Chapter 109: What on Earth Is Going On?

This really did become the top priority of their trip to Hanghai.

Zhang Lanzhi complained bitterly that, by her calculations, her period should have arrived two days earlier. It had surely been delayed by all the exertion of the past few days. She was so anxious that, now that it had finally come, she was flustered and at a loss, having made no preparations.

Rang Weidong’s solution was to bring out even the bottle of Maotai. This was hardly a problem for him. Thick-skinned as ever, he went to ask a stewardess on the secretary’s behalf.

Sure enough, the stewardess gave him a small rolled package. Knowing exactly what it was, Rang Weidong took it back to Zhang Lanzhi, whose face was flushed but who continued eating sea cucumber.

The secretary was even more astonished than she had been by the sight of people drinking and smoking on the plane.

“What is this?”

Rang Weidong was even more surprised. “You don’t know? You’ve never used one? They don’t have these in Rongdu?”

In his previous life, he had attended a county middle school, where he had little contact with girls in the first place. In such a remote area, these things certainly did not exist. Later, after being injured in Shangzhou and taking a job as a security guard, he had been almost completely cut off from young women. Still, he vaguely remembered that the older women in the residential compound had initially used strips of cloth.

Zhang Lanzhi confirmed it for him: at least in Western Mountain Factory and all the surrounding counties, they had never seen such a thing.

Rang Weidong gave the secretary a brief explanation of how it was used. Even though she had never encountered one before, she had seen enough television commercials.

Abandoning her sea cucumber, Zhang Lanzhi rushed to the lavatory in delighted excitement to change.

When she returned, she wore the expression of someone who had suddenly realized that life could actually be like this.

She found the revolutionary product astonishingly comfortable. Not only had she never seen one at the factory in that remote mountain valley, she had not even encountered one after arriving in Rongdu.

For a moment, Rang Weidong considered whether he should go into the business himself.

But traditional attitudes made the trade seem somewhat embarrassing, and besides, they had not even managed to solve the problem of toilet paper. This product would surely be even more complicated.

He dismissed the thought.

Before they got off the plane, however, he still asked the stewardess about it. He learned that even in Hanghai such products were exceedingly rare. Apart from those issued by their work units for official use, they were sold only in stores catering to foreigners.

Zhang Lanzhi was filled with admiration that he had dared to ask a stewardess even about such a thing.

Yet she did not object to Rang Weidong chatting and laughing with other beautiful women.

After arriving, they went straight to the foreign-goods store where he had once bought a Sanyo tape recorder. He deftly found a scalper to obtain some exchange coupons, then came out with several packets.

Only after that did they check into a guesthouse.

It was not that Rang Weidong had changed expression the moment Zhang Lanzhi got her period. At this time, Hanghai had far fewer hotels for foreigners than Yuezhou. There were not even enough rooms when foreign guests arrived, so such hotels were entirely closed to mainland residents.

Cadres of a certain rank could of course stay in proper hotels.

Ordinary people traveling for work or study could only stay in the various guesthouses run by urban districts, streets, or their own industries. They were watched closely by neighborhood matrons and the local police assigned to each street.

Tourism involving aimless travel from one end of the country to another was not encouraged either. Anyone who behaved that way was generally regarded as no good.

So Zhang Lanzhi was undoubtedly happier staying in the Instrument Factory Guesthouse, where men and women slept in separate quarters and a bed in a four- or five-person room cost 3.2 yuan a day, than she would have been in a five-star hotel.

At least she did not have to toil day and night.

After putting down their luggage, she ignored her physical discomfort and enthusiastically insisted on going to work with Rang Weidong.

She wanted to go shopping, didn’t she?

Rang Weidong was depressed as he went out with her. Did she really have to look so relieved?

Was he really that disappointing?

They had chosen this guesthouse because the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Nonferrous Metals Factory—the one they had done business with several times—had long ago recommended it to anyone coming to Hanghai.

Anyone carrying an industrial work certificate or letter of introduction was advised to stay at this guesthouse in Huangpu District.

The advantage was that more than a dozen bus routes to every part of Hanghai ran nearby. Even when Rang Weidong called the vacuum-packing-machine manufacturer from the front desk to confirm their appointment, the person on the other end asked where he was.

The moment he gave the address, the man immediately replied, “Take such-and-such route, get off at such-and-such stop, and change to such-and-such bus.” At most, they would need to transfer once.

The answer came without a moment’s thought, which showed just how convenient the guesthouse’s location was.

In fact, the destination was only two or three stops away. The factory itself stood in a cramped lane, occupying a narrow, crowded compound shared by several plants under the Municipal Food Machinery General Works.

At last, Rang Weidong saw the vacuum-packaging machine of this era.

As it turned out, they could not go to an ordinary vacuum-machine factory. Those industrial vacuum pumps were enormous and consumed huge amounts of power; they were used to evacuate the air from television picture tubes.

Only a food-machinery factory made products suited to their needs.

And this particular type of machine had only appeared that year.

The factory had copied a Japanese design. It looked like a single-door refrigerator standing a little over half a man’s height, with a lid that could be lifted conveniently with both hands.

The sealing, vacuuming, and heat-pressing section was forty or fifty centimeters wide, meaning the largest bags it could seal were only that size.

Its operating efficiency was certainly not high. Each bag had to be placed inside by hand, evacuated, and sealed individually.

But Rang Weidong thought he could simply have two or three people work around it in a production line. The machine would be one merciless cog in the process: the workers could rotate endlessly, while the equipment kept running without pause.

The price was one-tenth that of an original Japanese machine, but it still cost twelve thousand yuan and weighed just over 120 kilograms.

As for the EVOH heat-resistant sterile packaging bags Rang Weidong had brought, the factory technicians nodded and confirmed that the machine could seal them. They could also supply similar bags, but each cost ten fen because they were custom-made in Japan.

That was the difference between domestic and imported goods—or perhaps the difference caused by an extra middleman making a profit as a comprador.

Rang Weidong asked to see a demonstration using one of their ready-made vacuum bags.

The technicians readily agreed. After the heating unit warmed up, it made a sizzling sound followed by a sharp click, sealing a bag around a randomly selected ball of waste paper and clamping it tightly inside.

Rang Weidong immediately prepared to make the purchase.

The secretary, who had been trailing behind him and taking her time wandering through the lanes, suddenly reminded him, “Shouldn’t we look at a few more? Whenever our factory develops a trial product, we have to run a whole batch to check the yield. And this equipment is meant for continuous operation, isn’t it? We should also test its durability.”

Perhaps her recent experience of watching Rang Weidong go from a complete beginner to someone rapidly improving had left a particularly deep impression on her.

Even Rang Weidong noticed the struggle on the technician’s face.

The man finally spoke with some disdain. “Each test bag costs ten fen. If you use one, then someone else uses another, and in the end you don’t buy the machine, who’s going to cover the cost?”

Rang Weidong was generous. “It’s only ten fen per bag. We’ll start with a hundred and give them a try. No—ninety-nine.”

As he spoke, he pulled out a ten-yuan note and courteously pushed it across the table. He was not trying to take advantage of them.

The technician finally admitted helplessly, “Because we lack precise temperature-control technology, the temperature of our heat-sealing strip fluctuates by twenty degrees Celsius. It is alternately too cold and too hot, so the leakage rate is approximately fifteen percent. Japanese machines fluctuate by only two degrees. Their equipment also comes with a high-efficiency ultraviolet sterilization module, whereas ours is much less effective. So in the end, we can guarantee storage for only about a year. The original Japanese machines can preserve the contents for up to three years.”

Inside, Rang Weidong was already thinking, That’s more than good enough. If industrial equipment can preserve sealed cooked meat for a year, what more do you want? And you even have ultraviolet sterilization?

But he still had to look dissatisfied.

“What else? Vacuum and ultraviolet light—are there any other sterilization methods?”

The technician clearly knew nothing about Master Liao’s high-temperature sterilization process.

“No. We admit there’s still a gap between our products and Japanese ones. Our evacuation time is sixty seconds, while Japanese equipment takes fifteen. We can run continuously for only four hours, whereas imported machines have forced-air cooling and can operate for twenty-four hours. The only place in all of Hanghai that has imported a continuous vacuum-packaging machine is the cannery. That one can be used in a production line. Ours can only process one chamber at a time, so the efficiency is much lower.”

Rang Weidong asked about the continuous vacuum-packaging machine. It might indeed have been the kind of system he imagined, with many workers operating around a single piece of equipment.

The quoted price was several million yuan, immediately killing that ambition.

For now, he would bring this machine home.

Rang Weidong used the same old approach. “Sell me this one—the sample unit. I’ll transport it back first and have the city leaders use it to get the whole factory running. Once we produce some goods, we can apply for funding. When you release an improved model, I’ll come back and buy new equipment in bulk.”

He did not mind buying secondhand goods in the least.

The important thing was to get started.

The factory representatives discussed it among themselves. They probably felt that the defects in this sample unit were already fixed and that improvements would be better made in the next model. After some negotiation, they offered to transfer the sample machine for 8,900 yuan.

Haha! His good secretary had just saved him another three thousand yuan!

He was so delighted that he nearly turned around and hugged her, kissing her twice.

But the girl would probably dodge him. It would be too humiliating, so he let the idea go.

Rang Weidong also persuaded them to throw in several dozen vacuum-sealing bags, making it look as though he could return home and cobble together a little demonstration project to help secure funding.

On the journey from E'Chang to Yuezhou, he had sold cameras for nearly seven thousand yuan in cash. In Yuezhou, he had sold another two hundred cameras and collected more than five thousand yuan in payments.

Although he had spent quite a lot in Yuezhou, apart from the seventy thousand yuan transferred by telegraph, he had not spent more than he had earned.

After reducing the camera commission, the profit from four hundred units came to just over three thousand yuan.

Rang Weidong had originally been prepared to use the ten-thousand-yuan certificate of deposit he kept in Hanghai, but there was no need now. He could simply pay cash and have the machine packed for shipment.

Besides, an ordinary buyer might not even know how to transport equipment weighing more than a hundred kilograms back home.

Freight services were still extremely underdeveloped. Most factories handled their own transport, while private logistics were disorganized and unreliable. The railway parcel service Rang Weidong and the others knew how to use had a weight limit of one hundred kilograms.

But in Rang Weidong’s case, none of his past experiences had gone to waste.

He paid for the factory’s truck to transport both the machine and the two of them to the freight wharf in the northern suburbs. To a cargo ship, a load of little more than a hundred kilograms was nothing.

The biggest surprise came at the shipping department on the wharf, where he discovered that a cargo ship scheduled to unload in Shangzhou would be departing soon. The machine could be sent directly home.

All they had to do was notify Xia Xueying to collect it at the wharf. That was precisely what all those dockworkers were there to do.

Just as they were about to ride back to the city with the truck, the secretary, who had been silent all this time, suddenly spoke.

“I heard the driver say that we passed a small town just now. I understand the Hanghai dialect. I want to go and have a look. My parents have told me countless times what our old water-town home was like.”

On the way from the guesthouse to the machinery factory, the secretary had changed out of the skirt suit and black stockings she had worn on the plane and put her military uniform back on.

She had probably felt safe enough to change again.

After all, their repeated experiments over the past few days had made it obvious that the military uniform was even more alluring than her office outfit. Add black stockings, and Rang Weidong had no chance of resisting.

In truth, most straight men figured things out once they had experienced women.

Rang Weidong had merely spent years deliberately avoiding and suppressing the feelings between men and women. He was not stupid.

After being disciplined for several days, he had become quite well behaved. He nodded.

When the driver said he was getting off in the small town to buy cigarettes, they gave him the money and were left behind as the only two people in a water-town settlement where they knew no one.

At that time, it was nothing more than a shabby rural town. Yet it did possess the imposing air of the great family homes one never saw in the countryside of eastern Sichuan. There were arched bridges, ceremonial gateways, and old streets that seemed to retain echoes of their former bustle.

The delicate, graceful atmosphere of the Jiangnan region immediately stirred Zhang Lanzhi’s melancholy.

She followed a dilapidated old street winding beside little bridges and running water, as though she had stepped into a girlhood dream beneath a veil of misty rain.

The flagstone pavement, mottled walls, and dry, rough-hewn wooden pillars were enough to bring tears to the corners of her eyes.

Rang Weidong followed as if he were watching a play. Returning to his own village had never moved him in the slightest.

Could she also have been reborn, and simply treasured the rare chance to return to her hometown?

There happened to be a stall selling sponge cakes by the roadside. He bought a box and followed leisurely behind her, finally finding enough mental space to wonder whether the figure walking ahead of him was his secretary, his girlfriend, or perhaps his wife.

Zhang Lanzhi herself had never once raised the subject.

In this era, that was an exceedingly unusual state of affairs.

Rang Weidong had always been either working or dealing with his secretary. Only now, with his period forcing him to pause, did he finally think about it.