During the day, Qiao Jiajia stayed at home with her grandmother. Her father, Qiao Heping, her mother, He Yingying, and her grandfather, Qiao Qiusheng, all worked at the largest steel factory in the provincial capital. They usually finished work around five o’clock.
On Sundays, the whole family had the day off.
The Qiao family lived in a workers’ apartment building, and it was currently 1956, when ration coupons for grain and cloth had only just begun to be introduced.
Qiao Jiajia had already figured out these basic details from listening to her family talk about their daily lives.
There was a large wall clock hanging in the house. It looked quite old-fashioned, but the clock face was big enough that Qiao Jiajia could clearly see the time even from a distance.
She tilted her head up and looked at it.
It was already five o’clock.
“When will Grandpa come home?”
Because a one-year-old child’s language development was still incomplete, Qiao Jiajia could only speak in short sentences at the moment. Long sentences were still somewhat difficult.
Of course, if she really tried, she could manage them.
But saying long sentences was tiring, and she was too lazy to bother.
Qiao Zhufang carefully placed her precious granddaughter into a small bamboo chair. Then she soaked a clean cloth in warm water, wrung it out, and gently wiped her granddaughter’s face before answering.
“Grandpa should be home soon. When he came home for lunch, he said he might get off work a little early this afternoon.”
“What about Daddy and Mommy?” Qiao Jiajia asked.
As soon as she finished speaking, Qiao Zhufang answered, “Your father and mother are going to Hejia Village after work today. That’s where your maternal grandparents live. They should be back tonight.”
A one-year-old child was at a crucial stage of learning to speak.
Whenever Qiao Zhufang had nothing else to do, she would chat with her precious granddaughter. Now that the little girl had started asking questions, she certainly wouldn’t brush her off.
No matter how much the child could understand, Qiao Zhufang always answered her carefully and patiently.
When it came to her granddaughter, she never seemed to run out of patience.
She had learned it from her own mother.
Her husband had married into her family. Her mother had therefore become the child’s grandmother.
People married very young in those days. When Qiao Zhufang gave birth to her son, Qiao Heping, she was only sixteen. She had been too young to know how to care for a baby, so her mother and her nanny had helped raise him.
Her mother had been extraordinarily patient with her grandson, Qiao Heping.
She had even personally taught him his first characters, which was completely different from the rough way most families in the village raised their children.
That probably had something to do with her mother’s background.
Her mother had been the daughter of a scholar.
Unfortunately, her father had later become addicted to opium, and the family fortune had declined. They had gone through a very difficult period.
Fortunately, her mother had been betrothed to a good family when she was young. The other family had been a famous and wealthy merchant family.
After getting married, it took them many years before they finally had one child—a daughter.
That daughter was Qiao Zhufang.
Later, her mother never had another son, and none of her father’s concubines gave birth to a boy either.
Her father eventually began planning to adopt a male heir from their hometown.
But before that could happen, an accident occurred.
There was a gunfight in the street, and by the time they carried him home, he was already dead.
The relatives back in their hometown were not kind people.
Qiao Zhufang’s mother had only one daughter—her—and no other relatives to rely on.
She was completely alone.
If they stayed there, those relatives would certainly have taken advantage of them and seized the family property.
Then her mother overheard those people from their hometown plotting to kill the two of them.
In the end, before the relatives could all arrive, her mother decided to flee with Qiao Zhufang and her nanny.
The three of them were all women, and the outside world was in complete chaos.
People were dying in the cities every day, while various factions fought for power.
Later, by a stroke of fate, her mother saved the only son of the He Family Village chief.
Hejia Village was in a fairly good location. Whenever soldiers came from outside, they could hide in the mountains. The terrain was complicated and relatively safe, and the village chief was also a good man.
Eventually, Qiao Zhufang’s mother changed her daughter’s surname.
She no longer used her father’s surname and instead took her mother’s surname.
Then, together with her nanny, she brought Qiao Zhufang to Hejia Village, pretending that they were refugees fleeing from the chaos.
Her nanny claimed to be Qiao Zhufang’s aunt, because poor families obviously wouldn’t have a nanny.
After spending several years establishing themselves in Hejia Village, another wave of refugees fleeing a famine arrived, sometime around the 1920s.
Among them, Qiao Zhufang’s mother bought her a child husband.
When Qiao Zhufang was sixteen, she married her child husband, Qiao Qiusheng.
The following year, she gave birth to their son, Qiao Heping.
At that time, Qiao Zhufang was her mother’s and her nanny’s only child. She was still very young, and the two women doted on her.
As a result, Qiao Heping was practically raised by Qiao Zhufang’s mother and nanny.
Remembering those days, Qiao Zhufang couldn’t help smiling.
So much time had passed.
Her son had grown up, and she now had a granddaughter.
Her mother and nanny had also passed away.
But now she was following her mother’s example and helping raise her own son’s child.
Meanwhile, Qiao Qiusheng was hurrying home with a bag of eggs and several aluminum lunch boxes in his hands.
The family’s eggs had run out, and since he had gotten off work early that day, he had stopped by the grocery store to buy a pound of eggs.
Since last year, grain, cloth, and cooking oil had required ration coupons.
Fortunately, eggs didn’t require coupons yet, so whenever the family ran out, they simply bought more.
His granddaughter Jiajia was almost one year old now and was gradually being weaned.
She could also eat some solid food.
Eggs were one of the foods she ate most often, and she especially loved steamed egg custard.
Qiao Qiusheng had only one granddaughter, Qiao Jiajia.
Her grandmother, parents, and grandfather all loved her dearly. How could they possibly be unwilling to give her good food?
For most families, eggs were a rare source of meat and protein, something they might only get to eat during holidays.
But eggs had never been lacking in the Qiao household.
Almost every other day, they made steamed egg custard for Jiajia.
They didn’t make it every day only because they were afraid she would get tired of eating it.
Qiao Qiusheng, his son, and daughter-in-law were all factory employees and had to work during the day, so they couldn’t stay home to care for the child.
For now, his wife was the one taking care of their granddaughter.
Originally, his wife—Jiajia’s grandmother—had also been a factory employee. She had worked in the workers’ cafeteria, serving meals.
But she had already said before Jiajia was born that once the baby arrived, she would stay home and help raise her.
She simply couldn’t bear to send her granddaughter to the factory’s nursery.
Her son and daughter-in-law had been married for six years before finally having this one child, so the entire family treasured her.
If they sent her to the nursery, they couldn’t help worrying that something might happen.
After all, there were many children at the nursery, and most of them were extremely young.
Once children were a little older—around three or four years old—they would be sent to the factory’s kindergarten.
The children in the nursery were mostly only one or two years old, and some were even newborns just a few months old.
They could barely take care of themselves, so naturally, looking after them required a great deal of effort.
On top of that, there weren’t many staff members.
It was difficult for them to give every child enough attention.
There was no way their care could be as meticulous as that provided by family members at home.
And having a whole room full of children crying and calling for someone was completely normal.
The caregivers couldn’t possibly stop to comfort every single child. Often, they could only wait until a child cried themselves tired.
Because of this, even before the baby was born, Qiao Zhufang, as the grandmother, had already made up her mind.
Once the child was born, she absolutely would not send her to the nursery.
She would raise the child herself at home.
Qiao Zhufang had experienced a fairly privileged childhood herself.
Back then, she had several people—a nanny and maids—looking after her alone, and she had been raised with great care.
When her son Qiao Heping was born, there had also effectively been four adults looking after one child.
Even though they had been living in the countryside in Hejia Village and their living conditions weren’t particularly good, they had still raised him with great care.
Now that it was her granddaughter’s turn—and she was a girl at that—how could Qiao Zhufang bear to raise her carelessly?
Besides, Qiao Zhufang didn’t think she was old at all.
She was more than capable of taking care of one granddaughter at home.
Although she was already a grandmother, she was actually only forty years old this year.
That was because people married extremely young back then.
There were plenty of girls who married at fourteen or fifteen.
Qiao Zhufang hadn’t married until sixteen, which was already considered relatively late.
Qiao Qiusheng had originally disagreed with her decision.
It wasn’t because he was worried about losing her factory salary. Their family wasn’t short of money.
He was simply worried about his wife.
Taking care of a child wasn’t easy, especially a newborn. It required a great deal of energy and was much more exhausting than the work his wife had previously done at the factory.
Qiao Qiusheng couldn’t bear to see his wife wear herself out.
But his son and daughter-in-law were both still young and were at the stage of building their careers. They couldn’t possibly quit their jobs just to stay home and raise the child.
At that time, anyone entering a factory had to spend three years as an apprentice before becoming a regular worker, after which they could gradually work their way up through the ranks.
If they quit, they would have to start all over again if they wanted to return to factory work.
Qiao Qiusheng’s original plan was to invite a relative from the countryside to come help take care of the child and pay them a monthly wage.
After all, everyone in the family now worked at the factory, and their combined salaries were more than two hundred yuan a month.
They could certainly afford to hire someone.
But plans couldn’t keep up with changes.
Who would have thought that little Jiajia would be such an easy child to raise?
She had never stayed up all night crying and had never required the adults to worry over her.
Compared with how troublesome Qiao Heping had been as a child, she was incredibly easy.
On top of that, his wife strongly insisted on raising their granddaughter herself rather than hiring someone.
Only then did Qiao Qiusheng abandon the idea of bringing a relative over.
However, the whole family had an unspoken understanding.
No matter how easy the child was to care for, they would never leave all the responsibility of raising her to Qiao Zhufang alone.
In the past, after finishing work at the factory, they might have wandered around outside for a while before coming home.
But now, the moment they thought about the family waiting at home, who would still have the mood to stroll around?
Qiao Qiusheng and his son and daughter-in-law all hurried straight home after work.
And now, thinking about his wife and granddaughter waiting at home for dinner, Qiao Qiusheng quickened his pace even more.
His wife was already working hard enough by staying home to care for their granddaughter.
Naturally, they weren’t going to make her cook as well.
Usually, he or his son and daughter-in-law brought food home from the factory cafeteria.
Sometimes they cooked at home too, with him taking charge of the kitchen.
He and his wife had grown up together, so he knew exactly what she liked to eat.
On the way home, he ran into someone from the factory, a worker from the workshop named Wu Dazhi.
As soon as Wu Dazhi saw Qiao Qiusheng, he immediately came over from a distance.
Walking toward him, he called out enthusiastically,
“Master Qiao, congratulations! You’ve been promoted to a Grade Eight fitter. You’re really something at our factory!”
As he spoke, he gave Qiao Qiusheng a thumbs-up, his words filled with flattery.
Qiao Qiusheng didn’t show much reaction.
He merely gave the standard polite response.
“It’s nothing. It’s all thanks to the Party and the organization’s training.”
Qiao Qiusheng wasn’t close with Wu Dazhi. They often saw each other in the workshop, so they recognized each other’s faces, but that was about it.
He had no intention of stopping to chat.
Besides, he was carrying a bag of eggs and several lunch boxes. He had just picked up the food from the factory cafeteria and was rushing home.
If he delayed too long, the food would get cold.
Wu Dazhi didn’t seem to notice Qiao Qiusheng’s eagerness to get home and continued enthusiastically.
“By the way, my boy will need your guidance in the workshop in the future. Master Qiao, you’re the best fitter in our factory. I see you aren’t taking on an apprentice right now, so you’ve got plenty of time.
“If my boy runs into anything he doesn’t understand, I’ll have him come ask you. I’m sure he’ll improve quickly!
“I also heard your granddaughter is about to have her first-birthday celebration, right? I’ll come then too. How about I give the child a big red envelope?”
Qiao Qiusheng wasn’t close with Wu Dazhi, and he didn’t care about the man’s red envelope.
He immediately waved his hand and refused.
“No need for a red envelope. We aren’t close. We’re just having a simple first-birthday celebration for the child.”
When Wu Dazhi heard that he didn’t need to prepare a red envelope, he secretly breathed a sigh of relief.
He was actually quite pleased.
He had never really intended to give one in the first place. He had only mentioned it as an excuse to strike up a conversation.
If he really had to hand over money, he would have been reluctant.
After all, he wasn’t like Master Qiao, who earned such a high salary—more than one hundred yuan a month, even higher than the factory director’s!
But before he could finish celebrating his good fortune, Qiao Qiusheng added,
“As for your son, if he has any questions in the future, he should ask the master assigned to train him. Don’t come to me. He needs to follow the organization’s arrangements. Otherwise, everything will become a mess.”
Wu Dazhi looked somewhat disappointed.
He had long known that Master Qiao had a bad temper, but he had still come over hoping to curry favor.
What if it worked?
Now that he’d been rejected, he couldn’t help feeling a little resentful.
As he turned to leave, he muttered,
“Hmph. You’re the master craftsman, with excellent skills and a big temper. Looks like an ordinary worker like me can’t count on Master Qiao for help. Master Cheng has a much better temper. No wonder he’s so well-liked!”
“Oh, Master Cheng does have a good temper. Go ask him, then. My teachings are too advanced for your son to understand.”
Qiao Qiusheng’s reply was blunt.
He wasn’t the type to indulge anyone.
Qiao Qiusheng’s good temper was reserved for his family.
At home, he was an exceptionally gentle man.
But when it came to outsiders, he had never been known for having a particularly good temper.
Take Wu Dazhi, for example.
Didn’t he know what level his own son was at?
His son had only recently been promoted from apprentice to a Grade One worker. He hadn’t even fully understood what his own master had taught him.
Could he really understand what a Grade Eight worker like Qiao Qiusheng taught?
Besides, if every Grade One worker in the factory came running to Qiao Qiusheng with questions, Qiao Qiusheng might as well spend the entire day doing nothing but training Grade One workers.
Why did the factory assign masters to young workers in the first place?
Wasn’t it so those masters could train them?
If a worker asked their own master a technical question and the master genuinely didn’t know the answer, then they could come and ask Qiao Qiusheng.
Qiao Qiusheng would be more than willing to help in that situation.
But as for everything else?
Forget it.
He wasn’t that free.
Why should a Grade Eight worker spend his days training a Grade One worker who wasn’t even his son and wasn’t related to him in any way?
After getting rid of Wu Dazhi, Qiao Qiusheng continued hurrying home.
Almost every factory employee he encountered along the way greeted him.
Of course, that didn’t mean he was particularly popular.
There was only one reason everyone was suddenly so friendly toward him.
Starting the previous year, the factory had implemented the “Eight-Grade Wage System.”
Just one month earlier, Qiao Qiusheng had been promoted to Grade Eight.
His monthly salary was now 126 yuan, even higher than the factory director’s.
There were so few Grade Eight workers in the factory that they could be counted on one hand.
And he was the factory’s only Grade Eight fitter.
At a time when most people earned only thirty or forty yuan a month, his salary was extraordinarily high.
He belonged to the very top tier of earners in the factory.
During the past month, quite a few people had come to borrow money from him.
Qiao Qiusheng gave every one of them the same answer:
“No.”
If people he barely knew had the nerve to come asking for money, he had the nerve to refuse them without hesitation.
He didn’t need to be like Master Cheng, who apparently wasn’t focused on improving his skills but instead spent his days building connections and trying to make everyone like him.
What was there to fear about falling out with people simply because he refused to lend them money?
In Qiao Qiusheng’s eyes, technical skill was what truly mattered.
As long as he had the skills, it didn’t matter what others thought of him.
Whenever they saw him at the factory, they still had to respectfully call him, “Hello, Master Qiao.”
As the factory’s only Grade Eight fitter, he naturally had every right to be confident.
Just a few days earlier, the factory director had even discussed having him train two more apprentices.
They would be selected from among the Grade Four or Grade Five workers.
The candidates hadn’t been finalized yet, and the matter hadn’t been announced publicly. It was still under consideration.
Otherwise, there might already have been people coming to his door trying to pull strings.
Qiao Qiusheng hadn’t taken the earlier incident to heart at all.
Once he finished work, his mind was already filled with thoughts of home.
“Ah-Mei, the cafeteria made braised fish today. I brought some home. It’s still hot, so you eat it. I’ll take care of Jiajia.”
Qiao Qiusheng placed the bag of eggs in the cupboard, then put the lunch boxes on the table before picking up his granddaughter.
“Jiajia isn’t fussy. Brother, sit down and eat with me. It’ll get cold otherwise,” Qiao Zhufang said.
When she saw that her husband still wasn’t sitting down, she added,
“Hurry up. Otherwise, I won’t eat either.”
Qiao Qiusheng smiled and nodded.
However, instead of sitting down immediately, he pulled the little bamboo crib from beside the window over to the table and placed it next to his chair.
He carefully put little Jiajia inside, making sure she would remain within his sight.
Only after doing all that did he pick up his chopsticks and prepare to eat.
Although the two of them were already grandparents, they were actually still very young.
They were only in their early forties, and their relationship was still as affectionate as ever.
Qiao Jiajia sat inside her little bamboo crib.
She tilted her head and looked at her grandfather, then at her grandmother.
Then she smiled.
She felt that her grandparents must truly love each other.
She could tell just from the way they addressed each other.
Grandpa called Grandma “Ah-Mei,” while Grandma called Grandpa “Ah-Ge.”
In this era, especially for a couple who were no longer young lovers, such intimate forms of address were exceptionally affectionate.
However, after observing her grandparents for the past few months, Qiao Jiajia had noticed that they only called each other Ah-Ge and Ah-Mei when they were alone.
When her parents were around, they addressed each other as “Qiusheng” and “Zhufang.”
Everything became much more proper.
Perhaps adults simply felt embarrassed about displaying affection in front of their children.
As for why they didn’t bother hiding it from her, perhaps it was because she was only one year old.
Her grandparents probably thought she was too young to understand anything, so there was no need to hide the little private affection that belonged only to the two of them.
Qiao Jiajia’s guess made perfect sense.
But it wasn’t entirely correct.
Qiao Qiusheng and Qiao Zhufang had been together for most of their lives, and they truly loved each other.
The fact that they had called each other “Ah-Ge” and “Ah-Mei” for nearly thirty years without changing those nicknames was proof enough.
However, when they first started using those terms, it had nothing to do with marital affection.
Qiao Qiusheng and Qiao Zhufang both had the surname Qiao.
It wasn’t because they happened to share the same surname.
Rather, Qiao Qiusheng had married into the Qiao family as a live-in husband. He had originally had a different surname but had changed it after joining the Qiao family.
He had been very young when he first came to the Qiao household.
The two of them had both been children at the time.
So he called her “Ah-Mei,” and she called him “Ah-Ge.”
And that was how they had addressed each other for the next thirty years.
In Qiao Qiusheng’s heart, although the two of them had married, grown up, experienced countless years together, and now even had a granddaughter, Qiao Zhufang would always be the soft-hearted little Ah-Mei he had first met as a child—the girl he felt he needed to protect for the rest of his life.
Qiao Jiajia was only one year old, and adults obviously wouldn’t go out of their way to explain such things to a child so young.
Naturally, she had no idea that her grandparents had actually been childhood sweethearts, or that her grandfather had originally been a child husband who married into the Qiao family.
“Did Jiajia have her formula this afternoon? If she hasn’t, I’ll feed her some of this minced-meat porridge. I asked Old Sun to make a special batch for her.”
The aluminum lunch box was filled with porridge.
Qiao Qiusheng had carried it very carefully all the way home, and not a single drop had spilled.
“She did. I fed her formula three hours ago. But she practiced walking for a while this afternoon, so she should be hungry again by now,” Qiao Zhufang said.
Hearing this, Qiao Qiusheng naturally took on the task of feeding his granddaughter.
He divided the minced-meat porridge from the lunch box into two small bowls.
He pushed one bowl toward his wife and held the other in his hand, carefully feeding little Jiajia.
His granddaughter was only one year old.
Although she could now eat some foods besides formula, she couldn’t eat too much.
Milk was still her main source of nutrition.
There was no way she could finish an entire lunch box of minced-meat porridge by herself, so dividing it into two bowls worked perfectly.
Grandmother and granddaughter could each have one.