Li Jiaxian's expression froze for a moment. He could only nod quickly, "Yeah... I haven't been back in so long. I really miss it. I haven't had proper Southern Province cuisine in ten years. You don't know how spicy the hottest things I've eaten in Huadu were – just Lao Gan Ma! And then the exploding chili beef noodles. These past years, I haven't gone a single day without missing the food here."
"It seems Uncle is very busy," Lin Xiao said after a pause, sighing.
Li Jiaxian blinked. Why would Lin Xiao suddenly say he was busy?
"Uncle misses the food in Sha City so much, yet in these ten years, you haven't had time to come back even once. This shows how incredibly busy your business is," Lin Xiao explained.
"...Yes, there's no choice. After all, I left my hometown and struggled alone. If I hadn't been working hard all these years, I don't even know how I would have survived," Li Jiaxian chuckled dryly.
He wasn't lying. He had missed home terribly during these ten years. But ten years ago, when he had just achieved some success and things were starting to look up, he thought about returning home in glory and showing his family. However, more and more people asked him for money. At first, he lent it to them... but later, he refused.
He knew then what "lend to the needy, not to the poor" meant.
"It's not easy for anyone."
Lin Xiao nodded. httpδ:/m.kuAisugg.nět
As they were chatting, the doorbell rang. Li Shuxiao had returned.
"Dad!"
Li Shuxiao walked over with great joy, taking her father's hand. "Dad, you knew you were about to arrive, so you rushed back immediately."
"Oh, you! When you go out to travel, just enjoy yourself and don't worry about your old dad. I'm right here, I won't get lost," Li Jiaxian patted his daughter's head and then asked, "How is it? Do you feel any difference in Sha City now compared to before?"
"Dad, let me tell you, there are too many people in Sha City now! Whether it's a weekday or a weekend, any place that's even slightly famous is packed. Just now, I wanted to buy a milk tea, and you know what? For those roadside shops, each one had a line of thirty or forty people. The most outrageous thing was that I saw a shop with over a hundred people in line nearby. I really can't understand it."
Li Shuxiao then began to exaggerate:
"And eating, too. I went to three restaurants that I'd marked in my travel guide. The combined number of people waiting in line at those three restaurants should have been two or three hundred. When I went to get a number, the waitress told me the waiting time was over two hours..."
Lin Xiao blinked on the side. Hearing Li Shuxiao say this, he felt a bit dumbfounded and subconsciously asked, "So many people waiting in line?"
"Yeah!"
"How come I never encountered that?"
Lin Xiao scratched his head. He really hadn't encountered anything like it. He never had to wait in line.
"Brother-in-law, you have to wait in line for food?"
Li Shuxiao rolled her eyes and said impatiently.
Then she corrected herself, "No, Brother-in-law, it's not that you have to wait in line for food. The places you cook are much better than those outside, so you don't need to go out to eat."
"That seems right."
Lin Xiao nodded. When he did go out to eat, it was usually at noon with his wife, at the restaurants owned by Jiang Tao and Rao Yilong.