"Zhou Qiang." Xu Nianji had just finished unloading a cart of goods, huffing and puffing as he walked over to Zhou Qiang, took a swig of water, and gulped it all down in one go. He then sat down beside him and said, "If you can’t handle this job, what can you do when you go back home?"
"I can do anything!" Zhou Qiang blurted out, confident as any man would be—aren’t there plenty of jobs he could handle?
"Then tell me, what can you do?" Xu Nianji asked.
Zhou Qiang opened his mouth to reply, but after thinking it over, he realized that he actually couldn’t do much at all.
Over the years, he had tried various jobs, this and that, yet there was nothing he could stick with for long. Thinking it over, it seemed he really didn’t have any particular skills.
If there had been suitable jobs, his mother wouldn’t be so anxious to find help from his brother-in-law.
"Can’t think of anything, can you?" Xu Nianji chuckled, then said, "I’ll tell you, when I used to move bricks, it was ten times harder than this!"
"Ah..." Zhou Qiang thought this job was already hard enough. Ten times harder? That would surely kill him.
"Back then, I earned twenty yuan a month, but I still worked my hardest." As Xu Nianji reminisced about those days, he too felt how hard they were and wondered how he had survived them. However, now he felt that the bitterness of those times was for the sweetness of the present.
"After half a year, I could keep up with those who had been working for several years. My salary went from twenty yuan to twenty-five, and eventually to thirty. It was tough, but at least I was earning money." Xu Nianji decided to use this rest time to give Zhou Qiang one last piece of urgent advice. He said, "If you don’t stick with me on this, I won’t have any other job to recommend you for. You couldn’t handle moving bricks with your skinny arms and legs."
"Brother-in-law, I..." Zhou Qiang felt truly exhausted, yet upon considering Xu Nianji’s words, he thought they might actually be right.
"I know you like to smoke, your dad likes to drink, and you fancy bicycles, right?" Xu Nianji suddenly changed the subject.
Zhou Qiang was momentarily taken aback, then nodded and said, "Who doesn’t like those things?"
He had bought a bicycle when he got married and wished he could show it off around the village every single day.
"Have you ever seen a motorcycle?" Xu Nianji asked.
"Saw one once." Zhou Qiang had seen a motorcycle in the county town; it was much more flashy than a bicycle.
He wouldn’t even dare to dream of it!
"Don’t you want to own one? And what about your house—don’t you want to tear it down and build a new one?" Xu Nianji bombarded him with questions one after another.
Unable to help himself, Zhou Qiang swallowed hard and asked, "Brother-in-law, if I work with you, can I earn enough money to build a new house and buy a motorcycle?"
Just the thought of that possibility made Zhou Qiang’s heart race with excitement. A new house and a motorcycle?
"I’m not saying you can buy them now, but after five years, ten years, I believe you definitely can!" Xu Nianji’s words were firm and filled with profound confidence.
Being a ten-thousand-yuan household now would mean they were wealthy, but Xu Nianji felt that their family would soon become one. His goal was to earn even more money and provide a better life for his family.
Years later, Zhou Qiang, who had by then made enough money from deliveries to build a new house and was riding a motorcycle, still felt especially grateful to his brother-in-law whenever he remembered this conversation.
Without Xu Nianji, there would be no future for Zhou Qiang.