Chapter 97

At nine o’clock in the evening, Su Chunjun took the yellow bus back to Zhujialou, the street lamps on the roadside were turned off, there was not a single pedestrian on the road, there was not a single car, the street was empty and dark.

The street is empty and dark. There is a light on top of the main door of Zhujialou.

The driver stopped, Su Chunjun out of the car, stuffed him a dollar.

The cart driver thanked him repeatedly, “Many thanks, many thanks.” Then pedaled the cart around a corner and flew away.

Su Chunjun knocked on the door, and after a while, Ma Tianbao opened the door.

The Ma family probably realized that they didn’t pay the rent, and the Zhu family didn’t charge any other fees, so they did all the chores in the Zhu family’s building.

Ma Tianbao was the one who watched and guarded the door at night, and Ma Dama cleaned the stairs, corridors, and water rooms, as if she had become a worker in the Zhu family building.

I don’t know how this happened, but slowly everyone acquiesced. Auntie Ma’s body seems to be completely well, Ma Tianbao although still can only do some odd jobs, but his English here is kind of a place to use, and now can earn enough money to support the family’s food and drink. Ma refused to take medicine when he was not in pain, and now, in addition to lying in bed every day, he does not give trouble to the family, and he can move his hands freely, although he can not sit up, but his hands are good, so he took over the work of gluing matchboxes from the outside, gluing 1,000 of them for five cents a day, he can gluing more than 10,000 of them, and he can gluing them without turning on the lights, and he can make one or two dollars two or three days down the road.

Generally speaking, the Ma family’s life is getting better and better, and the people next to them are also looking at it with a sense of encouragement.

When Ma Tianbao saw Su Chunjun, he opened the door, “Mr. Su, you’re back.”

Mr. Su Chunjun came in, “Thank you.”

Ma Tianbao closed the door, “It’s late, you should go up and rest. Let me get you a pot of water.”

Su Chunjun busily said, “No, no, there’s hot water in the house, I just boiled it in the morning, it’s just enough. Good night.”

He stomped up the stairs, turned the corner and stopped at the Zhu family’s door, leveling his breath before gently knocking on the door.

Not long after, Zhang Ma came over and opened the door.

“Mr. Su, have you eaten? There is still hot porridge on the stove.” Zhang Ma said.

The room was lit up with a dim and warm light, and there was a smell that could only be found in a home.

Yang Yuyan was sitting on the sofa with a book in her hand, but she wasn’t reading it, instead, she put it in her hand to use it to deal with Yang Yucan, saving her from having to come and supervise her studies again.

Zhu Yanshu had many more old friends to entertain and many more card games to attend in the past few days, and she was so busy every day that her feet didn’t stick to the ground, her mouth was dry, and her toes suffered. She held the herbal tea that Zhang Ma specially boiled for her, and placed her feet on the sofa, where Yang Yucan was massaging her.

Mr. Su was already half of his own family, Zhu Yanshu didn’t waste any more energy getting up to greet him, even Yang Yucan just turned around to say hello.

Only Yang Yuyan jumped up, cheerfully putting down her book and coming over to lead him to the dining room, “Mr. Su, you’re back really late today, are you busy with work?”

Su Chunjun touched the ring box in his pocket and replied absentmindedly, “I’m probably going to be transferred to the secretariat, it might just be in the next couple of days, so I’m in the process of handing it over.”

Yang Yuyan complimented him appropriately, “You got promoted again?”

Su Chunjun smiled and shook his head, saying, “Not a promotion, just a flat transfer. I was also doing clerical work on the first floor, and now I’m just transferred to the second floor to continue going to do clerical work.”

The difference was that when he was on the first floor, he was answering calls from the counties and cities below, and when he switched to the second floor, he was answering calls from all departments. To be nice, it wasn’t nice. When he was on the first floor, he was across the phone lines, and no one was going to come rushing up and hit him, and he had the advantage of being above to below. But on the second floor, if he didn’t handle it well, someone might come halfway across town to beat him up, and he would no longer be safe on his way home from work.

Mr. Ho was invited to leave from the road after work, and he didn’t dare to let out a single fart when he came back.

He because of where the head of a few ideas, called where the head think he is in this area of the mind, so he transferred up, specializing in answering the phone. In the past two days, he only cared about helping where the long answer the phone, other things did not do.

But the matter of transferring is probably already stable.

He just sat down, Zhang Ma gave him a meal, the dishes on the table were not collected, open the lid can be eaten.

Yang Yuyan did not want to go back to reading, so she sat in the dining room to eat with Su Chunjun. He eats, she said. Her little mouth is so loud that it’s a hundred times better than the radio, and Su Chunjun sometimes listens to her so much that he can’t even think about eating.

Yang Yuyan: “I’ve told my mom to let me go to school. I’ve heard that there’s no catching students.”

Su Chunjun shook his head: “Now there are no arrests, that’s because the school control is strict, did not let the students go to the parade. But if those who were arrested don’t release a few next week, the students will definitely march. At that time, will you see if the streets are chaotic?”

Yang Yuyan lowered her voice and asked, “Is the situation getting worse? The tenant of my house has run away again.”

Su Chunjun did not hide it from her and said, “Well. The mayor should have a lot of determination this time.” He has been hiding very well and not coming out, and someone in the bureau has made up a story saying, “What a big shrunken head turtle.”

Yang Yuyan glanced at Zhu Yanshu and Yang Yucan in the living room and continued to ask in a low voice: “But he can’t control it, right? Isn’t he just an answering machine?”

Su Chunjun then laughed, “You can’t say that, the mayor is still quite bold.”

Yang Yuyan grunted, not picking up on this.

In a city, there is a mayor and a prime minister, you say, who do you listen to? There are several governments, that’s what’s most interesting.

Su Chunjun: “But in this case, the order did come from the mayor’s side. The Prime Minister is not in charge of that.” The day-to-day affairs are still under the control of the city government.

Sweeping the city of bad information, censoring newspapers and magazines, this was indeed all ordered by the mayor.

Getting the gendarmes to step up their patrols on a daily basis to ensure law and order, that’s also an order from the mayor.

Because the patrols of the gendarmes have exposed the shortage of troops and the need to increase the number of gendarmes, this is also an order from the mayor.

The Prime Minister’s Office was completely hidden during this incident.

Everyone could see that the mayor had no choice but to do it, and that he was a puppet on a string. But he had the “guts” to come out and be the puppet, so he was very courageous.

Although the city government is now completely empty, the mayor and deputy mayor and other departments of the head of the brain almost all hide, which can not be denied their courage ah.

Su Chunjun didn’t have the slightest intention of trying to whitewash Yang Yuyan, and told her all of this in a low voice.

Yang Yuyan had a hidden pleasure, as if she was doing something bad behind the adults’ backs.

She commented to the mayor in a small voice, “What kind of courage is this called? The courage to find death?”

After laughing, she said with a sullen face, “…… Then what do we do next?”

Adults’ things are funny, after laughing, they also have to think about how to live their own days.

Su Chunjun held the plate of peanut beans to eat, cold and cruel said, “We have no way.” He looked at Yang Yuyan and said, “Foreigners might be invited out to maintain order.”

Someone in the government had already started contacting ambassadors. It was obvious that the building was going to fall, people were going to run away, the rats couldn’t run away, they could only save themselves.

Everyone in the government could see that the precarious balance that hung by a thread was about to be broken. Once broken, the city would be thrown into instant chaos.

This is not the time to consider right and wrong, nor is it the time to consider good and evil, the first thing to ensure is order, as long as the order is not chaotic, the people will not suffer too much. Therefore, even an evil order was better than no order at all.

Yang Yuyan’s face instantly turned bad as she straightened up, “Will it come to this?”

What she really wanted to ask was: is it coming to this now?

Then what about them? What were she and Zhu Yanshu, Yang Yucan, Zhang Ma, and Su Chunjun going to do?

Run?

But where to run?

During this period of time, because the tenants had surrendered their rents, they were all going back to their hometowns. She asked Zhang Ma if it was better for them to go back to their hometowns than to stay in the city.

Zhang Ma: “What’s better? You think there are no security fees in the countryside? When the bearded bandits come, they won’t talk to you about charging a few dollars; they will not let go of a grain of rice, a piece of cloth, or a donkey in your house, and they will drag them away from you! A little girl like you, the bandits like the most, put it on the car and pull you back to spoil it for you.”

Yang Yuyan was scared to death when she heard this, and said, “Are there that many bandits ……?”

Zhang Ma: “Not only bandits, landlords, county officials, Baozheng, the village chief will also bully the village girls and daughters-in-law. You have a car in the city, but in the village you rely on two legs, how far can you go? Like your mom with her two daughters in the village, it’s an extinct family. And now they let you collect rent? You’re so lucky, you’ve even had your house stripped. It’s impossible to live in the village.”

Where could she go if she ran away?

When she was in school, the school had two trips abroad every year, asking parents to pay for them in the name of learning. Even when a teacher had a large group of students along for the ride, she’d encountered being yelled at to her face. It’s not that there aren’t good people, most people are good, and there are only one or two bad ones. But only encountering them once is enough to make one fearful.

He doesn’t hate me because I’ve done something wrong, he hates me because I’m me.

It’s unchangeable and most frustrating.

She had been an auditor at a school in the United States for six months – but the teachers at the school were Chinese, and all spoke Chinese. The students were all Chinese, and she felt it was no different from going to school in China, except that the school was built in the United States.

It was a “study abroad” program arranged by the school, and it was purely a money scam.

But it wasn’t all for naught. The teacher taught them half a year of Chinese American history, and there was no test afterward.

Although there was no test, although she was not very attentive to the class, but also basically understand that the Chinese in foreign countries is really after two thousand years to obtain a higher social status, the reason is that China is really rising. Before that, Chinese in foreign countries were third class citizens.

Every teacher has a long, bloody history of how they were discriminated against in the U.S. They can talk about it for a year.

And the time when the Chinese were most discriminated against was not in their time, but fifty years ago.

That was the time she was living in now.

If she were to define the position of the Chinese in this era on the world stage, the most straightforward definition would be: slave.