in the text: In 1990, information was extremely scarce. Rural areas were still typical traditional societies where much information spread by word of mouth. Many food preparation methods that seem simple and easily accessible today were unknown without someone teaching them, and those who knew kept their knowledge tightly guarded and wouldn’t share it.
So, when Lu Gan Grandpa wasn’t selling Braised Dried Tofu, others had no choice but to wait.
Regarding the issue of incomplete seasonings making it impossible to prepare tasty Braised Dried Tofu, Lu Gan Grandpa used simple seasonings to create a version that suited the tastes of Zhou Town residents (though the female protagonist thought it was just so-so). He made a vegetarian version, while Wang Xiao prepared a meat-based one. Her product was popular in the rural areas at the time because people preferred oil-rich foods.
With wages so low, why were people still willing to spend money on food and drinks?
Since people didn’t face immense pressures from housing or education, they lived in a state of carpe diem. Especially among the youth, it was common to spend whatever they earned, with many being “moonlighters” (spending their entire monthly income).
Additionally, during the busy farming season, rural areas became the most generous in spending money, so it wasn’t surprising that people bought braised food without hesitation.
It was also normal that when buying tofu, they didn’t bring their own pots to carry it. The female lead, who had transmigrated into the book, assumed that sellers would provide containers. As she mentioned, before transmigrating, she only made small portions of Braised Dried Tofu for herself, so she didn’t immediately realize that selling required larger quantities of tofu, making plastic bags impractical.
It wasn’t odd that when the female lead first sold Braised Chicken Feet, she didn’t know the pricing and let locals set it. Rural society at that time clearly distinguished between insiders and outsiders. If someone tried to take advantage of a local child selling food by setting unfair prices, they would be looked down upon by the community. Moreover, the female lead wasn’t foolish; if anyone blatantly tried to cheat her, she wouldn’t sell at a loss.
Additionally, portraying herself as a somewhat naive seller fit her persona as a college graduate cadre from the provincial city. This made people more likely to believe she was just temporarily selling food in Zhou Town on a whim.
Rural buyers also trusted such a person more, believing she wouldn’t play tricks and that her goods and prices were honest.
Of course, any misunderstandings are my fault. A Jin researches extensively for writing, but often, perhaps because the material is too realistic, it gets flagged as sensitive and locked upon posting (many longtime readers of A Jin’s works should know this). Thus, I’m hesitant to share references.
Having written many period novels, A Jin often overlooks the information bubble. I assumed certain things were common knowledge and didn’t need explicit explanation.
I’ll be more careful in the future.