Night.

The lights are dim.

Walking all the way to the city, the lights are getting brighter and brighter.

From time to time, extremely fast vehicles whizzed by.

Slowly pedaling the bicycle, walking on such a road, I unconsciously have a feeling that everything is flashing, and I have seen through everything.

However...... That's for the average person.

For an old guy who has lived for more than a thousand years, he only feels that he is integrating into the world little by little, into this prosperity.

In fact, he feels that he has been doing well in the last half month.

Eating, sleeping, going to class, reading, playing football, cycling, it's all good.

So no matter what you do, it's easy to put a smile on your face.

It's not much worse than the state after hundreds of years of retreat and meditation in the previous life.

After turning a corner, he was getting closer and closer to his home, but suddenly stopped the car, hesitated for a moment, smiled freely, shook his head, turned around, and rode towards a more urban area.

After nightfall, Suzhou City is not less prosperous.

Especially this is the most prosperous part of the old city.

All the way through, no need to go around, the road is very familiar, easily turn to the old textile factory family courtyard gate - the old textile factory is about to be demolished, it is said that a company from Guangdong wants to buy the whole, and now it should be a lawsuit, because the other party is obviously unwilling to bear the resettlement of so many old workers.

However, this burden is too great, and once thousands of workers are laid off, they, as well as the thousands of families behind them, and tens of thousands of people, will suddenly become a factor of social instability.

And the city is not yet able to afford to accommodate so many laid-off workers.

Zhou Pingping and her family are already people who saw the opportunity earlier and are more able to recognize the current situation.

The main reason is that in the past ten years, whether it is nationwide or just in Suyang, there are too many factories that have closed down and been acquired, and there are batches of laid-off workers, and there is already a lot of experience ahead.

Truth be told, there are so many stories that can't be told in this decade.

In Yuan Liyang's family, the older generation is on the verge of retirement, and his parents are basically hard occupations, so in fact, when he was young, he didn't have any pain about it. Among his relatives, his aunt was also laid off, but he hated his aunt, so he felt very happy about her laid-off.

It wasn't until later, when he walked out of college and began to work, and then came together with Zhou Pingping and listened to her talk about the years when her parents were laid off.

It's all painful on the skin.

In fact, according to Zhou Pingping, the old textile factory was not paid much in the years before it closed down and was acquired.

Many workers have to look forward to the resurrection of the factory, and at the same time, in order to make a living, they have to find their own ways to make a living.

In short, in recent years, many roadside dilapidated huts cost 50 yuan an hour, around 30 years old, I dare not say that half of them, or about two or three percent, are laid-off female workers in textile factories.

And if Yuan Liyang's memory is not wrong, Zhou Pingping's mother should have entered a local textile factory opened by the boss of Zhejiang last year - that factory specializes in making canvas, because Yuan Liyang was particularly impressed.

As for Zhou Pingping and her father, they set up a food stall, went to the gate of Suyang Normal School during the day, and returned to the gate of the old family home after dinner, mainly selling egg scones and leek cakes.

According to Zhou Pingping, just because she went to the teacher to sell snacks, her father was beaten by a group of hooligans, and later paid a monthly protection fee before being allowed to sell there.

It wasn't until a few years later that her father finally opened a small shop, and her mother also quit her job to work together, the business was not bad, and life gradually improved, and when Yuan Liyang and Zhou Pingping discussed marriage and wanted to buy a house, her parents were even able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor.

A family that is especially able to endure hardships and stand hard work.

It can even be said that almost all the good and bad traits of Zhou Pingping come from this family that has struggled step by step from suffering.

Of course, who is qualified to really judge whether it is good or not?

Zhou Pingping married herself, and finally ended in a gloomy divorce, but it was already somewhat romantic.

Her sister is three years younger than her, and after graduating from college, she came back to teach, and there were many suitors, and her admirers in college even chased her all the way to Suzhou City, even Yuan Liyang and Zhou Pingping were very moved, but she shed tears while driving people away, insisting that non-civil servants do not marry.

Because she felt that only civil servants were the most stable.

Later, she married a civil servant, her father-in-law was still a petty official, and her mother-in-law was in the banking system, so it could be said that everything was as she wished, but she felt that she was a dwarf, and her life was not very happy, every time she went home for the New Year to see her and her husband, she always felt that she was a little cowering, and she was frightened when her husband stared, and according to Zhou Pingping, when they chatted at night, she was silent many times.

It's all your own choice.

But in fact, what choice is there that is not affected by the environment?

Zhou Pingping later had a special emotion, crying and asking Yuan Liyang: Zhou Yanyan's school is not bad, she is not stupid, she is not ugly, and it is not difficult to find a job for her English major, if she stays in the magic capital after graduation, or comes to the imperial capital to find herself, or, if she does not have to find a so-called iron rice bowl family, what will her life be like? Will it be worse than now?

Yuan Liyang didn't know how to answer at all.

I could only hug her tightly and be silent.

…………

The lights are dim.

At the door of the family courtyard of the old textile factory, there are many snack trucks lined up.

Although the old textile factory is in decline and on the verge of bankruptcy, the family home is already very old, and it will be demolished in about another decade or so in the future, but in such a small community, after all, there are 20,000 or 30,000 people.

Therefore, even if the shadow of laid-off has actually completely enveloped this community, at the door of the community, there is a strange, almost deformed prosperity at this moment.

The weather warms up, and after dinner, many people will come out to walk around and help the old and the young.

In the distance, Yuan Liyang stopped the car.

On a snack cart not far away, a large light bulb was raised high, but it was not too bright, and under the light, it was a middle-aged man who looked a little oily up and down, and was nervously busy, taking care of the large pan under the main lamp, while talking to the guests waiting for the cake.

On his left-hand side, a girl was kneading dough and rolling bread with her hands and feet, and her handsome face was both smoky and greasy, and stained with some white flour.

On his right-hand side was another girl with a slightly shorter head, as pretty as her sister, and at the moment there was a dirty and greasy square carton in front of her, almost all of which were bills of two, five, and ten yuan—but she was skillfully grabbing an egg, skillfully breaking it, pouring it into the bowl, stirring it quickly with chopsticks, and then the chopsticks in the hands of the man next to her wore them lightly around the cake, clamped them, and she was extremely skillful in holding the small stainless steel bowl and pouring the egg liquid evenly into it.

Cooperate tacitly.

The faces of the three people were all the same red fluttering.

On a mid-March evening, in the tens of degrees, their faces were covered with beads of sweat.

But there were bright smiles on their faces.

On the side of the road more than ten meters away, Yuan Liyang stood on the ground with one foot, stopped there, and looked at such a scene in front of him.

After a few minutes, a relieved smile appeared on his face, and after turning the front of the car, he looked back again, shook his head self-deprecatingly, smiled, and pedaled the bike.

Drifting away.

But grass grew up in my heart.