Director Liu closed the tin box, the metal clasp snapping shut with a sharp "click" that startled the sparrows perched on the windowsill.
He pulled two photographs from a folder. On the left was a scene from 1978 of manual brickmaking: over a dozen workers, shirts off, stood in the mud pit, their wooden molds glistening with dampness under the sun. On the right was a photo taken last month, showing Wang Jianguo squatting beside an improved brick-molding machine, his detector displaying the moisture level of the clay.
"Look at Grandpa Zhang. Back in the day, he’d stand as straight as a poplar trunk while shaping the bricks, but now he has to hold his knees just to bend down and pick up a tool." He tapped the photo on the right with his cigarette case. "Machines aren’t meant to make us lazy; they’re meant to let us focus our strength where it matters most—like figuring out how to make the bricks crack less and how to cut coal consumption by twenty percent."
Chapter 667