potato. The family they stayed with were in despair over the fact that a ten-yuan note that they had carefully stored in an earthenware crock buried beneath the kitchen stove â their entire savings for the year â had been chewed by rats. Ling spent the evening try to piece together the damaged note by the light of a dim lamp, so that she could take it to a bank in town and change it for one of the new ten-yuan notes before the family lost their savings in a different way when the old notes were phased out. When Ling presented their hosts with a new ten-yuan note, the whole family almost got to their knees in gratitude. Wang Tong wept. She didnât understand why life was so poor and so hard in a village that was only a short distance north of Nanjing. From then on, she would collect the paper that the printing factory where she worked threw away, and staple it into little booklets which she would send to the family in Guanyun. She hoped that the children, who had no school to go to, could at least use it to draw pictures.
Because Wang Tong understood where Three had come from she was particularly moved to see how this young girl could transform the Happy Fool with the skills she had learned in the countryside. She loved to watch her customers making the circuit of her restaurant discussing the displays, especially the parents and children, and shetried hard to increase her own knowledge about what produce was best in which season. Threeâs ambition and skill were an inspiration to her and she no longer felt that it was unworthy to engage in trade, nor that one should simply accept oneâs lot in silence. On the contrary, she was filled with such energy that she could feel her slow, measured personality, which had used to make her older sister jump up and down with frustration, becoming more and more outgoing.
For her part, Three was amused to see how city people clustered around wild plants that grew all over the place like weeds where she came from in order to debate their special properties. However, when she heard some of them discuss how it was good to find mud on vegetables because it showed they were fresh, or that insect holes were a sign that harmful pesticides hadnât been used, she felt sad. She thought of how carefully her mother prepared vegetables for market, always pinching off any damaged leaves and washing away the mud. She would say that, in this way, every fen people paid would go into their mouths.
As she began her third year in Nanjing, Three felt that, finally, she was beginning to understand the ways of the city. With only two years of schooling under her belt, she had struggled in the beginning. She had needed all her concentration to follow what Guan Buyan and his wife were saying, and customers often laughed at her. Determined to avoid this humiliation, she made a point of observing and copying other peopleâs behaviour, but there was so much to learn. The men who worked in the south and returned to the village at Spring Festival had never mentioned that there were so many forms of address in the city! Chairman, Inspector, Officer ⦠the list seemed endless. A journalist friend of Guan Buyanâs had once told her that it would be better to claim that pigs could fly than to get an officialâs title wrong. Trivial cases were fined, but more serious ones could result in you losing your job. Three was so scaredwhen she heard this that she would quail whenever she saw a man with a protruding gut walk into the restaurant, afraid that if she used a lower form of address than his actual status it would cause trouble for the business.
Although Guan Buyan and Wang Tong, with their city education, had little idea of quite how terrifying everything was to Three, they did their best to help her settle in. Guan Buyan would try to explain everything very slowly, and would warn her endlessly about potential problems, no matter how small; Wang Tong was more easy-going than her
Because Wang Tong understood where Three had come from she was particularly moved to see how this young girl could transform the Happy Fool with the skills she had learned in the countryside. She loved to watch her customers making the circuit of her restaurant discussing the displays, especially the parents and children, and shetried hard to increase her own knowledge about what produce was best in which season. Threeâs ambition and skill were an inspiration to her and she no longer felt that it was unworthy to engage in trade, nor that one should simply accept oneâs lot in silence. On the contrary, she was filled with such energy that she could feel her slow, measured personality, which had used to make her older sister jump up and down with frustration, becoming more and more outgoing.
For her part, Three was amused to see how city people clustered around wild plants that grew all over the place like weeds where she came from in order to debate their special properties. However, when she heard some of them discuss how it was good to find mud on vegetables because it showed they were fresh, or that insect holes were a sign that harmful pesticides hadnât been used, she felt sad. She thought of how carefully her mother prepared vegetables for market, always pinching off any damaged leaves and washing away the mud. She would say that, in this way, every fen people paid would go into their mouths.
As she began her third year in Nanjing, Three felt that, finally, she was beginning to understand the ways of the city. With only two years of schooling under her belt, she had struggled in the beginning. She had needed all her concentration to follow what Guan Buyan and his wife were saying, and customers often laughed at her. Determined to avoid this humiliation, she made a point of observing and copying other peopleâs behaviour, but there was so much to learn. The men who worked in the south and returned to the village at Spring Festival had never mentioned that there were so many forms of address in the city! Chairman, Inspector, Officer ⦠the list seemed endless. A journalist friend of Guan Buyanâs had once told her that it would be better to claim that pigs could fly than to get an officialâs title wrong. Trivial cases were fined, but more serious ones could result in you losing your job. Three was so scaredwhen she heard this that she would quail whenever she saw a man with a protruding gut walk into the restaurant, afraid that if she used a lower form of address than his actual status it would cause trouble for the business.
Although Guan Buyan and Wang Tong, with their city education, had little idea of quite how terrifying everything was to Three, they did their best to help her settle in. Guan Buyan would try to explain everything very slowly, and would warn her endlessly about potential problems, no matter how small; Wang Tong was more easy-going than her
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