Chapter 2

Chunni’s Convenience Store

Sui City wasn’t big. Stretching no more than 300 kilometers, only about 30% of the area had any human activity. Fifty years ago, it was little more than a desolate backwater, not even significant enough to merit a label on most maps. Later, a provincial highway passing nearby turned the area into a secondary hub. By the time Ha Yue was born, the region had begun to resemble an urban-rural fringe area.

Where people flowed, opportunities followed.

Some opened restaurants and inns; others hawked cowboy hats and jade bracelets to passersby traveling from north to south. Many daring entrepreneurs made good money. These so-called “big bosses” would return to their distant hometowns for New Year’s feasts and spread tales of their financial success. The stories of these riches inspired many ambitious young people to try their luck.

If natural gas could be transported from west to east, why couldn’t wealthier people from the south help make them rich too?

Ha Jianguo and Zhao Chunni were among the many young couples who traveled from faraway hometowns to Sui City to seek their fortunes.

Neither particularly bright nor skilled, they thought in simple terms: business was good. Making money from other people’s pockets while avoiding the hardships of farming seemed like a much better option.

But fortune is like the Yellow River’s shifting course—success doesn’t come to everyone. Sui City, this desolate place, had only a few fleeting years of prosperity. After less than five years as a “hub,” nearby cities with better natural resources began to develop new projects like national highways, expressways, and interchanges. 

With the government focusing on developing major urban centers, Sui City was no longer the prized bottleneck it once was. The truly visionary businesspeople took their money and moved on to the next promising destination. What remained was a ghostly landscape of abandoned buildings and empty streets.

Even Ha Jianguo and that woman—his partner—were eventually driven away by poverty. But some, like Zhao Chunni, stubbornly stayed behind in this place that was neither quite a city nor a village.

The storefront of Ha Yue’s family business was a small prefab steel structure backed by an unfinished building, facing the abandoned Sui City Elementary School across a diagonal asphalt road.

“Chunni Convenience Store” was unbearably hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. The garbage bin outside always reeked of rotting expired spicy snacks. Yet, it was precisely this shabby little shop that allowed Zhao Chunni, abandoned by her husband, to raise Ha Yue on her own.

As Zhao Chunni often put it, this store not only kept Ha Yue from starving but also funded her four years at one of the country’s top universities in the high-cost city of Ji City. Just for that reason alone, Ha Yue had no right to look down on the store, on Sui City, or on her mother.

It was thanks to this illegal structure in Sui City that Ha Yue wasn’t left begging on the streets.

When she was younger, Zhao Chunni’s temper wasn’t much better than it was now. Ever since her husband left, she had been running the shop alone—restocking, selling, and managing inventory. Add to that the fact that she never remarried, and the excessive workload left her unusually neurotic. In an era of both material and spiritual deprivation, it was common to see children being scolded or hit, but oddly enough, Ha Yue had never been beaten. Her mother’s attacks were more verbal than physical.

Besides blatantly cursing her unfaithful father in front of her, forbidding her from mentioning Ha Jianguo’s name, she would humiliate her daughter publicly. She’d tell the neighbors how much Ha Yue resembled her father, who had run off with another woman, claiming she had inherited his knack for smooth-talking. Or she’d accuse Ha Yue’s friends of stealing snacks from the shop when they visited.

Whenever Zhao Chunni deliberately shamed or hurt her daughter, she’d add an irrefutable truth as if it justified her actions: “If it weren’t for me keeping you, you’d be begging on the streets by now, just like your dad!”

Perhaps it was her desperation not to be labeled a beggar or a subconscious act of rebellion against her mother’s malice. Over time, Ha Yue began deliberately avoiding her mother’s shop on her way home from school, taking longer routes to steer clear of it. At school, she became withdrawn and reserved, a far cry from the cheerful, outgoing girl she used to be.

She not only stopped longing for her runaway father but also stopped speaking more than necessary to Zhao Chunni at home. Every time she looked at her mother’s perpetually displeased face, she silently vowed to escape that house.

After ten years of hard work, she finally left Sui City to attend university in Ji City, leaving behind her sharp-tongued mother and that chaotic, decaying convenience store.

But today wasn’t one of those days from her past. Now 26 years old, Ha Yue was no longer in the age of silently crying herself to sleep or secretly battling depression over her mother’s cutting words. After a busy morning and a minor argument with her mother, she parked her electric tricycle under the large locust tree beside the steel-framed shop. Unlocking the door to “Chunni Convenience Store,” she felt no lingering resentment brewing in her heart.

She was pleased that her heart had become as tough as iron, too indifferent to bother getting angry with Zhao Chunni. Surely this was a sign of emotional maturity.

Of course, this adult-like calmness was shattered just four hours later.

The shrill ringtone of her phone broke the silence. At that moment, Ha Yue was standing behind the counter, giving change to an old customer who had just bought a bag of vacuum-sealed chicken drumsticks.

Rolling up her sleeves, she held a hundred-yuan bill up to the light, checking its authenticity. The sunlight streaming through the banknote and slanting in from the window across the way lit up the fine peach fuzz on her face.

Her skin was naturally fair—not the “porcelain white” praised on the internet, but a respectable shade of “light tan 1.5.” Especially after graduating from Ji City, where her nine-to-five job required her to commute in and out of the ultra-modern Wangjing SOHO complex, she had once aspired to be a sophisticated city girl, a proletarian warrior destined to climb the corporate ladder.

In those early days of work, her salary wasn’t much. But she understood the value of premium skincare products. Moreover, her first love—a boyfriend with impeccable taste and style—had greatly refined her sense of aesthetics. Her makeup skills, particularly in shaping her brows and enhancing her features, had become outstanding. With seven-out-of-ten natural looks, she could easily transform herself into a stunning ten with makeup.

Unfortunately, everything in this world must be earned through hard work, and even a beautiful appearance requires long-term nurturing to become truly valuable. The myth of earning fifty thousand a month from a three-million-dollar order she had once achieved was no longer replicable.

In recent years, she had been back in her hometown, running a small business, earning the hard-earned money from running the store. She spent her days either bargaining with neighbors over a few cents or dealing with the animals and her mother at home. No one to appreciate her makeup, and she had become too lazy to admire herself. Not only had she given up on makeup, but even her skincare routine had been downgraded to the store’s own cheap products.

As a result, her complexion was noticeably more “healthy” than before. Just a touch of sunlight would make her face resemble a sunburned look with freckles.

Ha Yue’s thin eyelids slightly lifted as she answered the phone, pressing it between her shoulder and ear. Her aunt’s voice came through the receiver, sharp and urgent, forcing Ha Yue to reluctantly set the money down and move the receiver a couple of centimeters away from her ear.

The young man on the other side, adding lunch to his day, was a wind power engineer from the local power plant. He had been sent here last year as a graduate student in the new energy management program from the Jiang City headquarters.

Sui City was located on the border, surrounded by desolate, open land, with harsh weather that drove people to migrate elsewhere. Yet this very geography gave the area an advantage for wind power generation.

Since the rise of wind power in Sui City, most of the customers at “Chunni Convenience Store” had been employees of the nearby power plant.

Their work was to maintain the wind turbines, which wasn’t too exhausting. Because the wind turbines were located in the mountains, most of the workers were from other places. During their free time, some of the single men, in order to save on travel expenses, would choose to stay in the city rather than return home, spending their downtime in Sui City.

Luo Zhiyun, the power engineer in front of her, was one of them.

Today, Luo Zhiyun had come specifically to Chunni Convenience Store, his reason being the two movie tickets in his chest pocket.

It was no whim; after developing a fondness for Ha Yue, he had done some digging and learned that this girl, who was about his age, was still single. Despite running an unlicensed small store, she had been the top student from her local high school and had been accepted into Ji City University, a rare achievement.

Because of this, Luo Zhiyun had formed an image of Ha Yue in his mind as a new-age intellectual woman whose spirit of progress matched his own. Unlike other literary types, Ha Yue was practical and hardworking.

What a humble Ha Yue! What a virtuous Ha Yue!

Truly, she seemed to be the best match for marriage in today’s world, a rare find for any man.

Luo Zhiyun had thought deeply about this from spring until autumn. He had now made up his mind to first become friends with her and then slowly develop the relationship.

But before he could say any of his carefully prepared lines, he saw Ha Yue, who usually wore a smile, suddenly adopt a serious and sharp expression as she asked into the phone, “Aunt, explain it clearly. Don’t just cry. What do you mean, the pig is gone and my mom is gone too?”

“Didn’t I tell you not to let her go out alone?”