After all, most of the Youth Palace’s summer teachers were temporarily recruited from key neighboring schools. Chinese and math teachers were easy to find; good English teachers were not.
And so, Xu Huiqing’s job finally stabilized.
After her job settled down, Yinshan Kindergarten’s summer program officially began. Including Xiaoxi, six new students now joined Teacher Xi’s class. The two teachers simply pushed two wooden tables together, and all six children sat around the two long tables. Every day, they played games, told stories, and worked on training the children’s daily routines.
Xiaoxi, who had started kindergarten three days early, turned out to be the most well-adjusted of the new arrivals. Having weathered the first three days where she would cry for a stretch every time Xu Huiqing left, now, with the other new students arriving, she calmly played with her toys on one side and comforted the new kids: “After school, Mommy will come pick us up.”
Most of the time, Xiaoxi was a very emotionally stable child. She didn’t cry just because other kids in the class were crying. Once she confirmed that her mom would come to pick her up at the same set time every day and wasn’t leaving her here for good, her emotions quickly settled down.
Her calm, in turn, affected Xu Huiqing.
She felt the benefits of timely letting go after Xiaoxi started kindergarten. Just as Teacher Xi had said, she and Xiaoxi were weaning each other off.
Sometimes, it’s not the child who can’t leave the mother, but the mother who can’t leave the child.
Xiaoxi now had her friends and kindergarten life, and Xu Huiqing had more time and space to do her own things.
Every day, Xu Huiqing taught from nine to ten in the morning, had a fifteen-minute break, then taught again from quarter past ten to quarter past eleven. In the afternoon, she started at two and taught until quarter past four.
Since the midday break was long, after eating lunch at the Youth Palace cafeteria, Xu Huiqing would stop by the surrounding markets to buy fruits and other ingredients. She would then make a mango pudding or some mango pomelo sago for the children.
Officer Little Zhou came home for lunch every day. By the time Xu Huiqing finished making the desserts, it was almost exactly when Zhou Huaijin returned home from work. His house was only occupied by him, and his refrigerator was practically empty. Xu Huiqing would borrow his fridge, placing the finished mango puddings, milk jellies, and mango pomelo sago in there to chill for a while. By the time Zhou Huaijin finished his lunch, the desserts in his fridge were basically set. Xu Huiqing would pack individual portions for Xiaoxi’s kindergarten teachers and classmates, take them to the school, and always leave a large portion for Officer Little Zhou to take back to share with his work-unit colleagues. This got to the point where everyone in Zhou Huaijin’s unit thought he had found a girlfriend, and they never stopped teasing him about it.
Sometimes Xu Huiqing would also pack a batch to bring to the Youth Palace for her colleagues, especially for the person in charge, Teacher Hu.
Occasionally, she would deliberately prepare extra to give to the students in her class as prizes, to motivate their enthusiasm for learning English. This not only earned her the affection of the students but also won the approval of their parents.
For Xu Huiqing, all these were small, pleasant gestures that cost little but brought great benefit. They allowed both her and Xiaoxi to quickly integrate into their new life.
The greatest advantage this brought Xu Huiqing was this: the proof of income that originally would have required at least three months of work to obtain was issued by Teacher Hu in just half a month, thanks to those two weeks of constant little sweet treats.
With the work-unit-stamped income certificate, she could go to the bank and apply for a housing loan. She immediately found Zhou Huaijin, whom she had also been feeding for half a month, and asked him to help with the purchase of shop units in the neighboring shopping mall. Whether it was the mall’s management or the people at the bank, she needed Officer Little Zhou’s help to make introductions and arrangements.
Both the mall management and Officer Little Zhou’s classmate at the bank all assumed that Xu Huiqing was Officer Little Zhou’s girlfriend. Learning that she wanted to buy shop units, they all gave her the maximum discounts.
After seeing the price they quoted for the shop units, Xu Huiqing carefully checked the developer’s Real Estate Certificate, House Ownership Certificate, and other documents. Then, she bought eight shop units in one go!
Yes, eight!
Terrified that the cash on her would depreciate and become worthless, she practically couldn’t wait to spend every last cent she had!
Because the Zhao family ran a home appliance business, they were very clear about the several bouts of inflation in the eighties and nineties. Xu Huiqing thus knew that another wave of hyperinflation would hit in the second half of this very year.
By hyperinflation, that meant inflation suddenly surging to twenty to forty percent on top of the previous baseline. There had been inflation in 1980, 1985, and 1988, but each time it increased by roughly ten percent. The currency depreciation had been gentle on the populace. What people felt most was an increase in the variety of goods on the market and a rise in wages; they rarely felt the rise in commodity prices and currency devaluation so starkly and suddenly.
Because of the Zhao Family Appliance Store, Xu Huiqing’s memory of this year’s second-half hyperinflation was extremely vivid, so she was desperate to empty all the cash on her as quickly as possible.
She unwrapped the cloth bundle she had taken from her father-in-law’s room—the one tied up with the old man’s worn-out shorts. Inside was a total of sixty thousand yuan in cash.
The wholesale cost of home appliances was never cheap. And it was summer—peak season for selling refrigerators, air conditioners, and fans. This sixty thousand yuan was the money Old Zhao had set aside for his next bulk purchase of televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and the like. Xu Huiqing had scooped it all up in one go.
Originally, she planned to use the sixty thousand to buy shop units along the row facing the main road, especially the very best unit right at the entrance near the bus stop by the roadside. However, not all the shops in the mall were for sale to the public. As the developer, the Provincial Construction Group was required to retain twenty to thirty percent of the mall’s shops for itself.
In other words, this street-facing row of shops—the most valuable ones in the best locations—all belonged to the Provincial Construction Group’s retained properties and were not available for sale.
But because Xu Huiqing was the very first buyer of the mall’s shop units, and because Zhou Huaijin had made the introduction, and also because she was making such a massive purchase in a single transaction, the Provincial Construction Group released two street-facing shops for her. Neither was in the absolute primo spot at the entrance, but they were among the best locations in the entire mall. One was 42 square meters, the other 46, priced at 360 yuan per square meter.
These two shops alone consumed a large portion of Xu Huiqing’s total cash, with the fifty percent down payment coming to fifteen thousand yuan.
In addition to these two, Xu Huiqing bought another street-facing shop at the Four-way Intersection near the Night Market, also just over forty square meters, but the price was somewhat cheaper. She used the rest to buy interior shops near the staircase landing. These five shops, the largest being 38 square meters and the smallest 26, were basically all connected together.
Because the “loan” was so large, Xu Huiqing did not pour all her cash into the shops. Instead, she retained a small portion of cash to temporarily cover the mortgage payments.
Given Xu Huiqing’s income, she wouldn’t normally have qualified for so many loans. But banks at the time had lending quotas to meet. Seeing Xu Huiqing make such a hefty purchase, even though the salary listed on her income certificate was only two hundred, the bank still deemed Xu Huiqing capable of repayment and approved her loans.
In truth, after buying all these shop units, the money Xu Huiqing had left truly wasn’t enough to cover the mortgage payments. So She took out her silver dollars and asked the bank if they would take them, and for how much.
The bank offered different prices based on the coins’ year and edition, but the highest did not exceed one hundred yuan. The lowest was for those from the Republic of China Year 3, priced at thirty yuan apiece.
This price was far below the floor Xu Huiqing had in mind. She had also vastly overestimated the value of these Silver Dollars.
In her previous life, she had seen Old Zhao treasure these silver dollars and ancient coins, saying they were worth so-and-so many thousands now. She had thought that at this time, these Silver Dollars must be worth at least a few thousand per coin, right?
That was why she had so readily put almost all her cash into buying shop units.
Reality slapped her in the face. Of the few Silver Dollars she had brought with her, apart from one valued at a hundred yuan, the remaining two were priced at thirty and eighty yuan respectively.
Thirty yuan per coin—ten coins would be only three hundred yuan. What could three hundred do now? A month and a half’s wages, nothing more. Even at a hundred per coin, ten coins would only be a thousand. She had a total of twenty-some Silver Dollars on her. Even at the highest price, that was only a couple thousand yuan, and there were still other Silver Dollars back in her hometown she hadn’t brought. She also didn’t know the exact year variants of those.
Seeing that Silver Dollars were nowhere near as valuable as she had imagined, she didn’t rush to sell them. She took the three she had brought back and planned to ask around elsewhere.
Back in her rental room, she pulled out the purchase contracts for the shop units she had just signed. Having spent almost all of her cash, Xu Huiqing finally breathed a sigh of relief. Otherwise, she would have been constantly uneasy with that much cash on hand, afraid of a break-in or that the money would soon depreciate into nothing.
Neither the developer nor Zhou Huaijin had expected such boldness and grand scale from Xu Huiqing.
Truth be told, from the very first dinner she treated him to after coming to the city, from the way she ordered dishes, Zhou Huaijin knew this young woman was probably used to spending freely and wasn’t short on money. But he never imagined she would have this much—producing sixty thousand in one go.
After they got back, she even asked him where there was a pawnshop. She wanted to try pawnshops and other banks to ask about the value of these few Silver Dollars and offload them all at once.
Zhou Huaijin considered for a moment, then said, “If you trust me, don’t rush to sell. Let me ask around for you.”
What he meant, naturally, wasn’t pawnshops but coin collectors.
Sometimes private coin collectors would offer much higher prices than banks and pawnshops. Banks and pawnshops, after all, were in it for profit. Coin collectors were in it for passion.
Xu Huiqing had already dispersed so much cash; was she really going to worry that Zhou Huaijin would take off with a few worthless Silver Dollars? She just stuffed the coins right into his hands.
Seeing how much she trusted him, Zhou Huaijin laughed and handed the coins back. “No need to give them to me. Once I’ve found someone and gotten a clear picture of the market, you can bring them along and we’ll go together.”