"Juan's mother, your Xiao Long really is something!" Sister-in-Law Lu sat on the Li family's sofa, stitching a shoe sole as she spoke to Liang Yuemei. "That fish nobody could sell-with just a word from him, someone bought the whole lot... he's really something!"
As she spoke, Sister-in-Law Lu drove her awl hard through the sole. She pulled it out, passed her needle through the hole, drew the hemp rope threaded through it all the way through, wound it around twice, and finally gave it a hard tug. That finished one stitch.
What a bother. Looking at those dense stitches and thinking of the hundreds needed for a single shoe, what a laborious undertaking it was!
But the women were used to it. Only soles stitched this way were sturdy enough. Walking was every farmer's most common means of getting around back then.
If daily step counters had existed then, what farmer wouldn't have clocked tens of thousands of steps a day?
"Oh, it was just a lucky coincidence. He happened to run into the right person." Liang Yuemei, who was also sitting on a stool stitching a sole, smiled. She rubbed her awl against her hair, then pushed it into the sole.
She knew the facts and knew that her younger brother-in-law Li Long really was lucky, but she didn't want the team members putting him on too high a pedestal.
As a country woman, she didn't know the term "killing with praise," but she understood the situation and knew it wasn't good for Li Long.
These past few days, everyone in the team had been talking about how Li Long had solved those people's trouble selling fish. The evening Xie Yundong and the others first came back, plenty of people had already learned they hadn't sold their fish.