It is not that there are no great men in this world. There are men like Lu Ming, but not many.
How sad it would be if a woman's destiny could not be controlled by her own hands.
Du Juan has truly awakened.
Lu Ming noticed this, and although he didn't say anything on the surface, he was still very happy in his heart.
Du Juan now commutes to get off work on time every day. She has a bowl of porridge and two steamed dumplings at a snack bar in the alley for breakfast. She also eats lunch and dinner in the factory. She is also used to the free meals in the factory.
After returning home at night, the landlord would boil a pot of hot water for her and put it in a thermos bottle for her to make tea and wash before going to bed.
Although it was the cold winter season, there was no stove in the house, but a pot of charcoal fire for heating. Dujuan thought it was too luxurious, so the landlord did not have to light a fire for her to keep warm.
The kind-hearted landlord told her that the younger she was, the more important it was to take good care of her body and never catch cold, otherwise all the problems she had made when she was young would appear when she gets older.
The landlord thought that Du Juan was afraid of coal smoke poisoning, so he told her that he had been doing this for more than ten years and there would be no problems. Du Juan no longer objected, but insisted on paying two or three yuan a month for charcoal.
The landlord initially refused to accept the rent, saying that the rent was already high enough. Du Juan insisted that she accept the rent and paid her a one-time payment of ten yuan for the entire winter.
The landlord didn't make any further excuses. Within a few days, all the residents in the alley knew that this young and beautiful lady was a senior manager of the nearby spinning mill and a helper.
They didn't understand what the position of assistant manager was, but it sounded similar to a manager, so he was probably a big shot anyway.
Many residents in the alley told Du Juan through their landlord, saying that their girls also wanted to work in the factory to earn some money to supplement their family income, and they hoped to be accommodating and give her a chance.
Du Juan told them with a wry smile that the positions in the factory had long been filled and that no more female workers would be recruited. There would be vacancies only if a female worker resigned. However, she promised the neighbors that once there were vacancies, she would give priority to arrange for their daughters to join the factory.
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After getting to know these neighbors gradually, she realized that the female workers who she thought were extremely miserable were actually envied by everyone in the hearts of these common people.
In the factory, two steamed buns and a bowl of green vegetable soup with oil stars at noon every day are considered very good benefits. You don’t have to run around in the wind and rain, and you can get a salary every month. How nice it is.
It's a matter.
The residents in the alleys are not considered extremely poor in Shanghai. Even so, not every household is willing to eat steamed buns for every meal.
An average family just buys cornmeal noodles and some vegetable leaves, cooks them into porridge in a big pot, adds some salt, and if you want to be extravagant, add two drops of vegetable oil to it. This is the family's staple food for the day.
Those who work in factories can only eat one steamed bun a day, those who don't work can only eat one, and those who work can only eat 80% full.
Du Juan had never thought that the cornmeal steamed buns she had never used to feed puppies before would be a delicacy in the eyes of so many people.
She thought about the life she had lived in the past and the feast Lu Ming had treated her to, and felt that she was being too pretentious.
A week later, she accidentally chatted with her landlord and found out that the white-haired landlord woman was actually in her thirties. Her hair turned gray overnight because her husband died and she was overly sad.
"Du Xiangli, my man is not a red element. He is just dissatisfied with the oppression of the workers by the factory bosses. He took the workers to the boss to reason with him several times, but he was slandered as a red element by the boss. In the tenth year of the Republic of China,
He was killed by the government in six years." The landlady explained again and again for fear of Du Juan misunderstanding.
After listening to the landlord woman's explanation and the neighbors' comments about the landlord woman's husband, Du Juan learned that the landlord woman's husband was named Lei Zhenyu, a worker at the Yangshupu Power Plant. He was tall, handsome, and powerful, and among the workers
Has high prestige.
Lei Zhenyu was dissatisfied with the bosses' wanton oppression of the workers, and often even withheld their wages unreasonably. He often took the workers to the bosses to find justice for the workers, but the bosses also held a grudge.
Later, Lei Zhenyu took some workers to participate in a city-wide workers' strike, so he was on the list of red suspects.
Wang and Jiang within the National Government joined forces to plan and organize the April 12 Massacre that shocked the world. Lei Zhenyu's boss took the opportunity to falsely accuse Lei Zhenyu of being a Communist Party member to the Shanghai Security Command, and Lei Zhenyu was arrested.
They were arrested and massacred directly without any judicial trial or court trial.
The landlady's name is Yu Guilian, a native of Shanghai. After her husband died, her son was only three years old. She lived hard in this house with her son.
Yu Guilian's ancestors were once a wealthy family in Shanghai. Several two-story buildings nearby were originally the private property of the Yu family. Later, her grandfather smoked cigarettes and her father gambled, completely ruining the family business, leaving only this one for their children.
A small building to live in.
After the death of Yu Guilian's parents, those relatives who were seeking to sway her have cut off all contact with her. Except for this small building, the rest of her remaining property has long been defrauded by those relatives using various means.
Yu Guilian lived alone in this small building and lived by pawning a few pieces of jewelry for two years. Later, she met a tall and handsome young man named Lei Zhenyu. After falling in love, the two got married and have been living here ever since.
The life of the two after their marriage was very sweet and perfect. Their son was born the next year, and the family lived happily, relying on the husband's salary. Although they lived a poor life, they were still very happy.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. In 1927, the Kuomintang government launched the April 12 coup and massacred the leftists and progressive youths in the Communist Party, the Kuomintang and the Kuomintang. Lei Zhenyu was also massacred in this massacre.
They were killed when their son was only three years old and still at an ignorant age.
After Yu Guilian heard the news, she felt like the world was falling apart. If it weren't for her son, she would have followed her husband underground.
She was so sad that her head turned gray, she suffered from long-term insomnia, and she did not want to eat or drink, and her body soon collapsed. Her son was frail and sickly. If Lei Zhenyu's friends during his lifetime had not often come to help him, mother and son would have had to sell their house.
Now Yu Guilian cannot go out to work, firstly because of her poor health, and secondly because the child is too young to be separated from her, so the couple can only make ends meet by renting out a house.
The child's name is Lei Jiu, whose nickname is Jiujiu. He is only 6 years old this year.
Jiujiu has been in poor health since she was born, and is relatively thin. In the past two years, she also suffered from malnutrition due to poor living conditions, and she looks very different from her actual age.
In fact, most of the people living in this alley have symptoms of malnutrition, whether they are elderly, young or children.
Du Juan fell in love with Jiujiu as soon as she saw him. She suddenly saw the shadow of her young brother in this thin child. When she left home, her brother seemed to be the same age.
From then on, every day at dinner, she told the chef in the cafeteria to prepare a plate of fried steamed buns for her to eat as a midnight snack.
Of course the chef in the cafeteria was happy to flatter the assistant manager. Du Juan was considered a big shot in the factory. She was pretty and had a very docile temperament. She was never picky like those tacky women, with their noses crossed and their eyes raised.
Du Juan said that she had to pay because she wanted to take it home for midnight snacks. The cafeteria chef refused to accept it and told her that everyone was trying to take things home from the cafeteria, not just her.
Du Juan just thought about it. The main reason was that she was used to spending a lot of money, so giving or not giving this small amount of money didn't matter at all.
She didn't know why, but she rushed back home as soon as she got off work. She seemed to always have a concern in her heart, and when she entered the alley, she felt an unspoken pleasure.
Du Juan fell in love with the life here unknowingly. The fireworks in the alley, the firewood, rice, oil and salt provided in every household, and the vendors selling food early in the morning gave her a sense of intimacy with life that she had never had before.