She Only Cares About Cultivation

I originally planned to go back to the county for a few days, but it looks like I have to wait until most of the snow melts, at least enough to walk. In that case, it’ll probably be March.

Well, for the next two months let’s focus on reviewing the second-year junior high school knowledge points and see how well they grasp them. Then, test with the second-year exam papers obtained from the school. If both of them can pass, we can concentrate on key points for a speedy promotion, aiming for them to skip a grade successfully.

After An Yi came back to live, the sisters sensibly returned to their own home, still following last year’s pattern—studying here during the day and going home to sleep at night. After all, the house hasn’t been lived in for many years, and with this heavy snow pressing down on the roof, if it’s not melted quickly, it will affect the quality of the house.

The grain she prepared for them before she left was checked, and it turned out they ate more coarse grains, with very little fine grain consumed. It seems they gave the fine grain to the kids. These sisters know how to show gratitude, making her feel that her efforts were not in vain.

At the same time, she found about two hundred jin of mixed grains in the cellar, made of dried and ground corn stalks, rice stalks, sweet potato vines, and peanut vines, mixed with bran skins, and bean dregs left after oil extraction. In the 1970s, this stuff was used as pig feed, and now it’s being given to people to eat?

The next day, when the sisters came over, she asked, and only then did she realize that this was the "grain" given to her by the village as a subsidy.

Looking at this so-called "grain," An Yi was both amused and helpless.

"Can this even be counted as grain? Wouldn’t this grind the stomach to perforation if eaten? Do you have any of this?"

The sisters nodded: "Our household registration is here, so we have some as well, similar to yours. This is the basic ration stipulated by the state. Since we didn’t work, we don’t get the work points subsidy, but it’s indeed unreasonable not to allocate any grain to us."

An Yi widened her eyes, "It’s not just unreasonable, it’s simply treating us as non-humans. Although I have a salary, I’m not an urban resident; I’m a rural resident. Even rural residents, without work, should receive nearly a jin of grain subsidy per person per day. Wasn’t it supposed to be eight taels for women or something?!"

"Eight taels, this eight taels as a grain subsidy, should make it two hundred ninety jin of grain in a year, but what we’ve been allocated...,"

An Yi grabbed a handful and was shocked by the fibrous texture inside, wondering if this could be digested once consumed.

She was tearless in her lament: "This stuff is really coarse grain, very coarse. How do you usually eat it?"

Qiuxia and Caihua are quite familiar with this kind of food, as they have to eat it routinely.

"Grab a handful of this, chop in some vegetable leaves, add some cornmeal or sweet potato flour to bind it into a dough, make it into steamed buns, but you have to eat them while hot. Once they dry out, you probably can’t bite into them. It’s impossible to make them taste good unless you add a lot of fine grain, it’s especially bitter, indescribable taste, and after eating it, the stomach feels a bit bloated, not very comfortable."

An Yi sighed, "I’ve seen this kind of scenario in the city; it seems that just for survival, our stomachs have taken on a lot!"

For instance, this substitute food, she truly despises it, but Qiuxia and the others, because they did not work, could not even get this kind of allocation.

If it weren’t for her family planting a little in their private plot and subsidizing a bit, whether the two sisters could survive the winter would be unknown.

"Oh right, there are also 300 jin of sweet potatoes, which we have already buried in sand over in that corner."

Two hundred jin of substitute food and 300 jin of sweet potatoes sound like a lot, but these can’t really be counted as true grains, she frowned.

"We can’t just muddle through like this, the village chief’s practice is unfair. They promised me half a work point initially, that together with the basic rations, it ought to add up to three to four hundred jin of grain, right? This is the minimum standard, after all, the Northeast is a major grain-producing area—when did it come to using substitute food as the mainstay?"

Throughout the year, not a single grain was allocated to them, and could the production team leader justify that?

In this era, under normal circumstances, each person is allocated 360 jin of basic grain a year, which is equivalent to one jin per day. Even if they are women, calculated at eight taels per day, it should be 288 jin, and as long as your household registration is here, you must be allocated this grain.

As for the part corresponding to the work points, more workload, more gain, and less workload, less gain. She didn’t expect much initially, but it was the village chief who promised her, accounting for half a work point. So where did that portion of grain go? Even if not granted by work points, but by half of the basic ration, she should get at least 432 jin of grain a year. Mind you, this is grain, solid grain, not substitute food, and not sweet potatoes.