"Fool! Who says I don’t miss you?"
Eight letters, Feng Qingxue read each one three, four, even five times, pressing them tightly to her heart, muttering to herself, smiling, until she smiled so hard she began to weep, hard to imagine the serious face of Lu Jiang as he wrote these letters.
"Fix this immediately, okay, I’m fixing it." Feng Qingxue immediately unfolded the paper after setting down the received letter, her brush flowing like water.
Once finished, she sealed the letter.
At lunch, Feng Qingxue said to her two nephews, "Tianjun, Acheng, come with me into the city tomorrow."
Lu Tianjun and Guan Cheng didn’t question why, they just nodded, "Okay, aunt."
Father Lu asked out of concern, "Is something up? If there’s no urgent need, just let those two boys run the errands, you rest at home." Her belly was getting bigger day by day and in this harsh winter, Father Lu was worried about her going out.
Feng Qingxue shook her head, "Ajiang wrote that he’s having surgery in early December, that’s not far off. His comrades have sent a lot of nutritious supplies, I’m sending some to him, although by the time they reach him the surgery might already be over so they will act as a supplement. Ajiang has sent his salary to the post office, I need to go pick it up. Some of Ajiang’s comrades have fallen, their families are struggling, Ajiang left their addresses for me. I’m sending them some money and grain tickets. Also, there’s a comrade of Ajiang’s in the Northwest named Huo Beiting. He didn’t send any supplies, but he did send a lot of military supply tickets, including grain tickets and supplies tickets. I want to use the grain tickets to exchange for grain here and then ship it back to him. The conditions there are harsh, the reason he has all these leftover grain tickets is because there isn’t enough grain for them to claim."
Like, for example, Huo Beiting receives forty pounds of grain tickets each month, but the local conditions don’t allow him to buy forty pounds of grain, or the canteen can only supply him with thirty pounds of grain a month, then ten pounds of grain tickets would be left over.
The Northwest region is known for its harsh climate.
The regions are divided based on the local economy and living conditions, also known as wage regions. There are eleven categories of regions in the entire country. The first category has the best living conditions but the lowest wages. For each category increase, the wages increase by three percent. The harshest conditions are places like Qinghai, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, etc, which are eleventh category regions. They have the highest wages, but the locations are remote, the living conditions difficult, and resources extremely scarce.
The Capital is a category six region, Shanghai is category eight, and her hometown is also category six.
Huo Beiting is in a category eleven region, what he lacks the most is grain.
The grain that Feng Qingxue sent to the Northwest previously was for Huo Beiting. She doesn’t know if he has received it yet.
So Feng Qingxue exchanged the military supply tickets he sent for supplies and sent him the grain, shipped a part of the other supplies back to him, part of them to Lu Jiang, and kept only eight pounds of cotton for Wang Jiao’s dowry quilt.
Wang Zhengguo and Miao Fengqin only have one daughter. They had started saving for her dowry quite early. They relied on the Lu family before the liberation and lived quite comfortably, they had enough cloth and cotton to make clothes and quilts for Wang Jiao. The two quilts they owned were made out of silk and satin, their colors were magnificent and eye-catching.
Wang Jiao wore a Shanghai-brand watch, a red sweater she knitted herself, black pants she made, wore Blue Begonia leather shoes, wore a red cotton jacket over her sweater, not a coat.
A red satin cotton jacket, with a stand-up collar, and oblique lapels, featuring a red base with golden embroidered flowers.