After leaving school, Gu Xiangqian took Su Ye to a restaurant for dinner. This state-owned restaurant was next to the neighborhood committee, and newlyweds who had obtained their marriage certificates would usually come to this restaurant for dinner. It had both expensive and cheap dishes, and it catered to both the rich and the frugal.
Gu Xiangqian told Su Ye, "After my father and mother got married, they once came to this restaurant to eat. Before she passed away, my mother asked me to bring some food here to try."
The chefs in this state-owned restaurant are very skilled. People with limited financial resources order a bowl of vegetarian noodles, while those with more money order a meat dish. Of course, meat dishes are now available, and the vegetarian dishes are also well cooked, but the current prices are prohibitive.
Gu Xiangqian ordered shepherd's purse and tofu soup, vegetarian lion's head, vegetarian meat pie with mushrooms and cabbage, longan, jujube and red beans, three dishes and a sweet soup. He spent three pounds of food coupons and ten yuan. This one meal cost an ordinary worker half a month's salary. Usually Gu Xiangqian was very frugal, and he would only do so when he went out to eat with Su Ye.
After ordering the dishes, he carefully took something out of his pocket, took out the developed photos and handed them to Su Ye. There were one large and two small photos.
This is their wedding photo. Although it is only in black and white, it is very beautiful. Gu Xiangqian is wearing a pine green suit, standing straight and handsome. He stands behind Su Ye, his eyebrows are like thick ink, and his lips are pursed into a line and slightly raised.
The girl in the photo raised her lips to reveal her white teeth, with a faint smile in her eyes. The photo was filled with a strong sense of happiness.
Su Ye never knew that he would look like this in an unconscious state, with joy and happiness easily visible.
She took out her wallet and put the small wedding photo inside.
"Eat it while it's hot. It tastes good. You'll definitely miss it when you return to the countryside." Gu Xiangqian picked up a piece of vegetarian lion head and put it into the Suye bowl.
Even though Su Ye had eaten a lot of delicious food, she would still be amazed. She should bring Liu Gang to the capital, let him try these vegetarian dishes, and then make such dishes in the countryside.
In building a new socialist countryside, no matter how hard it is, we must not make ourselves suffer!
After Su Ye stayed in the capital for a week, Gu Xiangqian was officially transferred. She ate all the dozen or so poultry she brought from the countryside because she couldn't carry them all. After a whole week of eating, Gu Xiangqian's company benefited from his kindness and tasted the delicious meat.
When he left, tears welled up in my eyes, I couldn't bear to let him go.
Everyone thought that since he was stationed in Tibet, he would definitely be evaluated for excellence and promoted in the future, and they all congratulated him. But Su Ye guessed that he might be on a confidential mission. This time point is quite sensitive because these few years are a critical period for the development of nuclear weapons. Su Ye said to Gu Xiangqian, "Remember to write to me."
"When I finish my work in the countryside, maybe I'll meet up with you if I have the chance." She winked at him and kept him in suspense.
There was a reason why Su Ye applied for computer science at that time. The computer technology in China was extremely backward and in a state of ignorance and chaos. Domestic computers were still used for military purposes at this stage. They were huge and difficult to operate and calculate. The highest speed was only 500 times per second. However, the domestic computers in Su Ye's era could reach a maximum speed of 549 quadrillion times per second, making them the fastest computers in the world.
When our ancestors were researching nuclear weapons in the 1960s, this huge machine was even broken, and they had to calculate the complex formulas one by one.
…
The next day, Su Ye returned to Shanggou Village.
After two rains, the weather was getting colder. But the dormitory of the educated youths in the second team of Shangou Village was very hot. The rabbits they raised were booming. Lin Yuan, who was in charge of raising rabbits in the dormitory, used the method taught by Su Ye to grow grass with water and cut wheat seedlings every day to feed the rabbits.
Rabbits have amazing reproductive capacity. If they are fed and watered for a few months, they will give birth to a litter every two months. They specially cleared a room to raise rabbits, but it was not enough. Before winter, almost everyone had a rabbit fur husk to keep warm. Throughout the fall, they made several rabbit hot pots and ate very well.
Many students have adapted to the local customs and gradually got used to life in the countryside. After all, they had lived a hard life with Teacher Su, with enough food and meat to eat. She never treated them badly, and they were glad to follow her to the countryside when they graduated.
Li Ming used to despise the backwardness and poverty of the mountain village and waited for his parents to introduce him to a job in the city factory. Now, even if Changyou Grain and Oil Factory wants to recruit him, he won't go! The situation in the city is not optimistic now. The letter sent from home in September made Li Ming feel that life was difficult.
His parents wrote in the letter: "A number of factories in the city have stopped production. I don't know how long Changyou can hold on. The leader said that Changyou is a model oil factory in the province, and it will be given priority in oil supply. We don't have to worry too much, but the textile factory and sugar factory where my uncle and uncle worked have closed down. The factory director gave the employees a severance pay and some peanuts, beans and sweet potatoes, which is better than nothing... I stay in the countryside and don't have to think about going back to the city to work. The situation is difficult now, and it's the same across the country. At least I can have enough food in the countryside."
It turned out that life in the city was very hard. A basin of cold water poured on him completely extinguished Li Ming's idea of returning to the city to work as a worker. He looked at his partners with even more fiery eyes, and worked harder both in study and labor, wishing that his teacher could see his sincerity.
Ruan Ruliang thought that Li Ming was a strange student who kept hanging around him. He couldn't stand Li Ming's fawning attitude, so he asked him to go to the field to measure the soil.
Su Ye went into Ruan Ruliang's "office" and poured him a cup of tea. In his office there were microscopes, experimental instruments, incubators, magnifiers, electronic scales... Many of them were broken and discarded by the school, and Ruan Ruliang picked them up and repaired them for reuse. He had pieced together a decent place to work over the years.
Ruan Ruliang likes to drink the tea from Shanggou Village very much and he always makes a pot of it after every meal.
She could no longer look directly at Ruan Ruliang's unbridled pursuit of "10,000 jin of sweet potatoes". Ruan Ruliang was digging deep into sweet potatoes, beans, and vegetables, and was more interested in wheat. She was sure that he was not like that old man.
Su Ye handed him the information he had written down.
During these days in Beijing, apart from being with Gu Xiangqian, she spent her free time memorizing Mendel's genetics. Ruan Ruliang flipped open a thin notebook, and the more he read, the more serious his expression became. He read it over and over again eagerly. Mendel's genetics is not recognized internationally, and there are very few translations of it in China. Only a few articles in newspapers and magazines talk about it.
This handwritten translation was obviously more detailed and profound. Ruan Ruliang suddenly stood up and walked around the room, talking to himself, then picked up a pen and scribbled a page of words.
He said excitedly, "Teacher Su, I don't know how important your information is to me!"
He was so sleepy that he handed over a pillow. This handwritten supplement to Mendel's genetics helped Ruan Ruliang discover a new path. He worked day and night to look up information and do experiments. It can be said that except for eating, drinking, defecating and urinating, he spent the rest of his time in the office.
A month later, Li Ming saw Ruan Ruliang laughing like crazy, running around the field with his hands raised. He couldn't help but twitch his mouth. He only knew that people would go crazy if they didn't have enough food, but he didn't know that some people would go crazy if they didn't have enough food or water.
Li Ming asked Su Ye, "What happened to Teacher Ruan?"
Liu Gang guessed cheerfully: "Teacher Ruan may have discovered something incredible. Comrades, we won't have to worry about having staple food to eat next year!"
The staple food they eat now is mostly exchanged bit by bit from the black market. The production team gives them five kilograms of coarse grains a month, which is just enough to fill their stomachs, but they are half-baked. Liu Gang and his friends can only exchange meat for staple food at the black market in the county and the city.
The first two months of going to the countryside were not bad, but it became harder and harder to exchange for rice. In the past, Liu Gang could exchange one pound of meat for three pounds of rice, but now one pound of meat can only be exchanged for one pound of rice. They were reluctant to waste meat and could only exchange it for the cheapest sorghum flour. However, even so, their conditions were still very good, after all, they could eat enough rice and meat. Some people in the educated youth camp next door had even started eating Guanyin soil.
Liu Gang couldn't bear to see this, so he occasionally gave them a few handfuls of sweet potato leaves to make soup. The members of Shanggou Village had already stored a whole year's worth of food by selling tea leaves. Although the harvest in autumn was small, there would not be famine at the end of the year. However, this group of old educated youth was miserable. They had no dealings with the villagers on weekdays, and they were included in the village's per capita food distribution. This year, they had a very difficult life.
No matter how difficult life was, everyone kept their mouths shut and carefully kept their secrets.
Autumn is over and the long winter is coming.
Everyone was trying to store food for the winter. Liu Yuan's rabbits had bred to the fourth generation, and Li Ming could pick up eight eggs every day, leaving one for Teacher Ruan and another for Teacher Su. The remaining six eggs were eaten by everyone in turn. After a series of good luck, they encountered a suckling pig on the mountain.
Li Ming ran away holding the suckling pig without fear. Liu Gang was surprised to find that they had run into a litter of piglets. Li Ming only held one and ignored the other two. Liu Gang drooled as he picked up all the piglets, holding one in his left hand and one in his right hand, and ran down the mountain like crazy.
The educated youth dormitory had three piglets from then on, which meant they would have pork to eat next year. Every day they would diligently feed the pigs with sweet potato leaves and cut grass for them. Ruan Ruliang would use the manure of poultry and livestock to make organic fertilizer.
Time flies, and each working time is always very short.
The sweet potatoes that the new educated youth have been planting for half a year can finally be harvested. Farmers will harvest the sweet potatoes before the frost falls. After the frost falls, the sweet potatoes will be frozen and the sweetness of the tubers will be greatly reduced.
Ruan Ruliang told Su Ye, "I am researching a sweet potato with a higher yield than Red Star No. 1. I am waiting for the acceptance of the results of this batch of Red Star No. 1. I will research Red Star No. 2 based on them. I estimate that the yield this season will not be too bad, at least 6,000 kilograms."
The current highest yield of sweet potatoes can reach 3,000 kilograms, and the yield of kilos can reach 6,000 kilograms, which is quadrupled compared to the past. Using the same land and applying similar fertilizers, it can feed half the population.
Su Ye was so excited that he went to inspect the sweet potato field. In the famine years, the grain output per mu of land dropped sharply, and being able to hand in 2,000 kilograms of sweet potatoes was considered to have completed the task. They planted two mu of land, and after paying the state grain, they still had 8,000 kilograms of sweet potatoes left.
This amount of food is enough for them to eat for a whole year. This is only two acres. If the whole village plants sweet potatoes in the spring, how much food can be harvested in the summer? Su Ye quickly calculated that if each person eats three kilograms of sweet potatoes per day, if 100 acres of sweet potatoes are planted, the whole Shanggou Village will have more than enough food for ten years!
Ruan Ruliang said cheerfully, "In theory, this is correct, but eating too much sweet potato will cause heartburn. If the yield of wheat is so high, I will wake up laughing in my dreams. Pasta can enhance the physique of Chinese people and has a wider range of uses. It can be made into steamed buns, noodles, dumplings, wontons... It's a pity that my ability is limited and I can't make such complicated things."
"I hope Liu Gang and his group of children can work harder and get admitted to a university next year, and strive to achieve this grand goal in the future."
Su Ye really wanted to persuade Ruan Ruliang to take a look at the rice!
But Su Ye stopped talking just as the words came to her lips, and she didn't want to disturb him. What if he accidentally realized his dream of producing 10,000 catties of wheat per mu
…