Chapter 215 - Homecoming (Part 5)

Thanks to the Heaven and Earth Society’s promotion of new agricultural methods, irrigation construction, improved seeds, local pesticides, and balanced fertilizers, crop yields had doubled. This made farming a profitable endeavor for many households, rather than just a means of subsistence. All families with a bit of land were expanding their operations, and many fields that had been abandoned due to low yields and unprofitability were being cultivated again.

The result was that labor became expensive. Lin’gao had never been a place with abundant labor. In the past, the problem was masked by low agricultural output and the farmers’ lack of enthusiasm. Now, the demand for labor had greatly increased, but the surplus rural labor force had been largely absorbed into industry, the army and navy, and schools, exposing the labor shortage issue.

The direct consequence of the labor shortage was a sharp rise in the price of hired labor. This was painful for the landlords and rich peasants who were used to getting a day’s work for a full meal and a little pocket money—the pursuit of profit is innate in human nature.

“The master’s wife must be forcing everyone to work from dawn till dusk again, right?” The master’s wife was Fu Yijin’s mother, so Fu Fu still maintained a degree of politeness. However, the children in the family had always both feared and hated the master’s wife, including her own children.

Fu Xi giggled. “Of course, but the food is good now, and the master’s wife isn’t as stingy as she used to be. Otherwise, everyone would be clamoring to leave.”

With the rise in labor prices, job opportunities were everywhere. Bairen City recruited workers every day. The risk of losing one’s livelihood or even starving to death after leaving one’s master no longer existed. If a master continued to exploit and abuse their servants, they could vote with their feet and go work for the Australians. The master would not only lose a laborer for nothing but would also only be able to recover a negligible sum for their indenture if they pursued the matter. It was now impossible to buy another servant with that amount of money. The poor had more options, whether it was working for the Australians, joining the army, or going to school, all of which were more than enough to make a living. Not to mention, the Australians now had extremely strict controls on the slave trade, stipulating a heavy tax on slave ownership.

Fu Yijin smiled awkwardly and said nothing. When Fu Fu asked if the village seemed to have gotten bigger, he learned that Meiyang Village had indeed expanded a lot. The immigrant families assigned to Meiyang Village, with the help of the People’s Committee for Civil Affairs and the Heaven and Earth Society, had built a new residential area on the wasteland on the other side of the small river outside Meiyang Village, following several standard village construction plans developed by Wen Desi. As a result, the number of households in Meiyang Village had expanded to over one hundred and fifty, with a population of nearly a thousand, making it a large village.

“With more outsiders, the village isn’t as peaceful as it used to be,” Fu Yijin complained with a frown. “Although Father is the village chief, the outsiders don’t respect him. Not long ago, there was a fight over water allocation.”

After the irrigation systems were built, people no longer relied on the heavens for their livelihood. But during droughts, which piece of land got water first and how much became a point of contention among the farmers.

“Why?” Fu Fu found it strange. Usually, it was the outsiders who were bullied. Before he returned home, during a general meeting, a political officer had specifically promoted the spirit of “uniting with and helping the immigrants.”

Fu Yijin was reluctant to say more. She felt that women shouldn’t meddle in such matters, and besides, she found it difficult to explain the situation clearly and in detail.

It was Fu Xi, the one who had been to school, who could explain it. “How could the immigrants be bullied? Now it’s half immigrants and half villagers. And the immigrants were all given land, grain, farm tools, and seeds, so they’re all on an equal footing financially. They’re in a strange place, so they stick together. The people in our village, some are poor, some are rich. When the rich are bullied by the immigrants, the poor in the village just watch for entertainment. Who’s willing to stand up for them?”

“Is that so?” Fu Fu found this quite novel. “Doesn’t that mean the immigrants are bullying the villagers?”

“The outsiders are just ungrateful,” Fu Yijin complained. “The land originally belonged to our village. Now they’ve been given so much of it, and the grain for their first year and the labor for building their houses were all provided by our village. Now that they have land and are settled, they’ve all become arrogant.” Fu Yijin probably felt that the villagers had suffered a great loss in this matter and couldn’t help but ramble on. She was uneducated and her speech was disorganized, jumping from one thing to another, leaving Fu Fu utterly confused. In short, it was all the immigrants’ fault for being unreasonable and ungrateful.

“You can’t say that,” Fu Xi said. Her own position was more detached, and her feelings for Meiyang Village were not as deep. “The outsiders’ land was wasteland that the village hadn’t cultivated for years. Everyone helped with the land reclamation and house building, but the Chiefs also paid for it; it wasn’t for free. Besides, the first year’s rations and so on were a fine for concealing land—it wasn’t a good deed. So no one owes anyone anything. But then again, it’s also true that the immigrant households feel they have more people and don’t respect the village’s management. They say they want fairness, but in reality, they always want to be first—that’s how the fight over water started.”

“So everyone has become enemies?”

“Not really. After the fight over the water, the resident policeman and the master village chief had a talk with the leaders from both sides, and everyone made peace—after all, no one was killed. We see each other every day, so we can’t be preparing for a fight all the time. But for now, no one is talking to each other. It’s like a clear boundary has been drawn. If you lose a duck and it runs to the other side, you just have to consider it bad luck.”

Fu Fu, who had been indoctrinated with the idea of “unity” in the army, couldn’t help but blurt out, “That’s not good.”

“Of course, it’s not good. The master’s job as village chief is very difficult—apart from the official duties assigned from above, the people don’t obey him at all. When Chief Wan comes to teach new agricultural methods, even though they are all clients of the Heaven and Earth Society, the two sides refuse to attend together. He has to teach two sessions to finish. It’s difficult to get anything done in the village; the two sides are bound to work against each other. The master is only half a village chief,” Fu Xi said, picking some wildflowers from the roadside and casually weaving them into a garland. “I think the master will probably complain to Chief Wan again tonight.”

“And the Chief doesn’t do anything?”

“Chief Wan says he’s from the Heaven and Earth Society and doesn’t handle these matters,” Fu Yijin continued to complain. “He told Father to report it to his superiors. But Father is afraid to go—”

“Isn’t he just afraid that the Chief will think he’s incompetent and can’t be the village chief anymore?” Fu Xi had no respect or fear for the master. “As long as there’s no major incident, he’s just going to let it be.”

The three of them walked towards the village, talking and laughing. The part where the original residents lived was now called East Village. The layout hadn’t changed much, and most of the houses were the same, but the small river at the entrance of the village was much clearer—the fertilizer collection activities had cleaned the river. The once-shaky wooden bridge had also been rebuilt, becoming wider and sturdier.

A new public toilet had been built at the entrance of the village. According to Fu Xi, there was another one at the other end of the village. The public toilet itself was nothing special, except that the septic tank was made of brick and plastered with cement. Everyone said the Australians were extravagant. It was said that this was to produce “biogas.” As for what this biogas was and what it was used for, no one knew yet.

“They say this is called unified fertilizer collection,” Fu Xi said. “This way, our homes are much more hygienic.”

The houses in East Village looked old and dilapidated compared to the newly built fortress-like houses in West Village. Although the new immigrants in West Village lived in strange houses that the local people had never seen before, Fu Fu knew that although the area occupied by each household was not large, the facilities were complete. They were all brick-and-tile houses, which didn’t leak in the summer and kept out the wind in the winter, making them very comfortable to live in. Just the fact that they were brick-and-tile houses put them above almost all the original residents of East Village—in the past, only a handful of families in the entire Meiyang Village lived in brick-and-tile houses. The rest had bamboo-slat walls plastered with yellow mud, with a coat of whitewash considered a luxury. The roofs, needless to say, were all thatched.

No wonder there was immediate conflict between the immigrants and the original residents, Fu Fu thought. The gap was too big. He himself couldn’t understand why the Chiefs were so good to the immigrants, building them houses for free that only landlords could have afforded in the past.

Fu Bu’er’s house had just been renovated. After the land survey last year, the Heaven and Earth Society, in order to set him up as a model, had him rent most of the land confiscated from the Fu You San family on a sharecropping basis. Fu Bu’er had tasted the benefits of land improvement and sparse rice planting and had gained confidence. Therefore, he was willing to invest and listen to the guidance of the agricultural technicians. This year, he had a huge harvest—he sold tens of thousands of catties of fava beans, grown to improve the soil, to the Heaven and Earth Society alone.

With money in his hands and having become the village chief, Fu Bu’er, in accordance with the traditional thinking of Chinese farmers, immediately began to rebuild his house. This matter immediately attracted the attention of Ye Yuming and Wu Nanhai. In order to make Fu Bu’er a model of “new agriculture and new countryside,” and at the same time to set a living example for the next step of encouraging farmers to develop “courtyard economies” and engage in sideline businesses, Fu Bu’er was persuaded by Wanli Hui to build an “Australian-style farmhouse.” The Heaven and Earth Society specially hired designers and workers from the Lin’gao Construction Company to build this courtyard house for the Fu family, based on the drawings of various “new countryside” houses from the Grand Library and combined with the local specific conditions.

In addition to living quarters, this courtyard house also took into account sideline businesses, storage, and processing. The structural design was reasonable, and the space was fully utilized. In terms of both practicality and livability, it was more than three hundred years ahead of the best landlord houses in Lin’gao. Most luxuriously, this courtyard house even had a dedicated toilet—not the old manure vat.

Of course, the price Fu Bu’er paid for this house was not small—so much so that after the house was built, he was penniless and had to apply for a loan from the Heaven and Earth Society to start his production activities.