Chapter 44: The '60s Farm System (10)

"H-Heroine, please sit!"

Gouwa eagerly invited Xie Yang onto the ox cart.

Xie Yang was amused; she fished out two pieces of Fruit Candy and handed them to him.

Gouwa stared at the Fruit Candy wrapped in beautiful cellophane, his eyes fixed: "T-this is for me? No, no, no! I can't take it!"

While his mouth said he didn't want it, his hand honestly gripped the candy tight.

Xie Yang laughed and said, "If you like it, take it. Thank you for saving me a seat."

Gouwa's face turned red instantly; there was no one else on the ox cart besides him at the moment, so there was no need to save a seat at all.

Gouwa's grandfather, Zhou Afu, however, had an indescribably good first impression of Xie Yang.

First, he had heard his grandson talk about her act of chivalry, and he had a good impression of her before even seeing her;

Now that he saw her, he found she didn't have that sense of a fallen phoenix in a chicken coop, nor that high-and-mighty feeling.

Hopefully, she is different from the other Educated Youth.

At this moment, Lu Jieqiong and the other three arrived as well.

Seeing the five new Educated Youth, Zhou Afu couldn't help but feel a headache; there were three girls, and the other two boys were also thin, frail-looking skeletons.

This was already the second batch of Educated Youth.

When the first batch of Educated Youth had just arrived, they were still very welcoming.

After all, they were educated youths from the city, a rarity in the countryside; they had been full of anticipation, hoping they could lead all the commune members to progress together!

But as time went on, many problems were exposed one by one.

The biggest problem was that these Educated Youth couldn't do farm work!

The work points they earned every day were barely enough to feed themselves, and in the end, the brigade had to take out grain to provide them relief.

Was this coming to help? They were clearly here to carve up the commune members' rations!

Because of this, the commune members' impression of the Educated Youth plummeted.

Hearing this time that five more Educated Youth were coming, the commune members gathered at the brigade headquarters, grumbling and hoping the Brigade Leader would send the Educated Youth back.

They couldn't afford them!

But this was policy; even if they couldn't afford them, they had to take them.

Zhou Afu sighed deeply.

Forget it, forget it; let the Brigade Leader and the Secretary deal with the headache! He was just an ox cart driver.

He put away his tobacco pipe and told the Educated Youth to get on the ox cart.

"Sit tight! We're off! Let's try to get back to the brigade before sunset!"

Seeing that the Donghe Brigade next door had come to pick up their Educated Youth with a tractor, while she had to sit on a smelly ox cart, Lu Jieqiong couldn't help but complain: "Why aren't we taking a tractor? The ox cart is too smelly!"

Zhou Afu cracked his whip in the air: "Our brigade can't afford a tractor. If you think the ox cart is smelly, you can walk back; it'll be easier on the old ox!"

"..."

Lu Jieqiong went silent.

Xie Yang and the others didn't speak either.

The rest of the journey was very quiet, with only the sound of the cart wheels rolling, the whistling of Zhou Afu's whip in the air, and the clip-clop of the old ox's hooves.

Gouwa sat beside his grandfather, clutching the two pieces of Fruit Candy he couldn't bear to eat, turning his head to look at Xie Yang from time to time.

He thought to himself that what his grandfather said was both right and wrong!

The other Educated Youth were indeed pampered and hard to please, but the heroine was different!

She didn't mind the smell of the ox cart, nor did she mind the bumpy village road; on the contrary, there was a smile on her lips, and she seemed quite satisfied with the surrounding scenery!

The reason the Yuewan Brigade was called by this name was because there was an irregularly shaped lake near the brigade.

Looking down from the mountain top, it looked very much like a crescent moon, hence the name Yuewan Lake. The brigade was located at the bay mouth below Yuewan Lake, hence the name.

The Yuewan Brigade at dusk was very beautiful.

The sunset glow spilled onto the lake, shimmering as if paved with gold;

The green mountains not far away, as the temperature dropped, revealed a layer of misty fog, which complemented the wisps of cooking smoke rising above the village.

Setting aside the distance to the County, Xie Yang was very satisfied with the geographical location of the Yuewan Brigade.

With green hills and clear waters, a tranquil environment, and an abundance of negative oxygen ions... it was no less than the private manor where she spent her retirement in her previous plane.

It was estimated that Xie Yang was the only one satisfied; the other Educated Youth looked at the increasingly desolate and difficult mountain path and were on the verge of a breakdown:

"Why aren't we there yet? Is it this far from the County?"

"It's going to be a hassle to go out from now on!"

"What are we going to do! I thought it wasn't far from the County, so I didn't bring much, planning to go to the Supply and Marketing Cooperative to stock up after arriving, and maybe grab a bite at the State-run Restaurant..."

"If I had known it was deep in the mountains, I wouldn't have chosen this dump! Listening to the name, I thought it was a plain."

Listening to the Educated Youth's hushed complaints, Zhou Afu, who was sitting at the front driving the cart, sighed deeply.

He had said it before: the Educated Youth from the city were all about the same.

Not only did they make the brigade build them a Youth Hostel, deal with all their disputes, and tire out the old ox to pick them up at the train station, but they couldn't do any farm work, and in the end, the brigade still had to pay out grain to provide them relief.

Nominally, it was lent to them to tide them over, but the first batch of Educated Youth had been "tiding over" for half a year, and he hadn't seen them pay it back yet.

Although the Youth Office had issued resettlement funds, building the Youth Hostel cost money, and issuing farm tools to the Educated Youth cost money.

Seeing that the Educated Youth earned so few work points that it definitely wouldn't be enough to eat, the brigade had originally intended to supplement the remaining resettlement funds with grain when it was distributed.

As a result, the first batch of Educated Youth wouldn't have it, insisting that the brigade was withholding their resettlement funds; they made a scene over this, and in the end, the Brigade Leader had to return the remaining resettlement funds to them per capita.

These Educated Youth spent money lavishly and had spent it all before the grain was even distributed.

When the distributed grain wasn't enough to eat, they came to borrow from the brigade again; one borrowed after another, how much grain could the brigade have to lend them? And how would they pay it back once they borrowed it?

"A bunch of lazybones who only know how to eat and can't do a lick of work!"

The other members of the Yuewan Brigade were also collectively complaining about the Educated Youth.

By rights, it was already time to finish work; usually, everyone would have long since gone home to cook dinner or rest.

But today, except for the women rushing home to cook, the other members were in no hurry to leave, wanting to get a look at what this batch of arriving Educated Youth looked like.

The first batch had fifteen people, including seven female Educated Youth and eight male Educated Youth. Because there were so many, the Brigade headquarters didn't have enough empty rooms, so after the Brigade Cadres discussed it, they approved a plot of land by the shore of Moon Lake to build an independent Youth Hostel.

The Brigade had shown full sincerity, but as it turned out, those Educated Youth were not only ungrateful but also picked faults everywhere, complaining that the house was made of adobe, the roof was thatched, and that the rooms weren't big enough or numerous enough to satisfy their demand for one room per person...

In short, they weren't here to help the members progress at all; they were clearly a bunch of young masters and misses who didn't know the hardships of the world!

Although no one dared to say this openly, which of the members wasn't full of complaints in their hearts?

Even the members who had married female Educated Youth as wives didn't hold back from chiming in to complain about those weak male Educated Youth.

"What 'helping members progress'? I heard those people at the Commune whispering in private that it's clearly because the job positions in the city are full, and the remaining people are just eating without working, causing the city to run out of food, so they were assigned to the countryside. To put it bluntly, they're just here to share our rations!"

"You shouldn't go around saying things like that!"

"Who's saying things? That's the fact!"

"Sigh, if they knew how to do farm work, then let them come. But the ones who came are all high-minded but low-skilled. They can't even complete a third of the Task assigned to them by the Brigade Leader. If this keeps up, it's equivalent to us having to support them!"

"Pah! I can barely afford to feed my own son, and I'm supposed to support a bunch of unrelated people?"

"You think you're the only one who doesn't want to support them? But what can we do? Even the Brigade Leader is at his wit's end."

"Sigh..."

"They're here, they're here!"

While a group of half-grown boys were climbing trees at the village entrance, they saw an ox cart approaching and the fast ones ran back to report: "Saw them! Quite a few women!"

A chorus of sighs rose from the field ridges.

"Alright, stop sighing and groaning. If you're tired, go home and rest! Stop wagging your tongues in front of the new Educated Youth. They haven't offended us; we shouldn't have preconceived notions!"

The Brigade Leader walked over with a stern face, scolded everyone a few times, and then turned toward the village entrance to lead the way in welcoming the arrival of the new Educated Youth.

"Whoa—"

The ox cart drove up close, and Zhou Afu pulled on the old ox to steady the cart, letting the Educated Youth get off one by one.

Constrained by the Brigade Leader's presence, no matter how dissatisfied the members were, they still had to step forward to help.

A sturdy man climbed onto the ox cart to pass down luggage. When it was Xie Yang's luggage's turn, he couldn't lift it at first: "Whoa, whose bundle is this? It's really heavy!"

The man receiving it below the cart took it with both hands: "Yo! It really is heavy." He thought to himself that it must belong to one of the male Educated Youth.

Just as he finished speaking, a soft female voice rang out in his ear: "It's mine."

Xie Yang jumped off the ox cart, reached out to take the luggage, hoisted it onto her shoulder with one hand, and smiled kindly at the man, "Thanks, Uncle! The luggage is heavy, I'll handle it myself!"

"!!!"

"!!!"