Chapter 530: Chapter 529: Visiting Her Parental Home on the Second Day of the New Year

The lively and bustling New Year’s Day ended amidst the joyful sounds of toasting among the clan members.

Today, the clan’s banquet not only had enough seafood but also unlimited white rice!

What is seafood compared to that? Everyone was tired of eating it!

What we truly crave is white rice! An adult man should eat at least three big bowls, filling his belly round and full to feel satisfied.

Compared to the adults’ obsession with white rice, the children have grown up! After all, at school, they could have it now and then, unlike adults who rarely see it and are amazed.

The Lin Clan members are usually reluctant to eat white rice at home. To be precise, even now, their rice jars at home hold no white rice, only brown rice.

When the physical exertion isn’t much, everyone likes to cook brown rice porridge, adding more water to cheat the stomach, and in times of hunger, they use cheap salted fish or shellfish as a stopgap.

When the labor is intense, or the men of the house are going out to fish at sea, then they eat pure brown rice.

Brown rice is the rice with the outermost layer removed; the texture is very coarse, and it always seems a bit irritating to the throat.

When Lin Wanwan first came to the Lin Family Manor, the Clan Leader gave her her first meal, which was roughly a brown rice meal.

For the people of Lin Family Manor, this was already high-standard hospitality; they wouldn’t usually eat like this themselves.

Actually, in dynasties before the Tang Dynasty, Southern people mostly ate brown rice, and only true noble families had refined white rice.

After entering the Great Tang, with the solid foundation left by the Sui Dynasty and advancements in productivity during the early Tang, ordinary small landlords in big cities gradually became more particular and fell in love with eating refined rice.

Refined rice is brown rice that has been further milled, removing all the rice bran, and the embryo within the brown rice is also milled away, leaving behind the white and fine endosperm.

Obviously, after such an operation, the texture improved, but the milling process became more complex, labor costs increased, and food quantity decreased.

For people who found it challenging to get enough to eat, it was impractical.

Therefore, households that could eat the white and shiny refined rice were undoubtedly the wealthy families of the villages ten miles around, and Lin Family Manor was clearly not at this level.

So, it’s conceivable how popular today’s white rice was, almost all of which was donated by Lin Wanwan.

As a major household of the clan, sponsoring a little white rice during the annual clan feast was also quite normal.

For Lin Wanwan, buying white rice was easy, as she had a whole modern-day granary!

But she couldn’t take it out too ostentatiously; if the Lin Clan was just a closed small village, Lin Wanwan could have acted boldly since she could always say she got it through connections, claiming she had a senior brother outside.

Just like when she first arrived at Lin Family Manor, she wasn’t afraid to take things from modern times at all—afraid of what? Many in the clan had never left town in their whole lives.

The seaside folk with limited knowledge had no idea what the outside world was like, so Lin Wanwan could say whatever she wanted.

After all, to the people of Lin Family Manor, what difference is there between glass and gold? They’re both luxuries out of their reach.

What noble household goods were supposed to be like, they couldn’t even imagine, so naturally, they wouldn’t suspect anything as Lin Wanwan did as she pleased.

But later, Lin Wanwan met Xiao Chong and started mingling with the town’s aristocrats, even recognizing an outsider family to solidify her identity, and her courage became smaller and smaller.

These people had experienced what the high society of the Great Tang was like, and they weren’t as easily fooled as the simple rural folks.

Especially Xiao Chong, he wasn’t only an aristocrat but also a noble born in Chang’an, the current center of the universe!

His grandfather, Xiao Yu, was the most distinguished noble during the Tang Dynasty.

Born as the son of the Emperor of the Liang Dynasty, he was titled king from a young age; after Liang’s fall, he was the full-blood brother of the Sui Dynasty’s Empress Xiao; by the time of the Tang Dynasty, he was a relative of Li Yuan, titled Prime Minister; when Li Shimin came to power, he became in-laws with Li Shimin, ranking ninth among the Twenty-four Heroes of Lingyan Pavilion, continuing as Prime Minister!

With such an incredible grandfather, Xiao Chong’s upbringing and experiences were on the ceiling level of the Great Tang; what kind of rare treasures hadn’t he seen?

Therefore, Lin Wanwan was unqualified in fooling Xiao Chong, full of flaws. What she thought was careful was far from cautious.

If it wasn’t for getting involved with the nobility of the Great Tang and just staying in this remote seaside village of Lin Family Manor, Lin Wanwan might have been boldly trading refined white rice from modern times, selling it at low prices to the clan members.

Now, the deeper her ties with the nobility of the Great Tang, the less freely Lin Wanwan could act.

If she had traveled to Chang’an instead of Mao County, she might have been exposed early on.

In Chang’an, people like Xiao Chong were a dime a dozen, and characters like Zhangsun Wuji, Fang Xuanling, and Du Ruhui were extraordinary.

As night fell, the bustling Lin Family Manor gradually quieted down.

Lin Wanwan accompanied little Qingyu to sleep; tonight, she didn’t plan to return to modern times, so she allowed little Qingyu to snuggle into her bed, a rare New Year treat for the little one.

The mother and daughter, who had been busy all day, were both quite tired, focusing solely on enjoying themselves without attending to any actual business.

Perhaps the greatest joy in life is squandering time without any burdens.

The next day was the second day of the new year, when visiting relatives and friends officially began.

Today, many married-out women of the clan returned; homes with both sons and daughters were generally held back from returning to the wife’s family, first hosting the sisters-in-law.

Lin Juhua was one of the daughters returning to her family.

Her biological brother, Lin Mengxing, just married a new wife this year, and the new wife was now pregnant. Ideally, it should have been about the new wife first, visiting her family’s home on the second day of the new year.

However, times have changed; Lin Family Manor is different now, with the Village Lady holding down Lin Family Manor, making it not an ordinary agriculture household. The daughters married out from Lin Family Manor naturally became more esteemed than daughters-in-law from elsewhere.

A woman’s status is either earned through her efforts or given by her family.

So even the new wife had to stay at Lin Family Manor on the second day, initially hosting the returning sisters-in-law.

Lin Juhua, as usual, came to pay New Year respects to Lin Wanwan with her son in her arms and her daughter in tow.

The family she married into was poor, but her husband was still considerate, knowing Lin Wanwan liked mountain products, so today they also brought dried mountain goods when paying New Year visits.

These are all pure, natural, pollution-free mountain treasures, which Lin Wanwan gladly accepted, and she generously gave each child a golden grain for good fortune.

Lin Juhua’s son was now crawling around skillfully, and little Qingyu was joyfully teasing him.

Her daughter, Xu Fu, sat quietly by the side, watching little Qingyu play with her brother.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep