Hong Kong Apple Jeans

The next day was Sunday, a rare day off.

The school, bustling all week, had quieted a little. With fewer slingshot-wielding brats in the woods, the birds returned to the treetops, full of life; with fewer artistic youths strolling through the grass, the insects mated in peace-for Demacia; with fewer men and women who knew neither hunger nor fullness in the cafeteria, even the stench of the toilets had grown dull, with a sweet aftertaste.

Engineer Shao's son, Shao Liang, appeared at the gates of Xibao Middle School in fashionable clothes.

He carried a green army bag of the sort common at the time, but had deliberately folded back the flap covering its opening, exposing the aluminum zipper to gleam in the sunlight.

His Sailor Shirt, jeans, and Warrior Shoes were also the absolute height of fashion.

The Sailor Shirt was the blue-and-white striped undershirt sailors wore, also called a Navy Shirt. It was the most fashionable summer choice for young people, cool and good-looking, and a little more dashing than the limited-edition Adidas of later years. Wearing something like that to play sports was much like a student playing soccer in LV socks thirty years later: an extravagant sort of cool.

The mighty Warrior Shoes were naturally even more impressive, with their high tops and thick soles. Even knockoffs cost over ten yuan a pair, while genuine ones cost thirty-six, and could be impossible to get even if you had the money. But whether fake or genuine, Warrior Shoes in the eighties were legendary equipment. Wearing them out meant more than looking handsome and extravagant; there was swagger in it, too. Especially when wearing Warrior Shoes outside school, a kid without a certain amount of fighting ability might well end up going home barefoot and crying.

So students wearing Warrior Shoes were much like thugs wearing cloth shoes: wearing them was dangerous, and anyone who could keep wearing them looked all the more handsome, which encouraged even more people to wear them.

Occasionally, a few boarding students passed by. When they saw Shao Liang, they would watch him from a distance for a while. If anyone had calculated his head-turning rate, it would naturally have been one hundred percent.

Shao Liang seemed accustomed to this atmosphere. He deliberately stood at the gate for quite a while before entering the school, then surveyed the single-story buildings, playing field, and pit latrines around him with disdain...

The meat processing plant's Factory-Run Middle School was naturally better than a township middle school. Like most public facilities in this era, those belonging to large state-owned enterprises were always the best, followed by those of government departments, then public institutions, and finally those serving ordinary people.

State-owned enterprises had profits of their own, and once they had paid the state its profits and taxes, they could spend as much as they liked. Naturally, they strove for excellence in the schools they built for employees' children. Besides, in an age of material shortages, state-owned enterprises could trade their own products for good things, whatever they produced. Government departments and public institutions depended on fiscal appropriations and naturally could not do the same.

However, although the meat processing plant's school had excellent facilities, it was severely lacking in personnel, particularly teachers, who were very difficult to recruit through normal channels. University graduates were all assigned jobs at the time, as were graduates of secondary teacher-training schools. Even if the meat processing plant wanted a quota of just one or two teacher-training graduates, getting approval from the higher authorities was difficult.

Besides, a factory ultimately had to put production first. Against a backdrop of dire talent shortages, they certainly had to meet production needs before considering the employees' school.

As a result, although the Factory-Run Middle School Shao Liang attended had a three-story building and a cinder track, most of its teachers were workers promoted to cadre positions. Calling them unskilled would have been wrong, but their teaching ability really was not high.

To date, the meat processing plant's Factory-Run Middle School had not produced a single junior college student.

Employees' children with slightly better grades would make the county middle school their first choice when entering high school. Only those whose entrance examination scores were truly too low, and who could find no connections, would attend the Factory-Run Middle School.

In the mock examination at the start of the school year, Shao Liang had scored only 120 points in total, an average of twenty per subject. His results could hardly have been worse.

Engineer Shao had only approached Yang Rui because he truly had no other options.

Other teachers had no interest in tutoring a child like this. Even if personal obligations made them agree, none believed Shao Liang could get into university.

These were years when even top students might end up back home farming. Who would dare make such a guarantee?

"Do you know someone at your school called Yang Rui?" Shao Liang stopped a student to ask. He had been ordered here by his father and had no choice but to make the trip, so his attitude was hardly going to be good.

The student he stopped looked him up and down for a while, then asked, "What do you want with Brother Rui?"

"I have something to see him about."

"What is it?" The student looked alert.

He was being interrogated. Shao Liang sighed helplessly and said, "Tutoring. I'm from Xibao Meat Processing Plant. I know him."

"Oh, you know him. Then go straight ahead. When you reach the red door, that's the Sports Room. The Rui Study Group people are there all day."

Having fulfilled his counterintelligence duties, the student took another look at Shao Liang's Warrior Shoes before sauntering off.

Shao Liang looked around as he walked and found the Sports Room easily.

The two small, single-story rooms were packed with people. Some who could not fit inside were even standing outside.

Shao Liang craned his neck to look and spotted Yang Rui in the middle of the crowd.

Unlike what he had imagined, Yang Rui was dressed ordinarily, but his eyes were sharp and bright, and he had quite the air of a leader.

After all this time spent building it up, the Rui Study Group now had more than fifty members, all of whom followed Yang Rui's orders. With the test papers selling well and payments arriving steadily, their sense of group identity had swelled to unprecedented heights. Even if Yang Rui had lacked a leader's bearing, it would have been cultivated in him.

Yang Rui's voice was deep and clear as he said, "...We've made a lot of preparations to send this signal. Now it's time to spread it. Next, we'll visit the teachers one by one to express our appreciation, in the order listed on the Teacher Evaluation Form. Those assigned tasks: team one, remember to bring the teacher appreciation gifts; team two, keep hold of the firecrackers and set them off on time; team three, maintain our formation and keep Rui Study Group members separate from onlookers. Don't let us get scattered. Also, our visits mustn't interfere with the teachers' normal lives. Prospective members working around the perimeter, pay attention when telling the stories. You absolutely mustn't contradict yourselves. Get each teacher's details straight, and don't mix them up..."

Shao Liang listened in bewilderment, but one thought grew clearer in his mind: Putting on another mysterious act, isn't he?

Yet the moment Yang Rui finished speaking, everyone around him dispersed at once, each going about their own tasks.

Only he was left standing in the middle, face-to-face with Yang Rui.

"Which school are you from?" Yang Rui looked him over and confirmed that his own school had no student this trendy. Apart from anything else, Shao Liang's outfit cost upward of fifty yuan, more than an ordinary worker's monthly wages and over a fifth of a farming household's annual income. Xibao Middle School had no students that wealthy, nor did they have that sort of fashion sense.

Shao Liang smiled and said, "I'm Shao Liang. I'm looking for Yang Rui."

"That's me."

"I'm Engineer Shao's son..." Shao Liang studied Yang Rui in turn. Feeling that he was just a student about his own age, dressed more dowdily, he grew increasingly certain and asked, "How did you trick my dad?"

"What?" Yang Rui was even more surprised. Engineer Shao had gone to great lengths to give Xibao Middle School a batch of canned food, all to ask him to tutor his son. Where had this talk of fraud come from?

Shao Liang snorted twice and said, "I don't know what you did to bewitch my dad, but anyway, I'm not coming here for tutoring. I came all this way just to let you know."

With that, he cast a wary glance at the broad, burly Cao Baoming beside him, then turned to leave.

"Wait." Yang Rui could not let him leave just like that. The canned food had already been given out; leaving this favor hanging would make it difficult to repay.

Shao Liang stopped, as though he had expected this, and said, "I knew it. Can't bear to give up, can you?"

Yang Rui pointed at his own nose, at a loss for a reply.

"I have an idea." Shao Liang chuckled, opened his green army bag, and took out a pair of jeans. "I won't come to you for tutoring, but I won't tell my dad either. That saves you time and saves me time, too. Besides, I'll give you a pair of jeans. When my dad asks, you help me keep the lie going. We both get something out of it. How about it?"

As he spoke, he tossed the jeans to Yang Rui.

When Yang Rui had worked as a tutor before, he had encountered students like Shao Liang. He had not expected to encounter one even after returning to the eighties. He could not help laughing. "You might think it's a good idea, but I don't."

"You want to swindle a bit more out of him, right? That's not impossible, actually. As long as you're willing to split it evenly, I can even help you." As he spoke, Shao Liang smoothed his hair in a dashing gesture and said, "Look at the jeans first. Hong Kong Apple. You can't buy these in Xi County."

"Hong Kong... Apple... jeans?" Yang Rui was stunned by those three terms strung together.

Shao Liang looked even more pleased with himself. "Never seen them before, have you? Smuggled in through Guangzhou. A pair costs over a hundred yuan. Consider this one a first-meeting gift. Just do as I say, and whenever I get new stock, I'll sell it to you at cost."

To make himself more convincing, Shao Liang even lifted the hem of his Sailor Shirt, revealing the apple logo on his trouser leg.

A whole, large red apple was thus displayed before Yang Rui.

"It really is... Hong Kong Apple." Yang Rui was rather moved.