Every day, the postman would put a few envelopes in the mailbox of the residents in the building; but Marco Valdo's mailbox never had anything, and no one would ever write to him. If it weren't for those orders that forced electricity and gas bills, his mailbox would be useless at all. "Dad, I believe it!" Michelino called out. "What!" Marco Valdo replied, "It's not those advertisements!" All the mailboxes were stuffed with a piece of folded blue and yellow paper. The above said that among all similar products, the best soapy water is the "White Sun" brand; it also said that as long as you present this blue and yellow paper, you can get free samples. The paper is thin and long, and some of it poked out the outside of the mailbox; some of it were rolled into a ball and threw it on the ground, and some were just a little wrinkled, because many residents were used to throwing out the advertising paper when opening the mailbox, because it took too much space. Philipto, Pietruchi, and Michelino picked up a few pictures from the ground, then picked a few from the mailbox, and sometimes even hooked a few pictures from the mailbox with iron wire, and then collected coupons for the "White Sun" card. "My more!" "Impossible, count again! Let's bet if I have more coupons!" The advertising of the "White Sun" brand has spread throughout the community, and no one missed it. So the three brothers followed the community to stock up on coupons. Some janitors would yell at them, "Naughty guys! What are you here to steal? I'm going to call the security guard!" But the other janitors were quite happy to see them, because in this way, someone cleaned up the paper piled there every day. At night, Marco Valdo's two poor rooms were filled with "white sun" blue and yellow paper; the children counted the papers and piled them up in piles, just like the cashiers in the bank counted the bills. "Dad, if we have a lot of coupons, can we open a laundry?" asked Philippeto. Those days, a huge uproar occurred in the laundry detergent manufacturing industry. The advertising of "White Sun" has made other competing companies very nervous. In order to promote their products, other companies began to stuff receipts into every mailbox in the city. With these receipts, people can receive more and more free samples. So Marco Valdo's children were very busy in the next few days. The mailboxes bloom every morning like peach trees in spring: those receipts with green, pink, sky blue and orange patterns are painted on them, promising clean washes to all customers who can use gold balls, bright shuffles, dawn cards and clean clothes detergents. For children, the types of receipts and coupons collected are becoming more and more diverse. At the same time, they also expanded the territory they collected, sometimes expanding into corridors in other streets. Of course, this move is impossible not to be noticed. The children of the neighbors quickly understood what Michelino and his brother were searching for all day, so the paper they had never seen in person quickly became a spoil that everyone longed for. For a time, the naughty guys from various gangs were very hostile, and collecting advertising papers in this community became the main reason for various disputes and disputes. Then, after a series of exchanges and negotiations, they finally reached an agreement that organized hunting would be more profitable than random robberies. So this matter became orderly. Whenever a person who sent detergent cards or quick-clear cards came to the doorway to stuff advertising papers, his whereabouts would be reconnaissed step by step and followed closely. Once the materials were distributed, they would be taken away by the naughty guys soon. Who will command various actions? Of course it was Philippeto, Pietruchi and Michelino, because the idea was first thought of by them. They even convinced other children that these receipts were public property and should be kept in a unified manner. "Just like a bank!" Pietruchi explained further. "Are we the owner of a laundry or a bank?" asked Michelino."No matter what it is, we are all millionaires!" The children were so excited that they couldn't even sleep at night, and kept planning their future: "We just need to exchange all the samples to save a lot of laundry detergent." "But where to put it?" "We have to rent a warehouse!" "Why not rent a boat?" This advertisement is like flowers and fruits, and is seasonal. A few weeks later, the detergent season passed, and there were only some advertisements for treating corns in the mailbox. "Do we have to accept this too?" someone asked. But the opinion of concentrating efforts to quickly exchange the accumulated wealth into laundry detergent has the upper hand. This means that they have to go to the designated store to exchange coupons for samples, and exchange coupons for one coupon for one pack: but this seemingly simple new stage of planning is much longer and tedious than the previous stage. These actions need to be carried out separately: each child can only go to one store at a time. You can even bring three or four notes at a time, as long as the brands are different, if the clerk is willing to give only one brand sample and no other brand, then you have to say, "My mother wants to try several brands to see which brand is better." But sometimes it will be a little more troublesome, because in many stores, you can only get free samples after consumption; mothers have never seen children want to be sent to grocery stores to buy things like this. In short, the process of converting coupons into goods took a long time and brought extra expenses because moms gave them little money to buy things, while there were many shops waiting to be patrolled. In order to get enough funds, they had to immediately enter the third phase of the plan and sell the laundry detergent they had received. They decided to go to each household to ring the doorbell and promote laundry detergent. "Auntie! Are you interested? It's so perfect!" Then he quickly handed over the box of "Su Qing" or the bag of "White Sun". "Okay, OK, give it to me, thank you." Some aunts took the sample and then closed the door suddenly, and the door almost hit their faces. "What? Where is the money?" They kept pounding the door. "Pay? Not free? Gougu, naughty!" Indeed, in those few days, many representatives of brands were giving away free samples from door to door: because the promotion of coupons and tickets was ineffective, the entire laundry detergent industry launched a new advertising offensive. Marco Valdo's home is like a grocery store filled with detergent, clean clothes, and shuffled products, but these goods cannot be made even a penny; these are all given, just like water in a fountain. Naturally, the representatives of these laundry detergent companies soon heard the news, saying that some children were on the same route as them and were selling products they begged to accept for free in every household. In the trade world, pessimistic thoughts often appear: people start to say that people who give them laundry detergent for free say they don’t know what to do with the laundry detergent, but buy laundry detergent from people who ask them to pay for laundry detergent. So many company research departments gathered together for a meeting, and they consulted experts from "market research": the final conclusion was that such a untrustworthy competitive situation could only be caused by those hiding goods. After receiving legal reports of these unknown perpetrators, the police began to search for thieves and stolen goods hiding sites in the entire community. So laundry detergent becomes as dangerous as glycerin explosives at any time. Marco Valdo was scared: "We can't even keep a little washing powder in our house!" But he didn't know where to put these washing powder, because no one wanted to get it home. Finally, it was decided that the children would throw the laundry detergent into the river. So, before dawn that day, a small car filled with gold bubbles and bright shuffled detergent boxes came up on the bridge, Pietruchi pulled in front, his little brothers pushed in back, next to it was another same car, pulled by Uguchione, the son of the doorman opposite them, and then many other cars. They stopped when they walked to the middle of the bridge. After a curious cyclist who looked back and saw the final word, they heard a "throw!" and Michelino began to throw the box containing the laundry detergent into the river."You are stupid! Didn't you see the box floating on the river?" Filipetto shouted, "You have to pour the laundry detergent out of the box, not throw it away!" So, a ball of white mist softly dropped from the open boxes and fell on the river. At first it seemed to be sucked in by the river water, and then many small bubbles appeared again, and then it seemed to sink to the bottom of the river. "That's all!" So the children continued to pour laundry detergent under the bridge with ten kilograms. "Look, look down there!" Michelino shouted, pointing at the valley. There is a rapid flow not far from the front of the bridge. The river there was going to be a small slope, and the bubbles couldn't be seen; then it reappeared at the bottom, but now it turned into large bubbles, one by one, they were squeezed up from the bottom, and became bigger and bigger. The waves rolled out by a soapy water rose higher and higher, and the bubbles had risen to the height of the river beach before the downhill, and were white, just like the bowl of things that the barber mixed with a brush. It seemed as if all the laundry detergents of competitor brands were stubbornly competing for their respective bubble abilities: the river was filled with soapy water, and it kept flowing to the dock, and when it was light, the fishermen who were already standing in the river standing in the river quickly took back the fishing line and ran away as if they ran away. A slight wind blew from the sky in the early morning. A string of bubbles broke away from the river, flew lightly, and finally flew away. Because it was still dawn, the bubbles were dyed pink. The children shouted as they watched the bubbles float high above their heads, "Wow..." The bubbles flew along the invisible airflow tracks above the city, and when they flew to the height of the roof, they rushed into the roads, and could always avoid touching the edges and eaves. Now the tight bubble strings have spread a little: all bubbles have flew away one after another, and each bubble has taken different courses due to the different height, lightness and lines, swimming around and moving in the air. It was as if these bubbles had become more; to be more precise: it was true, because the river continued to spit out the foam, like a kettle burning on the stove. And the wind, the wind lifted the feast of bubbles to a high place, and the bubbles were lengthened and turned into rainbow-colored rings (the sun had climbed over the roof, and the oblique sunlight controlled the entire city and the river), so the bubbles crossed the wires and antennas and slowly invaded the sky. The dark figures of the workers rode on the thudded motor bicycles and rushed towards the factory, soaring above them, the green, pink, and blue bubbles like bees followed closely, as if each of them had a long thread tied to the handlebars of the thread, and the end of the thread was dragged behind them were strings of balloons. This scene was discovered from the tram: "Look, look, everyone! Hey! Look, look, what's on it?" The tram driver stopped and got out of the car, and the passengers got out, looking into the air, bicycles, motor bicycles, cars, newspaper sellers, bakery owners, all the pedestrians who were rushing in the morning, and Marco Valdo, who was rushing to work, all stopped and raised their heads to pursue the whereabouts of the soap bubbles. "It's not something like an atomic bomb, right?" an old lady asked, panic spreading in the crowd in an instant. Someone ran away while yelling, "There is radiation!" The light and fragile rainbow-colored bubbles continued to flutter, just a gentle blow, puff! There was no trace; so the alarm sounded quickly and was released quickly. "What kind of radiation does not radiate? It's soapy water! The kind of soapy water that children play with!" In this way, a carnival swept across the crowd. "Look at that bubble! That! And that!" They saw that the flying bubbles were so large that they were incredible, because if the bubbles met the bubble, they would merge together and become twice or even triple the size of the original one. The sky, the roof and the skyscrapers took shapes and colors that had never been seen before through these transparent round covers. At this time, the chimneys of various factories began to spit out black smoke just like every morning.So the bubbles, like bees, encountered a cloud of black smoke, and the sky was divided into black smoke and rainbow-colored foam streams. In the whirlwind, the two streams seemed to be fighting, and for a while, for a while, the top of the chimney seemed to be conquered by bubbles, but soon the two streams - the black smoke that trapped the bubble rainbow and the bubble balls that surrounded the black spotted curtains - were stirred together again, and they were so indistinguishable from you and me that they couldn't figure out what was going on. Until later, no matter how Marco Valdo looked in the sky, he could no longer see bubbles. All he could see was black smoke, black smoke, or black smoke.
Ma Xiaomo Translation
