Daily life of farming and supporting a family on the ancient Loess Plateau

Thanks to Ji Manqing, the Ji family will have chicken to eat tomorrow. Ji Yongning and the others kept circling around Ji Manqing, watching him pluck the chicken feathers and chop the chicken bones.

Before the rooster crowed the next day, Ji Yongning and Ji Yongzhou were already lying on the kang (a heated brick bed) calling for their mother to stew chicken. Hu Xirong kicked them twice before they finally sat down obediently.

As dawn broke, the family got off the kang (a heated brick bed) and went out of the house to sweep the yard, fetch water, and wash clothes. Afterward, those who needed to dry the wheat continued to dry it, and those who needed to cook went to cook. It was another day that repeated itself.

Ji Manqing finished cleaning the chickens too late last night, so he's going to deliver them to Zhang Baoqing today.

Before leaving, Ji Yongling called out to him, "Uncle, don't fight with anyone on the way."

Ji Manqing said awkwardly, "What hammer? Who am I hammering with! Don't talk nonsense, I hate hammering with people the most!" With that, he picked up half a chicken and walked towards Zhangjiapan.

Ji Manchuan shouted from behind, "Look at you, so silly! At least wrap the chicken in a leaf! You're just carrying half a chicken around like that. Before half a day will be enough to let everyone in the village know we're having chicken!"

Ji Manqing turned around and said, "So what if you know? What's there to be afraid of!"

Ji Manchuan rolled his eyes and said, "Do you dare say that you killed this chicken by hitting it with the ditch?"

Ji Manqing thought for a moment, worried that the chicken in his hand might be targeted by bad people, so he picked a few sycamore leaves and ice grass by the roadside, tied them up, and continued to walk towards Zhangjiapan.

When they arrived at Zhang Baoqing's house, the family was drying wheat in the threshing ground. When they saw that Ji Manqing had returned half a chicken, they refused to accept it no matter what they said. In the end, Ji Manqing had no choice but to hang the chicken on the shaft of a cart in the threshing ground and run away, thus avoiding a tug-of-war between the two.

On my way home, I met a man carrying a wooden pitchfork and wearing a white hat.

Ji Manqing looked closely and, coincidentally, it was the man he had thrown the huji dart at that night.

He felt a little embarrassed, so he walked with his head down, pretending not to see the other person, and muttered to himself, "Could it be that the hammer we didn't manage to make that night will have to be used today?"

The man in the white hat had been staring at Ji Manqing ever since he saw him.

Just as the two passed each other, the man in the white hat said with a puzzled look, "Hey, why do you look so familiar?"

Seeing that he could no longer keep up the pretense, Ji Manqing raised his head, grinned arrogantly, and said, "Really? My face hasn't been scalded with boiling water, so how could it be familiar?"

The man in the white hat glared at Ji Manqing speechlessly and muttered to himself, "No, he just looks familiar."

Ji Manqing cleared his throat and said, "My appearance is the standard look of a man from Qingzhou. Have you ever seen the black-faced Guan Yu in the Grasshopper Temple? He looks just like me!"

The man in the white hat tilted his head, looked Ji Manqing up and down, and sneered, "Lord Guan Yu has a red face, but you have a black face! Tell me, where are you from?"

Ji Manqing crossed his arms, his eyelids drooping, and glanced at the other person out of the corner of his eye, saying, "Is Ada in your room?"

The man in the white hat held the wooden fork with the tip pointing upwards and the handle downwards in his hand, saying, "I asked you first!"

Seeing the other party's posture, Ji Manqing assumed he was about to fight with the wooden fork, so he sneered, "What? Want to fight? If you want to fight, then fight! Who's afraid of who! Stop talking nonsense!"

The man in the white hat rolled his eyes: "You're really putting on a brave front! I'm just asking you, do you even know who that guy from Zhangjiapan is?"

Ji Manqing said impatiently, "Who is it? If you want to hit me, then hit me. Stop talking so much nonsense! I hate it when you ask if I know who this person or that person is as soon as I hit them with a hammer. Do you think you'll get fewer hits if I know who the Emperor himself is?"

The man in the white hat threw the wooden fork in his hand to the ground, crossed his arms, and puffed out his chest, saying, "We definitely need to find out the truth, otherwise we might hit the wrong person, and then we'd have taken the beating for nothing!"

Ji Manqing crossed his hands, clenched his fists, and cracked his knuckles, eager to get started. He said, "Stop talking nonsense, are we going to fight or not? Damn it, hurry up and finish this, I'm still waiting to go back and dry the wheat!"

Suddenly, the man in the white hat seemed to remember something and exclaimed, "Your surname must be Ji?"

Ji Manqing stopped clenching his fingers and said, "What's wrong with me? My surname is Ji! Can't someone with the surname Ji beat you up?"

The man in the white hat slapped his thigh and said, "Oh dear, what a mess! Do you know Zhang Baoqing? He's my cousin. I heard you saved his life a couple of days ago."

Ji Manqing was taken aback at first, then realized what was happening, scratched his head, and grinned, saying, "It's nothing, how did it spread so far?"

The man in the white hat became even more enthusiastic, grabbing Ji Manqing's hand and saying, "Oh, good brother. My cousin told me that it was all thanks to you and your niece that day. To tell you the truth, I was cutting wheat in the cool of the night when someone threw a clod of earth at me. I was furious. The other day I went over and told my cousin about it, and he said that when you went back after rescuing him and his wife, you probably mistook me for a bad guy."

Ji Manqing said awkwardly, "You're Zhang Baoqing's cousin! Oh, brother, I'm so sorry. I didn't see clearly that night, I definitely won't throw those junks around like that next time."

The man in the white hat pulled Ji Manqing tightly toward his house, saying, "Come on, come on, let's sit inside and chat for a while."

Ji Manqing quickly refused, saying, "No, no, the wheat is still drying at home today, I have to go back quickly, next time..." As he spoke, he tried to break free from the man in the white hat's hand.

The man in the white hat was so enthusiastic that he wouldn't let go. In the end, the two men pulled and tugged at each other until Ji Manqing was finally able to escape.

……

Like the Ji family, the threshing grounds of the families who had finished harvesting wheat were filled with drying wheat, and everyone was working tirelessly under the scorching sun to turn the grains over and dry them.

The harvesting of wheat differs from that of other crops because it is highly time-sensitive. The rush to harvest involves not only cutting the wheat but also threshing and drying it. If the wheat isn't dried properly or gets rained on, it will sprout and mold, meaning a year's work will be wasted, and the family will go hungry for the following year.

Although the wheat harvest season is during the Grain in Ear and Summer Solstice periods, when the temperature is high and the sun is strong, the wheat is also prone to "white rain" after threshing, which is a fatal blow to the wheat drying in the threshing ground.

In the Gyeongju area, people call sudden, unpredictable heavy rain in the summer "white rain." White rain comes so fast that if the wheat in the field cannot be harvested in time, one can only watch helplessly as the rain gathers into a rapid stream, mercilessly washing the wheat grains down the slope and into the ditch, with no way to stop it.

Just today, the sky was clear and blue, but suddenly it darkened and a strong wind picked up. Before Ji Yongling could even realize what was happening, Grandpa Ji was already shouting in his deep, resonant voice, typical of an old man from Northwest China: "It's going to rain! It's going to rain! Hurry up and harvest the wheat! Everyone, hurry up and harvest your wheat!"