He was really busy, perhaps because the New Year was approaching.
Qin Xiangnuan opened the pan and placed the pancakes inside.
The morning business was still good, especially as the weather turned colder, the better the business became. Now, earning nearly forty yuan a day was shocking to many.
For a teacher like Su Baijin, who taught English, a salary was less than 200 yuan a month, while she, a spring onion pancake vendor, made about 1000 yuan a month, which was five times Su Baijin’s salary. However, to many people, doing business was still looked down upon, nowhere near as prestigious as being a teacher.
So, if it was about introducing someone for marriage, she thought, people like her probably wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye.
After she finished her stall, she prepared the dough and left it by the stove. The winter weather was too cold, so starting the dough early meant it would be ready by the following morning.
After locking up the shop, she needed to hurry to school.
Carrying a few leftover pancakes, she saw that the grandfather-grandson pair outside the park was no longer there, and she hadn’t seen them for a long time. She didn’t know where they’d gone - maybe they were begging elsewhere, maybe they had found another way to survive, maybe...
But those were just maybes.
Everyone has their own fate, and she was actually just an outsider to these lives.
She took the spring onion pancakes back home. She would later bring them to school; there were some students from very poor families who would go without breakfast, sparing every yuan. These pancakes wouldn’t taste good left over, so giving them to the students would be just right.
She herself ate a spring onion pancake for breakfast without any side dishes, just with a glass of milk to finish it off. Then she packed up her backpack and took the remaining pancakes to school.
Luckily, her home was not far from the school; it was just a fifteen-minute walk. So along the way, she just walked slowly. Compared to students who had to ride bicycles to get to school early, she had a pretty leisurely pace, although, of course, she couldn’t compare to the boarders.
When she arrived at school, she placed the pancakes in front of a female classmate.
The classmate took them, slowly opened the bag, and started eating one.
"Xiang Nuan, you still went out to sell even in this cold weather? You have no idea how I just didn’t feel like getting up because I was so frozen. If I had to get up , I’d rather die," she said while eating, not forgetting to ask. The weather was indeed too cold. She had been curled up in her quilt, not wanting to move at all, and only unwillingly got up ten minutes before class, rushing to wash and dress and making it to the classroom just in time to eat a pancake before class.
"Of course I went out, why wouldn’t I?" Qin Xiangnuan took her books out of the backpack, "I’m used to it. Just getting up a bit earlier in the morning, I sell almost all of them in less than two hours. People there like my pancakes, where would they go for good pancakes if I didn’t set up my stall?"
Her half-joking words carried a grain of truth.
Her spring onion pancakes were indeed delicious, and she thought if one day she really stopped vending, many people would miss her and her pancakes.
Before long, the bell for class rang, signalling the start of a day’s morning self-study. This time was for the students themselves, mostly memorization, as it was just after waking up and their energy and concentration was at its best, giving them an edge in memory retention.
After morning self-study, a few students gathered together to eat the pancakes that Qin Xiangnuan had brought.