Chapter 79: Recruiting Employees (3)
“Well, lucky that you didn’t then. That’d have been so shameful. Our son is classmate with her daughter. If your son’s classmates and teachers find out that you work for your son’s classmate’s mother, imagine how shameful that’d be for him.” Zhang Huafeng gave his wife an unpleasant look. Did she still have a brain? To go sell clothes for her son’s classmate’s mother? That’d put their son at a lower status than his other classmates.
Wu Xiuyue replied unhappily, “Then what if I don’t go get a job? With just your income, when will we be able to have our own place? So me working for someone else is shameful, but us living here is not? Looking at that Lin Hui and Shu Yan, they had both bought houses at Nanfu Mansion, and the 120 m2 ones no less. Look at our house? We cram six people into 40 m2. Hanhan, at his age, is still sleeping in our room. Is it not shameful that he won’t even be able to have his own room when he gets older? And then there’s that sister of yours. She is still single at 28. How’s that not shameful?”
“Hey, we are talking about me here. Why do you have to drag my sister in all this?” Zhang Huafeng looked over at the door and lowered his voice. “Okay, so I don’t make a lot. Don’t drag Xiuxiu into this.”
Wu Xiuyue sighed and didn’t say anything else. She realized that she did cross the line a little with what she had just said. She sat down on the other end of the couch and sighed. Then, suddenly, she had another idea. “Okay, so if it’s shameful for our son if I go and get a job, then what about Xiuxiu?”
“Xiuxiu is doing just fine at the factory. You want her to quit her job to sell clothes?” Zhang Huafeng felt that his parents would never buy into that.
“The factory that Xiuxiu is working at has stopped producing a long time ago. She hasn’t even been paid for six months. What is the point of staying there? She might as well quit the job and take her final pay. I know this sounds bad, but she is 28 after all. If she wanted to look for a good family to marry into at her age, it won’t hurt to have a bigger dowry. I don’t want any of the money from her final pay. She can save all those up for herself. That and all the money that she had saved up over the years. We can also chip in a little and help her get her own house, that would put her in a much better position when she gets married.”
Wu Xiuyue wasn’t a bad person after all. It was just that all the neighbors had been gossiping about her single sister-in-law over the years and that had gotten to her a little.
Zhang Huafeng looked at his wife, a little touched. “Wife, I…. I’ll bring it up to Xiuxiu in a little bit. We need dad and mom to sign off on that as well. Why don’t you ask Shu Yan tomorrow first? Maybe she had already found someone too?”
***
On the other hand, Shu Yan was stressing over hiring a store clerk. There had been a few who interviewed for the position after she had put up the hiring sign, but either they were not pretty or that they were not articulate. This was a clothing shop after all. Never mind that she wasn’t pretty herself, if the store clerk wasn’t pretty either, who’d go in and buy their clothes.
Which was why Shu Yan did not decline when Wu Xiuyue asked her if she was still hiring.