Witty Wife, Better Life

Shen Yunfang's house was a typical Northeastern farmhouse, comprising just three rooms. Upon entering, you'd be in the main room, which doubled as a kitchen, with one room on each side.

Shen Feiyang had stayed in the east room yesterday, which held nothing more than a large Kang bed and two mahogany chests, aside from a square table and two uneven-legged stools.

On the table, there was also a kerosene lamp. Indeed, at this time Gaijiatun still had no electricity, and every household relied on kerosene lamps for light at night. However, Shen Yunfang's kerosene lamp had long been out of kerosene, so for quite some time, she had been fumbling around in the dark at night.

She pushed open the door to the west room opposite and had a look inside. It was not much different from her own room, except this one was even darker. Shen Feiyang examined the window—it was even smaller than the one in the east room, and the window was patched up with newspaper.

Below the window lay another Kang bed, which was bare and lacked even a mattress. The entire room's floor was stacked with wicker baskets, with an empty winnowing basket at the top. A hoe and an iron shovel stood nearby, and there was a cutting block that clearly had been used for many years.

Shen Feiyang walked over, undisturbed by the dust, and rummaged through the baskets. There certainly were no treasures to be found—inside was a roll of plastic sheeting, a few somewhat thicker iron wires of unknown purpose, a pair of cotton gloves, and several scraps of cloth.

After making a round to ensure he had checked every corner of the room, he finally picked up the cutting block from the ground and walked out, teetering along.

Gaijiatun was located in the mountains, at the foot of the hills.

When Shen Feiyang came out of the house, He saw that their yard was quite large, but it was littered with chicken droppings. Four hens roamed confidently around the yard. Seeing someone emerge from the house, they approached enthusiastically, clucking away.

They were probably hungry, having not been fed for more than a day.

The first thought that came to Shen Feiyang's mind upon seeing them was astonishment that his family actually kept four chickens. Had they stopped the policy of "cutting off the capitalist tail"?

He stood there, trying hard to remember, and finally concluded that this remote little mountain village had not been greatly affected by this **** era. In recent years, hardly anyone had come here anymore. Even the educated youth, not one had been sent to their commune.

So, even during the strictest years, the villagers of Gaijiatun carried on as usual, keeping chickens and going about their lives with little disruption.

Just the year before last, a new order had come down from above, saying that to support the national call, every household should vigorously develop pig farming to support national construction. It was permissible to keep any number of chickens or ducks, with no specific requirements, but pigs were mandatory. Each household had to supply one qualified fattened pig to the state every year. The qualifying standard was to reach at least 135 pounds, to be sold to the collective meat distribution station.

Of course, if you raised more than necessary, you were not allowed to sell them freely, only to the state.

Yet though every household raised chickens and pigs, they were all struggling because, as Shen Feiyang remembered, the Gaijiatun production team had little money to distribute at year's end. For diligent families, earning around one hundred thirty to forty yuan a year was considered good; for the lazier ones, it could be as little as thirty to fifty yuan. And this money had to last from the beginning to the end of the year—for oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, clothes, socks, and everything else—that it would barely cover the year's expenses.

As for earning extra money, that depended on the family's hens and large fattened pigs. Essentially, each family would take their saved-up eggs straight to the supply and marketing cooperative to sell directly to the state, or to directly exchange them for goods.

In this era, eggs were as good as cash. With eggs in hand, one could spend as if they had money.

Some might think, "If that's the case, why not just raise a few more chickens at home, or wait until the end of the year to sell the fattened pigs to make money?" However, in this era, people could hardly feed themselves, let alone raise chickens or pigs.

If you want chickens to lay eggs, and lay them frequently, you need to feed them grain. They can't survive on vegetable leaves alone. Raising pigs is even more demanding; they eat more than humans. Ordinary families don't have such an abundance of grain to feed them, so after a year, the pigs are still skinny, and with the government's low procurement prices, raising pigs doesn't make much money.

But for Shen Feiyang, who had experience with animal husbandry in her previous life, none of these were problems. She looked at the few old hens at her feet with a glimmer of green in her eyes, feeling as if life was starting to have some prospects.

For her future happiness, she had to raise these chickens well. Shen Feiyang gathered her spirits and picked up the large broom behind the door to start sweeping the courtyard.

The Shen Family's courtyard was divided into a front and a back section. The front was mainly for raising chickens, and the back was a private plot where they grew vegetables for daily consumption.

The front courtyard was about forty or fifty square meters. On the left side, there was a pile of firewood, all branches, which Shen Feiyang knew Yunfang would pick up casually when shepherding sheep on the mountains, saved for daily cooking and heating. Outside the courtyard gate, there was a large stack of firewood, a common sight in every household, piled high for winter heating. On the right side, there was a chicken coop about half a person's height, and next to it, a small enclosure made of branches, designated for the daily roaming of the four old hens. For some reason, those chickens could now stroll around in the courtyard. The courtyard wall was made of stone, a testament to the times when Yunfang's father was alive and, with the help of his brothers, gathered stones from the mountains, which is why the walls of all the Shen brothers' compounds were made of stone.

Shen Feiyang was quite satisfied with this wall that was over a meter high. First, it was secure; as a girl living there alone in the future, a sturdy and tall wall like this gave her a sense of safety from within. Moreover, it provided privacy, keeping any prying eyes from easily seeing what she might be doing at home.

Now, the stone wall was surrounded by a type of squash plant that had lost its leaves by this time of the month, leaving behind only a few green-skinned large squash resting on the ground.

She swept the chicken droppings into a pile and then found a broken dustpan behind the door. She scooped up all the droppings into the dustpan and carried it off to the back yard.

Yunfang's home was truly nested at the foot of the mountain; in the entire village, her home was located at the very northern end, right against the big mountain. Following the path from her backyard, it didn't take more than ten minutes to enter the woods.

Of course, there was also a path leading to the mountains in front of her house, but taking that path first led to a small hill where she often took the sheep to graze.

Because Yunfang's home backed onto the mountain with no other houses behind it, their backyard was larger than most others'.

The backyard was a vast expanse of vegetable garden, with two small dirt paths running alongside the house, intersecting each other.

Shen Feiyang, with the dustpan in hand, followed one of the dirt paths heading deeper into the backyard.

It was already mid to late October; the fields had been left in fallow except for a few vegetables that were kept for seeds, still hanging from their branches.

Shen Feiyang walked straight ahead to the end, where there was a latrine, similar to all rural outhouses with three wooden sides and a curtain for the entrance, airy on all sides.

She emptied all the chicken manure from the dustpan into a dung pit next to the latrine, where it was left to ferment. Yunfang's home did not have a pigsty because their household was small and lacked the labor force to raise pigs.