Chapter 12: Setting Off for the Construction Site
Even though he didn’t have to go sell vegetables today, Xu An still needed to get busy making boxed lunches, so he got up at four in the morning as usual.
After getting up and washing up, he grabbed a flashlight and rode his bicycle to town.
When he arrived at the town’s wholesale market, the sky was just beginning to lighten, but the market was already bustling with noise.
Following his memory from yesterday, Xu An found the area selling chilled ingredients.
Chilled ingredients certainly weren’t as fresh as their fresh counterparts, but any food sold in the wholesale market had to at least meet national food safety standards.
The texture was just slightly inferior to fresh ingredients.
"Hey, you over there. Yeah, I’m talking to you."
He was in the middle of comparing the quality of the ingredients at the various stalls when he heard the voice and looked up instinctively. The speaker was a burly, bald man with two heavily tattooed arms, and he was pointing right at him.
Xu An was certain he didn’t know the man. He stood his ground, not moving, and quietly watched the bald man.
"Bald Chen, I told you to wear long sleeves, but you wouldn’t listen. With the way you look, who wouldn’t be scared?" The stall owner next to Bald Chen saw the situation and mocked him mercilessly.
"In this weather? I’d die of heatstroke in long sleeves."
After a moment’s hesitation, Xu An walked over. After all, of all the stalls, Bald Chen’s had the best quality meat.
"I saw you yesterday, kid. Figured you wouldn’t be buying meat here. Didn’t expect you to show up today."
"Why did you think I wouldn’t come, boss?" Xu An pulled a pack of Double Happiness cigarettes from his pocket, taking one out and offering it to Bald Chen.
Bald Chen took it and tucked it behind his ear. He leaned closer to Xu An and said in a voice only the two of them could hear, "I saw you yesterday. When you were leaving, that person handed you a flyer. After you read it, you headed off in that direction."
"Eight or nine out of ten people who go that way don’t come back. They get blinded by money, obsessed with it. Especially the younger ones—they think it’s no big deal."
’So he saw what happened yesterday.’ Xu An just smiled without replying and focused on picking out pork from the stall.
For steamed meat patties, it was best to use pork with some fat. Too lean and it would be dry; too fatty and it would be greasy. A three-to-seven or two-to-eight fat-to-lean ratio was the most suitable.
He picked out a few pieces, put them in a red plastic bag, and felt the weight. It was about ten jin. He handed it to the bald boss to be weighed.
"Eleven jin. Seven yuan a jin. That’ll be seventy-seven yuan altogether."
He pulled money from the inner pocket of his pants, counted out seventy-seven yuan for the boss, took the meat, and headed to the daily necessities section.
One hundred disposable plastic lunch boxes at 0.35 yuan each came to thirty-five yuan; one hundred disposable plastic soup containers at 0.1 yuan each were ten yuan; one hundred pairs of disposable chopsticks were five yuan; fifty disposable spoons were six yuan; and a bundle of one hundred transparent plastic bags was six yuan. The total expense came to sixty-two yuan.
If his grandmother hadn’t given him three hundred yuan, and if Uncle Dongliang hadn’t guaranteed he could bring twenty people, Xu An would have planned to just make ten boxed lunches as a trial run. He would only gradually increase the quantity if sales were good, rather than buying so many supplies at once.
On his way out, he passed a stall selling stainless steel products. When he saw the kind of soup buckets commonly found in restaurants and fast-food shops, he was suddenly tempted.
It took over an hour to ride his bicycle from home to the Zijing Garden construction site. There would be no shortage of bumps along the way, and the soup was very likely to spill. If he put it all in one large bucket and portioned it out at the site, he wouldn’t have this problem.
He asked for the price—fifty yuan each. Xu An gritted his teeth and paid for one.
He had bought pretty much everything he needed for the day. Carrying a large pile of things, he returned to where his bicycle was parked. He placed everything into the baskets and used a strap with hooks to secure them to the back of the bike.
While he was doing this, Xu An saw several figures walking in the direction of the Anxin Food Processing Company.
’Business seems to be booming.’
Xu An muttered to himself, then got on his bicycle and headed for home.
When he got back to the village, he saw someone on a tricycle blocking the entrance to his house from a distance. As he got closer, Xu An could make out the person’s face. It was Xu Heping.
"You’re a real piece of work! Starting a business and not even telling me. If I hadn’t run into Uncle Dongliang, I’d still be completely in the dark!" Xu Heping started shouting as soon as he saw Xu An.
"I’m just starting out, and I didn’t even know if it would work. That’s why I didn’t call you." Xu An got off his bike and pushed it closer. "Where’d you get the tricycle?"
"It’s an old relic from my place. Hasn’t been used in years. I figured you could use it, so I cleaned it up. Tinkered with it all night, and it works." Xu Heping proudly patted the tricycle’s seat. "This is way more reliable than that bicycle of yours."
Since Xu Heping had offered his help, Xu An saw no reason to refuse. He led him into the courtyard and, with a clear conscience, started directing him to help out.
Although Uncle Dongliang didn’t get off work until noon, workers with different jobs at the construction site had different finishing times. People would start getting off work one after another from 10:30 AM onwards.
Therefore, Xu An had to arrive at the site by eleven at the latest. Any later, and everyone would have already eaten elsewhere.
What needed to be chopped was chopped, what needed to be marinated was marinated, and what needed to be minced was minced. They were busy from seven to eight, just preparing all the ingredients.
When Xu Kang and Xu Le woke up and saw the two of them busy in the courtyard, they forgot all about playing in the sand and followed at their heels, clamoring to help.
The two four-year-old little peas couldn’t help with washing vegetables, and letting them help with chopping was out of the question. In the end, he sent them to sit in front of the stove to wait for the cooking to start and help tend the fire. Only then did they stop making a fuss.
Though they were young, their fire-tending skills were already maxed out. When Xu An said to make the fire bigger, they made it bigger; when he said to make it smaller, they made it smaller. They were more responsive than a gas stove.
By nine-thirty, the rice was cooked and packed into the soup bucket first.
Xu An continued to busy himself by the stove, preparing to make a tomato and egg drop soup. Beside him, Xu Heping started packing the food into the lunch boxes. Xu Kang and Xu Le placed chopsticks and a spoon into each bagged lunch box. The whole process was proceeding in an orderly fashion.
The meals were packed one by one and placed into the two large foam boxes Xu Heping had brought. Each box held fifteen portions, a perfect fit for all of them.
He rinsed out the soup bucket, wiped it dry with paper towels, and poured in the freshly made tomato and egg drop soup.
Xu An easily moved the two foam boxes full of lunches and the soup bucket onto the tricycle, securing them with straps. The prep work was now complete.
The five of them ate lunch with the leftover food. It was exactly ten o’clock, time for Xu An and Xu Heping to head to the construction site.
Before leaving, Xu An felt like something was missing. After a moment’s thought, he realized he didn’t have a sign. He went back inside, found a piece of cardboard, and wrote down the day’s menu. At the very top, he wrote "Xu’s Fast Food".
While Xu An was making the sign, Xu Kang and Xu Le saw that the back of the tricycle was still half empty after the lunch boxes were loaded. They climbed in, squatted down in the back, and refused to get out no matter what.
Xu An had no choice but to go back inside and get two straw hats for them to wear, telling them to sit tight and hold on.
With one step onto the pedal, Xu An set off on the tricycle, taking the lead. Xu Heping followed behind on his bicycle as they headed toward the Zijing Garden construction site.