Lu is a native of Siyang County. In the late 1980s, she dropped out of junior high school and began to help her parents with farm work.
What impressed Lu most was secretly fanning fans in winter. Every family there has this tradition. As soon as winter comes, they go to the streets to buy sweet potatoes, drag them back and wash them, then grind them into paste with a machine and scoop them into gauze hung from four corners. The sweet potato residue was left in the gauze, and the delicate starch leaked from the gauze eye into the small water tank below, and white lubricated starch was precipitated, which is the raw material for making vermicelli-sweet potato powder.
Lu's task at that time was to keep shaking the pulp cloth with sweet potato sauce until his arms were sore, until his eyes were blurred, and until cold stars were everywhere.
Sliced vermicelli is a huge project, which usually involves several people. You come to my house tonight to help, and I will come to your house tomorrow night to help, cook the pot, rub the noodles, make a ladle, filter the cold water, put a pole on it and hang it outdoors. Every time Lu does it, it is the last process with the least technical content. Sliced vermicelli must be on a frozen day. Frozen vermicelli will be stiff and will not stick together, so every time she slides vermicelli. When the sun came out the next day, she tried to break the frozen fans with these red potato-like hands, often breaking the hammer.
When I was a little older, my eldest daughter Lu provoked the burden of life, cutting wheat, pushing fertilizer and doing everything. Worst of all, she is like a man, pushing a unicycle weighing several hundred kilograms with only two tender arms without tripping. The car is full of bricks from her kiln, each of which weighs six or seven kilograms wet. She has to push more than fifty bricks at a time.
In her spare time, she learned to do some small business. First, she sold her fans. After the sale, she went to the nearby Wang Ji Township to sell fans. She also sells vegetables and sells them from far away by bike, earning some difference.
After a hard rural life, Lu became a veritable "Iron Lady".
two
In the early 1990s, the closed doors in rural areas were slowly opened. Mei Feng's heart also began to want to go out. In her twenties, she followed the doorman to work in Yangzhou. That is a small factory that produces children's backpacks. The salary is only about 100 yuan per month, and she didn't pay it on time. She only gives twenty or thirty yuan a month for living expenses, and the rest is put there.
It didn't take long to get to Maikou. Lu and her fellow villagers went home to collect wheat. After the wheat harvest, everyone felt that the factory was unreliable and collectively quit. Later, she followed people to work in a small clothing factory in Yizheng. Within a few months, the small clothing factory closed down and Lu returned to his hometown.
When she wants to go out again, her parents don't want to, because she is "old" and is 24 years old. It's time to talk about marriage However, a young man's heart cannot be locked in an isolated and backward countryside. She insisted on going abroad to work, and finally her parents had to promise her to find something to do in Huaiyin, which is close to home.
So, she and her fellow villager Zhuang Hongmei came to work in a small restaurant next to Huaihai South Road Power Supply Bureau. The owner of this small restaurant is a married girl in their village. Lu helps wash vegetables and dishes here, which is equivalent to a waiter.
At that time, you could only find these things to do in Huaiyin city. In such a big city of Huaiyin, you can't find several powerful factories at all. They are too weak to even support their children. How can you have extra food to feed these migrant workers from the countryside? So at that time, people went out to work in Jiangnan, and few people were willing to come to Huaiyin City to find something to do.
One day, the boss's brother came to a small restaurant for dinner. When he saw these two fellow villagers who were helping in a small restaurant, he excitedly said to them, hey, don't you two know mechanics? There is a factory called Huading on Xinmin Road, which is run by the Japanese. The room we are decorating is for the Japanese. Can't you try?
In short, the dreamer was awakened. In the afternoon, both of them were empty-handed, looking around for this place to sign up. When signing up, they rummaged through their pockets and scraped together a few dollars for the registration fee. When they signed up, they needed an ID card, but Lu only took out a work permit when she was working outside. But fortunately, the person in charge of registration didn't ask them hard. They successfully signed up and passed the later exams, and became formal employees of Huaiyin Huading Shoes Co., Ltd., a Sino-Japanese joint venture.
The year is 1994. She is 24 years old. A rural girl began to paint her colorful city dream with her industrious hands.