My era, 1979!

Chapter 16 StreetVoice and "Silly Melon Seeds"

As the morning light crept onto the corner of the table at the Workers, Peasants and Soldiers' Guesthouse, Xu Chengjun had already finished revising the last page of the manuscript.

He pulled the canvas bag up to his knees.

He counted the money in his pocket: three yuan and fifty-six cents, two feet of cloth coupons, and three jin of national grain coupons.

I need to think about what to bring back for my fellow villagers!
"Finished making changes?"

The middle-aged man who works in the supply and marketing department, diagonally opposite the bed, is filling an aluminum lunchbox with pickled vegetables.

"A new 'Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Department Store' has opened on Changjiang Road. It sells Dacron fabric from Shanghai, which young women love to wear."

Xu Chengjun folded the manuscript paper into a square and stuffed it into his pocket, then smiled and said, "Let's go take a look. We can't have come all this way to Hefei for nothing."

As the sun began to heat up on Changjiang Road, the flow of bicycles had already become like a river.

The woman in the blue cloth shirt hurried to the market with a bamboo basket on her shoulder. Inside the basket was a tin can containing corn porridge for her husband who ran a stall.

The old man at the shoe repair stall squatted on a small stool. The "thud" of the awl piercing the sole of a shoe was mixed with the bargaining: "Two cents for a sole repair, no less."

Behind the glass window of the supply and marketing cooperative, polyester fabrics hung in a rainbow, and a sign with red background and black lettering read "One dollar and eight fen per foot, supplied by coupon".

The Butterfly brand sewing machine on the windowsill was polished to a shine, and the words "50 Industrial Coupons" on the price tag were particularly eye-catching.

It's a hard currency for marriage!
Xu Chengjun followed the flow of people.

He paused in front of the watch repair stall, where the mechanic was using tweezers to handle the balance spring.

The Shanghai brand watch in the glass case was priced at 120 yuan, with a note in chalk next to it that read "remittance coupons required".

He clicked his tongue.

It's fucking expensive!

When we arrived at the Mingjiao Temple Farmers Market, the shouts almost made the sun overhead blow away.

An old man wearing a straw hat squatted beside a sack, with a mountain of sweet potatoes in front of him, and a note on the rim of the basket that read "Negotiable price: 3 cents per jin".

The woman in the floral-patterned jacket, clutching two dimes, argued with the egg seller until her face turned red: "Give me ten for twelve dimes, or I'll go to the commune with you to settle this matter!"

The liveliest stall was a roasted nut stand, where sunflower seeds bounced around in a black tin pot. The stall owner fanned the smoke with a large palm-leaf fan and shouted louder than a loudspeaker: "Wuhu sunflower seeds, two cents a tael, no coupons required!"

As Xu Chengjun approached, he overheard the conversation between two middle-aged women:

"Have you heard? That Nian Guangjiu from Wuhu can roast melon seeds so sweet they're sweeter than sugar, and he can sell hundreds of kilograms a day!"

"That's right! My nephew works at the Wuhu Steel Plant. He said that idiot hired more than a dozen temporary workers and was still cooking them up in the middle of the night. The team said he was 'going capitalist,' but he dared to do it!"

The word "idiot" made Xu Chengjun pause in his steps.

A passage from "The Turbulent Thirty Years" flashed through his mind: Nian Guangjiu and his "Fool's Melon Seeds" later became living specimens of individual business owners.

It's surprising that this name could already be heard on the streets of Hefei in 1979.

He stroked his chin and saw the stall owner weighing melon seeds, the scale beam tilted high.

"Weigh out two ounces." Xu Chengjun took out five cents and handed it over.

The stall owner was a lean man who rubbed his hands on his apron: "Your accent sounds like you're from Fengyang?"

"You heard me perfectly!" Xu Chengjun gave a thumbs up, took the paper package, and the caramel aroma of the melon seeds mixed with the smell of smoke filled his nose.

He joked, "How much worse are your sunflower seeds than those from Wuhu?"

The man grinned, not annoyed at all.

"The problem lies in courage! Nian Guangjiu dares to divide melon seeds into 'cream' and 'five-spice' flavors, while we can only roast the original flavor. But then again, his scale is accurate; an ounce is an ounce, unlike some people who weigh their scales too low."

Xu Chengjun picked up a sunflower seed and threw it into his mouth, making a crisp sound.

When Xu Chengjun came out of the market, his canvas bag was much heavier.

I bought a foot of light blue polyester fabric for Xinghua, which cost 1.8 yuan plus two feet of cloth coupons. The shop owner drew a small butterfly on the corner of the fabric with a stearic acid pen and said, "This is a new Shanghai pattern."

I bought two liang of sweet potato liquor for Zhao Gang. It cost 15 cents a liang, no coupons required. The liquor pot was made of coarse pottery and was heavy to the touch.

The most thoughtful thing was making milk candy for Li Erwa. Fruit candy from the supply and marketing cooperative required grain coupons, so he went around to the tobacco and liquor store on the corner of the street and bought a pack of "White Rabbit" candy for 22 cents.

The boss secretly slipped it to him, saying, "This was brought by an overseas Chinese; don't tell anyone."

With the last penny he had left, he bought a bag of dried hawthorn berries.

The dried hawthorn was so sour that it made your eyes squint, attracting the attention of the children nearby. Xu Chengjun smiled and gave the remaining two hawthorns to the child, watching him run away with the dried fruit in his hand.

Suddenly I felt that this trip to the street was worthwhile; I was able to feel the pulse of the times.
-
When we returned to the guesthouse, the setting sun was casting golden light onto the window paper.

Xu Chengjun had just finished putting things away when he heard a knock on the door, two quick knocks, sounding rather agitated.

When I opened the door, it was the young man from the provincial newspaper, carrying a stack of newspapers in his arms, his forehead covered in sweat.

"Comrade Xu, I've finally found you!"

He placed the newspaper on the table, revealing the manuscript paper tucked inside. "My name is Ma Shengli, from the provincial newspaper's reporter team. This is from my cousin who asked me to give it to you."

Xu Chengjun then remembered that the young man he had met at the bathhouse was only known as Xiao Ma, and he hadn't asked his real name yet.

The wontons I brought last time ended up in Xu Chengjun's stomach because I didn't meet him in person.

He handed me an enamel mug: "Drink some water first, see how fast you run."

Ma Shengli drank most of the water in the vat and wiped his mouth.

"My cousin, Chen Jianguo, works in the supplement section of the Hefei Evening News. I've mentioned him to you before. He originally wanted to publish your poem 'Time,' but editor Lin Xiuying snatched it away."

"Lin Bian is my cousin's old classmate. He works as an editor at Anhui Literature. He said that the poem needs to be published in a monthly magazine to be considered worthy of its name."

Xu Chengjun suddenly realized.

My cousin asked me to pass on a message.

Ma Shengli pulled a note out of his pocket.

“He really likes your poems. He said if you write prose or short stories and contribute to the evening newspaper, he will pay you four yuan per thousand words, which is two mao higher than the standard for newcomers. You can get published as early as the August issue.”

"Oh, right, poetry too!"

Xu Chengjun looked at the handwriting on the note; the strokes were very stiff.

The document included the mailing address of the Hefei Evening News and a polite invitation to contribute an article.

He scratched his head and smiled, "Thank you for me, cousin, but I'm busy with revision meetings lately, so I'm afraid I won't have time."

"A manuscript revision meeting? The one that Anhui Literature is having tomorrow?"

Ma Shengli's eyes lit up, "Brother Xu, you even published an article here!"

"You're a very well-informed reporter."

"Hey! You're a journalist! We're all in the same circle! Judging from your poetry, I can tell you must be a famous writer!"

Xu Chengjun waved his hand hastily, "My debut work hasn't even been published yet, so even 'newcomers' have to be called 'relatives'."

Ma Shengli rubbed his hands together with delight, but then remembered something as he was leaving.

"By the way, my cousin said that he originally wrote an editor's note for the poem 'Time', saying it was 'philosophical thoughts that grow from the soil'."

Xu Chengjun mentally gave his cousin a thumbs up; he had good taste!
-
He closed the door and saw that the candied hawthorn skewers were still on the windowsill, the setting sun casting long shadows.

As night deepened, Xu Chengjun sat at his desk and spread out his manuscript paper.

The phrases "silly melon seeds" and "the crosshair of the scale" that I heard during the day kept swirling in my mind.

He wanted to write a story about reform, and he hoped to find inspiration in the taste of those few sunflower seeds!
Let's start with Nian Guangjiu!
He paused for a moment, then wrote the title: "The Stars Illuminate the Spring Breeze".

"The spring breeze was the wind of 1979. It blew across the bluestone slabs of Huaihe Road, lifted the faded curtains of state-owned stores, and softened the wrinkles on Old Zhou's blue cloth apron. There was an unfamiliar feeling in this wind: the loose change on the scales, the red stamp on the business licenses of individual businesses, and the light that gradually brightened in people's eyes as they clutched their change."

"When Lao Zhou spread out the newly changed blue cloth, and the five words 'Serve the People' stretched out in the sunlight, the scales and the spring breeze collided. It was not a dramatic collision, but the soft sound of sunflower seed shells rolling on the bluestone, the faint light of the scales jumping, and the fact that ordinary people, at the turning point of the times, used their most practical days to weigh the weight of spring."

Xu Chengjun did not use the real person and story of Nian Guangjiu, but made it subtle.

"His melon seed stall has three unique features. First, the rock sugar he uses when roasting the seeds. While other stalls use granulated sugar, he insists that rock sugar gives the seeds a 'sweet taste'. Second, his scale has three times more markings than other stalls, so when weighing things, the weight always slips half a mark outwards. The most conspicuous thing is a cardboard sign that reads 'Buy two ounces, get half an ounce free' in a crooked hand. It has been torn down three times by the local industry and commerce bureau. Each time, Old Zhou would work overnight to make a new one, mixing pumpkin pulp into the paste, which makes it stick extra firmly to the bamboo basket."

Perhaps the spring breeze inspired my writing; I completed the short story of two or three thousand words in just two hours, from writing to revising.

Xu Chengjun folded the manuscript paper neatly.

"The night breeze swept across the scales, and the scales star shimmered with tiny lights under the moonlight, like a handful of newly sprouted seeds being scattered."

This story is suitable for the Hefei Evening News.

(End of this chapter)