The phone watch
During the May Day holiday, Dabao suddenly seemed to have figured something out and said she wanted to stay at her maternal grandparents’ place for a few days. She had grown this big without ever really sleeping over at someone else’s home, but after the talks we had last month, she actually showed some willingness to give it a try.
Since it was her first time staying away from home, we still felt uneasy. The family leader told me to buy a phone watch in a hurry. With the government subsidy, I spent 500 yuan and got her a MiTu 7X. I ordered it from JD, and it arrived the next day. Before that, I called my dad and asked him to take out the unused secondary SIM card and leave it at our old home. After work I made a quick trip back, picked up the card, and went straight back to the neighborhood.
Once I got home, I spent some time setting it up. I installed the app on the leader’s phone, added everyone’s numbers, set up avatars for the whole circle of relatives, and Dabao immediately got excited and called every single person one by one.
There were two reasons for choosing MiTu. Value for money was one of them. At the same price point, Little Genius didn’t seem to offer much in terms of configuration. At first I planned to buy the 300-yuan model, but after thinking it over, I decided it was better to get something slightly nicer. The other reason is that Dabao will probably start primary school in at most two years, and many primary schools don’t allow kids to wear phone watches. We’ll see what happens by then; maybe it’ll need to be replaced with a newer model anyway.
After getting this thing, she has already started exploring it on her own. She has figured out how to take photos. I only discovered that after she came back and I saw the selfies she had sent to her grandma and grandpa. Then, naturally, came the showing off. When I pick her up from kindergarten, I have to bring the watch along so she can flash it in front of the other kids while they play on the way home. That is pretty normal, really. I did similar things when I was little.
Our family has always kept fairly strict limits on electronic devices. Dabao doesn’t play with phones or tablets. At most she watches some TV, then goes downstairs to play with the other children. So in a way, this phone watch counts as the first electronic product that truly belongs to her.
Life in the village
Dabao went to her grandpa’s place on the 3rd. My father-in-law is the village doctor nearby. Apart from running the clinic, he usually has plenty of free time. My brother-in-law is currently working in a neighboring city, so most of the time it’s just the old couple at home. They have time to spare, the kind of retirement life people look forward to. Dabao is at that lively, mischievous age, and whenever we visit relatives without bringing her along, the old couple seems almost unhappy about it.
On the 5th, I had a day off and went with the leader to pick her up. To sum up those two days: Dabao had a great time.
It just so happened that the village had a traditional opera performance going on. The old couple love opera, so they went at noon and again in the evening, taking Dabao along with them. They also brought her to the supermarket and bought her a whole new set of clothes: top, pants, jacket, and shoes.
There is a patch of land inside the clinic compound. Last year my father-in-law made a small pond there for fish, and planted some vegetables beside it. This time they happened to be putting up frames for the vegetables. Dabao played while helping with the work, and the old couple even sent us videos from the scene. You could tell she was genuinely happy.
Thinking back, our own childhoods in the village were much the same. Carefree, colorful, full of running around, exploring, and playing wherever there was space. Now that we’ve moved into the city and life has become better, it feels like many things have been lost instead. Things like the spring outings and study trips organized by kindergartens today—we experienced all of that naturally when we were young.
The past few decades have moved too fast. So many things feel as if they happened just yesterday, but in fact they already belong to a long time ago.
Leaders and paperwork
The big leader was transferred and promoted. There had been no sign of it beforehand.
That transfer suddenly stirred up a lake that had been quiet for a long time. Waves appeared everywhere, splashing in all directions. It felt a bit hard to get used to. After things have been calm for long enough, you really don’t have much appetite left for tossing around.
Then the main hilltop also officially announced major changes. All kinds of daily reports and briefings have started rolling out. If you don’t fill them in, money gets deducted. In the age of information technology, being a workhorse really isn’t easy. At this rate, if DeepSeek gets connected someday and starts analyzing everything, big data might directly classify all of us workhorses into different grades.
So be a workhorse who works properly, I suppose. Add a brick and a tile to the company’s development.
Ah San and drinking
One of the small leaders held a banquet because a baby had been born in the family. I’m on good terms with the couple. After arriving at noon, I deliberately sat at a table where nobody was drinking, thinking I’d avoid alcohol this time, eat, and leave.
In the end, I still drank three cups that day. That left me dizzy at work that night until the second half of the shift. It was the kind of dizziness that lingers in the head. Looking back, the leader was right: sometimes I really don’t know how to refuse when people persuade me. I need to keep a clearer sense of my own limits in the future.
As for the recent fight between Ah San and Baba Yang, it really felt like witnessing a historical moment. The last time I had that feeling was during that round involving America. I originally thought that once fighting started, it would probably be fairly intense and drawn out, then Baba Yang’s logistics might become a weak point later, and after that the Rabbit might step in to support and stop the war.
This time I figured Ah San would probably win big. After all, the scale is there, and it would be normal for Baba Yang to suffer losses. But then Ah San pulled off something huge in the other direction. Sure enough, after all these years, despite so many modern Chinese war films being made, there are very few about China and India. It really is hard to film.
