Sutton's Burdened Heart Chapter 10

After Teacher Li and Zhang Suping came back from the cemetery, Li Ye was already sweeping the yard with a broom.

Teacher Li held her daughter's hand and looked carefully at the fair and rosy face and the shallow dimples. Li Ye was so embarrassed for his mother that he threw his arms around Suping's shoulders. Suping smiled and said to Teacher Li, "Ke De'er wrote a letter to tell Caihong about this."

Zhang Caihong is already working at Dongfang Shoe Factory as a planned temporary worker. Now she is getting to know the provincial capital that she once admired endlessly.

After the car left the Nanyi County boundary, Caihong felt that her aunt's expression had changed. She was sitting in the car with a solemn look on her face, no longer the relaxed look she had at home. Along the way, the aunt didn't speak to Caihong.

When the bus arrived, the aunt took one look at Caihong, grabbed the bag of cornmeal and got off the bus. Caihong also hurriedly followed her aunt out of the car carrying her luggage. A bunch of tricycles were crowded beside the door, and the drivers shouted at the top of their lungs, "You can go anywhere for one dollar, you can go anywhere for one dollar!" Aunt Caihong stood for a moment, and then said, "Fifty cents, Chengxi Railway Dormitory!" Aunt Caihong's accent It was no longer the Nanyi dialect that made Caihong feel familiar and friendly, but the foreign accent spoken by the people in Nanzhang Village.

On the way to the railway dormitory, Caihong wanted to ask her aunt what the name of the road was. When she was about to open her mouth, her aunt stopped her firmly with a gesture.

It wasn't until she went upstairs and entered the house that the aunt slowly breathed a sigh of relief. Then he said to Caihong in a very familiar and friendly Nanyi dialect, "Put your things down first and go wash your face first. I'll pour you some water." Caihong was stunned and didn't know what to do. The uncle was silent. With a smile, Caihong took Caihong into the kitchen to wash her hands.

In Caihong's eyes, the dinner at her aunt's house was too sumptuous. Stir-fried shredded pork with lettuce, stewed tofu with cabbage, scrambled eggs with green onions, and fried peanuts were my uncle's snacks to go with his wine. There were only aunt, uncle and Caihong at the dinner table. My cousin and cousin didn't go home for dinner.

After the meal, Caihong rushed to wash the dishes, but was stopped by her aunt again. The aunt said that was the uncle's job, so she took Caihong's hand into the west bedroom, which was her cousin's bedroom. The aunt quickly arranged Caihong's bedding, sat on the edge of the bed, held her hand and said something, asking her to remember it.

Auntie didn't talk much, but Caihong hasn't forgotten her to this day. The aunt said that the Dongfang Shoe Factory where Caihong worked was 40 minutes away from her home. It was too inconvenient to commute to and from get off work. Caihong wanted to get acquainted with it and rent a house by herself. In the city, she had to rely on relatives and even more on herself. In the city, you must first learn to speak Mandarin; in the city, you must listen more, think more, and speak less.

As soon as the aunt finished speaking her important words, the eldest uncle came and asked them to watch TV. The TV at my aunt's house is a 17-inch color TV, which looks very comfortable. Even Xing Zhibin looks much younger.

Early the next morning, Caihong followed her aunt on the No. 7 bus. The bus was so crowded that when she got off the bus at Dongfang Shoe Factory, Caihong was already hanging in the air with only one foot touching the ground.

After getting off the bus, we walked a short distance to the north of the road and found the Oriental Shoe Factory where Caihong was going. On the door of the shoe factory is an arched dark red metal sign with "Oriental Rubber Shoe Factory" written in yellow paint, which seems to be the chairman's handwriting. Under the sign are two gray cement pillars, with two large iron doors painted in silver-white paint on them. Looking in through the doors is a gray factory building...

Caihong and her aunt entered an office with a sign of "Labor and Resources Department". There were people standing inside, all young girls in their twenties. As soon as she saw how they were dressed, Caihong understood that these girls were different from herself. They are all new to the factory. In the confusion, Caihong filled out a form and hurriedly came out. The aunt smiled and said, everything is done. There is still space in the staff dormitory here. You can just move here to avoid running away every day.

This is how Caihong started her career of working in the provincial capital...

Caihong and dozens of other new girls did the same job, stepping on the sewing machine and smashing the uppers of shoes.

When Zhang Caihong and the others first entered the factory, they had no specific production tasks. They mainly moved leather, carried glue buckets, and boxed finished shoes. Then they watched how the little girls from last year and the year before were applying glue and smashing them. Shoe uppers, how to trim the fabric thorns on the uppers...

During these twenty days as a handyman apprentice, Zhang Caihong gradually gained a complete impression of Dongfang Rubber Shoes Factory.

Dongfang Rubber Shoe Factory is an old state-owned enterprise and one of the few light factories built with Soviet aid in the 1950s. This old factory has been supplying all kinds of sports shoes in North China for decades. Although the output is not very large, before the 1980s, sports shoes were basically the exclusive property of urban people, so it was able to balance supply and sales. After the early 1980s, rural people suddenly had the money to wear sports shoes, and the demand was growing day by day. The sales section chief of Dongfang Rubber Shoe Factory, who is usually not very conspicuous, started walking without looking at the soles of his feet.

Starting in 1986, the Dongfang Rubber Shoe Factory, with the tacit approval of the Provincial Second Lighting Bureau, began to recruit young girls from rural areas into the factory in batches. Zhang Caihong and the others were already in the third batch.

The day before the apprenticeship period of Zhang Caihong and her group of young girls expired, the factory suddenly issued an announcement:

In view of the shortage of dormitories in the factory, the factory leaders decided after research and decision that all temporary workers (including planned temporary workers) who enter the factory after September 1st will solve their own accommodation problems. You are required to pack your belongings and move out of the factory dormitory within three days. Violators will be dismissed.

October 23, 1988

When she saw the notice in the factory, Zhang Caihong, like the other new girls, was stunned.