“That’s still better than you! When you were in elementary school, you still wet the bed. Go on, get some cake flour for Little Brian and a bowl, the kid’s probably hungry—dinner’s late today!” Grandma and Grandpa really are family—birds of a feather flock together. Grandpa can’t stand to see his grandson bullied, and Grandma can’t bear to hear anything bad about her grandson, not even from her own son. She tossed the rolling pin onto the board and started to take it out on Uncle Carter.

Cake flour was a kind of baby food from that era. It looked a bit like milk powder, but it wasn’t; it came in a kraft paper bag. You ate it the same way as black sesame paste: first mix it with water, then boil it, and it’s ready to eat. You could also add it to milk to make it thicker.

Brian Carter grew up drinking milk—one glass bottle a day, about half a pound. If that wasn’t enough, he had to rely on this cake flour to fill his stomach. Because he was growing so fast, he was tall and skinny. His mother always suspected he was malnourished, especially lacking calcium, so she even found some calcium tablets, crushed them, and mixed them into the cake flour for him.

Actually, all kids in that era were malnourished. Besides vegetables and rice or flour, there wasn’t much else to eat—very little meat, eggs, or dairy. But not many people realized this; being able to fill your stomach was already good enough—who cared about nutrition?

Just look at the walls in Grandma’s house and you’d know what Brian Carter did as a child. He often lay in bed picking at the wall plaster and eating it, leaving holes everywhere. His Little Uncle Carter wasn’t to be outdone—while Brian Carter picked at the walls, he tore at the window paper, and when no one was looking, stuffed it in his mouth. According to Brian Carter’s mother, these were all signs of trace element deficiency. But knowing was one thing—there was nothing anyone could do. Even though Brian Carter’s mother was a doctor, she couldn’t help Brian Carter or his Little Uncle Carter much, except to bring home some vitamins and calcium tablets from work for the kids, and even those weren’t always available.

“Brian Carter! Come eat your cake flour!” Uncle Carter pouted, extremely unwilling, as he finished cooking the cake flour for Brian Carter, then shouted at Brian Carter, who was daydreaming under the big tree.

“Uncle Carter, I don’t want it. You have it, I’m not hungry!” Brian Carter didn’t even look up. He really wasn’t very hungry, and even if he was, he didn’t want to eat that paste—white and bland, with no taste at all.

“Mom, he says he’s not hungry, he’s not eating!” Uncle Carter carried the little milk pot back into the main room and reported to Brian Carter’s Grandma.

“What’s with this kid today? We’ll talk when your dad gets home. Give it to your little sister then—what a waste!” Grandma had heard Brian Carter’s answer too. The old lady didn’t have time to figure out what the kid was thinking. If he didn’t want to eat, so be it. Nothing would go to waste in this era—anything edible would end up in someone’s stomach.

Brian Carter wasn’t studying whether the ants under the big tree could defend their home, or whether the ants marching from under the steps could conquer new territory. He didn’t have time to think about ants—he was thinking about what he should do! How he should live from now on!

He knew the course of history perfectly well, but that didn’t help his current situation at all. A four-year-old child, in an era full of rules—what kind of waves could he possibly make? The answer: almost none! Even if Brian Carter could invent a cell phone right now, no one in the country would believe him. And money, in this era, was just one of life’s necessities—not even the most important one. So if he tried to use making money to fool people, the consequences would be dire—everyone would see him as a freak and want to get rid of him.

In this era, you needed all kinds of ration coupons to buy almost any daily necessity. That was the principle of the rationing system. You needed flour coupons to buy white flour, rice coupons for rice, meat coupons for meat, and there were coupons for sugar, mahjong sets, and so on. Besides food, you needed industrial coupons for industrial goods, cloth coupons for fabric, and cigarette coupons for whole cartons of cigarettes. Without these coupons, even if you had money, you couldn’t spend it.

So, in his current four-year-old state, Brian Carter thought for a long time but couldn’t come up with any way to live more comfortably—there were just too many restrictions. Still, his pondering wasn’t for nothing. In the end, he came to one conclusion: no matter what, he couldn’t go back to the nursery. Not that the nursery was bad—actually, the lunches there were better than at home, with eggs or steamed egg custard every meal. But Brian Carter couldn’t stand being with a big group of kids all day. He could handle physical hunger, but mentally, he couldn’t take that kind of stimulation.

But not going to the nursery needed a solid reason. He’d resisted once before and got a good beating for it. If he defied his father’s decision again for no reason, Brian Carter figured he’d probably get another beating. Even though his brain was that of a man in his forties, his body was still 100% a child’s. Getting hit would definitely hurt, so if he wanted to avoid a beating, he’d have to reason his way out.