Chapter 75: Those Who Refuse to Submit to Fate

On the twentieth day of the first month, the lanterns on the streets of Qingshui County began to be taken down.

This also meant the 1982 Spring Festival was truly over; workers from factories and mines should now shed their holiday laziness and rally their spirits for the great project of the Four Modernizations.

Li Ye turned left, then right, dodging workers dismantling scaffolding, his brow furrowed as he pressed forward.

These past few days had been nothing but annoyances, leaving him in a foul mood.

First came the matter of his stepmother Han Chunmei buying out her pension—far faster than Li Ye had anticipated.

In just a few days, the news spread through relatives and friends; many mocked Han Chunmei and the Li family.

A daughter married off is like water spilled out—sixty yuan as bride price was already too high; now she’s being sold again like a commodity? Are you made of gold?

The poor girl burst into tears, too ashamed to even go to work, convinced everyone was pointing at her back, her ears buzzing with flies.

Li Ye thought he’d outsmarted everyone, but his grandfather’s face hung like a stormy sky, and Li Kaijian treated him with nothing but contempt.

【It’s all your fault, you little brat.】

Fuck.

A bunch of slow-witted fools, utterly unaware that Li Ye was solving a future crisis for the family.

Li Kaijian and Li Zhongfa still thought in the mindset of the past thirty years of “low income disparity”—a factory director earned only a few dozen yuan more than an ordinary worker.

Workers cursing their director’s face? That was normal.

But after 1980, the fear of inequality outweighed the fear of poverty; the harmonious family ideal would soon face brutal tests.

The Han family wouldn’t even treat their own granddaughter to breakfast—what kind of people are they, really?

No matter how Li Ye explained it, Li Zhongfa and Li Kaijian refused to see the danger; Li Ye had seen such leeches in his past life, draining relatives dry.

Blood is thicker than water, bones still connected even when broken—you’ve got eight million, your own parents come to kowtow and beg, crying over past hardships, asking for ten or twenty thousand...

What do you do?

When your younger brother kneels before you, banging his head on the ground, what then?

To buy out, you must strike hard—this time, you must crush Han Chunmei’s hopes completely; otherwise, when the Li family becomes rich, the Han family will surely cause more trouble!

With Han Chunmei’s weak-willed nature and Li Kaijian’s wife-worshipping, money-mad brain, wouldn’t Li Ye be stuck wiping their asses forever?

Li Ye had no time to tangle with the Han family—he targeted Han Chunmei alone.

Otherwise, he’d have acted directly the night before last.

He could’ve beaten Han Xiaoxu to a pulp, provoked the Han family into a mob attack, and dragged them straight to the hospital—ending the feud once and for all.

But then, would Han Chunmei feel such hatred toward the Han family now?

You’ve already sold your daughter!

As long as Han Chunmei doesn’t agree, the Han family’s scheming is useless; even if Li Kaijian dotes on his little wife, he won’t fill their holes.

After this mess, the Li family no longer recognizes them as kin.

So Han Chunmei’s psychological shift is the key.

Li Ye appears to be targeting Old Han, but in truth... he’s forcing Han Chunmei’s hand.

Of course, if Han Chunmei cuts ties, this suffering now means nothing—later, she’ll realize how many lifetimes of fortune she earned by marrying Li Kaijian, this super-potential stock, and securing what kind of life for herself and her two daughters.

If Han Chunmei can’t cut ties... she’ll suffer more.

Li Ye isn’t a bleeding heart—he can spare a few hundred yuan, but tampering with the Li family’s foundation... hmm...

Another annoyance was Hao Jian and Jin Peng.

The two of them, along with two junior partners—Ergou and Sanshui—left for Guangdong on the third day of the New Year.

After settling in Yangcheng on the seventh, they sent Li Ye a safety telegram, then fell completely silent until the nineteenth day of the first month.

Li Ye had assumed their business was nearly done, and at least one of them should’ve returned on schedule.

But yesterday afternoon, he received a telegram: those two had made zero progress in over ten days, and were forced to urgently beg for his help.

【What a pair of idiots—no adaptability, no scheming, can’t even ask for help without wasting ten days. Only I could save them; otherwise, they’d be crushed flat on the beach.】

Li Ye cursed them silently in his mind, then stepped into the Qingshui County Post and Telegraph Bureau.

Seeing Li Ye enter, the clerk chuckled: “Li Ye, you’re here so often! Should we give you an honorary staff title?”

Lately, Li Ye had been coming to mail manuscripts, send telegrams, or collect royalties; everyone knew him.

Only since Teacher Ke returned had letters and packages to and from Beijing been handed over to her.

Li Ye handed over a telegram form: “Sending a telegram today.”

The clerk took the form, then froze: “You’re sending a telegram? Not a letter? That’s a lot of characters—this’ll cost a fortune!”

At seven fen per character, three characters bought a jin of rice; everyone tried to write as little as possible, but Li Ye? He wrote like he was sending a letter.

Li Ye confirmed: “Yes, a telegram—to Yangcheng.”

“Yangcheng?” The clerk suddenly remembered: “Yesterday, a telegram arrived here from Yangcheng for you—did you send another manuscript there?”

Li Ye smiled: “No, a pen pal.”

“Oh? Writing to a pen pal via telegram? You’re really impatient.”

The clerk chuckled and took the telegram form to send it.

In the 1980s, a “pen pal” was like the first generation of internet users—truly fashionable, and some were even refined ladies, unlike later generations... who were either dinosaurs or bottomless pits.

But everyone exchanged letters with pen pals; sending a hundred characters by telegram was truly “desperate.”

Hao Jian and Jin Peng were desperate.

The two of them, with their junior partner Sanshui, sat outside the Yangcheng garment wholesale market, watching vehicles and merchants come and go—as if watching bundles of RMB slip past their eyes.

“Peng Ge, what do we do now? Maybe we should try somewhere else? Guangdong’s huge—there’s more than just this market!”

“You know nothing. This is the provincial capital—where the big hats rule. If we can’t make it here, going elsewhere just means getting ripped off faster.”

“I was just saying... three cobblers... I’m just anxious...”

Hao Jian glanced at Sanshui, exhaled a smoke ring, and stayed silent.

Sanshui had only joined them before the New Year—he had drive, but was nowhere near Jin Peng’s level. Calling him dim-witted was unfair, but in today’s Yangcheng, his brain was useless.

When the four first arrived in Yangcheng, they were fired up, confident they’d secure a big shipment in three to five days, ship it back by train, and return to Qingshui County rich.

But reality gave them a harsh lesson.

“East, west, south, north, center—wealth comes to Guangdong.”

This saying hadn’t yet spread nationwide—it would take a few more years.

In early 1982, Yangcheng was far from the openness it later became; its few garment wholesale markets had only opened a year and a half ago, and business conditions were nowhere near as relaxed or enlightened as Li Ye had described.

In the early 1980s, clothing and household goods across Shenzhou were still a seller’s market—just moving goods out of Guangdong, a few hundred kilometers away, meant solid profit.

So Hao Jian came with money expecting vendors to roll out the red carpet?

Forget it—he had to fight local Guangdong natives who’d been trading in neighboring provinces for years; Hao Jian and his crew were stealing from their mouths.

Northerners called southerners “southern barbarians”; southerners called northerners “northern bumpkins”—a fiercely regional merchant circle, utterly closed to outsiders.

The tin-roofed stalls inside the market looked shabby, but many were backed by factories; each had their own networks, regional groups like the Huizhou faction, fiercely exclusionary.

People like Hao Jian and Jin Peng—irregular, small-time peddlers—were looked down upon; even if Hao Jian begged and pleaded, they quoted retail prices, insulting him.

The shops willing to talk to Hao Jian were murky and treacherous; after dealing with several, losing nearly a thousand yuan in tuition, he finally realized and cut his losses.

Otherwise, their twenty-thousand-yuan capital might’ve already vanished in a whirlwind.

And Hao Jian wasn’t a fool—he carefully mapped out the entire supply chain and realized that even if they miraculously gathered the goods, transporting them back was another huge problem.

Because their letters of introduction were useless.

Their letter came from the Qingshui County Grain Department, vague in wording—something about purchasing supplies in Yangcheng.

Not only was railway freight back then extremely tight, and without connections they’d wait forever in line,

but a grain department letter? Fine for shipping a few bags of luggage, rice, peanuts, or nuts—but thousands of garments?

Are you kidding? Do you think railway officials are blind? Who’d take responsibility for that?

But if they didn’t use railway freight, how could four men carry twenty thousand yuan worth of goods on their backs?

Hao Jian had seen Chaoshan people in Dongshan Province—shouldering huge bundles, peddling hundreds of garments as itinerant traders.

Profit a few yuan per item, a couple of round trips a year, enough for initial capital.

But twenty thousand yuan worth? Unrealistic.

What about truck transport?

Forget it—first, transport teams might not even take the job,

and back then, highways had long stretches of dirt roads; over two thousand kilometers meant anything could happen,

fine if you were hauling machinery—but clothing? A single breakdown and you’d be stranded overnight.

Why was 1983 so strict? Look up highway bandits of 1982.

Hao Jian tried every trick, begging wholesale vendors to help solve transport—even if the price went up, he’d accept it.

But one crook, after trying to scam them, reported them as fraudsters trying to swindle without capital.

Luckily, they stayed at a legitimate hostel with official seals and documentation; the market authorities had no time to bother them, so they avoided prison.

If this happened a few years later, when temporary residence permits became common, they’d be in deep trouble!

But no matter what, early 1982’s “profiteers” had it rough indeed!

“Brother, Peng Ge, telegram’s here! A telegram from home!”

A thin young man sprinted from across the street, agilely dodging cars, leaping over the guardrail, and arriving breathless beside Jin Peng and the others.

This was Ergou—like Jin Peng and Sanshui, a jobless youth from Qingshui County, chasing the dream of wealth with Hao Jian and the others.

Yesterday, they’d sent a telegram home to Li Ye; today, Hao Jian had sent Ergou to wait at the hostel for news, while he and Jin Peng kept watching the market for opportunities.

At this moment, the telegram arrived; both of them sprang to their feet, filled with anticipation.

At this point, they could only rely on Li Ye’s opinion as the major shareholder.

After all, Li Ye had originally said that in business matters, he had the final say.

Whether to stay or leave now depended entirely on him!

Ergou handed the telegram to Jin Peng, but Jin Peng refused to take it, puckering his lips and gesturing for him to give it to Hao Jian.

He’d realized these past few days that in certain matters, Hao Jian had a slight edge over him—and besides, Hao Jian was also the second-largest shareholder, wasn’t he?

Mainly, there was a difference in education: though both were junior high school graduates, Hao Jian was the one who actually studied newspapers, so his ability to comprehend text was stronger than Jin Peng’s.

Yet this man who boasted he could discern national affairs from newspapers now stared at Li Ye’s telegram again and again, finally letting out sigh after sigh.

Jin Peng, furious, cursed: “What the hell are you sighing for? What does it say?!”

Hao Jian smacked his lips and said: “He scolded us.”

Jin Peng blinked. “And then? That’s it?”

Hao Jian said: “No, he told us to find locals for help.”

Jin Peng perked up. “Find who?”

Hao Jian shook his head: “Don’t know. He told us to find them ourselves.”

“I...”

Jin Peng snatched the telegram, read it twice, and understood only one sentence.

“It would be best to find someone who refuses to submit to fate—this would double the results.”

Jin Peng asked blankly: “What’s a person who refuses to submit to fate?”

Hao Jian lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and said with satisfaction: “Someone like me.”

“..........”

Jin Peng, Ergou, and Sanshui all froze.

After a long silence, Jin Peng clicked his tongue, his face twisted as if struck by stroke.

“That’ll be tough—someone as ugly as you? Hard to find.”