Between comments from the people in line, it quickly comes to Chen Xueniang’s turn.
She takes out her grain ration book, grain tickets, and money, and steps into the grain shop cleanly and neatly weighing fifteen pounds of cornmeal. As she supports the flour bag with both hands, she lets the shop assistant pour the weighed cornmeal into it. Simultaneously, she turns back to Feng Qingxue who has followed her and says, "I work in a textile factory and eat in the cafeteria every day at noon, so I need to keep some grain tickets on hand."
After making her purchase, she moves off to the side with the bag of flour. As Feng Qingxue hurries forward, she realizes that today they only have cornmeal and dried sweet potatoes, and there are no fine grains at all, with quality being a bit poor.
"What are you buying? How much?" the shop assistant asks impatiently.
Feng Qingxue quickly hands over the ration book and the grain tickets, "Thirty-five pounds of cornmeal."
The grain ticket that Wang Cuilan gave her was for thirty-five pounds of coarse grain, which is the supply standard for this month.
Since there is no sweet potato flour, she decided to buy cornmeal. In the afternoon or tomorrow morning when she goes home, she can bring some from home.
The shop assistant looks at her ration book, immediately smiles, weighs the cornmeal for her and then fills it into the flour bag. "Ah, you’re from Mayor Cheng and Director Wang’s family? I have never seen you before. The cornmeal is ninety-two cents a pound, totaling three dollars and twenty-two cents."
The raw grain is seventy-two cents, and the processing fee is one cent. The final product is ninety-two cents, as they must have taken into account the losses between the raw grain and the final product.
Feng Qingxue has a quick calculation in her mind, hands over the money, takes back her ration book, and picks up the flour bag.
There were too many people at the grain shop. Everyone pushed and shoved, some people who hadn’t queued wanted to jump in, claiming they had to get to work. The others didn’t want to let them, causing a commotion. Chen Xueniang and Feng Qingxue finally made their way out of the crowd, they laughed at each other’s disheveled state and their appearances became more agreeable to each other.
As daylight broke, Feng Qingxue got a better look at Chen Xueniang. No wonder Wang Erniu was so jealous; she was indeed beautiful, her beauty was in her bones and remained unaffected by age.
She appeared to be around forty, but Feng Qingxue knew that her actual age must be more than that.
Chen Xueniang raised the veil covering her face, "If you don’t mind, I’ll come to talk to you when I have time!"
Feng Qingxue nodded and smiled. She saw Wang Cuilan signaling her and quickly left Chen Xueniang, moving towards Wang Cuilan.
"Auntie, they only have cornmeal and dried sweet potatoes. I bought cornmeal, we’ve got plenty of dried sweet potatoes and sweet potato flour at home. I’ll bring a sack back tomorrow, which will be enough for a few months. Sweet potatoes are not good for the stomach, eat less when you can."
"That’s fine, anything works." Wang Cuilan shows the basket in her hand, takes pride, and says, "Today is my lucky day, I got half a pig liver and half a pig head. They didn’t need a ticket, and I used a small meat ticket to buy a small piece of lean meat to make meat porridge for Xibao, the remaining meat tickets can be used later. I’ll stew the pig head this afternoon, you can take some home tomorrow morning for the elderly and children to taste."
"Thank you for your consideration, Auntie." Feng Qingxue thanked her.
"What are you thanking family for? Let’s go, hurry up, deliver these goods home, and get to work immediately. Otherwise, you’ll be late!"
At this time, many offices and units aren’t managed very strictly, being occasionally late once or twice isn’t a big deal because many staff members have nothing to do and sit in the office drinking tea, gossiping, or reading a newspaper.
Feng Qingxue hurriedly arrived at the hospital, only to find that from top to bottom, everyone was quite relaxed. Zhou Chengfeng and Chen Yuwan were whispering to each other.