Ye Yaodong set down the basket he was carrying with A-Cai and looked at the catch already piled all over the buying station's floor.
He pointed at it. "Do you know how much these toadfish would sell for? Brother Cai said only three and a half fen a jin. There are about 1,200 to 1,300 jin here, so they'd only fetch forty-odd yuan."
"Forty-odd yuan! Twelve or thirteen hundred jin of catch, and all it'd fetch is forty-odd yuan. Just hearing the price breaks my heart. How am I supposed to sell them? How could I bring myself to?"
Father Ye and Mother Ye exchanged looks. Although they knew this fish had always been cheap, hearing the figures laid out like that made their hearts ache a little too.
If it were just about any other fish, worth eight or nine fen or a tenth of a yuan per jin, it would fetch over a hundred yuan, and they wouldn't feel so bad.
Father Ye frowned and asked him, "Then what are you planning to do?"
"Keep all of them and hire people to dry them tomorrow. There's no rain these next couple of days, and we've got northerly winds and sunshine. With some wind and sun, they should dry easily."
He had just done some rough calculations in his head. Without aiming too high, he could price the dried fish at four tenths of a yuan per jin.
Toadfish had a high water content, but if five or six jin could yield one jin dried, he could still make half as much again. Labor was dirt cheap. Hiring one or two people would only cost a little over a yuan per person per day.
So these 1,200 to 1,300 jin, which would originally fetch only forty-odd yuan, could double