Chapter 757 – Homecoming (Part 5)

The Tiandihui's agricultural revolution had transformed the countryside. New farming methods, irrigation works, improved seeds, homemade pesticides, and formulated fertilizers had doubled yields per mu. For many households, cultivation had finally become profitable—no longer a desperate scramble for survival. Every family with even a modest plot was expanding operations, and fields that had lain fallow for years, abandoned because meager yields couldn't justify the labor, were being tilled once more.

The consequence was a labor shortage that no one had anticipated. Lingao had never possessed surplus workers; only the low agricultural output and the peasants' chronic lack of motivation had masked the problem. Now demand had surged while the pool of rural idlers vanished—absorbed into factories, enlisted in the army or navy, or enrolled in schools. The scarcity was suddenly, painfully exposed.

Wages for hired hands skyrocketed. This pained landlords and rich peasants who had grown accustomed to extracting a full day's labor for a bowl of rice and a handful of coppers. Such was human nature: the pursuit of profit.

"I suppose the mistress still drives everyone from cockcrow to midnight?" Fu Fu asked. The mistress was Fu Yijin's mother, and he maintained some courtesy toward her—though every child in the household, including her own offspring, both feared and resented the woman.

Fu Xi gave a quiet laugh. "Of course. But the food has improved, and she's not as stingy as before. Otherwise, everyone would be clamoring to deregister."

With labor prices climbing, opportunities abounded—daily recruitment in Bairren City alone offered countless options. The old terror of leaving one's master to face destitution or starvation had evaporated. If a household head continued exploiting servants, they could simply walk away and work for the Australians. The master would lose a laborer outright, and even if he pursued legal recovery, the pittance he might recoup was nowhere near enough to purchase a replacement at current prices. The poor now had choices: work for the Australians, enlist, or attend school—all more than sufficient to keep food in their bellies. And the Australians had tightened their grip on the slave trade, imposing heavy taxes on slaveholding.

Fu Yijin smiled awkwardly and changed the subject. When Fu Fu asked whether the village had grown, he learned that Meiyang Village had indeed expanded considerably. Settlers assigned to the village had, with help from the Civil Affairs People's Committee and the Tiandihui, built a new residential district on wasteland across the small river from the old settlement. They had followed one of the standard-village blueprints drawn up under Wen Desi's direction. The result: Meiyang Village now numbered over 150 households with a population approaching a thousand.

"With all the newcomers, the village isn't peaceful anymore," Fu Yijin complained, her brow furrowing. "Father is village head, but the settlers pay him no mind. Not long ago, there was even a brawl over water-release rights."

Now that the irrigation system was in place, no one depended solely on heaven's mercy. But during dry spells, disputes over which fields received water first—and how much—became flash points for conflict.

"Why?" Fu Fu found this strange. Normally it was settlers who got bullied. Before he had left on leave, the officers at the pre-departure assembly had stressed the importance of "uniting with the migrants and helping them."

Fu Yijin hesitated, unwilling to elaborate. She felt such matters weren't a woman's place to discuss, and besides, she couldn't have explained clearly even if she'd tried.

Fu Xi, the student among them, could articulate things better. "How would the migrants get bullied? It's half and half now. And the settlers were given land all at once—plus grain, tools, and seed—leveling rich and poor alike. In a strange new place, they pull together. Meanwhile, our villagers are split—some rich, some poor. When a rich man gets pushed around by settlers, the poor folk just laugh. No one sticks up for him."

"I see," Fu Fu said. "So the migrants are the ones bullying the original villagers?"

"Those outsiders are ungrateful," Fu Yijin grumbled. "The land was ours to begin with, yet so much was handed over to them. And the first year's grain, the labor to build their houses—our village provided it all. Now they've settled in, gotten their land, and suddenly they strut about." She seemed to feel the village had been terribly cheated and began rambling, her uneducated thoughts jumping from one grievance to another until Fu Fu was thoroughly confused. The gist was clear enough: the settlers were unreasonable and ungrateful.

"It's not that simple," Fu Xi interjected. Her position was more detached, her attachment to Meiyang Village less deep. "The settlers' land was wasteland the village hadn't cultivated for years. The land-clearing and house-building involved community labor, sure, but the leadership paid for it—it wasn't charity. And that first year's rations came from fines on hidden-acreage fraud—not from anyone's generosity. Nobody owes anyone anything. That said, the settlers feel they have the numbers, so they don't defer to village management—that's also true. They talk about fairness while always putting themselves first. The water-release brawl started exactly that way."

"So everyone's become enemies now?"

"Not quite. After the fight, the resident policeman and Father brought the ringleaders from both sides together for a chat. Everyone patched things up—no one was killed, after all, and they see each other every day. They can't live in constant combat mode. But right now, neither side will speak to the other. Clear boundary lines. If your duck wanders over to their side, consider it lost."

Fu Fu had been thoroughly indoctrinated with "unity" thinking in the army. "That's no good," he blurted.

"Of course not. Father's job as village head has become nearly impossible—apart from tasks handed down from above, nobody obeys him. When Manager Wan comes to teach new farming techniques, both sides are Tiandihui clients, yet they refuse to attend together. He has to hold two sessions. Any village project is hard to accomplish because the two sides work at cross-purposes. Father's village headship is basically half a village headship." Fu Xi plucked a few wildflowers from the roadside and began weaving them into a wreath. "I expect Father will be pouring out his grievances to Manager Wan again tonight."

"And the leadership doesn't do anything?"

"Manager Wan says he's Tiandihui, so it's not his department," Fu Yijin continued to complain. "He told Father to report it to higher-ups. But Father doesn't dare—"

"Because he's afraid the leadership will think he can't get the job done and strip him of the headship," Fu Xi said. She no longer showed any trace of deference toward the master. "As long as nothing major blows up, he'll just sit on it."

The three of them chatted and laughed as they walked toward the village. The section where the original residents lived was now called East Village; the layout was mostly unchanged, the houses largely as they had been before. Only the little river at the village entrance had grown much cleaner—the manure-collecting campaign had scoured it out. The rickety wooden bridge had been rebuilt, now wide and sturdy.

At the entrance stood a new public latrine. Fu Xi mentioned there was another at the far end of the village. There was nothing remarkable about it except that the cesspit was lined with brick and coated with cement—villagers grumbled that the Australians were extravagantly wasteful. Supposedly this was for producing "biogas." What biogas was and what use it had, no one yet knew.

"They call it 'centralized manure collection,'" Fu Xi said. "It keeps the houses cleaner."

The houses in East Village looked shabby compared to the all-new, fortress-style dwellings of West Village. Though the migrants lived in structures unlike anything the locals had ever seen, Fu Fu knew that even if each household's floor space was modest, the amenities were complete. The houses were solid brick and tile, watertight in summer, draft-free in winter—very comfortable. On the strength of the brick-and-tile construction alone, West Village outclassed nearly all of East Village. After all, in the old Meiyang, only a handful of families had lived in brick houses. Everyone else had walls of mud-plastered bamboo mat—whitewash was a luxury—and, needless to say, thatch roofs.

No wonder there's friction between settlers and natives, Fu Fu thought. The disparity was too stark. He couldn't understand why the leadership treated the migrants so generously, giving them houses that in the past only landlords could have afforded.

The Fu Bu'er household's own house had just been renovated. After the previous year's land survey concluded, the Tiandihui had wanted to establish a model farmer. They let Fu Bu'er sharecrop most of the land confiscated from the Fu Yousun household. Fu Bu'er had already tasted success with soil improvement and thin-spaced rice planting; emboldened by his gains, he was willing both to invest and to follow the agricultural technician's guidance. This year had brought a bumper harvest—the broad beans grown to improve the soil alone had sold for roughly ten thousand jin to the Tiandihui.

With cash in hand and the village headship secured, Fu Bu'er had immediately set about rebuilding the house—the time-honored instinct of the Chinese peasant. This caught the attention of Ye Yuming and Wu Nanhai. To transform Fu Bu'er into a "new agriculture, new village" model figure—and to establish a vivid example for the next phase, when farmers would be encouraged to develop "courtyard economies" and large-scale sidelines—Wan Lihui persuaded Fu Bu'er to build an "Australian-style farm manor." The Tiandihui brought in architects and workers from the Lingao Construction Company, and using drawings from the Grand Library's various "new countryside" blueprints, adapted to local conditions, they constructed this manor for the Fu family.

Besides living quarters, the compound accommodated sideline operations, storage, and processing. The layout was rational, the space used efficiently. In practicality and livability, it was three hundred years ahead of the finest landlord mansions in Lingao. The ultimate luxury: the manor had a proper indoor toilet—not the old dung-pit.

Of course, Fu Bu'er had paid dearly for it. By the time the house was finished, he was flat broke and had to apply for a Tiandihui loan to resume production.

(End of Chapter)