"I encountered something yesterday and was touched." Mingzhu's mood was a little low.
Lu Ming did not interrupt, waiting for her to continue.
"Yesterday afternoon when I was about to get home, I saw someone selling a child on the street. She was a little girl, as dirty as a mud monkey, and she looked about four or five years old. Her father was sick and was about to die. He was waiting for money to go to the hospital to survive. As long as
For fifty yuan, her mother planned to sell the child. She had seen many such things before and didn't care at all. Yesterday, it was probably because her sister's affairs were blocking her mind. When she saw the little girl, she seemed to be thinking of herself and her sister.
When I was a child, I would give money whenever my heart softened." Mingzhu recounted.
"Did you buy that little girl?" Lu Ming was surprised.
"No way, why should I buy a little girl and take it back? I don't know how to take care of the child. I'm afraid that the money I gave her won't be enough to treat the disease, so I'll sell the child anyway. Why don't I just give her mother more money, and the child won't be able to care for her?"
I will be sold again. I gave that woman all the five hundred yuan you gave me."
"You gave her five hundred yuan!" Lu Ming screamed.
"I knew I was wrong, but at that time my heart softened and I gave it all to her." Yuan Mingzhu said with some annoyance.
Lu Ming smiled and said: "I'll give it to you. It's just five hundred yuan. It's a good thing to do good deeds and save people from fire and water."
"You really think so, and I'm afraid you'll scold me?" Mingzhu became happy again.
"Really, but don't do this again in the future." Lu Ming sighed.
"I know, I missed my sister yesterday, as if I had lost my soul." Mingzhu laughed at herself.
In fact, she felt sorry for herself. Five hundred yuan was a lot of money to her. Her parents only gave her a thousand yuan a year for living expenses. She gave away half of it as soon as she let go. It was indeed generous. But she usually eats and drinks.
Sa's godmother paid for almost half of it, and she couldn't feel the importance of money to a person.
Lu Ming was not thinking about this, but that Mingzhu might have harmed that family.
Five hundred yuan is a huge sum of money for ordinary people. There may be some unscrupulous people who will do anything to kill people and steal money for these five hundred yuan. There are many cases in Shanghai every year.
Lu Ming often saw beggars and people selling children and girls on the street, but he seldom paid attention to them. Sometimes he would throw some dimes, and sometimes he would pass by in a hurry.
Most of these beggars and those who sell their children and girls are men in their families who are addicted to drugs or gambling. In order to smoke opium or enter the casino, they have lost all their money and then forced their wives and children to beg on the streets.
, even selling his wife and children, just to take a few more puffs of opium and go to the casino again.
Although there is a mixture of good and bad, and gangs run rampant, Shanghai is still the most developed city in China. As long as a family is willing to work hard to make money, they will never starve to death, let alone sell their children and daughters, except of course when encountering natural or man-made disasters.
Poor people must be hateful, this is what they say.
Lu Ming rarely talks about these things, let alone to Mingzhu. He doesn't want her to understand the dark and cruel side of this society prematurely. It is his responsibility as a man to keep Mingzhu young, beautiful and innocent.
.
Lu Ming took out a thousand-yuan silver note and handed it to Mingzhu.
"I don't want it anymore. It's not like I don't have money to live anymore." Mingzhu pushed his hand away.
"Take it, the detective has done a good job, this is the bonus for discovering poisonous mushrooms." Lu Ming said with a smile.
"I heard from my elder brother yesterday that the lower class people in Shanghai can live on fifty yuan a year, while others only spend twenty yuan a year. How do they live?" Mingzhu asked with a doubtful look on her face.
"The way to live a poor life is to buy some stick noodles every month, add some bran to steam the cornstarch, and then go to the vegetable market to pick some rotten cabbage leaves. This way, you really can't spend much money in a month." Lu Ming sighed.
"The family never eats meat...?" Mingzhu couldn't imagine what kind of life it was like.
Lu Ming smiled bitterly. Emperor Hui of Jin laughed at the hungry people affected by the disaster, saying that they would rather starve to death than eat meat porridge. It was not that Emperor Hui of Jin was really that stupid, but that he had never seen how hungry people lived.
Speaking of which, he, Mingzhu, Sheng Muyi, and Sheng Di are all flowers living in a greenhouse, and they belong to the type of people who are likely to say "Why not eat minced meat?"
"Then you go to the United States and other countries in the world. Are they really rich?"
"Well, the United States and most European countries have completed industrialization, but we are still an agricultural country and are completely behind the times. They make money all over the world by exporting their products, so they are very rich." Lu Ming explained simply.
"Then do you think our country can be as rich as theirs in the future?" Mingzhu said with concentration.
"We are lagging too far behind. It is very difficult to catch up. The government must be completely reborn." The problem is too big, and Lu Ming doesn't want to talk about it.
During the Republic of China, the gap between China and European and American powers was so huge that it made people feel hopeless. Even compared with Japan, its close neighbor in East Asia, China still lagged far behind. Lu Ming was asked the same question when he was studying in the United States.
, how can ancient China, with its splendid civilization, catch up with Japan?
China's Westernization Movement was almost synchronized with Japan's Meiji Restoration. At a certain stage, it was even ahead. However, in the end, Japan completed its industrialization, while China's industrialization was stillborn.
why is that?
Lu Ming thought about this problem when he was studying and consulted a lot of information, but he did not get a satisfactory answer. Later, when he read "The Scream" by Mr. Lu Xun, he suddenly understood that Chinese society is not just about the national system and the upper-level structure.
There is a problem, and there is also a problem with the spiritual consciousness of the entire nation.
Does industrialization mean advanced machinery and equipment? Absolutely not. Machinery and equipment are only external factors, and the human spirit is the internal factor. If you want to change the situation in China, you must first transform the national spiritual consciousness. Instead of transforming Chinese subjects into citizens, China
Industrialization will never be realized and we can only sleep in the backward agricultural era.
Thinking of this, he suddenly remembered that not long after returning to China, he actually met Mr. Lu Xun outside his residence on Xiafei Road. What he saw was not the intellectual giant he imagined, but a man with piercing eyes who was as thin as a handful of bones.
elder.
He didn't go over to talk, he just watched from a distance, and finally left silently.
He realized that what his husband needed was not visitors, but rest. His health was too important.
Mingzhu saw that he was not very interested in talking, so she stopped continuing the topic. In fact, she accidentally caught a glimpse of a corner of the lower class society yesterday and was touched by it by chance. After that, she lost interest.
After dinner, Mingzhu drove back. Lu Ming didn't want to take a car, so he simply walked home slowly. Sometimes he likes to walk slowly on the street alone, watching the shops on both sides of the street and watching the people walking on the street, quietly
Savoring this world of mortals.
Some streets in Shanghai are as prosperous as those in New York. Its charm lies in the perfect combination of Chinese and Western. Walking through the gorgeous neon lights on the streets, you may walk into an alley from the Kangxi and Qianlong eras. The ancient mottled atmosphere and the new era The hustle and bustle of the city blend together, giving people a dreamy feeling of intertwining time and space and going back in time.
Lu Ming was walking when a strange feeling suddenly came over him. He pressed against a wall and looked behind him, and saw a figure disappearing quickly at the corner of the street.
Even though it was a quick glance, he was able to identify the figure as the female assassin who had attacked him at the detective station a few days ago.
He had experienced the skill of this female assassin before. It was like a poisonous snake in the dense forest in autumn, sudden and fast, catching people off guard. Lu Ming felt a chill on his back when he thought of what happened that night.
After waiting quietly at the wall for a while, another group of people walked up the street. He hurriedly joined the group, walked quickly forward, turned the corner, and happened to see a taxi. He jumped on the car and told the driver the address of the apartment. , let the driver drive with all his strength.
He looked back every once in a while, and his field of vision quickly covered both sides of the street, but the frightening figure never appeared again. Maybe the other party knew that he had been exposed and gave up tracking.
He did not dare to let down his guard. When he arrived in front of the apartment building, he hid inside the door and quietly observed the street outside for a long time. He found nothing suspicious before going upstairs and returning to his room.
As soon as he entered the house, he locked all three locks on the door, then took a sharp knife from the kitchen and put it at hand.
After the last sneak attack, he encountered a lot of things, and his brain automatically produced a stay-and-go selection mechanism, and the female assassin was automatically excluded. Afterwards, he thought that it might be a single incident, and it would never happen again after it passed, but today he suddenly Warning: The crisis still exists and we cannot let down our guard at all.
The appearance of the female assassin may be related to the disappearance of Sheng Muyi that he is pursuing. If the two are analyzed together, the matter will be much more complicated than imagined, and the danger level will also be greatly increased.
Could this female assassin be...
Japanese? From Frank to Sheng Youde, their words were connected together. If it were not a coincidence, they pointed to the same target: Japanese. Lu Ming couldn't help but shudder.
He suddenly felt that he lacked due respect and trust for his teacher Frank. He called Frank from thousands of miles away, and it could be said that he was very seductive, but he was just doing it in a perfunctory manner, thinking that the detective agency had a lot to do, bullshit! How ridiculous. !
Lu Ming felt that he had to reorganize his thinking and consider Sheng Muyi's disappearance into a larger context. In fact, Sheng Youde had already hinted to him that the background of this matter was complicated and the consequences would be serious.
Thinking of the dolphin toxin in Shengjia's mushrooms, he suddenly had a feeling that the Japanese were already targeting him, and their current purpose was obvious: to prevent him from searching for the missing Sheng Muyi.
But from another perspective, this is also a good thing. Since it prevents him from searching, it means that Sheng Muyi is still alive.
Lu Ming has never interacted with Japanese people, but he met a Japanese student while studying abroad. They learned each other's language in their spare time. After a few years, his spoken Japanese was not a problem for communication, but after returning to China, he no longer had any problem. Have any interactions with Japanese people.
Lu Ming sat quietly next to the table, with the sharp knife at hand. Although it was not as handy as the paper knife in the detective agency, it was enough for self-defense.
He sat with his ears pricked up until midnight. He got up several times to lift the curtains to check the situation outside. He found no suspicious signs before going to bed.