Chapter 62: Part One

Lin Yongfu gave Lin Fujia’s entire family a thorough beating. Once he calmed down, he realized it was no big deal after all, so he went over to their house to make another scene. Hearing the various threats thrown at him by Lin Fujia and his wife, he didn't care in the slightest.

What could possibly threaten him now? He had lost his home; of what use were those fields and plots of land to him? With his wife and daughter gone during his lifetime, when he died, who would be there to smash the mourning basin?

"Now that I've lost my wife and daughter, you people bear the full responsibility..."

Lin Yongfu went to his older brother's house to eat, drink, and take their grain back to his own place. Enraged, Lin Fujia went to look for the elders of the Lin family and the village cadres, but by this time, everyone outside had turned into peacemakers:

"You are the eldest in the family. Now that your younger brother has ended up like this, you and your son must support him."

"Your brother hasn't had an easy life either. At his age, it's about time he enjoyed some comfort."

"He has suffered a trauma, so you all should treat him better."

...

The villagers were all clever folks who knew this kind of dispute shouldn't be meddled with. Right now, Lin Yongfu was a reckless loner; if someone angered him with their words, the one who would suffer bad luck and a beating would be themselves. It was much better to let Lin Fujia coax his younger brother properly. After all, the ones taking the loss wouldn't be them.

Lin Fujia and Zheng Qiaoli were worried to their wits' end. Their eldest daughter-in-law had run back to her maiden home, their second daughter-in-law had started making a fuss about a divorce, their eldest daughter and son-in-law remained sullen and silent, and their youngest daughter, Lin Qingxue, was working down south. In the first month, she had sent fifty yuan, which had been cursed at and despised by Lin Fujia and his wife; now, because she refused to send money home, she had completely cut off contact...

Seeing the state of their family, the villagers were more than happy to watch the spectacle:

"Serves them right. The ways of heaven are cyclical; that's what you get for bullying your younger brother's family."

"Look at others—they raised daughters and found good sons-in-law. If they had just treated people a bit better when they were young, they wouldn't have walked away so decisively."

"All the benefits they enjoyed before now have to be paid back. This is the end for people who don't act like human beings!"

Lin Fujia and Zheng Qiaoli looked a dozen years older.

Lin Yongfu, on the other hand, suddenly looked much younger. Having vented years of pent-up frustration, he spent his days eating, drinking, and listening to the radio. He loved listening to the storytelling segments, such as *The Tales of Yue Fei* and *The Water Margin*, swinging a stick around and practicing martial arts moves.

By the end of the year, when the farm work slowed down, there were all sorts of celebrations in the nearby communes, and people asked him to come help with the cooking. In previous years at year-end, Lin Yongfu was always called upon to help cook for banquets. He had a good hand for cooking in large woks, and at the end of the year, he could earn some pocket money this way. In the past, he never kept the red envelopes he received for himself, but handed them all over to Li Yinhua.

Acquaintances didn't care about his family matters and called him out to help with celebrations once again. As he listened to the newlyweds' festive music, he thought about how he hadn't even been able to attend his own daughter's wedding. Meanwhile, the people around him talked about how to spend the upcoming New Year, while he was destined to spend it in desolate loneliness, with not a trace of warmth left in his home.

Lin Yongfu was reluctant to return to a house that held only him.

After collecting the red envelope from this household, he returned home and locked his old sewing machine, radio, and bicycle in a single room, then sold off the household's grain, chickens, and ducks. After finishing all this, he glanced out the window at the sewing machine inside the room, recalling how Zhang Yuxin used to step on it with radiant joy. Back then, he had felt that without a son and having fallen out with his nephew, his life had no future.

Now that both his wife and daughter were gone, he finally understood what it meant to have no future at all; he couldn't bear to live through a single day more.

He began to feel that the period when they had initially split the household and Zhang Yuxin lived alone with him was actually a blissful, fairy-tale time worth yearning for.

Armed with the hundred or so yuan in his pocket, Lin Yongfu bought a southbound train ticket and traveled alone to Pengcheng. The moment he stepped off the train, he was frightened out of his wits by the massive crowds. There was a city map at the railway station, but the streets outside were far too vast; trying to find someone was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

He didn't dare stay in a hotel. Like other migrant workers, he slept on the streets. On that particular road, many places were hiring temporary, short-term laborers for heavy physical work that paid eight yuan a day. He went to work for three days, his body barely able to handle the strain. Later, he came across a restaurant looking for a cook and secured a position as a kitchen hand, which included room, board, and a monthly salary of four hundred yuan. He planned to save up some money before going out to look for Zhang Yuxin.

Lin Yongfu never expected that wages here could be so high, or that running a restaurant could be this profitable.

*

Having hired people for renovations, Lin Yongfu—no, Lin Xuexia—gave the entire restaurant a complete makeover in less than half a month. Most areas of the shop remained largely unchanged except for the kitchen, for which she had high standards. The ingredient section featured a large row of freezers with separate zones for freezing and refrigeration, two rows of stoves, and state-of-the-art exhaust and ventilation systems installed by professionals.

With this setup, featuring two serving windows and several people cooperating with a division of labor, standardized and rapid food service could be achieved. According to Lin Xuexia's calculations, during morning, lunch, and dinner shifts, the kitchen could reach a theoretical maximum output of tens of thousands of meals. Of course, that was just on paper.

In reality, selling three to six thousand meals would already be quite an achievement.

In the morning, the shop served breakfast items such as century egg and lean pork congee, rice noodle rolls (changfen), fried dough sticks, beef pies, and xiaolongbao. At noon, it offered various fast-food bento boxes, alongside rice noodle rolls, congee, and various health-restoring soups.

For breakfast items like century egg and lean pork congee and rice noodle rolls, Lin Xuexia didn't strive for earth-shattering flavors; she maintained a solid upper-middle standard. Naturally, in terms of taste, it couldn't compare to old-established shops that specialized exclusively in those items. In reality, the congee and rice noodle rolls at most shops around here tasted pretty much the same—none stood out as exceptionally good or bad, and everyone had their own preferences.

Her shop's congee was served with a signature side of cold pickled vegetables, and the rice noodle rolls came with a secret spicy sauce. Many locals here traditionally never added spicy sauce to their rice noodle rolls, but... as more and more migrant workers arrived, most rice noodle rolls shops began offering chili sauce. Some people particularly loved a slightly sweet rice noodle sauce paired with extremely fiery chili sauce. This flavor profile had a definite market, and if done well, there was no need to worry about lacking repeat customers.

Lin Xuexia set up a cashier counter at the entrance of the restaurant and commissioned custom meal-pickup tickets. The cashier handwritten the ticket numbers, next to which was a row of various stamps representing different dishes—for example, a braised pork rice bento would receive a braised pork rice stamp.

Customers paid, collected their meal ticket, and took it to the pickup window to claim their food.

On the counter of the pickup window, there were tags marked with numerical sequences. By clipping the customers' meal tickets onto these tags in order, orders could be called out, prepared, and picked up in an orderly fashion.

The meal-pickup tickets were printed in duplicate, and accounts were settled every night to calculate the daily revenue.

Chen Miaorong and another newly hired employee served as cashiers, with Chen Miaorong also acting as the accountant. Zhao Huiru and Zhang Yuxin worked busily at the windows, while Xue Lingjun and Lin Xuexia managed the kitchen, which included three other staff members besides the two of them.

Lin Xuexia also hired two part-time delivery personnel and a procurement officer, equipped the shop with tricycles, and installed a landline telephone.

Before the grand opening, Lin Xuexia had thousands of promotional flyers printed. Her second and third younger sisters volunteered to help distribute them. Lin Yuxia was currently in high school and couldn't earn money, relying entirely on her mother and sisters for support. Feeling deeply guilty, she was eager to help her older sister in any way she could; whenever she had free time, she handed out flyers near the shop and studied or memorized her books inside.

Lin Yuexia utilized her commuting hours to cover an entire office building, promoting her older sister's restaurant and encouraging people to order bento boxes from the shop.

The office building where she worked happened to be nearby.

"Older Sister, Eldest Sister, I've brought you six hundred meal orders! You won't have to worry about opening day!"

"I've widely publicized this order hotline; in a few days, I'll go canvass another office building." Lin Yuexia said, flushed with excitement.

Lin Xuexia smiled and said, "Alright, thank you so much. I'll give you a big red envelope."

On the opening day, Lin Xuexia ordered floral baskets. Fu Wei sent her eight, and other acquaintances sent another eight, creating a massive array of congratulatory baskets at the entrance. With red silk ribbons draped over the sign, the snapping of firecrackers, and the bursting of fireworks, the restaurant officially opened amidst great bustle and excitement.

Her fast-food restaurant was named "Shanhai Time."

Without any profound underlying meaning, Lin Xuexia had simply thought of the name on the spot, commissioned an exclusive shop logo, and had a corresponding stamp made to press onto the meal-pickup tickets.

After opening her shop here, the price of braised pork rice was raised from one yuan fifty fen to two yuan fifty fen, with corresponding adjustments to portion size and presentation. She also implemented several marketing strategies, such as giving away free soup with every ten meals purchased or offering free meals based on the quantity of bulk group orders.

Even before noon, their pre-orders had already exceeded one thousand, sending the kitchen staff running around in a frantic blur.

Starting at eleven o'clock, several delivery personnel began dispatching orders in batches. Not long after the first batch of deliveries concluded, Lin Xuexia received four or five more ordering calls at the front desk—presumably, when people saw the quality of the bento boxes during delivery, they decided to place orders as well.

She recorded them one by one and arranged for delivery. The chaotic rush of the opening days was something Lin Xuexia had long anticipated. To handle it, she specifically borrowed people from Fu Wei; out of the crew of minor foremen under him, she asked him to recommend a few honest, slender fellows who couldn't handle heavy physical labor to work part-time as delivery workers and odd-jobbers.

With far too many orders coming in, aside from the tricycles, the bicycles ridden by Zhang Yuxin, Chen Miaorong, and the others were also converted into delivery vehicles, loaded with crates of bento boxes dispatched in all directions.

On the first day, they served five thousand meals; on the second day, six thousand; on the third day, the number settled back to five thousand, with daily revenues exceeding ten thousand yuan.

Lin Xuexia estimated that in the future, if the daily average stabilized between two thousand and four thousand meals, after deducting all operating costs, maintaining this level of business would bring her an income of no less than seventy to eighty thousand yuan a month.

Opening in this location, such revenue wasn't exaggerated; after all, this belonged to the category of Chinese fast-food restaurants and was situated in a prime commercial district. For instance, when the Western fast-food chain opened last year, its first-day revenue was eighty thousand yuan, and its subsequent daily average revenue hovered between twenty thousand and forty thousand yuan.

In the city where Lin Xuexia currently resided, there were very few fast-food restaurants of this kind, placing her at the forefront of the trend. Ordinary Chinese restaurants simply couldn't match such rapid food output.

Once similar fast-food establishments multiplied in the future, competitive pressure would undoubtedly increase.

Her shop was located separately from Gao Chunyan's. Gao Chunyan had visited her place to observe a few times and was now selecting a location to open her own rice noodle shop. Previously, she had thought renting a storefront was a waste of money, but after witnessing the speed of food turnover at Lin Xuexia's place, she was completely dumbfounded.

Rice noodles were also very easy to prepare, and she learned from Lin Xuexia how to renovate and improve her kitchen layout, though she couldn't replicate the telephone delivery service—after all, delivered rice noodles would turn mushy halfway there, which was far too troublesome and labor-intensive.

Fu Wei brought Zhong Xiangdong and several other sworn brothers and friends to visit his wife's restaurant. Neither he nor Zhong Xiangdong had any appetite for braised pork rice at that moment, nor did they want curry rice; both of them were completely fed up with curry.

Lin Xuexia had previously experimented with curry cubes and used them as guinea pigs. Zhong Xiangdong had initially been extremely fond of curry cubes because cooking with them was effortless: he simply stir-fried some potatoes and onions, boiled them until soft, added the curry cubes, and poured the mixture over rice—it was delicious and went down easily with rice.

Moreover, if this stuff was cooked at noon and reheated in the evening, it didn't ruin the texture... It was truly an essential household treasure for bachelors.

Zhong Xiangdong had never cooked for himself before, but using curry cubes made him feel as though he had suddenly transformed into a master chef. He cooked various kinds of curry rice for himself for three days straight, eating so much of it that he didn't dare touch the stuff for a whole week.

Braised pork rice was delicious, but even the best things grew tiresome when eaten too frequently, and eating too much of it became cloying and greasy.

Therefore, upon arriving at the restaurant, the two didn't order anything else, opting instead for shrimp rice noodle rolls, two bowls of century egg and lean pork congee, and beef pies.

Taking in the thriving, bustling scene inside the shop with people coming and going, Zhong Xiangdong couldn't suppress his curiosity and whispered to Fu Wei, "How much does your wife's shop make in a month?"

Fu Wei, who was in the middle of drinking congee, raised his eyes to glance at him and remained silent.

Zhong Xiangdong persisted, "Would it be twenty or thirty thousand?"

Fu Wei closed his eyes for a moment: "...The month isn't over yet, so I'm not entirely sure."

As the husband of the shop's proprietress, Fu Wei knew the daily ledger of the shop better than anyone else, because every single night his wife sat in his lap to calculate accounts and estimate the next day's revenue together with him.

If the restaurant's business conditions stabilized, she even planned to open branch locations.

At that moment, a strong sense of crisis arose within Fu Wei's heart. He felt a bit troubled, sensing that his own status was under threat. Before they got married, he had envisioned working hard to make money and support his wife; at the rate things were going now, his wife was making more money than he was.

He had to figure out a way to make more money, or else wouldn't he end up becoming a pretty boss lady's kept handyman?