Chapter 88: Wanting to Trade for Batteries

Li Xiangdong looked at the crowd gathering around with a grin, feeling extremely pleased with himself.

It was much better to set up a spot and buy. As outsiders coming to someone else’s territory to buy crickets, they were easily taken advantage of.

Now that the tables had turned, the local people’s home-field psychological advantage would also be weakened somewhat.

He looked at the cricket jars laid out in front of him, casually picked one up, and teased the cricket inside with a blade of grass. After the cricket let out a pleasant chirp, he nodded and said, “Mmm, this insect is good. Whose is it?”

“Mine, mine.”

A middle-aged woman squeezed next to Li Xiangdong and asked, “How much can you give?”

“30 cents.”

The middle-aged woman selling the cricket was very dissatisfied with the price. “Hey~ how can it be so little? Give a little more, a little more.”

“That’s the price. Do you have any more?”

The middle-aged woman pointed to the seven or eight cricket jars at Li Xiangdong’s feet. “Yes, yes, these are all mine.”

Li Xiangdong looked at them one by one. “I’ll take all of these.”

He turned to Hou San and said, “Give this big sister 3 yuan in total.”

“Alright, Brother Dong.”

Hou San paid the money, and Li Xiangdong put the crickets into the bamboo tubes one by one, then plugged them with cotton.

“Dongzi.”

Ah Zhe squeezed through the crowd and whispered in Li Xiangdong’s ear, “The price is set, 40 cents each.”

Li Xiangdong nodded, “Okay, the price is acceptable. Go bring the person over, we’ll take them all.”

“I’ll go right now.”

Ah Zhe, with an excited look on his face, pushed through the crowd and walked away.

“Who’s next?”

“Me, it’s my turn.”

An old man wearing a straw hat responded. He saw Li Xiangdong’s setup for packing the crickets and said in surprise, “How can you use cotton for this? What a waste of good stuff.”

Li Xiangdong looked down at the cricket in the jar. Hearing the old man’s words, he looked up at him and said, “How is this a waste of good stuff? I’m not throwing the cotton away after using it. In the winter, I’ll find a cotton craftsman to fluff it up, and it won’t stop me from making cotton-padded pants to wear.”

The old man smiled and nodded, “How’s my insect?”

Li Xiangdong put down the cricket jar in his hand. “This one’s no good.”

Hearing that his insect was not good, the old man became unhappy. “How can it be no good? This is a good insect!”

“If I say it’s no good, it’s no good. The cricket is all listless, and you’re still trying to fool me!”

As Li Xiangdong spoke, he even poked the cricket in the jar with the blade of grass.

The old man was relentless, “How can you talk like that, young comrade? My cricket is a good one!”

“If you keep going on and on, I won’t even look at the rest of your crickets. You should just go do whatever you need to do.”

Li Xiangdong didn’t want to get entangled with the old man any longer. He wouldn’t give in to him just because he was old. Everything had to be reasonable. He was here to do business, not charity.

“I won’t say any more. Look, you continue to look at my insects.”

Li Xiangdong bought crickets from several people in a row. Ah Zhe came over with the young man from the beginning, and they were also holding cricket jars.

He looked at them one by one again and then called out to Hou San, “Pay the money, 40 cents each.”

The young man took the money, happily put it in his pocket, tied up his cricket jars with a straw rope but didn’t take them, and trotted over to get the half-brick he had been sitting on.

He saw that Li Xiangdong’s clothes were clean and even patted the dirt off the brick with his hand. “You sit and buy. Squatting for a long time will make your legs numb.”

“Thanks.”

Li Xiangdong took the brick and placed it under his bottom. He looked at the young man and asked, “Is there something else?”

The young man waved his hands with a red face, “No rush, you buy the crickets first.”

Li Xiangdong smiled and continued his great undertaking of buying crickets.

“Next.”

“Comrade, do you have batteries? I’ll trade crickets with you for them.”

Li Xiangdong shook his head, “We don’t have batteries, only money. Are you selling?”

“Selling!”

There were two ways to catch crickets: “treading” and “listening.”

For example, to catch crickets in a cornfield, you needed to walk back and forth constantly. The crickets would hear the sound and crawl out of their holes, making them easy to catch, but it was not easy to catch good insects this way.

The other method was to judge the cricket’s location by its chirp. As you approached, the cricket would stop chirping. You would stand still and wait for it to chirp again, then get a little closer. This method was very laborious, but there was a high probability of catching top-grade specimens.

But no matter which method was used, they were all done at night, which meant lighting tools were indispensable.

Flashlights were still considered household appliances at this time. There were some that used two batteries, and larger flashlights that required four.

Batteries needed to be purchased with tickets, but the common people didn’t have tickets, so many people traded crickets for batteries.

…

In less than two hours, the three large sacks of bamboo tubes, along with the bamboo tubes in Li Xiangdong’s and his companions’ cloth bags, were all filled with the crickets they had bought.

The crowd gradually dispersed. Li Xiangdong looked at the young man squatting next to him and asked, “Little brother, is there something else you wanted to say now?”

“I don’t have anything. I’m waiting for my dad. My dad, he…”

Before the young man could finish, a middle-aged man walked over from not far away. He was wearing long clothes and long pants, with the cuffs and pant legs tied with ropes. A flashlight was tucked into one side of his waist, and a string of straw-woven cricket cages hung from the other side.

Seeing the man, the young man waved and called out, “Dad, I’m over here~!”

The middle-aged man saw his son waving, his eyes lit up, and he walked over quickly.

Li Xiangdong looked at the young man and asked, “Your dad is…?”

The young man rubbed his hands and looked at Li Xiangdong cautiously, “It rained lightly last night, so it’s easy to find good insects. My dad went to the fields to catch crickets all night. The comrade before said he wanted to buy all my crickets, so I asked a fellow villager who came with me to go home and call my dad over.”

Ah Zhe, at the side, reminded him, “Dongzi, we’ve used up all our bamboo tubes.”

Li Xiangdong smiled, “It’s fine. Since they’re already here, let’s take a look first.”

The young man was worried that Li Xiangdong and his group wouldn’t buy his father’s insects because they had no empty bamboo tubes. He quickly said, “That’s right, take a look first. My dad brought straw-woven cricket cages. As long as you can take the insects, the straw cages aren’t worth much. We’ll give them to you.”

Hearing the young man’s words, Ah Zhe didn’t say anything more. There were still empty bamboo tubes at the hostel. As long as they could bring them back, the more they bought, the better.

The young man went forward to greet his father, took the cricket cages, and handed them to Li Xiangdong.

“Good insects!”

Li Xiangdong looked at the four crickets the young man’s father had brought. These four were better than all the crickets he had bought. If he brought these back to Beijing and sold them to Cricket Sun, he definitely wouldn’t sell them for just two yuan each!

Especially one of them, a “Blood-Clear White-Flecked Head,” was of extremely good quality. He estimated this cricket was about six or seven *li* (a unit of measurement for crickets).

What a find! If this were a few decades later, if you offered less than a hundred thousand yuan, they wouldn’t even let you look at it