Chapter 97: A Home for Every Dweller

The Chikan New District soon received its first batch of construction materials. The place had already grown quiet: after the simple dock was built, the main workforce shifted to the Kiln District, leaving only a handful of people in the New District, hardening the earth's surface along the beautiful coastal shore every day.

Along with the construction materials came builders and a sizable number of Transmigrators. Today's model house project was very important, so it was overseen by the professional, Zheng Yangyang.

Zheng Yangyang's name sounded like a rich second-generation kid, but he was actually a carpenter. After graduating high school, he worked at the Old Moxa Woodware Factory, and later spent a stint in America working under the table, where his daily job was building wooden houses with his Mexican coworkers — you could say he'd mastered both Chinese and Western traditions.

Among the Transmigrators, Zheng Yangyang's age put him in the younger generation — only 25 — but when it came to timber-frame construction, he was the top dog among his peers. There were plenty of guys who could pour concrete foundations and tie steel bars, but someone who actually worked with wood? There really wasn't anyone else.

Under the direction of Zheng Yangyang's electric megaphone, the workers chanted work songs as they first drove eight surface-carbonized wooden piles into the ground. These eight piles were set in opposing pairs, forming a rectangle.

The square wooden piles measured 20 by 18 centimeters, with one end sharpened into a four-sided point and the other bound with hemp rope as reinforcement bands. In theory, iron wire should have been used here, but for now they had to make do.

The wooden piles stood 60 centimeters above the ground. This height was sufficient — it would keep out snakes and insects, and normal rainfall wouldn't pose a threat.

Six base piles that an excavator could have hammered into place in just 10 minutes took thirty men, working in rotating shifts and chanting work songs, half an hour to finish. And that was under special circumstances today, with the bosses eager to see results; under normal conditions, it would have been even slower.

Next came the prepared floor panels and frames. Every beam and board here had undergone final measurement by Zheng Yangyang in the work shed, precisely so that today's model house would encounter fewer setbacks.

A rectangular base frame was quickly assembled atop the eight foundation piles, all joints using mortise and tenon construction — yes, without a single nail.

In the Old World, mortise and tenon joinery was already a vanished craft, usually seen only at antique auctions. Assembly-line-produced, quick and convenient wood screws and hinges had completely replaced it. But right now it was the 17th century, on a wild island with no wood screws, and the wrought iron nails shipped from Hangzhou were few in number and poor in quality. Add to that the ready availability of Ming carpenter labor, so a mortise-and-tenon timber frame made perfect sense.

The precisely measured tenons seated firmly into their mortises. In that moment, the advantage of mortise and tenon was on full display.

Because the joints require varying degrees of cutting and hollowing out, the drawback of mortise and tenon construction is that it demands hardwood. At present, of course, no one cared about this drawback — the Kiln District was piled high with hardwoods like camphor and Taiwan zelkova.

After the base platform was installed, green bamboo of uniform length and diameter was used to build the walls. The walls were fixed in place through pre-cut grooves in the base and tied down. The roof that followed was higher at one end and slightly lower at the other — the simplest kind of sloped roof — with a layer of straw matting laid over thin boards, and that was that.

With everything prepared, it took thirty block-stacking workers a full nine and a half hours to complete this utterly ordinary, long strip-shaped, stilted bamboo-and-wood simple house.

How to put it? As the Crossing Regime's first self-built house, though its style scored a zero and it lacked wooden verandas and railings for watching sunsets and flirting, the technological content of this dwelling was anything but low!

The house both sidestepped the problem of material shortages and represented the cutting edge of prefabricated component construction — American-style standardized parts hybridized with Chinese mortise and tenon joinery. It was the perfect crossbreed of a Labrador and a Chinese rural dog, the crystallization of Transmigrator wisdom.

Given that the house's designer was named Zheng Yangyang, this type of barracks-style dormitory was affectionately dubbed the "Ocean Mansion" by everyone from the day the design was finalized.

When a large crowd excitedly climbed the wooden steps and walked inside, they found it quite spacious. The long strip-shaped room had a total length of 10 meters and a width of 2.8 meters, with a standard occupancy of 10 people per room.

In the design, the room would hold five bunk beds, each bed 1 meter wide and 2 meters long, leaving a 0.8-meter-wide aisle.

Between every two beds there would be a 40-centimeter-wide double-decker nightstand, which together with the beds would take up 7 meters of length. The remaining length would be left for the doorway and the rear of the room. A long table would be placed in the doorway area, and at the rear there would be an extra partition — that was where the back door and the "piss" bucket would go, for nighttime bathroom needs.

The house was crude and simple, but everything that needed to be considered had been taken into account.

"How's the strength of this house? Can it hold up through the rainy season?" After entering and thoroughly inspecting the building structure, Chen Dong asked while testing the outward-opening bamboo window back and forth.

"Don't worry, boss, absolutely no problem." Zheng Yangyang was full of confidence. "If a typhoon comes, the roof might get blown off — that'll need reinforcing ahead of time. But the rest of the structure will definitely hold. Just look at the specs on this chassis — aside from having no basement, it's no worse than an American house!"

"Good. I didn't get a read on the man-hours today; go back and measure it."

"Okay, okay. I'll produce two labor charts — three days per unit if manpower's tight, two if we've got enough hands."

That very night, a few of the laughing, joking "block-stacking workers" slept in the first "Ocean Mansion." There were no beds, but sleeping on the floor in a proper house was still far better than the rotten shacks in the Kiln District. These men knew perfectly well that the Ocean Mansions were being built for them to live in.

As time passed, the Ming employees gradually "felt out" the temperaments of the masters. "Kun People" — the vast majority of Ming people knew nothing of West Kunlun or East Kunlun; they couldn't tell the difference. They only knew that the masters wore "Kun hair."

The Kun masters weren't bad people: as long as you didn't violate their taboos, they were usually quite amiable. If someone accidentally broke a master's glass sign, at worst they'd get kicked a few times — if you ran fast, you might only take a kick or two. In a wealthy household, a bloody beating with the plank would have been unavoidable, and broken legs were common too.

The masters were also kind-hearted. For any serious injury or illness, a physician would always treat you. Three meals a day, all you could eat. And now they were even putting such great effort into building houses for the poor wretches. For this alone, working for the masters was no raw deal.

A few days ago, word had spread like wildfire among the employees that some construction master had promised everyone: once manpower was more plentiful, they'd build single-family "foreign houses" to distribute so everyone could set up private property and settle down.

The master had also said, knowing that everyone was poor, the new houses wouldn't even require a down payment. Once built, the deed would be handed over. After that, they'd just deduct a tiny fraction from the monthly wages — the homeowner could decide how much to deduct, and the masters were happy to wait even ten or twenty years for it to be paid off.

Good heavens, had these Kun masters come from a kingdom of fools? No wonder they wore Kun hair — Heaven above has the virtue of cherishing life. These Kun people had done too much good, stealing business from Heaven, so Heaven had given them Kun hair as a warning!

The employees drifted into deep sleep, carrying their beautiful hopes for the future.

Yet aboard the Yuan Dou, the Transmigrators, with a canopy of stars overhead and the swell of waves beneath their feet, stared intently at the radar and sonar in the cabin, sailing silently across the sea's surface, utterly sleepless.