She slept very soundly, and when she woke up, she had a vague sense of not knowing what day it was.
The past few days on the train, she had slept sitting up. Now that she could lie down, it was so comfortable that she didn’t want to get up.
Faintly hearing voices from the front yard, Su Yun rolled around on the kang a couple of times before finally forcing herself to scramble up.
She straightened her clothes, shook out her tangled hair, re-braided it into two pigtails, and opened the door to head to the front yard.
A group of educated youth that Su Yun hadn’t met yet had already gathered in the front yard. Liu Huan was there too. About seven or eight people were standing or sitting around the yard, making a lively racket.
Seeing Su Yun, Liu Huan quickly walked over and pulled her along to introduce her to the others: “This is Su Yun, the new educated youth who came with us today.”
“Hello everyone, my name is Su Yun. I’m new and don’t know anything yet, so I’ll be troubling you all from now on!”
Su Yun quickly greeted them.
“My name is Li Xiaomei! You look so young—you seem even smaller than my youngest sister!”
The speaker was a female educated youth with the much-admired Liu Hulan hairstyle. She was quite tall, probably over 1.7 meters, wearing a blue work uniform. Her features were somewhat handsome and heroic, making her look rather dashing.
“I’m 16, I just look young for my age. I’ll call you Xiaomei Jie from now on!”
Su Yun’s eyes sparkled a little. This sister really looked cool! If she were in modern times, with short hair and a uniform, she could sweep a whole crowd of girls off their feet.
In the book, Li Xiaomei had a very straightforward personality, like the big sister of the educated youth group. She was also extremely protective, so the female educated youth usually turned to her for help with any problems.
The other educated youth also came over to say hello. On their first meeting, everyone seemed pretty friendly.
Before this, the educated youth site had housed four female and three male educated youth. The other older ones had either married locally, or their families had found ways to get them jobs back in the city. Half a year ago, a male educated youth had broken his leg falling off a bicycle and had been sent home on medical leave.
Li Xiaomei, who had been the first to greet Su Yun, lived in the front yard’s shared bunk with two other female educated youth: the somewhat introverted Wang Pan’er and the delicate-looking Xu Minmin.
The small room next to Su Yun’s belonged to Liu Xiaoyan, a female educated youth who had arrived last year. Her family seemed to be fairly well-off, as she still wore a light green “dacron” shirt even while working in the fields.
She had a gentle personality and got along well with the other female educated youth. Su Yun guessed she lived in a single room so she could cook for herself on the side.
As for the male educated youth, besides the male lead Zhao Jiayan, there was also his good buddy Li Feng, who lived in the back yard, and Zhu Shengchao, who stayed in the large communal bunk.
That’s right—because the previous male educated youth had either moved away or returned to the city, the large bunk had actually housed only Zhu Shengchao for the past six months!
Now that Li Jianjun had moved in, there were only two people in that big room—quite spacious.
These past few days, Wang Pan’er had been in charge of cooking. Su Yun and the others had already handed over their grain rations for tonight and tomorrow to the kitchen.
At the moment, Zhao Jiayan and Li Xiaomei were discussing the duty roster for the days ahead.
Including the new arrivals today, there were now 13 educated youth in total: five male and eight female.
They eventually decided that the male educated youth would take turns fetching water and chopping firewood—one person per day—while the female educated youth would pair up to cook and tend to the vegetable patch, rotating every three days.
The new arrivals would go to the county town tomorrow, so their shifts would start the day after.
Su Yun and the other newcomers were scheduled later. Su Yun was paired with Liu Huan, An Qin with Li Xiaomei, and Liu Xiaoyan with Wang Pan’er.
Su Yun sucked in a sharp breath. The female lead, Tao Yining, was actually paired with Xu Minmin!
Now this one was also a cannon-fodder supporting female character. She had come to the countryside in the same batch as the male lead and had ridden the same train. She’d had a crush on him for over a year. Later, when she and the female lead each sensed the other’s feelings, they’d been at each other’s throats for quite a while!
Su Yun inwardly—and rather immorally—cheered, “Fight! Fight!”
What a love triangle battlefield! There was sure to be plenty of drama ahead!
As the sky darkened, Wang Pan’er soon called them to get their meals. Su Yun went back to her room, grabbed her mess tin, and headed to the kitchen.
She’d just handed over her cornmeal and flour rations. Now each person got a bowl of grits porridge and a steamed cornbread bun. The male educated youth, having larger appetites, had handed in more flour, so they each got two buns.
There was also a stir-fried vegetable and a plate of smashed cucumber salad. Wang Pan’er simply used her chopsticks to give each person a serving directly into their bowls.
Since there was no table outside the educated youth site, everyone basically lined up to get their portions and then took them back to their own rooms to eat.
Nobody complained, since this also made it easier for everyone to go back and supplement their meals with their own private stash.
Not to mention those from better-off families, even the others would trade with the villagers for pickled vegetables, salted eggs, and the like to give themselves some variety. If they all ate together, it wouldn’t be easy to bring out their own private stash.
Everyone carried their bowls and headed back to their own rooms. Su Yun set her mess tin on the table. Since she’d already had the braised pork boxed lunch in the afternoon, she wasn’t particularly hungry right now.
She decided to let it cool for a bit before eating. After all, it was summer now, so drinking some cold porridge wouldn’t hurt.
Since everyone else was eating, she went to the kitchen first to boil a pot of water, brought it back, and took a simple bath.
It was the middle of summer, and after being cooped up on the train for over two days, she felt like she’d been marinated in her own sweat!
Su Yun couldn’t wait to scrub herself clean!
After her bath, she felt refreshed and light, her whole body much more comfortable. Since she didn’t have body wash, Su Yun just used scented soap.
If anyone else found out, they’d definitely think she was being wasteful. In those days, scented soap was a luxury item!
Laundry soap cost 0.3 yuan for a big bar, while the smallest bar of scented soap cost at least 0.5 or 0.6 yuan. The kind Su Yun was using, which had a fragrance, cost at least 1 yuan.
Moreover, both laundry soap and scented soap required ration coupons. Without them, you’d have to go to the black market and pay two or three yuan for so-called “seconds.”
Usually, young women and female educated youth who could afford it would use scented soap only for washing their faces. One bar could last a whole year—no one would be extravagant enough to use it for bathing.
After her bath, Su Yun put the soap back in its box. The soap the system had given her came with a plastic soap case, similar to modern ones, though the color was a bit uglier.
This soap was really nice! Su Yun took a deep breath—a faint scent of jasmine quietly spread through the room.
Scented soaps back then came in a variety of types: sandalwood, osmanthus, orchid, and all kinds of floral fragrances, even in different colors. Su Yun’s bar was white and jasmine-scented.
Moreover, these soaps served a purpose similar to modern perfumes—the scent lasted a long time and even had top and base notes. They were quite different from modern soaps, which are mainly used for handwashing and sterilization.
Modern soaps prioritize sterilization and disinfection, while back then, the focus was on the fragrance. Since China didn’t produce perfume at the time, wearing perfume could get you labeled as worshiping foreign things and being capitalist. So for young women, scented soap became a substitute for perfume.
Su Yun got dressed, carried out her wooden basin to dump the water, and after her bath, she felt a bit hungry again, so she sat down to eat.
The grits porridge was fairly thin. At the educated youth site, breakfast and lunch were thicker since they had to work in the fields; in the evening, they usually just had a bowl of thin porridge.
Yesterday was the new arrivals’ first day, which was why they’d made cornbread buns. Normally, they didn’t have solid food at night.
The food actually didn’t taste bad. Su Yun took a bite—the porridge had been cooked for a long time and went down easily.
Back in the modern era, her grandmother loved eating corn grits for breakfast. She’d always buy them in bulk from the supermarket, a few catties at a time, enough to last half a month.
The grits now weren’t ground as finely as the ones from the supermarket back then, but the flavor was the same, so Su Yun found them quite palatable.
The cornbread buns were made from flour, slightly yellowish in color, and tasted pretty good too.
Neither the grits porridge nor the buns were rough on the throat, unlike what Su Yun had read in some novels before.
The vegetables also tasted fine. Every so often, the educated youth site would collect a small fee from each person to buy cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and other seasonings.
They’d usually collect it once every few months, and each person only had to chip in a few dimes, since things were cheap back then.
The only exception was cooking oil, which was rationed and had to be used sparingly. Salt cost 0.15 yuan per catty, while soy sauce and vinegar were only 0.08 yuan per catty—you just brought your own bottle to fill.
They also grew scallions, ginger, garlic, and the like in the corner of their private plot. So the female educated youth could go all out when cooking and tried their best to make things tasty. After all, life here was already hard enough—if the food was terrible too, what hope would there be in the days ahead?
She finished her meal entirely in the dark, then washed up by moonlight. Su Yun planned to lie in bed and mull over what to do tomorrow.
Only the brigade office had electricity, with light bulbs and a loudspeaker. No other households were wired, and the educated youth site didn’t have power either.
Su Yun had just arrived and didn’t have a kerosene lamp yet. There wasn’t much she could do in the dark, so she might as well just lie down.
Kerosene also required ration coupons. At the end of each year, the brigade would distribute coupons to the members—small amounts of oil, cloth, sugar, kerosene, and so on.
But the year-end distribution was still half a year away. For now, Su Yun didn’t have any of those. All she had on hand was 30 catties of grain coupons.
What a headache! To buy kerosene, she needed kerosene coupons; to buy white sugar or brown sugar, she needed sugar coupons; even to buy a padlock, she needed industrial vouchers!
Su Yun yawned. She’d figure out a way tomorrow to exchange some of her grain coupons for other types of ration tickets.
Glancing at the time, it was already past nine. Better get some sleep and leave all the worries for tomorrow.