"Eating at home tonight?" Zhuo Feng slumped on the sofa; she and her husband had always divided chores, with Feng Xing being good at cooking, he would handle the cooking while Zhuo Feng cleaned up and washed the dishes. But today she felt like her bones were falling apart, she really didn’t have the strength for the after-dinner cleaning. The room had been under the western sun and was hot and stuffy; Zhuo Feng wasn’t quite willing to eat at home.
"Eating out is unhygienic. You were busy all day and didn’t have time to watch TV, right? The news reported that at Quanjude in Wangfujing, several groups of customers went to dine there with their children and then experienced vomiting and diarrhea, said to be food poisoning. One child is still unconscious," Feng Xing said, breaking up cabbage, planning to make a torn cabbage dish.
Zhuo Feng quickly turned on the TV. Xiao Xian glanced at the television, thinking to herself that something really had happened.
The evening news was reporting the details of the entire incident. "Husband, this looks scary. This isn’t the Quanjude in Wangfujing we ate at the other day, is it? Should we also go to the hospital for a checkup?"
"Shouldn’t be necessary, the ones sent to the hospital were all children; the adults were fine," Feng Xing said while scraping scales off a river fish, whose belly had already been cut open.
"I told them not to pick them, guessing they still ate some after picking," Xiao Xian muttered softly, her voice not very loud, and Zhuo Feng couldn’t hear her clearly.
"Xiao Xian, what are you talking about? Eating what?" Zhuo Feng was peeling an orange, intending to praise Feng Xing for the oranges he bought today; they were yellow and orange, really pretty, and they looked delicious.
"Wait, Auntie, don’t eat the orange you have, it’s from last year." The peel had already been removed, revealing a golden tangerine looking like a small lantern, but the inside was dry and wrinkled, just a mess of cotton wadding.
"Which store is so unscrupulous to sell oranges ," Zhuo Feng turned over the orange peel and saw that there was a small oval label attached to it, stating it was an Australian orange.
"What’s wrong? Is the orange not good? I spent more than twenty yuan on it," Feng Xing had washed his hands clean and came out without even having time to take off his apron. Their home apron, originally purchased by Zhuo Feng, was a pink Kitty apron, which Feng Xing casually tied on for convenience in cooking.
Seeing a one-meter-seventy-five tall man wearing such a small pink apron, both Zhuo Feng and Xiao Xian "snickered" with laughter.
After laughing, Zhuo Feng’s voice rose eight degrees, "More than twenty yuan? Just a bunch of rotten cotton wadding, which fruit stand is it? I’ll take the oranges back."
"Auntie, don’t be impulsive, don’t be like the bowed yellow cow in our village, getting bitten by mosquitoes and flies and then running wildly in the fields," Xiao Xian described, which made Feng Xing beside her laugh out loud, and Zhuo Feng gave him a glare.
"Xiao Xian, it’s not that Auntie is stingy. People in the city are different from those in your village. Here, people are more calculated. If they’ve taken advantage of you once and you let it go, they’ll do it a third and fourth time for sure. We can’t just accept the loss silently," Zhuo Feng said with heartfelt advice, her tone inevitably tinged with melancholy. She had once been like Xiao Xian, willing to let things go to keep the peace. But after being in society for too long, she had grown wary.
"Who dares to call Auntie stingy, I’ll be the first to not let them off. The oranges that Uncle sold, unless you knew the ins and outs beforehand, would not have been suspected, I reckon the fruit seller didn’t even know he had bought a batch of oranges that were ’gold on the outside, rotten on the inside’, just like the managers at Quanjude in Wangfujing didn’t know that the two pots of Golden Tangerine at their door were the source of their big trouble," The first half of Xiao Xian’s comment made Zhuo Feng beam with amusement, but the second half startled both Feng Xing and Zhuo Feng.
However, what Xiao Xian said was also true; if it weren’t for her innate ability to see through with one glance, she too would have, like Feng Xing, believed that these so-called Australian oranges were top-notch.
Zhuo Feng, who usually spoke like a machine gun, stuttered, "Xiao Xian... we can’t talk nonsense, are you saying what the news reported isn’t because of the food inside Quanjude but because of the two Golden Tangerine trees they placed outside the store?"
Zhuo Feng and Feng Xing looked at each other. Ordinary citizens want to avoid trouble if they can; they also didn’t wish to be pulled into a public incident. But in the end, the couple’s conscience overcame their desire to avoid trouble, and after a hurried meal, they rushed to Quanjude in Wangfujing.
What was a bustling duck restaurant just the night before had become a desolate scene, with not a soul in sight. The news had come out, and the parents of several children firmly claimed that they had eaten roast duck at Quanjude the previous night, and the next day, the children were complaining of stomach pain and were sent to the hospital with vomiting and diarrhea.
As soon as Zhuo Feng and the others entered the store, the doorman apologized in a listless voice: "Sir, Miss, I’m sorry, our store is closed for a reorganization today, we are not open for business."
After explaining the details of the situation, the store’s operations manager personally took care of them. But he was unwilling to believe Xiao Xian’s one-sided claims; these words, if they had come from a senior expert, would have had some credibility, but coming from a young student, how could anyone believe it.
"Did you buy this tree last December? And when you bought it, was it decorated with ninety-nine oranges?" Xiao Xian rattled off a series of numbers, then walked over to the two orange trees and made a strange gesture with her waist.
Zhuo Feng and Feng Xing also looked uneasy, like parents seeing a teacher.
"It seems like it, I need to check the records for that," the store manager had been sorting out the kitchen all day today, hoping to find the cause of the food poisoning; he hadn’t suspected the two orange trees at all,
"Even if what you say is all true, even if there’s an issue with these two trees, the thing is bought last December, any problems should have occurred long ago. Plus, several adult customers have picked oranges in between, and we didn’t see anything happening to them either." The manager still didn’t believe Xiao Xian and made a gesture to show them out.(to be continued. If you work, please consider casting your recommendation ticket and monthly ticket on Qidian.com. Your support is my greatest motivation.)
This chapter is updated by freew(e)bnovel.(c)om