1979: My fiancée is a goddess

Chapter 6 Submarine at Night
Cheng Kaiyan naturally didn't know about the conversation between the mother and daughter, but even if she knew, she wouldn't take it seriously. It's all in the past.

In the following days, there was no more snow in Beijing, and the sun was warm every day. However, it was not cold when it snowed, but it was cold when the snow melted.

Mom Xu Yuxiu went out to work as usual every day, while Cheng Kaiyan stayed at home.

This situation is just like forty years later, when the parents go to work as usual and the children graduate from college and cannot find a job and stay at home.

However, staying at home does not mean that he is really relying on his parents for support. Cheng Kaiyan is also busy with the plagiarism project.

"The East is Red, the Sun is Rising... He seeks happiness for the people..."

"Buzz buzz~~"

The semiconductor radio on the printed bed sheet made a chirping sound, and the air was filled with the sound of pigeon whistles that were often heard in TV dramas in later generations.

None of this interrupted Cheng Kaiyan's thoughts:

"I went back to my hometown during the National Day holiday. The old bed in the old room was so comfortable to sleep on. Every sleeping position I took was a reflection of countless times in my life. From childhood to adulthood, one layer on top of another, like a Russian nesting doll.

I felt particularly fulfilled and comfortable. The bed was like a soft lake, and I sank quietly into it in this autumn afternoon. When I woke up, I looked around the room. The curtains were painted with many brown fallen leaves, in various falling postures, which was very suitable for autumn. The light yellow fir floor and the light yellow desk.

The blue curved-neck desk lamp. The round wall clock with fluorescent green hands stopped moving a long time ago and has been hanging there for no reason..."

At the mahogany desk in the bright bedroom, Cheng Kaiyan finally put on her beloved Type 65 military coat, which was finally dry after several days of exposure to the sun. The coat exuded a soapy fragrance after hand washing, and had a warm smell under the sun.

Cheng Kaiyan cleared out a few sheets of manuscript paper. Even grid paper was expensive these days.

Just because the country resumed the college entrance examination, aspiring young people in the country have been working tirelessly and salivating over knowledge. They accept any book with words on it, and some even read the Xinhua Dictionary with the intention of memorizing it all.

Even paper became scarce.

It is said that when the college entrance examination was resumed last year, domestic educated young people signed up enthusiastically, and the number of candidates reached 5.7 million. There was not enough paper to print the examination papers. Therefore, the paper originally intended for printing "Selected Works of Mao Zedong" was used to print the examination papers, which alleviated the gap.

As for writing, Cheng Kaiyan has no shortage of paper, after all, her mother works at a school. The only problem is that she doesn't know how to write some words.

In the late 1970s, the systems of traditional Chinese characters, simplified Chinese characters, first- and second-simplified characters were still unclear, and the simplification of Chinese characters was a long process, which led to the current situation of mixed use.

However, simplified Chinese characters were not invented by modern people, and many of them can be found in ancient texts.

Cheng Kaiyan had no choice but to take out a dictionary, lean over the desk, and write on the manuscript paper stroke by stroke with a pen in her slender hands, looking up the dictionary from time to time.

Get up every half an hour to stretch your muscles and rub your hands, or add some tea to the kettle to refresh yourself.

Anyway, Cheng Kaiyan missed coffee a little. However, ordinary people couldn't enjoy coffee at the moment, so Cheng Kaiyan had to soak some tea leaf crumbs in water in a teacup. These tea leaf crumbs were Zhang Yiyuan's Gaosui, also called Gaomo.

Although it's not a good thing, but if you put some in a teacup, add some hot water, and then open the lid, you'll smell a fragrant aroma.

"When the royalties come in tomorrow, I'll buy a few kilograms of Mingqian Longjing tea and I'll be fine."

Cheng Kaiyan muttered to himself as the clock on the wall slowly turned. The golden grating moved from Cheng Kaiyan's face to other places, and time passed slowly in casual comfort.

……

"Squeak~"

There was only one line left on the manuscript paper. The steel tip, with blue ink flowing out, squeezed out the last few small words in the gap, and Cheng Kaiyan stopped.

On the top piece of manuscript paper, there were a few words in blue font: "Submarine at Night".

One of the short stories by post-90s writer Chen Chuncheng, the winner of the 2020th Boba Utopia Award, and one of the top ten novels of the year in Asia Weekly in .

But the story is not complicated.

"Submarine at Night" tells the story of the protagonist Chen Turner, who created a fantasy world for himself when he was a teenager.

Turner Chen is an impressionist painter. He has had an extraordinary imagination since he was a child. He can imagine the texture of marble as mountains and rivers, and he can travel through them. When he sees a landscape painting, he imagines himself in it, from strange trees to mountain streams, from wild beasts to streams, and he can wander in the painting for a week.

When he was 14, he imagined his home as a blue submarine, a sweet and exciting trip around the world in the ocean, which was his deep blue dream. It was not until his second year of high school that he had a serious conversation with his parents, which made him suddenly realize that he should worry about what normal people should do, instead of immersing himself in his own fantasies all day long.

So he imagined his imagination as a ball of blue light leaving him. Miraculously, his rich imagination was really like being taken away and never returned. In the next few decades, Chen Turner painted all the pictures he had imagined, but his favorite was still a deeper blue in the depths of the sea.

The story ends with a little boy picking up a rusty coin on the beach and throwing it back into the sea.

The reason for writing it is simple. Cheng Kaiyan happened to have read it before her rebirth, and this article was very popular on the Internet at that time.

The number of words is neither too many nor too few, a little over 7,000, so it is relatively easy to revise.

It would normally take no more than two or three days to handwrite several thousand words.

But there are some parts of this novel that need his revisions.

First, it is too much of an imitation of Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths".

Second, it is too pedantic and not fluent enough.

What Cheng Kaiyan needs to do is to retain its structure and core theme, optimize it, and delete things that are not in line with the times.

For example, Pikachu, who follows the protagonist on underwater adventures, was changed by Cheng Kaiyan into an underwater squirrel, right Sandy?
As for toilets and computers, there is no need to modify them, just leave them as they are.

Cheng Kaiyan estimates that after revisions and additions, the word count will be around 10,000.

……

It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s time for my mother to get off work, so today’s writing time is over.

Usually at this time, Cheng Kaiyan would be in the kitchen cooking, but he was not good at cooking, and he used to order takeout and watch live broadcasts. She still didn't want her mother to get sick from eating, so she decided to leave it to her mother.

Cheng Kaiyan stood up and stretched lazily, rubbed his sore wrists, and went to the window to get some fresh air.

I thought that not only would I need some tea, but it would also be nice to have a typewriter.

I really don’t know how Mo Yan managed to maintain the outrageous record of writing 430,000 words in 43 days when he was writing Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out?
There is definitely some water in it, but this is also scary. Cheng Kaiyan is now revising and choosing words carefully, and his hands are sore after writing only 2,000 words.

I guess Mo Yan is still working as an administrator in the library right now?

It will not be until next year that his first novel, "Rainy Spring Night", will be officially published in the bimonthly magazine "Lian Chi" in Baoding, Hebei.

I wrote the manuscript "Submarine at Night" very slowly and I have only finished half of it.

Fortunately, Cheng Kaiyan was not in a hurry and just wrote slowly. He adapted quickly to the slow pace of life in the late 1970s.

……

Everyone got off work and had a day off on Saturday afternoon.

Under the sycamore tree in the courtyard, the chattering of several old ladies filled the courtyard.

"Tsk tsk... I never thought the army wouldn't assign a job to the Cheng family kid. No matter how I asked Yuxiu, she wouldn't say a word."

"I'll tell you a secret, but you must not tell anyone else. It is said that the Cheng family kid was having affairs with men and women in the art troupe, so the leaders didn't give him any work."

"Hiss... no wonder! Old Zhou from the neighboring Meizha Hutong was discharged from the army normally and was even assigned to the supply and marketing cooperative. How could he not get a second-class merit? But it's normal. The Cheng family boy is handsome, and the art troupe is full of girls. It's impossible not to mess around! Hehehe~"

"I originally wanted to introduce my niece from my hometown to the Cheng family kid, but I didn't expect that he was an unemployed vagrant. Forget it."

"Tsk, how can anyone like your niece? She's big and strong. Even though Yuxiu is usually kind and gentle, she's actually very proud. How can a lady from a scholarly family like your niece? From what I can see, among all our neighbors, Yuxiu only likes Zhao Ruixue, who is going to college."

Five or six middle-aged women were exchanging information in the yard.

After a week, no matter how slow-witted the old lady in the courtyard was, she knew what kind of young man was able to stay in the house for a week in these days.

The aunties are used to seeing migrant workers everywhere in the capital.

Although these individuals use a nice name and nickname them "naughty guys", they are actually unemployed vagrants who catch chickens and chase dogs all day long and do all kinds of evil.

As a result, the public security environment has become much worse. A murder and beheading case occurred in Chaoyang not long ago.

It's still good that Cheng Kaiyan is staying at home, at least he's not harming anyone.

Just as the ladies were exchanging information.

Aunt Wang was sitting on a stool when she suddenly caught a glimpse of a beautiful woman with a cold face coming in with a pile of books in her hands. Aunt Wang was so scared that she quickly shrank her neck.

He coughed twice and said, "Ahem... Yuxiu is off work? Why is it so early today? Are the students still not out of school?"

The ladies looked at each other, not daring to speak, as they were all overwhelmed by Xu Yuxiu's aura.

……

At this time, Cheng Kaiyan was making a fire in the kitchen. There was naturally no secret in a place like a courtyard house because the sound insulation was too poor.

Not to mention the chattering of the old ladies, he could even hear the chirping of the sparrows in the courtyard clearly.

Mom Xu Yuxiu pushed the door open and came in, carrying a pile of books and throwing them on the table. Her tone sounded a little strange, "Here! I asked someone to find you some basic exam materials. For the next few days, you stay in the house and don't run around!"

"Mom? Who offended you?"

Cheng Kaiyan smiled, looked down, and saw more than ten books piled together.

The first thing that caught my eye was the "Self-Study Series of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry" and "Senior High School Textbook (Type A): Chinese"...

"Heh! You pissed me off!"

Xu Yuxiu snorted, "I borrowed this from someone specifically. When the Zhao family's girl comes back tonight, go find her and see if you can borrow her previous exam notes and learn from the experience of successful people."

"it is good."

"Look at how leisurely you are. Sometimes I really worry about you. You hear more gossip outside at home than I do, right? How about we find a job first? You can work and study at the same time in college." Xu Yuxiu asked tentatively.

"What are you afraid of? They have the nerve to do that. Every family in the yard and the alley has a child who went to the countryside as an educated youth. Only the young people in our yard haven't come back yet. If a few of them come back, they will be well behaved." Cheng Kaiyan said nonchalantly.

Eh~ that seems to make some sense...

"Don't even mention a few. If only one comes back it will be a disaster. Not to mention food, there won't be enough accommodation for everyone." Xu Yuxiu stroked her hair by her ears and said with a smile.

There are six households with more than thirty people in the courtyard. Only one child is left in each household, and most of them are children.

For example, the Zhan family next door only kept their youngest daughter, Zhan Xinyu.

There were a total of eleven or twelve people who went to the countryside. Several of the older ones got married in the countryside and could not come back.

The state stipulated that educated youth who remained in the countryside could return to the city, but there were two restrictions:

First, married educated youth could not return to the city. Second, anyone who had been arranged by the state, such as those who had attended technical secondary schools and were arranged to work in local communes or rural agricultural supply stations, or in county agricultural machinery factories or mountain village primary schools, could not return as long as they were working and receiving state wages.

(End of this chapter)