Chapter 471
Zhu Yuyan and Su Chunjun settled down in London.
The source of their livelihood was sharing an author’s name with Shi Wuwei, translating novels or literature together.
Since there were four of them under the author’s name, there was no requirement for the source, author, nationality or religion of the translated work, so the name “Tehran” suddenly became a popular author for the publishing house.
Their income increased immediately, and they thought that the money from selling jewelry would soon be consumed, but they did not realize that the income from translations would be enough to support them to live a fairly decent life in London.
This was quite a surprise.
Su Chunjun grew a beard, while Zhu Yuyan bleached her hair at home according to the practice taught in the beauty book, bleaching the hair color from black and brown to light yellow.
After this little disguise, the two of them lived a life of deep seclusion, and their security was greatly improved.
However, in order to grab manuscripts from other translators to expand their own voice in the publishing house, to have more power to select manuscripts, and to expand the sources of manuscripts, the two of them could only sleep and eat, day and night translations.
Su Chunjun left all the better translations to Zhu Yuyan, and started to pick up French and German again after many years, struggling with the dictionary every day, making him look more scholarly.
Mrs. Su was in charge of all the trivial matters of life.
First, there was the matter of picking a house.
From the time they decided to settle down in London to now, in just three months’ time, they had already changed three apartments.
It wasn’t that Mrs. Su was overly fussy, it was just that London was a much more unsafe place than she had imagined.
The first apartment, looked very nice. Newly furnished, with a complete home, new appliances, a water heater and electric lights, there seemed to be no drawbacks.
But on the fifth day of living in the house, Zhu Yuyan realized that the house had installed many gas pipes for lighting! No wonder she felt that there were too few electric lights in the house!
How can you use gas pipes for lighting? This is actually a great invention of this era, the gas lamp. Thin gas tubes were located all over the corners of your home, from the living room to the bedroom, from the bathroom to the kitchen, all of them.
When you need to light up, you turn on the gas lamp like you would a gas stove, put on the lampshade, and the gas lamp lights up.
The wicks of the gas lamps were all gas holes from the gas stove, small, saved into a ball, very convenient and quick.
But in Zhu Yuyan’s opinion, this is a safety hazard! Gas leakage fire how to do! Not fire gas leakage will also be poisoned to death!
Only lived less than a week, she was on fire immediately found another set of houses, with no complaints Mr. Su moved.
The second house was also very nice, the street was new, there were no ghettos in the neighborhood, and it seemed nice.
Within half a month of living there, there were four demonstrations, an average of two a week.
The streets are new because the neighborhood is a factory district. The slums were all moved away because of the factory.
Of the four demonstrations, three were protests against the lack of access to food and the irrationality of the rationing system. Once the workers demanded a pay raise and lower working hours.
Zhu Yuyan realized that in London, demonstrations were a standard feature, and it wouldn’t be London if there weren’t one or two per week in every district. Especially now that the environment was bad, there were too many unemployed people and not enough food, there was a lot of anger among the British people.
She didn’t really have a problem with demonstrations, but once they happened, the stores on this street would close early and she wouldn’t be able to buy bread. And the marchers would smash the streetlights, and at night the street would be dark and scary.
So, she had to move again.
The third time she moved, she chose a row house. She rented all three floors to avoid problems with her neighbors.
This was an old part of London, with no factories or slums nearby. And because it was an old house, it wasn’t fitted with the latest gas lamps, only electric ones, although if it was night, the brightness of the electric lamps could at best support you to see where the dishes on the table were when you were eating, reading and translating were impossible.
But it was the best house they could find.
The two men finally settled in.
At seven in the morning, Mr. Su was the first to get up. He saw that Mrs. Su was still asleep, so he didn’t wake her up, got out of bed gently, went downstairs to the kitchen to boil hot water and eggs, went to the door to get milk and newspapers, and started their new day.
The bread was bought yesterday.
Mr. Su rubbed the pan with butter and sliced the bread and put it down to fry.
By the time Zhu Yuyan was awakened by the smell of buttered fried bread, he had already made breakfast: buttered fried bread, hard-boiled eggs, milk and coffee.
After breakfast, Su Chunjun looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to the post office this afternoon, is your manuscript translated yet?”
Zhu Yuyan nodded, “It’s translated. I’ve checked it and the typos have all been corrected.”
Su Chunjun smiled and said, “That’s great, this time the manuscript is delivered early again. The manuscript fee is also coming over, on the tenth. I hope they send the next batch of manuscripts over quickly.”
The two of them went out for a walk arm in arm, came back to check the manuscript again, and Su Chunjun went to the post office with the manuscript.
Zhu Yuyan sent the family’s clothes to the laundromat – both of them preferred to spend all their time translating manuscripts, so while three meals a day could be accommodated, and daily cleaning could be accommodated, the clothes had to be washed and cleaned, so they had to be sent to the laundromat. There they would also mend buttons, iron them and send them back, which was very convenient.
On the way back, she stopped by the bakery for bread and the vegetable store for tomatoes and potatoes, onions and carrots.
She stopped by the butcher’s and bought only ham and bacon, not fresh chicken.
The chicken plant might not even be viable now, and you could only buy eggs if you were lucky.
In this district, the rationing system barely worked, except for the fact that the food was very expensive, not to the point of being impossible to buy.
Zhu Yuyan, considering the personas of the two, did not go so parsimonious as to buy only bread, but also did not dare to buy too much, and every time she came back, she only bought one tomato, two or three potatoes, onions, and a small handful of carrots.
After returning home, Su Chunjun also returned. When he saw the food she bought, he was pleasantly surprised, “I can have tomato and egg soup today! There are two more eggs!”
The two of them used both eggs and had tomato and egg soup with bread, a strange and delicious meal.
The publisher remitted the money to “Tehran” on the 10th. Su Chunjun took all the money and wrote a check to Shi Wuwei.
In addition, the publisher also sent them the new translation catalog, hoping that they could take over the translation of these books.
Of course, along with the letter came the sample books.
There was no need to pay for the sample books.
Su Chunjun was holding a French erotic novel and raised his eyebrows. He turned his head to look at Zhu Yuyan and saw that her expression was also very strange, so he asked, “What’s that one you’re holding?”
Zhu Yuyan tried her best to describe it in plain words, “The Barn □□□.”
Su Chunjun bounced up in a flash, reaching out to snatch the erotic novel from her hand.
Zhu Yuyan hadn’t seen such a tasteful novel in a long time and immediately hid the book behind her back, “Wait! Literary freedom!”
Su Chunjun was a bit embarrassed, “I’ll flip through that book.”
Zhu Yuyan: “I’m married, are you still afraid that I’ll be bad? I’ll turn the pages of this book, it’s okay, it’s a very common romance novel.”
Su Chunjun was relieved to hear “ordinary” and asked, “Oh, who is cheating with who in the barn?”
Zhu Yuyan: “The young master and the horseman.”
Su Chunjun: “…… Better give it to me.”
Erotica is quite hot right now, and of course conservatives certainly don’t approve of it, but it’s the very same gentlemen who are buying the books to read, and a lady’s purchasing power in reading books is far from comparable to that of a gentleman’s at this point in time.
The spring of romance novels has not yet really arrived.
Zhu Yuyan rushed in the evening before dark, read the barn before the end of the book, the two are separated by the sky, but still in each other’s silent nostalgia for each other.
At the end of these kinds of novels, most of them result in separation. This is also to not go against the current social beliefs that cheating and homosexuality, which are meant to be separate, are not sustainable.
It would be inevitable that the two couples’ nightly sleepovers would be with two books of erotic literature as talking points.
It is also just right to look at the attitudes of the two countries towards love.
She asked Su Chunjun: “How did your book end?”
Su Chunjun: “The man killed the woman.”
Zhu Yuyan: “Oh man, tell me about it.” She nudges him, curious.
Su Chunjun pillows his arm: “They fell in love at a wedding and quickly fell in love, then the female lead found out that the male lead was having an affair at a bar and sleeping with a prostitute*, so the two of them had a big fight and broke up. The heroine took on another boyfriend, and the two soon talked about marriage. When the hero found out, he came to win the heroine back, and after they went on one date, the heroine decided to marry her boyfriend still. After she got married, her husband was busy with his work, and she met the hero again, and they started cheating on each other, and her husband found out, and she divorced him, and then she went to find the hero, and the two of them made a date to get married, and then in the last chapter, the hero went to a bar the night before his wedding, and went off with a prostitute*, and she tailed him to the hotel, and waited for a long time, and then rushed in to see if the hero was really with the prostitute* in bed, and then she smashed the hero to death with a vase. male lead to death with a vase.”
Zhu Yuyan sighed, “One must die in French love.”
Su Chunjun asked, “What about your book? Is it the same s**t?”
Zhu Yuyan thought it was pretty good: “Not bad. The young master is blonde and very arrogant, he looks down on the horseman, after the horseman was screwed over by the young master a few times, he was interested in his blonde hair, so he held the young master down in the barn, afterward the young master didn’t call the police, instead he started to avoid the horseman, so the horseman bullied the young master a few more times.”
Very traditional forced love plus gay □□□ style.
Su Chunjun: “And what happened after that?”
Zhu Yuyan: “This kind of novel doesn’t seem to have any later. The young master still lived a life of paper and gold afterward, the horseman went back to the countryside, and the two of them stopped seeing each other, just like a racy encounter. Compared to your book, this one is much more peaceful ah.”