She Only Cares About Cultivation

The birth rate in Japan is almost zero growth, but why almost?

Because when they realized that the probability of men and women in their country having children was extremely low, panic, over a span of eight years, from ’45 to ’53, fewer than five hundred children were born there.

What does this mean? No one understands better than they do. Everyone instinctively believes that nuclear radiation is to blame, after all, there are just too many people with side effects.

When their government tried every possible way to introduce foreign bloodlines and found it still ineffective, only a pitifully small fraction of people were affected, and these people were not enough to bear the burden of reproducing the entire country. Some experts even predict that within thirty years, Japan will be annexed by another country, and the world will no longer know of any pirates.

On this matter, An Yi scoffed and said to them, "Justice will prevail, retribution is not far away!"

——

That night, An Yi slept very comfortably. The next morning she boiled milk, the girl drank 180 ml, An Yi drank a bowl, took out the tea eggs boiled earlier, peeled two, gave her daughter one egg yolk, and ate the rest herself. Afterward, she prepared enough food and water for her family’s pets before carrying the child to work.

She was used to waking up early; she left home at six thirty, reached school by seven, and before classes started at eight, she would take out the lesson plan she organized last night to reinforce it.

During this era, teachers had a set of teaching materials, but the children had nothing. Only a few could afford stationery, and most of these few came from families where their parents were either the village chief, secretary, or accountant. Asking for their reasoning, you can only sense it rather than express it.

Everyone else started at the same baseline, with an uncountable number of poor farming families. Without businesses, everyone’s conditions weren’t too different, hence the inability to buy so-called books and stationery.

Unless a family had unique skills passed down from ancestors, they could do odd jobs in the off-farming season, which could earn a little extra, but just enough to avoid starvation.

In school, classes were conducted using sand tables. There was a sand table on each student’s desk from first to third grade, and by fourth to fifth grade, they could use paper for homework because those who reached fourth to fifth grade usually had a little more means to afford stationery.

So, now, students in first to third grades practiced writing in sand, conditions were so tough, it made people sigh.

After teaching Qiuxia and others, she realized she had made a serious mistake.

Chinese Pinyin wasn’t researched and established until the ’55 to ’57 text reform.

She completely overlooked this, only realizing her mistake upon finding no Pinyin in the dictionary.

Fortunately, Qiuxia and others were in junior high, not elementary school, otherwise explaining would be difficult. Now, she could only hope they wouldn’t pay attention to these details.

The distinction between grades one, two, and three in the Fifties lay in font and text difficulty, as there were no books, teachers’ blackboard notes became very important. One blackboard was divided among the three grades, with the least space for first grade and the most for third grade, because third grade needed to transcribe the whole text.

Male teachers, to take care of her, taught math for the first two periods. Because it was three grades at once, two periods were needed consecutively, with a big recess lasting half an hour in between. Her class was at ten o’clock, each session was forty minutes long, with a ten-minute break in between. Classes ended around 11:30.

At this time, those who didn’t bring lunch could go home to eat, while those who did ate at school.

Zhang Li also taught during the last two periods, so they planned to send their children to the daycare class for peace of mind to prepare for lessons.

Before sending her child over, An Yi first fed her. For privacy, she draped a curtain around herself and also prepared a set for Zhang Li. No extra words were exchanged; she didn’t care what Zhang Li thought.

With the privacy curtain, she became bolder and thought about feeding her child rice porridge, noodles, egg custard, lean pork porridge, which became more convenient.

Whatever she wanted to feed, she could give to her child, provided the food had little odor. Otherwise, how would she explain when others smelled meat?

Milk custard, rice paste, and rice porridge were within her range of choices, along with milk. She would feed the child once in the morning, provide supplementary food during recess, and after the morning milk, it’d be noon. If the child got hungry again, she would supplement with water, and fed some snack at the teacher’s place too.