Year 1979: Eating meat with my wife and children

Li Xiangdong looked at the crowd that had gathered around him with a big smile, feeling extremely pleased with himself.

It's better to just sit and collect them. Outsiders like them are easily fooled when they come to someone else's territory to collect crickets.

Now that the positions of the two sides have been switched, the locals' home advantage will be somewhat weakened.

He looked at the cricket jars piled up in front of him, picked one up at random, and teased it a few times with a stalk of grass. After the cricket emitted a melodious chirping sound, he nodded and said, "Hmm, this cricket is good. Whose is it?"

"Mine, mine."

A middle-aged woman squeezed next to Li Xiangdong and asked, "How much money can you give me?"

"Eight cents."

The middle-aged woman selling crickets was very dissatisfied when she heard the price. "Hey~ how can it be so little? Give me more, give me more."

"At this price, do you still have any left?"

The middle-aged woman pointed to the seven or eight cricket jars at Li Xiangdong's feet, "Yes, yes, these are all."

Li Xiangdong looked at them one by one, "I'll take all of these."

He turned to Hou San and said, "Give this lady a total of 3 yuan."

"Okay, Dong-ge."

Hou San paid him, and Li Xiangdong put the crickets one by one into the bamboo tube, then stuffed it with cotton to seal it.

"Dongzi".

Ah Zhe squeezed through the crowd and whispered in Li Xiangdong's ear, "The price is agreed upon, 4 cents each."

Li Xiangdong nodded and said, "Okay, the price is acceptable. Go and bring them over; we'll take them all."

"I'll go right away."

Ah Zhe excitedly pushed through the crowd and walked out.

Who's next?

"It's my turn."

An old man wearing a straw hat responded. When he saw Li Xiangdong's cricket-catching equipment, he exclaimed in surprise, "How can you use cotton for this? It's such a waste!"

Li Xiangdong looked down at the crickets in the jar. Hearing the old man's words, he looked up at the old man and said, "How is this wasting things? I don't throw away cotton after I've used it up. In winter, I'll find a cotton ginner to fluff it, and it won't stop me from making cotton trousers."

The old man smiled and nodded. "How's my bug?"

Li Xiangdong put down the cricket jar he was holding. "This won't do."

When the old man heard that his crickets weren't good, he became unhappy. "How can they not be good? These are good crickets!"

"I said no, and that's final. The crickets are all wilted; you think you can fool me?"

As Li Xiangdong spoke, he poked the cricket in the jar with a straw stick.

The old man persisted, saying, "How can you talk like that, young comrade? My crickets are perfectly fine!"

"If you keep going on and on, I'm not going to look at the rest of your crickets anymore. You should just go do whatever you need to do."

Li Xiangdong didn't want to get entangled with the old man anymore. He wouldn't give in to the old man just because he was old. He believed in reason and logic. He was here to do business, not charity.

"I'm not saying anything more. Look, you can continue watching my bugs."

Li Xiangdong collected crickets from several households in succession. A Zhe came over with the young man from the beginning, and they were still carrying cricket jars in their arms.

He looked at them one by one again, then called out to Hou San, "Give me the money, 4 mao each."

The young man took the money, happily put it in his pocket, tied his cricket jar with straw rope, and then ran to get the half-brick he had been sitting on.

He noticed that Li Xiangdong was clean and even patted the dirt off the bricks with his hand, saying, "You should sit down to collect it; squatting for too long will make your legs go numb."

"Thank you."

Li Xiangdong took the brick, placed it under his buttocks, and looked at the young man, asking, "Is there anything else?"

The young man blushed and waved his hand, saying, "No rush, you can collect the crickets first."

Li Xiangdong smiled and continued his cricket-collecting endeavor.

"next."

"Comrade, do you have any batteries? I'll trade you my crickets."

Li Xiangdong shook his head and said, "We don't have batteries, we only have money. Will you sell them or not?"

"Sell!"

There are two ways to catch crickets: wading around and listening.

For example, when you go to a cornfield to catch crickets, you need to walk back and forth constantly. The crickets will crawl out of their holes when they hear the sound, which makes them easy to catch, but it's not easy to catch good crickets.

Another method is to determine the location of crickets by their chirping. If you approach and the cricket stops chirping, stand still and wait for it to chirp again before moving closer. This method is very laborious, but it has a high chance of catching top-quality crickets.

Regardless of the method used, the search must be conducted at night, which necessitates the use of lighting tools.

Flashlights are still considered household appliances. Some have two batteries, while others, like larger ones, require four.

Batteries required ration coupons to purchase, but ordinary people didn't have coupons, so many people traded crickets for batteries.

......

In less than two hours, three large sacks of bamboo tubes, along with the bamboo tubes in the cloth bags carried by Li Xiangdong and the other two, were all filled with the crickets they had collected.

As the crowd gradually dispersed, Li Xiangdong looked at the young man squatting beside him and asked, "Young man, is there anything else you want to say now?"

"I'm fine, I'm waiting for my dad, my dad..."

Before the young man could finish speaking, a middle-aged man walked over from a distance. He was wearing a long shirt and trousers, with ropes tied around his cuffs and trouser legs. He had a flashlight tucked into one side of his waist and a string of straw cricket cages hanging from the other side.

Upon seeing the person approaching, the young man waved and called out, "Dad, I'm here!"

The middle-aged man's eyes lit up when he saw his son waving, and he quickly walked over.

Li Xiangdong looked at the young man and asked, "What's this about your father?"

The young man rubbed his hands together and looked cautiously at Li Xiangdong, saying, "It drizzled last night, which makes it easier for good insects to come out. My dad went to the field and caught crickets all night. That comrade said he wanted to buy all my crickets, so I asked the villager who came with me to go home and call my dad over."

Ah Zhe, who was standing nearby, reminded him, "Dongzi, we've used up all our bamboo tubes."

Li Xiangdong laughed and said, "It's alright, they're already here, let's take a look first."

Worried that Li Xiangdong and his group wouldn't accept his father's crickets because they didn't have any empty bamboo tubes, the young man quickly said, "That's right, take a look first. My father brought a straw cricket cage. As long as you can accept the crickets, the straw cage isn't worth much, we'll give it to you."

When Ah Zhe heard what the young man said, he stopped talking. The guesthouse still had empty bamboo tubes. As long as they could take them back, they would collect as many as possible.

The young man stepped forward to greet his father, took the cricket cage, and handed it to Li Xiangdong.

"What a wonderful insect!"

Li Xiangdong looked at the four crickets the young man's father had brought. These four were better than all the crickets he had ever collected. If he were to take them back to the capital and resell them to his cricket grandson, he certainly wouldn't sell them for two yuan each!

In particular, one of the crickets, named Serum White Hemp Head, was of excellent quality; he estimated that it was about six or seven centimeters in size.

This is a great item! If this were decades from now, people wouldn't even give it a second glance if the offer was less than 100,000 yuan!