At 6:30 in the morning, Qingshui County, under the plains of eastern Henan, was still shrouded in a layer of gray fog. The breakfast shops in the old town were already wafting out of the spicy aroma of spicy soup and the oily vapor of fried dough sticks. Wang Fugui held a half bottle of white wine soaked in wolfberry, pulled on a pair of frayed artificial leather sandals, and slowly walked into "Zhang Ji's Breakfast Shop".
"Uncle Fugui, are you still the same? One bowl of spicy soup and two fried dough sticks, more spicy and less vinegar?" Boss Zhang Jianjun was flipping the fried dough sticks and shouting at the top of his voice, loud enough to shake the putty off the wall.
Wang Fugui sat down on the plastic bench, his back straight, as if he was sitting not on a three-dollar bench but on a leather sofa in the county government conference room. He cleared his throat, tapped the greasy table with his fingernails, and said with a kind of half-hearted official authority unique to the county: "Jianjun, your hot spicy soup is not good recently. The vermicelli is missing, and the beef mince is invisible - I tell you, be honest as a person, and even more honest in business, don't always think about cutting corners, otherwise one day I will go to the Market Supervision Office to find my cousin and let him check you out."
Zhang Jianjun rolled his eyes hugely in his heart, but with a smile that was fluffier than a dough stick on his face: "Uncle Fugui said, I will put more of them next time! Who doesn't know you in the county? Who dares to fool you?"
Wang Fugui liked to hear this.
He is fifty-eight years old and has never been an official in his life, but he has become the most "respectable" person in Qingshui County. When I was young, I worked as a private teacher in a village primary school. After teaching for thirty years, I never became a regular teacher. When I retired, I got a rural pension of 1,200 yuan a month.
