Finding an Old Friend

Song Xiaogang rummaged through the cabinet, found a somewhat tattered Chinese-language newspaper, and handed it to Wang Ye.

Wang Ye first checked the date on the front page. This issue was from last month, not the latest one.

It seemed to have been thumbed through by too many people; the entire paper was ragged and worn.

But that did not matter. Wang Ye was not looking to read the news—he merely wanted to use the paper to find an old acquaintance's phone number.

He flipped straight to the advertisements on the last few pages and began examining them one by one.

Advertising in this newspaper was not expensive. One listing seemed to cost only five hundred rubles, or around twenty US dollars.

And the ad would run continuously for a whole week!

It was quite a bargain, excellent value for the money.

Of course, the ads themselves were extremely basic: just a small block the size of a piece of tofu, with a simple line of text.

Whether you wanted to sell something, hire an interpreter, or look for work, you simply stated it in the most concise terms possible.

The person Wang Ye was looking for sold phone cards. His name was Liu Jun!

The phone cards used by international students and Chinese merchants in Moscow were actually similar to the IP calling cards commonly used in China in the past.

They needed to keep in touch with people back home and make frequent calls. They could hardly dial international long distance directly—the charges would be far too high!

That was why people came up with these IP calling cards, which used dedicated lines for calls to China and were relatively inexpensive. They were very popular among international students and Chinese merchants.

These phone cards came in denominations of twenty, fifty, and one hundred US dollars.

There were, of course, cards with higher values, but those were generally purchased by businesspeople. Students naturally did not need to make that many calls.

There were quite a few people selling phone cards in the ad section, but unfortunately, Wang Ye searched for a long time without finding Liu Jun.

In fact, in his previous life, it was only after he had been at school for a while and noticed that he and his classmates had to ask classmates working at the big market to bring back phone cards whenever they needed them that he had a sudden idea. He casually picked up a Chinese-language newspaper and contacted one of the phone-card sellers in it. That person happened to be Liu Jun.

Sellers who advertised phone cards could deliver them, but only if you bought enough!

If you only bought one twenty- or fifty-dollar card, they naturally would not be willing to deliver it. Moscow was so large that a single trip could take a long time.

They would only deliver to your door if you bought several hundred dollars' worth of cards.

Ordinary students generally bought only one twenty- or fifty-dollar card at a time, so they could not enjoy delivery service.

But Wang Ye had been different. He had gritted his teeth and taken out two thousand dollars to wholesale over a hundred phone cards, becoming a "middleman" who profited off the difference...

Wholesale prices were certainly different from retail prices. Back then, he had paid Liu Jun two thousand dollars and received phone cards worth a total of twenty-five hundred dollars.

It took him two or three months to sell them all, and he made a little over three hundred dollars in total.

Because he wanted to sell them faster, he had offered quite a few discounts when selling the cards.

That had also been the first money Wang Ye had ever earned in his life...

But this time, Wang Ye naturally would not engage in such small-scale business as he had in his previous life. He had far greater ambitions!

Unfortunately, Wang Ye flipped through the newspaper several times in a row without finding an advertisement from "Liu Jun"...

That was normal. He remembered that Liu Jun had only sold phone cards as a part-time job to earn some extra money, so he naturally could not have advertised in the paper every day.

The money he made might not even have covered the advertising fees.

He set the matter aside for now. He could keep an eye out over the coming days; there was no need to rush.

Word that Wang Ye had bought a mobile phone quickly spread among the classmates who had arrived with him.

Some of them had actually planned to buy phones already; they had simply just arrived and had not had time to get one yet.

But Wang Ye had quietly gone and bought one himself without saying anything, which drew the "dissatisfaction" of several girls.

"Hey, Brother Ye, why did you go buy a phone by yourself without even telling us? I was planning to get one too. I don't care—you have to take me with you tomorrow to buy a phone!"

"Exactly! Wang Ye, that wasn't right. We all came here together, so we should act together. We know your Russian is good, but you have to consider those of us whose Russian isn't. Take everyone to buy phones tomorrow."

"Brother Ye, you can get that phone for three hundred dollars? That's not expensive. I was going to wait a while before buying one, but since it isn't that costly, I'll go with you tomorrow and get one too."...

Several classmates crowded into Wang Ye's dorm room, clamoring away.

Wang Ye looked helpless. He had not deliberately avoided his classmates and bought a phone by himself.

He had bought the phone because he had things to do—because he wanted to make money. Since his classmates did not seem to need phones urgently, he had not invited them along.

And now, somehow, it had become his fault...

He waved his hand and said with a wry smile, "All right, all right. This time it was my fault. I forgot to let everyone know. How about this? Come to my dorm at exactly ten tomorrow morning, and I'll take everyone to buy phones. It's at that big supermarket, not far away. Just make sure you prepare your money in advance. Oh, right—the phones there range from cheap to expensive. The cheapest ones will cost a little over three hundred dollars altogether, while the expensive ones might run over a thousand. Spend according to your means. Personally, I recommend not buying anything too expensive. A phone is just for making calls..."

Wang Ye was thinking of everyone.

Although he was only eighteen now and looked no different from the others, merely a young man who had just entered university,

in truth, he already had over twenty years of experience in society...

Wang Ye knew that his classmates' parents, including his own, did not earn money easily. There was no need to buy expensive phones just for comparison or vanity.

There was no real need for it. Besides, phones at this time had very basic functions. They could only make calls and send text messages.

Honestly, they were fundamentally almost all the same.

It was not like twenty years later, when the gap between low-, mid-, and high-end smartphones would be obvious.

But clearly, not everyone took Wang Ye's words to heart, especially the girls...

The next day, when Wang Ye led a large group to the big supermarket to buy phones, the difference between the boys and girls became immediately apparent.

The boys mostly sought value for money and bought relatively cheap phones. The Nokia 3310 was their first choice.

The girls, on the other hand, without exception looked down on the Nokia 3310 and chose pricier, prettier phones, almost all of them costing more than five hundred dollars...