Chapter 132: Eliminating the Four Pests

When the foreign tourists saw Han Yan, elegant and graceful in her qipao, they immediately understood the appeal. First, they pulled her aside for photos, and then the female tourists, captivated by a garment that so perfectly showcased a woman's curves, refused to leave. They queued up one by one to have Auntie and Juanzi take their measurements, placing orders for at least one qipao each. Those who were particularly enamored with the style would simply pick out several colors of silk and order multiple dresses, provided they could be finished before their departure.

Hong Tao only made a profit of a little over one hundred yuan on a finished qipao, but for custom orders, he tripled the price. The tour guides and escorts from the travel agencies were so taken aback they could only roll their eyes; one even privately warned Hong Tao not to deceive international friends in such a manner.

"Now, how could you say that? We wouldn't want to tarnish our nation's reputation, would we? This isn't deception at all. Do you see the seamstress we have here? She used to make clothes for the wives of ambassadors at the foreign legations in Dongjiaominxiang. Back then, the officials' wives who came to her paid for a decent qipao with gold bars! Besides, a Chinese qipao is equivalent to a Western evening gown. You work in foreign affairs—how much would they pay for a decent evening gown in their own countries? If we sell them cheaply here, wouldn't that just demean Chinese culture? Don't you agree? We can't let foreigners mock our culture and clothing for being low-grade, can we?" Hong Tao understood this line of reasoning, even if he didn't necessarily subscribe to it. But you couldn't reason with people bound by strict professional codes; you had to overwhelm them with "big hats"—the bigger the label you slapped on them, the more confused they became.

Beyond securing a stable, efficient, and highly profitable path for the tailor shop, Hong Tao wasn't idle. He spent several class periods sketching out a mountain of designs: Chinese knots, cross-stitch patterns, hardwood beads, carved wooden Buddha statues, wooden Peking Opera masks, vintage embroidered shoes, hardwood carved amulets, scent sachets—all sorts of small trinkets. In the future, these would be dime-a-dozen items found on street stalls, mass-produced and ubiquitous. But in this era, unless sold in state-run arts and crafts stores, they were essentially extinct.

Hong Tao didn't intend to make these himself. It was too tedious and time-consuming. He planned to open another room dedicated to selling these souvenirs, staffed by the unemployed "educated youth." He would let them choose what they wanted to make! The women could weave Chinese knots or do cross-stitch. There was almost no overhead—it was pure profit.

Other youths could venture into Beijing and the surrounding areas to find skilled carpenters, folk artists, and embroiderers to create the products, which would then be brought back to Beijing to be sold. Although they would need to take out loans from Hong Tao, the profit margins were even higher. Aside from the labor, there was almost no cost, yet they were sold as high-end handicrafts. The prices were bound to skyrocket by more than tenfold.

This way, the educated youths could earn a living through their own labor, and Hong Tao would receive an even higher commission. Holding this stack of drawings, Hong Tao could wake up laughing in his sleep. A golden opportunity like this—where money flowed into his pockets effortlessly while he simultaneously earned the reputation of a great philanthropist—was truly rare.

Unfortunately, before he could finish grinning after waking up, bad news arrived. The very next day, as soon as Hong Tao got to school, the school’s loudspeaker began broadcasting, calling on all teachers and students to mobilize and participate in a "Four Pests" eradication campaign before the summer break.

The "Four Pests" were flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. The first three were easy to understand—they were either disgusting or spread disease. But what had the sparrows done? They ate a few insects, and while their motives weren't exactly altruistic, they hardly counted as villains.

The sparrow’s crime was that it didn't just eat insects; it ate grain. During times of hardship, anyone who stole food from people's mouths was the number one villain. They had to be struck down, trampled under a million feet, and never allowed to rise again.

Hong Tao hadn't lived through the era when all of Beijing collectively tormented the sparrows, but those slightly older than him—like his uncle—had experienced it firsthand. He had heard stories about the environment the sparrows lived in back then.

Every neighborhood committee would hold periodic "Four Pests" campaigns. When that time came, every resident in the district—everyone, from eighty-year-old men to toddlers—was required to participate. Armed with washbasins, water buckets, and bamboo poles tied with cloth strips, they would march out of their homes.

In Beijing, sparrows were called "old house thieves." Being birds, they could fly, making them harder to deal with than flies, mosquitoes, or rats. So, what was the solution? The wisdom of the working masses was infinite; they devised a cruel but effective method. It was fortunate there were no animal protection organizations in China back then to investigate, or they would have been heavily criticized.

The method was: "Drive them!" Since you can fly, we’ll make sure you keep flying. Everyone would beat their basins, kick their buckets, and wave their bamboo poles. With adults shouting and children crying, it was a chaotic din.

The "old house thieves," though clever, were not as cunning as humans. Once they took flight, they dared not land. Those on the outskirts of the city could fly to the countryside, but those in the city center were doomed. They lacked the stamina to fly for dozens of kilometers without stopping, so they would fly until they collapsed from exhaustion or fell from the sky and died.

Those were the antics of the sixties and seventies. By the eighties, the food supply had eased, and the "old house thieves" were no longer subjected to such abuse. Everyone shifted their focus back to flies and rats.

Rats were hard to catch, so people used poison. The neighborhood committee distributed rat poison to every household, to be placed in kitchens and corners. If you found a dead rat, you could cut off its tail and turn it in to the committee. It was said that in some places, you could even trade rat tails for daily necessities, though Hong Tao had never seen it.

Flies weren't hard to kill—you could swat a dozen a day with a flyswatter—but there were so many of them, mainly because trash collection was inadequate. Household waste in the alleys was piled in vacant lots and only hauled away every few days, giving flies plenty of space to breed.

But no matter how many flies there were, there were more of us. We wouldn't just kill these annoying flies; we would dig up their ancestral graves and cut off their lineage.

The task assigned to Hong Tao and his fellow elementary students was to cut off the flies' lineage—in plain terms, to dig up fly pupae.

A brief bit of science: a fly's life is quite rough. It has to undergo three transformations to become a full-fledged fly. First, the egg, then the larva (the maggot, which everyone loathed), then the pupa, and finally the fly.

People at the time felt that killing adult flies wasn't enough, as there were plenty of "reservists" waiting in the wings. So, they mobilized the students to dig up fly pupae. Since everyone knew flies hung around filth, the pupae were naturally in the most disgusting places.

Since it was a school-wide activity with a daily quota, Hong Tao couldn't escape it. Whether he dug them up or picked them out, he had to hand them in. Principal Bai even specifically sought out Hong Tao to sternly warn him not to play any tricks—don't even think about buying pupae from classmates or trading them for candy. It was a moral issue, very serious, so he had to dig them himself.

"Mom, bring me a few pairs of surgical gloves tomorrow!" Hong Tao had been reckless in his past life, digging for pupae right next to the public toilets. To get more pupae and earn a little red flower, he had nearly knocked over the wall of the latrine. There was an old Beijing saying: "The stones in a toilet are both smelly and hard." While it was meant to describe a person's personality, it also reflected the stench of the toilets at the time.

"How old are you, still catching dragonflies? You're tanned like a black monkey; what's so fun about that? I won't do it!" His mother assumed he wanted the rubber gloves to make glue for catching dragonflies, and she was having none of it.

"I'm not catching dragonflies. The school wants us to dig up fly pupae. It's disgusting, so I need gloves to dig them," Hong Tao winced, feeling sick just thinking about it.

"Sigh! Digging pupae is useless! If you don't tackle the source, you can't dig them up as fast as they breed! Fine, I'll bring them back, and I'll bring some masks too. From now on, you must wash your hands with medicated soap before you eat! It's so dirty!" Once his mother heard it was for fly pupae, she stopped scolding him. As a doctor, she knew better than anyone that this was just pure formalism. No matter how many you dug, it was useless if the city's trash wasn't cleared away. Unfortunately, knowing that didn't change anything; she had to go along with the crowd.

The next afternoon, Hong Tao's two-man fly-pupae-digging team was formed: Hong Tao as the leader and Zhang Dajiang as the member. Hong Tao had wanted to ask Jin Yue to join, but she was becoming increasingly "progressive." As the class monitor, she had to lead by example and dig with the other students, disdaining to join a "backward element" like Hong Tao, who was hiding behind gloves and masks.