Chapter 662 Ask Liu Chuanjun
He turned around suddenly, his eyes shining.
"What did the ancients say? Oh, that's right! The new generation will replace the old generation in the world! Great, great!"
Before he finished speaking, he suddenly snatched up the document and looked through it carefully as if he were holding a pile of gold bricks, and he couldn't suppress the smile on his lips.
The wind outside the window blew in the fragrance of locust flowers, mixed with the smell of diesel and sweat on his body, brewing a breath of hope in the sunshine.
Song Guohua picked up the enamel mug and took a sip, with the tea stem sticking to his lips. He glanced at Liu Chuanjun sideways when he heard the words.
The sunlight came through the window, casting a spot of light on his glasses, but it couldn't hide the mischievous smile in his eyes.
He slowly placed the teacup on the table, stroking the blue edge of the cup with his fingertips, and deliberately dragged out his voice:
"What do you mean by new people driving out the old ones..."
"Old rough man!"
Before Liu Chuanjun could finish his words, Song Guohua interrupted him with a smile. He reached out and poked his old friend's waist, which felt hard - the tendon meat he had trained when he moved bricks in the brick kiln.
"This is called the disciple surpassing the master, and there are talented people in every generation."
Song Guohua deliberately emphasized the word "代", with the ending tone rising, with a bit of scholar-like cunning.
"You have so many apprentices in the factory, but you can't even remember all the idioms."
Liu Chuanjun's loud voice suddenly broke off, and he scratched the back of his head awkwardly with his rough hands, rubbing his straw hat to one side.
The sunlight fell on the tips of his gray hair, like a handful of silver coins.
He suddenly recalled that last year at the workers' night school, he was learning to write slogans with a pencil, and the ink had stained his fingers blue, but he always wrote "warmly celebrate" as "warmly celebrate".
At this moment, my ears were burning, and even the prickly heat on the back of my neck started to itch, so I could only laugh dryly to smooth things over:
"Yes, yes, you, Old Song, are well-informed. How can a rough guy like me compare to you? That's what I mean..."
"Ask Shuzhuo about the site selection."
Song Guohua took the enamel jar handed to him by Zhao Shuzhuo. The smile in his eyes had not yet faded, but it was replaced by a bit of solemnity.
He gestured toward the young man with his chin, and the sunlight danced on the white hair at his temples.
"This kid ran for half a month and walked all over the barren hills and valleys of the commune. He was more thorough than us when we were repairing the canal."
Zhao Shuzhuo's fingertips trembled slightly on the cover of the notebook. When he heard the word "business", he straightened his back almost reflexively. The collar of his Zhongshan suit rubbed against his chin, leaving a red mark.
"Director Liu, you don't know how anxious we were to get back here."
He spoke very quickly, as if he wanted to pour all the running around of half a day into his voice; the sound of the zipper of the canvas bag being opened was particularly harsh.
"I got up in the early morning to take the train. Look at this document——"
He took out the approval document that still had his body temperature, and the edges of the paper were still wrinkled by the rain.
Liu Chuanjun's Adam's apple rolled heavily, and his rough palm hovered above the documents for a long time without falling, as if those were not a few pieces of paper, but red-hot kiln bricks.
"Let me choose?"
His voice suddenly became hoarse, and his reading glasses slid to the tip of his nose, revealing the dense wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
"You young people worked so hard to get this project approved, how can you let an old stubborn person like me interfere?"
Liu Chuanjun's gaze stayed on the document for a moment, then suddenly turned to Song Guohua, his Adam's apple trembling twice along with the locust leaves outside the window.
The sunlight slanted across my old friend's lenses, casting a shadow under his eyes, but it could not hide the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that were as deep as the cracks in a brick kiln.
His fingers stroked the rim of the enamel cup, and the tea stains at the bottom of the cup left a dark brown mark on his palm.
"When I was learning to make bricks from my master, you were still using an abacus in the commune's granary. Why are you suddenly being polite to me?"
Song Guohua moved his chair forward, his knees almost touching Liu Chuanjun's overalls - the fabric was still stained with diesel from the tractor this morning.
He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses carefully with his sleeves. The metal frames made a slight "click" sound between his fingers:
"I'm not being polite to you."
He spoke very softly, as if he was afraid of scaring away the sparrows on the windowsill.
"Do you know the batch of substandard bricks produced by the town brick factory last month? It was all because the technician miscalculated the clay ratio. If our new factory doesn't have a 'stabilizing force', we might also go astray..."
He suddenly reached out and pressed the back of Liu Chuanjun's hand, and the calluses on the palm of his hand rubbed against the scar on the other's knuckles.
"Have you forgotten who was the one who was trying to stop the leak on the roof of the kiln during the rainstorm last year, and ended up having a fever and talking nonsense?"
Liu Chuanjun's back suddenly tensed up, as if someone had poked a painful spot in it.
He recalled the night of thunder and lightning when rain poured into the adobe room through the cracks in the kiln roof. He and his workers tried to block the leak with plastic sheets three times but failed. Finally, they simply lay down on the leak and used their bodies to block the water.
Later, when he was receiving an IV drip in the hospital, his daughter scolded him with red eyes, saying "you don't want to live anymore", but all he could think about was the 5,000 bricks that had not yet dried.
"But you have blueprints and data..."
He lowered his voice and his eyes fell on Zhao Shuzhuo's open notebook. On the CAD printout inside, various lines and parameters were dense like a spider web.
Over the years, he has learned a lot of new words from his night school teachers, but he still can't understand the technical terms marked in English. Wang Jianguo suddenly interrupted and said:
“Blueprints are dead, but soil is alive!”
The tip of his pencil pressed heavily on the map where the north slope was.
"Last time you taught us to look at 'soil veins', you said 'those with diagonal veins like silk are fire-resistant'. This is not written in the book at all!"
Song Guohua took the opportunity to take out a red cloth bag from the drawer, which contained a brick the size of a fist - it was the first kiln of bricks fired in the old brick factory, and the word "Jian" carved by Liu Chuanjun with a steel chisel was still on the corner.
"You touch it and see."
He stuffed the brick into Liu Chuanjun's hand, and the rough surface rubbed against the calluses on his palm.
"No matter how advanced the brick making machines are today, they can't produce this kind of 'ringing bricks' - they make a loud clanging sound when knocked, and the fracture is as clean as if cut by a knife."
He paused, and there was a hint of emotion in his voice.
"The last time an expert from the province looked at this brick, he said, 'This is a living specimen of traditional craftsmanship.'"
Liu Chuanjun's fingers suddenly clenched, and the edges of the brick corners made his palms hurt.
He recalled that when he was first called "Master Liu", the master handed him a brick like this and said, "When you can feel the sand content in the soil by hand, you will be considered to have entered the realm of art."
Now, these two young men, one can use drones to map the terrain, and the other can analyze the mineral composition according to the test report, are still willing to hold his "antique" as a treasure.
The sunlight passed through the gaps between his fingers, casting spider-web-like shadows on the documents. He suddenly remembered the first time he was in charge of the expansion of the brick factory, he almost built the kiln crookedly because he didn't listen to the technicians.