Weiguo knew that Lijuan had deliberately wanted to avoid this responsibility. In the past, he might not have given an order to her and would only ask Xiulan to help out at home. Now that Xiulan was sick and Lijuan was fine, it was only appropriate for his stepdaughter to do the housework.
He said with some dissatisfaction, “Can’t a girl like you cook some porridge? What’s so difficult about that? You don’t know or you just don’t want to do it?”
Lijuan didn’t dare to say anything no matter how unhappy she was, she could only follow Weiguo’s orders.
However, she glared at Xiulan fiercely, feeling that Xiulan was the reason why her stepfather asked her to do the housework. The cooking job shouldn’t have fallen on her as well.
An imperceptible smile appeared at the corner of Xiulan’s lips, and then she ‘sensibly’ said to Weiguo, “Dad, I will go to work later and earn work points.”
“Xiulan, you are not completely well yet, so can you still work? You should just rest at home!” Weiguo was really worried this time.
“Dad, I’m fine, I can still do some light tasks. We don’t have much foodstuff at home. If we earn more work points, we can get a little bit more foodstuffs and our family can have more provisions later as well.”
Hearing Xiulan’s words, compared with Lijuan, Weiguo felt that his eldest daughter was more sensible.
He used to be too negligent towards his biological daughters, so he needed to love them more in the future.
Their breakfast was a thin porridge with few grains of rice, one bowl per person, plus a wowotou, but there was no reaction in Xiulan’s stomach when she ate this meal.
However, in this era, when supplies were scarce, there were not many people who could fill their stomachs in full. Their stomachs were either half-full or empty, so it was still good to be able to fill something into their stomachs.
After breakfast, Xiulan, like everyone in the whole village, went to the rice field of the production team to huddle, waiting for the leader to assign their tasks for the day.
When all the people in the village who were going to work came over, the team leader, Liu Gensheng, took the workbook and began to distribute tasks to the people in the village.
***Original translation is from enchantesstranslations.com. Please read it on the translator’s website.
“Qian Weihua, go and plow the field along the ditch near the Sun family.”
“Li Weihong, go and mow the grass on the field in the east end.”
“Wang Chaoying, Liu Fubang, you two, go and open the river ditch in the west end…”
After everyone received their tasks, they all went to start working.
The tasks assigned by Gensheng were based on their genders. Basically, men do some heavy physical tasks, such as digging waterways, plowing fields, and carrying heavy things. On the other hand, women do light tasks, such as mowing grass, sowing seeds, and watering the ground.
The tasks were different and the corresponding work points were also different.
In this era, you could get a maximum of ten work points for a full-day of work. Men who could do heavy work would be given a little more work points, and if they did a good job, they would be given the full ten work points.
For women who could do light work, even if they do well, they would only get at most six to seven work points or seven to eight work points in a day. However, they could only get three to four work points or four to five work points in a day most of the time.
The foodstuff distribution was linked to the total number of work points a family could earn. The higher the work points, the more foodstuffs could be allocated to them. Therefore, every household wanted to be able to get more work points, so that the family could eat more meals.
Soon, Xiulan was also assigned a task—cutting hogweeds!
Gensheng knew that she fell into the river the other day and had a fever. After seeing her face, which didn’t look good today, he simply assigned her an easy task.
Xiulan saw that the team leader deliberately assigned her an easy task, so she thanked him gratefully. Afterwards, she took a sickle and a basket from the production team’s farm tools and went to the mountain to cut hogweeds.
The few people who were sent to cut hogweeds, as well as the cattle herders, were allowed to go to the foot of the mountain.
Xiulan went up the mountain based on the memory of the original owner.
Now was the era of the Great Famine, coupled with the great steel production in the previous few years, many trees had been cut down, so the mountain hills were a little bald and there was not much vegetation. It was no wonder that one could earn work points just by cutting hogweeds.