DBTHDCAR Chapter 29

In the last month of 1997, the weather was especially cold that dripping water would freeze into ice.

After school, Ning Xiaobei and Fan Xia braved the biting wind on their way home. The gusts were so strong they could barely keep their eyes open, and riding their bicycles felt like taking one step forward and two steps back. In the end, they simply got off and pushed their bikes along.

“I’m freezing to death! How can Shanghai be this cold?”

The moment he stepped inside, Fan Xia rushed toward the heater, practically wanting to hug it.

Shanghai lies in the Jiangnan region, and winters there are damp and bone-chilling. Although it rarely snows and temperatures usually hover around freezing, it feels far worse than the dry cold of the north; it’s like a “magic damage.”

“Xiaoxia, go wash your hands.”

Zhao Jingwen, slicing lamb in the kitchen, looked up and called out to him.

“It’ll be even colder after washing…”

Before Fan Xia could finish, Ning Xiaobei grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him toward the bathroom.

“Whoa, hot pot! Awesome!”

Rushing to the table, Fan Xia saw the old-fashioned copper hot pot set up, surrounded by piles of ingredients, and he was so excited he nearly jumped.

“What’s the special occasion today? Why are we having hot pot?”

Ning Xiaobei rubbed his hands together and looked curiously at Ning Jianguo.

“Well… a few days ago, my apprentice Xiao Sun, the one who got married at the end of last year, came to see me…”

Taking a sip of yellow wine, Ning Jianguo dropped a roll of lamb into the boiling broth and paused.

“He said there’s a shoe factory in Baoshan District, funded by a foreign investor, and they want to hire me as a ‘Senior Technical Director.’”

As he spoke, Ning Jianguo raised one hand, holding up three fingers.

“The salary is this much.”

“Three thousand.”

“Three thousand?”

Fan Xia was stunned.

“Wow, Uncle, even the director of your shoe factory doesn’t make that much, right?”

These days, wages for state-owned enterprise workers were determined by years of service, rank, and professional title. Even the top leader of the Third Shoe Factory earned less than 2,000 yuan a month.

“Three thousand is just the base salary, it doesn’t even include bonuses. If you add in monthly performance bonuses and the year-end bonus, it comes to about sixty thousand a year.”

At this point, Ning Jianguo was getting a little excited.

“The meat’s overcooked, eat it quickly.”

Seeing that he was too busy talking, Zhao Jingwen simply picked the meat out of the pot for him and placed it into his bowl.

“Foreign companies are really rich. No wonder I’ve been hearing at school that a lot of classmates’ parents have been switching jobs lately.”

Fan Xia said this while eating.

“Zhuang Li’s dad from our class switched jobs too. He went to a company run by a Hong Kong boss. She’s over the moon. She said her dad’s company even arranges trips to Hong Kong every year for mainland employees and their families. She can’t wait to go see Alan Tam.”

Ning Xiaobei quietly stirred the sauce in his bowl with his chopsticks and didn’t respond.

What was inevitable had finally come.

In the real world, his dad had also accepted Uncle Sun’s introduction and switched to a foreign company. Compared to his coworkers, who were later forced into unemployment when the shoe factory suddenly collapsed, Ning Jianguo’s choice had undoubtedly been the right one, but who could have known…

No. That path had already been proven to be a dead end.

Ning Xiaobei raised his head and looked at Ning Jianguo. “A higher salary is definitely a good thing. But Dad, if you really go to a foreign company, you’ll lose your state job status, and the senior engineer title you worked so hard to earn.”

A few months ago, Ning Jianguo had just obtained his senior engineer certification and gotten a raise. The black-and-white game console on the sofa, worth over a hundred yuan, was bought with that extra pay.

Even though Ning Xiaobei thought it was a waste of money, he didn’t really like those things, and only played occasionally with Fan Xia to keep him company, he couldn’t stop Ning Jianguo from wanting to spend money on him.

Anything Fan Xia had, anything other kids had, he wanted Ning Xiaobei to have it too.

“Our factory… might really be like what you said before, Xiaobei. Maybe it’s not going to make it after all.”

As Ning Jianguo spoke, his initial excited tone gradually sank.

By all rights, the end of the year should be the busiest, most festive time at the factory. In past years, the union would notify everyone to go to the office in order of workshop to collect their goodies.

Of course, the year-end bonus envelopes were important, but the various holiday gifts were the real highlight.

Not to mention long ago, take last year, for example, at the start of the year, the factory had already reserved a few pens of top-grade Jiangsu black pigs from a suburban meat factory, planning to distribute them at year’s end.

Sure enough, at the end of the year, each worker could take home fifty jin (25 kg) of pork. If both husband and wife worked at the factory, that was a hundred jin (50 kg) of pork. Even thirty years later, converted into cash, that would still be a considerable amount.

There were also all sorts of rice, flour, cooking oil, sesame oil, and miscellaneous daily necessities; from soap and laundry powder to shampoo, from cotton quilts to wool blankets. Female workers even received sanitary pads and toilet paper.

For a veteran like Ning Jianguo, every year at year-end, he had to hire someone with a auto-rickshaw to fetch everything from the factory. There was no way he could carry it all himself.

It wasn’t just the Third Shoe Factory. Ning Xiaobei remembered that at the end of the year, in Jiande Lane, every household was like this. If a factory distributed fewer items than expected, the embarrassed neighbors would sometimes wait until nightfall to sneak home with meager amount, almost like thieves..

“This year, the union only gave out a bucket of oil and a bag of flour, no rice at all.”

Ning Jianguo tugged at the corner of his mouth helplessly. “I came back from Heilongjiang at 21and joined the factory as an apprentice. Even then, the New Year wasn’t this grim.”

“You’re lucky. Because I wasn’t part of the workshop, I only got a bag of flour. No oil for me at all.”

Zhao Jingwen said with self-mockery, “Normally, at this time of year, I’d be the busiest. Inviting clients to dinner, running errands, giving calendars and souvenirs. But this year, the business department doesn’t even have a budget.”

“Dozens of salesmen just sit in the office all day. A cup of tea, a cigarette, and a newspaper; all sitting until closing time. ‘Running business,’ ‘running business’, if business doesn’t run, does it fall from the sky? But the expenses for entertaining clients and travel costs from three months ago still haven’t been reimbursed by the finance department. Should we pay out of our own pockets for the factory?”

At this, Zhao Jingwen’s frustration boiled over.

In fact, he had sensed the shift back at this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival.

In previous years, the factory had given clients mooncakes from the old and prestigious Xinghua Hotel. Tin boxes, printed with Chang’e flying to the moon, eight cakes per box, fragrant and sweet, making them impressive to present to clients.

This year, however, while mooncakes were still given, nobody knew which cheap, fly-by-night food factory had been contracted. One bite and they were neither fragrant nor sweet, just a half-baked bean paste taste — absolutely awful.

Sending this stuff to clients, it’s not “making friends,” it’s practically “making enemies.”

“Uncle, are we poor now? Then why did you buy that karaoke machine last month?”

Fan Xia realized too late and only now sensed that something was seriously wrong.

“I—I’ll go home tomorrow and have my dad give you a little more pocket money each month. And Mom… didn’t she already buy a house in Shenzhen? She can send you a bit more too.”

Saying this, Fan Xia gritted his teeth and held his chopsticks. “After today’s hotpot… starting tomorrow, we’ll only have meat once a month.”

“It’s not like you’ll be reduced to eating meat just once a month. That would be almost like the old society.”

Zhao Jingwen shook his head with a half-laugh, half-cry expression and served Fan Xia a big, tender piece of lamb.

“Don’t worry, Uncle won’t starve. I just figured out a backup plan… in any era, those who are capable won’t starve.”

Ning Xiaobei felt a twinge in his chest.

Indeed, it seemed that after the shoe factory closed, while his own family experienced ups and downs and constant upheaval, Uncle Zhao still managed to live pretty comfortably. He appeared to have partnered with someone to start a business, what people at the time would call “going into commerce.”

When the tide of reform hits, some are unprepared and get hit so hard they capsize. Others ride the wave, becoming the trendsetters of the era; the “first to get rich.”

Someone like Ning Jianguo, however, was dragged down by family circumstances. Otherwise, with his abilities, how could he have been abandoned by the times?

“Dad, I think… you should really think carefully before giving Uncle Sun an answer.”

Ning Xiaobei wanted to lay out all the possible consequences but didn’t want to scare Ning Jianguo or attract suspicion. After all, he was only 14 and could only appear as a child prodigy, not a prophet.

“Being an engineer for a foreign company isn’t impossible as a part-time. Completely giving up my state-owned position seems a waste. Besides, the factory is still paying salaries, right? If you can earn from both sides, why not?”

As Ning Xiaobei knew, many people at the Third Shoe Factory refused to buy out their work years when the factory eventually dissolved. They preferred to take unpaid leave while working elsewhere but kept their state-owned employee status.

At the time, these people were criticized as unreasonable and not thinking of the unit, but in the end, when they reached retirement age, they still received their full state-retirement pensions — though that was twenty years later.

Ning Jianguo, on the other hand, resigned too early and later lost his stable work for various reasons. By retirement, he only received the minimum pension, which wasn’t even enough to cover a decent apartment’s monthly property management fee in the city center.

“Part-time… aren’t impossible. If there’s work there, I can draw plans at home. At most, go to the factory on weekends to fix molds and produce samples. Payment can be per piece.”

In the end, leaving a factory he’d spent his whole life fighting in, stepping out of the system, Ning Jianguo still felt reluctant and resistant deep down.

Foreign companies sound fancy, but put it in the pre-liberation days, weren’t they just factories run by foreign capitalists in Shanghai?

Grandma Ning’s mahjong partner, Aunt Wu, came to Shanghai by boat at age twelve and worked in a Japanese yarn factory. According to her, those pre-liberation days were unbearably harsh, just like Xiao Zhenzi in 《A Single Spark》being oppressed. The capitalists being bad enough, but even ‘Namowen¹A historical slang term for Chinese foremen who sided with foreign bosses to supervise local workers‘, clearly a Chinese, bullied Chinese workers.

So someone like him going to a foreign company, called a “Senior Technical Director” in fancy terms, but back then, that would basically make him a ‘Namowen.’

Born in New China, raised under the Red Flag, and having served as a volunteer soldier for a few years, Comrade Ning Jianguo couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling.

Xiaobei’s suggestion was really good: if it’s just part-time, on one hand it secures family income, on the other hand he still keeps the pride of being a state-owned enterprise employee; surely better than quitting outright.

Seeing that Ning Jianguo actually listened to his words, Ning Xiaobei finally relaxed a little.

But no, he had little influence. Even if his father now thought he was right, what if he went to the workshop and his little apprentices egged him on? It could all go downhill.

He bit the tip of his chopsticks, thinking he should let Uncle Zhao persuade his dad a bit more, correcting these dangerous ideas.

Ning Xiaobei watched Zhao Jingwen constantly ladle food into Ning Jianguo’s bowl, attentively tending the fire under the pot, then rushing to open a window for ventilation; telling him to just sit and eat and doing more than even an attentive servant would.

Stepping back, really, if the factory collapsed with no way out, having his father follow Uncle Zhao into business wouldn’t be so bad.

After all, Uncle Zhao definitely wouldn’t cheat his father, right?

Full and warm, Fan Xia rubbed his belly and happily flopped onto the sofa.

“Go on, wash the dishes.”

He hadn’t fully lain down yet when Zhao Jingwen came over, tossed an apron and two sleeve guards onto him, and gestured with his chin toward the kitchen.

“Washing dishes in winter is cold.”

Muttering, Fan Xia reluctantly sat up and tied the bib.

The ancestral Shanghai manly skills of ‘buy, clean, and cook’ had to be cultivated from childhood. Right now, Zhao Jingwen was training his nephew in the clean skill: cleaning vegetables, washing dishes, and later downstairs, washing clothes and shoes.

“Where’s Xiaobei? Why isn’t he helping me?”

Normally the two boys washed the dishes together.

Fan Xia got up and looked around, only to see Ning Xiaobei and Ning Jianguo already dressed and ready to go, standing at the entrance putting on their shoes.

“So late, and it’s so cold, where are you going?”

Fan Xia asked anxiously.

He still had a big math problem from today’s homework he didn’t know how to solve and was planning to ask Ning Xiaobei for help when they got together.

“The old house in Jiande Lane is falling apart. I’m worried that if it gets cold, the pipes will freeze. Xiaobei and I are going over to see his Grandma, boil some hot water, wrap the pipes, and then come back. Don’t worry about the dirty dishes, they can wait. You two go home,” Ning Jianguo said, opening the door. A gust of cold wind swept in, making everyone shiver. Ning Xiaobei, caught off guard, let out a huge sneeze.

“Why don’t you wear your scarf properly? Finals are coming soon. If you catch a cold, what then?”

Ning Jianguo’s naturally fussing, overprotective side kicked in. He took Ning Xiaobei’s yellow wool scarf and readjusted it carefully around his neck.

This wool scarf had been hand-knitted by Aunt Wang from downstairs. It was the first time in Ning Xiaobei’s two lifetimes that he had received a handmade gift from a female elder.

Aunt Wang was beautiful and skilled with her hands. Before winter, she had knitted scarves for Chang Leyun, Ning Xiaobei, and Fan Xia in red, yellow, and green, respectively.

If they didn’t appear together, it would be fine. But all three together? They looked like a traffic light.

The father and son finally got ready and were about to head downstairs when suddenly, a loud slap rang out from somewhere.

Followed immediately by a heart-wrenching shout: “Mom!”

………………

Author’s Note:

Ah, to thank my readers for their deep love, I’ve decided to temporarily switch the weekend double updates to daily double updates. Let’s aim for 10,000 words per day!

• “拿摩温” (ná mó wēn): Shanghai dialect, English transliteration of “Number One,” refers to the Chinese foreman in a foreign-owned factory during the old society.
• 《星星之火》 (A Single Spark): A Shanghai opera adapted from 《The Bonded Laborers²A piece of reportage written in 1935 by the Chinese writer Xia Yan》, in which a teenage textile worker named Xiao Zhenzi is brutally beaten to death by Japanese women and the Namowen in the factory. This is the “small spark” reference in the story; oppressed workers, especially young girls, under colonial/foreign industrial exploitation.

====================

• 1
  A historical slang term for Chinese foremen who sided with foreign bosses to supervise local workers
• 2
  A piece of reportage written in 1935 by the Chinese writer Xia Yan