lerbook Chapter 1473: The Scenes I Have Seen Before
Chapter 1473: The Scenes I Have Seen Before
Chapter 1473: The Scenes I Have Seen Before
The world is big.
In the early winter morning, the sky was gray.
Another day begins at a pier in New York. It's just dawn, but the place is already noisy and crowded.
Warehouses with red brick walls, ships painted black, cranes, trucks, wooden boxes and ropes, white smoke, workers moving around in the messy docks,
A large number of people were gathering at the entrance of the pier.
They were all men, all wearing similar old dark overcoats, similar rough waistcoats and shirts, and the hats that everyone wore at that time.
The same wrinkles on the face with deep eye sockets,
Getting up in the dim light of the small room, they all came here before dawn to wait, and then when someone from the dock walked towards the entrance,
At this moment everyone rushed forward immediately!
Like a group of prisoners longing for freedom, they crowded in front of the iron gate of the dock. Everyone tried to stand at the front, while those at the back tried to stand on tiptoe to show their faces.
The cold wind blew through their dark clothes, casting a bleak filter over the world.
Leaving a newspaper headline trampled into the mud on the ground,
'1930, The Great Depression'
At the entrance to the dock, inside the crowded and noisy iron gate,
A man who looked like a foreman came over. He was wearing a brown Panama hat and shouted rudely to drown out the noise and chaos of the crowd outside the iron gate:
"I only want ten people!"
After saying this, he pointed at the crowd outside the iron gate and started to talk.
"One! Two! Three! Four!."
Only those who are tall, strong, and healthy-looking are selected, just like selecting livestock.
But the people he pointed out and chose did not show any dissatisfaction. They just quickly went in through the small door at the side, while those who were not chosen looked at him even more eagerly in the hope of being chosen.
"Ten!"
Finally, after counting the last person, the foreman in the Panama hat waved his hand and turned away.
"OK, that's all! Let's get started!"
All the 'lucky ones' he picked were handed a pair of handles with hooks. They would use them to hook the sacks and wooden boxes and load them onto the carts as temporary loaders.
Many more people who were not selected stood outside the iron gate with a look of disappointment on their faces.
Because this means that they have no job today, no income, their children are left to suffer from cold and hunger, and their lives are on the verge of collapse.
Maybe you can try other docks, but they rarely hire people after the morning opening hours.
They could only stand there silently and dejectedly, and then leave quietly.
At the last pier entrance, after the crowd gradually dispersed,
A figure standing not far away appeared.
He has a young face like a Chinese, and wears clothes that are out of date. He is slightly shorter than an adult and looks about 17 or 18 years old.
Like a child who has just grown up, he is in the transition period from adolescence to youth.
He just stood nearby, watching the people scrambling for work at the dock early in the morning, and the people around him passed by him as if they couldn't see this foreign boy.
Then at this moment, a man came to his side, and a light laugh sounded:
"Jiang Ran, what are you thinking about?"
When the elder asked, the boy turned around.
Will burn,
Seven or eight years have passed since the rainy night when he was rescued and since he got this new name.
Over the years, I have been living in the bamboo forest night club, following my elders in the mountains and forests every day, learning to exercise my abilities, learning various strange skills, learning literacy, arithmetic, astronomy, history, painting, music, and other worldly truths.
Sometimes, I go out to travel with my elders like this.
"Uncle Zhu Wen, I was just thinking that it's the same here, and it's even worse than other places."
At this time, looking at the dock gate where the crowd had dispersed, the young man named Jiang Ran expressed his thoughts after watching the scene just now.
The man he called Zhu Wen, who was wearing similar ancient clothes of unknown dynasty and had a handsome appearance with a changeable mind, also looked at the dock:
"After all, this is the epicenter of the disaster, so the people here are naturally not immune."
The country had suffered a disaster the previous year.
On the day known as Black Thursday, the Dow Jones Index on Wall Street suddenly plummeted, meaning that the prices of a large number of stocks plummeted, and the entire financial stock market collapsed.
This unprecedented disaster broke out when society was at its peak, like falling from the peak into the abyss.
Overnight, just overnight,
Thousands of people lost their life savings and assets.
At this moment, looking at a miniature of the aftermath of the disaster, Zhu Wen had seen the same scene at countless docks. He patted the shoulder of the boy beside him and smiled:
"Let's go and look somewhere else."
Nodding, and taking one last look at the iron gate of the dock, the boy followed the pace of his elders.
The two walked out of the dock and into another urban area. There were cement roads, iron street lamps, magnificent buildings on both sides of the street, and a skyscraper towering into the sky in the distance.
There are cars parked and driving on the street, and people in suits and ties walking by.
The streets of New York in 1930 seemed the same as before, but from everyone's expressions and the fact that there were fewer cars on the streets,
All of them make people clearly feel a depressed atmosphere of loss of vitality.
The world is big.
This is something that the young boy Jiang Ran has deeply realized over the years. He still remembers the first time he came here with his elders a few years ago.
Born in the countryside of a county town, where people were dark-skinned, wore shabby clothes, lived in mud houses, and some could not even afford shoes, he originally thought that his first scene,
The Bund in Shanghai, with its rickshaws, restaurants and shops, long gowns and cheongsams, and trams, is already prosperous enough.
But it wasn't until he came to New York that he realized what it meant to be beyond imagination.
Those wide and smooth asphalt streets, those endless streams of gasoline-powered cars, those radios, vacuum cleaners and other things that I had never heard of,
Those people with bright and beautiful appearance, those high-tech modern lifestyles, and the most intuitive,
There are cities that are made up of more than one skyscraper that is hundreds of meters high.
When the young boy looked up at that time, he felt an incomparable shock.
He didn't expect that when he came here again, it would become like this.
The world is big.
There are still many things in this world that he has not seen.
Walking through the streets and blocks, two figures who seemed to be outside this world walked in the city.
Then they stopped at a crossroads.
This is Central Park, but there is no park in front of us. In front of us are shabby houses made of wooden boards, old iron sheets, and tents, a shack area built on wasteland.
People who have lost their jobs, their savings, their homes, and the lowest class of homeless people live here.
And this kind of place is 'affectionately' called Hoover Village by them.
He took a boat from the Magic City to the west coast, and headed east to this city. Along the way, the boy had seen too many Hoover villages like this.
And not only that,
He had seen beggars on the streets, factories closing down, bankrupts committing suicide, and homeless people starving to death on the streets.
He had seen farmers dump tons of milk into rivers and shoot cattle and sheep to death and leave them to rot.
He also saw many people who could only pick up some unwanted rotten meat and vegetable leaves from the trash can and take them home.
In the context of millions of people being unemployed,
A series of bleak and depressing scenes.
At this moment, looking at the Hooverville in New York, the boy looked back at the skyscraper city behind him. The huge contrast created a sense of absurdity.
I was taught to come to my own understanding when traveling, and I asked many people along the way about the reasons for my current situation.
It was not until he reached the last part that he looked at the elders around him and asked:
"Uncle Zhu Wen, why did it become like this?"
There is still half left, I should be able to finish it tonight
(End of this chapter)