A. Jump out of the farm gate
On the east side of Huangpu River, there is a tributary called Yaojiabang, at the east end of which there is an ancient town of Zhaoguilou, and at the west end of which is Dujiaxing. In the 1940s and 1950s, there was a small ferry from Zhaoguilou to Shanghai Sixteen Shops Pier via Du Jiaxing. The local residents who traveled on the small ferry were local residents who had their hearts set on both the city and the countryside, and the people who watched the small ferry traveled along the shore imagined the ten-mile Shanghai.
Along the north shore of Yaojiabang, there is an official road that can reach Huangpu River, in this official road, there is a lofty Zhang Family pagoda, after the pagoda is the private ancestral hall of Zhang A Jian, a wealthy man in Pudong in the late Qing Dynasty, the two sides of the pagoda are somehow all the clansmen surnamed Zhu, my family lives in the western most end of this small house. My family lives in the western end of this small house. This small house with more than ten families is full of talented people and high school graduates before the Cultural Revolution, all of whom went to university, three 985 and one 211.
There is a temple at the eastern end of the Du family line, and there is an elementary school in the temple, commonly known as the East Temple. As a child, I traveled between Home and the East Temple along the river road, about less than a kilometer. In spring, the wheat seedlings were like green waves, the fragrance of golden rape blossoms was refreshing, and the reeds along the river were dry and wide, dancing with the wind. In winter, the fields are so thinly covered with greenery that, as you look around, there are mountains of charred graves and ragged, naked coffins scattered haphazardly across the fields, one of which is wrapped in straw with my late father lying in it. They were shivering in the cold wind, and that was the color of my childhood.
The society turned upside down and began to buy and sell goods collectively, with the hat of an agricultural household. Later on, the cooperative, land to the collective, farmland where there is a lack of seedlings no one to replant the melon seedlings, the ridge side of the field adzuki beans, sesame, and almost nothing, what to take to quench the thirst? The trees next to the houses were to be returned to the public, and the farmers cut them down for firewood, leaving the bare village with no shade to take advantage of.
After the summer harvest and at the end of the year, the money was distributed twice according to the work points, but after deducting the rations and agricultural by-products distributed according to the population, there were few left, and some people were still overdrawn (the work points were less than the money distributed in kind). When I saw the workers going home on the ferry, they were well-dressed and had shiny shoes, and some of them had bicycles at home, so I was very happy. But the school teachers said that the workers’ labor was complicated and intense, and they would get more money for more work, so rural students were not convinced.
The opportunity finally came when I walked more than 20 kilometers to Minhang with three young people from the town to take the Culture course for the Shanghai Electric Factory. We think the test questions are not difficult, a few days later, the factory called the production brigade to ask for people, the captain said: “One can not go!” Life‘s first attempt to go to the city failed in this way.
After communalization to eat canteen, the beginning is okay, then worse and worse, and finally broke up. Food shortages, agricultural accounts of middle school students 28 pounds, residents of 32 pounds, there are also side food supply tickets, in the green vegetables and rice, more money to spend, no way to try to pull herbs to sell. The wilderness in the summer looking around, once to the Puxi gas plant, saw a barrel of cold drinks under the corridor, ah, is chilled green bean Soup. Take the cup next to the bucket, drink, refreshing, never in my life to drink such a sweet drink. Looking around the tall buildings of the factory, it seemed like my heaven on earth.
My middle school was at the west end of Dujiayang, and there was a Catholic church on the school grounds, and everyone called this school the West Temple. Rural children have a lot of physical work. In elementary school, raising rabbits, sheep and cutting grass was my thing. After secondary school, I had to do all kinds of farm work, farm work on my own land, and household chores, and even went to the Puxi brick factory to push the brick carts, so I only studied when I was in school. To learn well, you have to work hard. The countryside is no electricity, the winter day is short, the night with kerosene lamps, one person two two kerosene, the whole family less than a pound, the night with enough, which can be hard reading under the lamp? Learn to chisel the wall to steal the light, the firefly reflecting snow, the first early riser at dawn to burn porridge, read foreign languages before the fire, and memorize extracurricular reading poems. The flowers must be folded, do not wait for the flowers to break the branches. The long wind will break the waves, hang the clouds and sail to the sea. I was inspired to move forward by the famous lines of the ancients.
When I graduated from high school, my class teacher looked at my volunteer form, which was all about teacher training, and said politely that the first one was Tsinghua, and the second one was Beijing Institute of Technology (now called Beijing Institute of Technology). I said helplessly, “My family is poor, so I can only apply for the teacher training, which is free of charge. The list was released, my class admission rate of one-third, the first in Shanghai County, industrial and mining enterprises are the aspirations of rural students, ten people admitted to engineering universities, only I was a teacher training. To the brigade to open a certificate to move the account, the captain said no with a stern face. I cried and ran to the school and the police station, and they made a phone call before I could move my account.
On August 21, 1962, carrying the acceptance letter and the household registration certificate, I got on the city ferry to Puxi, and my heart was in turmoil. At that Time, Puxi and Pudong were aliases of urban and rural areas in Shanghai. The dream of entering a factory was broken, and the dream of leaving the agricultural household was fulfilled. I left my relatives, no nostalgia, and went to the distant Beijing, to find a better tomorrow perhaps.
Second, up to the sky and into the earth
The first time I boarded the green train, I was amazed by the pink walls of Suzhou, fascinated by the sound of the fishing fires of the Yangtze River, smelled the fragrance of chicken in Fu Liji and Texas, and saw through the shiny dog’s buns in Tianjin, which were unattainable. The good thing is that Beijing has finally arrived, the wide Chang’an Street, the traffic, the majestic Tiananmen Square, solemn and solemn.
When I entered the gate of the university, I was greeted by smiling faces of the students and flowers were blooming on the campus. The most praiseworthy thing is that the flowers here are more fragrant, Lu Xun, Liu Shaoqi found a soulmate here, Mao Zedong, Ye Ting, Lu Dingyi and other distinguished family buds blooming here. In the past six years, I have listened to the academic reports of masters such as Qian Sanqiang and Qigong, watched the original color film in English, carried the national emblem in the front of the National Day parade, and secretly looked up at the great men of the city tower. Later, we listened to the curses of Jiang Qing’s sheep voice and witnessed the tragic image of General Peng being punched and kicked while kneeling on the ground with his arms cut back.
Finally, we were “kicked” to the cold Daxinganling Special Zone, a first forest city named Gagdache. When we reported to work, a personnel cadre, who read our resume as a “resume”, assigned my girlfriend and me to the Construction Engineering Division. There we could only work as laborers, a tired job lacking skills, and my girlfriend was the only female laborer in this unit.
The most memorable part of our time here was sifting river sand in winter. At dawn, we climbed into the big truck with long felt boots, sheepskin coats, ear-covering hats, and fingerless cotton hands, and ran on the wild river bank in the temperature of more than 30 degrees below zero. At least half an hour, the cold wind like needles on the face, hat brim, eyelashes covered with white frost. To the beach, rolling and crawling down to the ground, and constantly jumping, feet to feel. Dry talk for a while, roast a fire for a while, take out the frozen rock-hard buns at noon to bake and swallow them with the snow dough.
After a year of torment, I passed through Beijing again on my family vacation, and Chang’an Street, which I first met seven years ago, felt wider and more moving, but it was already a passing scenery for me.
Third, dare to stay here?
Six months after I returned from my family visit, I was assigned to work again in the local area and became a teacher in the Bishui Commune, which was being built for the first time. The commune here is a grassroots social organization that unites government, enterprise and society, with forestry as the center, production units with company establishment, a school, a hospital (like a workshop), a post office, a bank, and the only store. Store goods variety is very small, only a small amount of tobacco and alcohol, canned goods and other small daily commodities, mostly in the tent.
The peak season of timber production in the forest area was on the freezing day, and once the ice-free day arrived, the big day to build a place to settle down arrived. Leaders pointing to only the beams and pillars of the roof frame of the building said, building materials, skilled craftsmen unified distribution, rough work and miscellaneous work, each unit to do their own. The unified allocation of rounds, are in short supply, how to seize the opportunity to see the head of each unit of hard and soft strength.
House construction, some work is high-intensity physical work. And the big mud, water, mud, firewood and grass stirred together, and then nailed to the wall full of thin wooden strips to drop the stirred mud and grass, bare hands working in the mud, skin cracked, covered in mud.
The school is a freshwater government office, to building materials, to build a fireplace, fire walls, pan pits often dragged, to craftsmen, a smile to welcome, good cigarettes, sometimes to entertain dinner. When the house can barely live, the lack of bits and pieces of building materials. Repair and mend, all by themselves to solve, the only one store and no sale. Workers in the logistics of labor, not mixed with fish, but also near the water. A small carpenter who gave me doors and windows was a Shanghai youth, and he gave me a small homemade square table, two square stools, two benches, and a panel for making noodles, which solved the most basic necessities. Other people who worked in the construction team and shared the same fate often sent charcoal in difficulties. In this era of lowly teachers, what a rare and valuable feeling!
Water was a basic living resource, and there was a public well in the residential area, a steel pipe driven into the ground with a well head to pump water. In winter, the outdoor water dripped into ice, and water could only be pumped at fixed times, using boiling water to melt the ice in the well head. In winter, a small iceberg is formed with the well pipe as the peak, and the road is slippery and easy to fall. When the ice melts in spring and summer, the surrounding area is muddy and full of sewage.
The lowest temperature of minus 40 to 50 degrees in the harsh winter, heating is a big deal, the forest area burning dead wood, production units with large trucks, strong workers collectively go up the mountain to cut, pull home. The school has no car and no strong labor, can only pull their own cart up the mountain.
Once, the couple went up the mountain and pulled a small cart of dry wood downhill. Ice road down the mountain few no resistance, the faster it rolls. The wife behind the car said, “I can’t pull, come out. I quickly ran out of the frame, heavy car racing down, rolled to the foot of the mountain, clicked a sound, the handlebar broke. I dare not go up the mountain again.
The good thing is that there is a storage site near my home, the wood pulled down from the mountain according to the specifications cut off, some short useless tips unit do not want, the workers off work when the good carry home, and so they are off work, dark no one, I then specialize in picking up some smaller branches, barely get by. In order to reduce the pressure of lack of firewood, every year in the harsh winter will go back to the south. The ticket is expensive, once home, a year of savings all spent. The good thing is that when you return to bring back some few no supply of rice, salted meat, etc., a little to improve life. But the heavy journey to turn the car thrilling, once in Qiqihar, the car door was packed with people, it was difficult to push my wife into the car, the car was going to close, I was so anxious to scream, thanks to the military police on duty to push me into the car door leaving only a small gap, thrilling ah!
In those days, the central red-headed document said that schools were dictated by the bourgeoisie, the world view of teachers is bourgeois, so schools in rural areas have poor propaganda team, urban schools have labor propaganda team leading schools, public opinion incites students to revolt against teachers, there is a Huang Shuai type of students, teachers in the upper and lower two layers of the sandwich board to survive, once for criticizing students in the classroom nonsense, students scolded and high hat, angry, past the The first time I saw the student, I was so angry that I went over and slapped him, and he immediately pulled out a brick from the fireplace, showing his teeth. The night is dark, where is the end, a segment of the community said that the teacher complained to the leader, the leader said, you do a good job, the future will transfer you to the store as a salesman.
A spring thunder, the “Gang of Four” fell, the university began to re-enrollment. I was transferred to a new teacher’s college to teach physics. Before leaving, the head of the personnel section said to me, Huzhong people do not want you to go. This hat is really too tall. Farewell, the decade of useless knowledge!
Fourth, a God-given opportunity
My career began with elementary school teaching, and as the children of young workers grew up, I taught middle school and high school like ants climbing a tree. Nearly a decade of suffering, on the eve of the resumption of college entrance exams, I worked in the Huzhong District Literature and Education Section, witnessed the comedy of the rules change in the process of candidate registration, older youths put down the stone in their hearts, reviewed the heavy test papers full of stories behind them, admired the resilient among them, and was lucky enough to be the teacher of this group.
Daxingling teacher training college class enrolled students, few local children, more freshmen, the vast majority of Beijing, Shanghai and other places of youth, the Cultural Revolution is studying high school, age, many people have family so-called political history problems, can not go to a good school, good professional. These people are smart and studious, I am only four years older than them, when their teacher, I feel ashamed, they are studying hard to change their fate in life, they are my example to learn.
I turned out the old yellowing books that had been pressed for ten years, teaching and learning as one. Fearing the high barriers of Beijing and Shanghai, I entered my wife’s hometown of Chongqing College of Construction and Engineering, a national key university that historically split off from Chongqing University and then went back. The faculty included not only old gentlemen from Europe and the United States, but also many Soviet and Eastern European students, producing corporate superstars like Ren Zhengfei.
I graduated there and stayed on to work. My wife graduated from graduate school and stayed to work at a divisional university and was sent abroad on a public mission. To take care of my two children, I had to transfer to a divisional university.
There were many relics of the Southwest United University, the most famous of which was Wu Mi, who suffered a difficult fate. The second son moved from the rural suburbs of Shanghai and was supposed to be in the third grade of the attached elementary school, but for various reasons he went out to the first grade. Most of the key teachers at the university were graduates of our school, and the language of instruction was Sichuanese, and the students were mainly from Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. It was not easy for foreigners to integrate, and it was not easy for my wife to make a living when she had been abroad for many years.
In the mid to late 1980s, the country broke through the price barrier, the atomic bomb is better than selling tea eggs, Beijing professors even sold pies, the mainland teacher training teachers are even worse. Once I took my second son back to Shanghai to visit his family, and the small noodles by the pier were two yuan a bowl. I spent five days and nights in the fifth class cabin like a refugee, and once I went to the sixteen stores pier, a bowl of Yangchun noodles, 80 cents, delicious! Visiting relatives, a family suspected of light gifts, was actually returned, the gap between the mainland and the coast, solid hearts.
Want to go back home.
Some years ago, when moving away from the Northeast account, according to the policy by the way consign some wood to Shanghai, want to expand the ancestral home, not allowed. I encountered a similar situation where the youth returned to the city with a home that was difficult to return to.
My wife returned home after getting a doctorate and had a smooth career, and later became a vice president. In the blink of an eye, my Parents-in-law passed away one after another, and my two sons graduated from university and joined the workforce, with my second son working in Shanghai. My wife was so focused on her work that she did not accompany me on the school’s income-generating trip to Jiuzhaigou in the summer of 1998.
The school’s leadership team changed, and the party and government leaders were all 57 or 58 years old, and the old steed had aspirations for a thousand miles. Wife laid off to pick the physics department Shen Bo heavy responsibility, the lack of administrative resources is difficult to win. The other three senior school party and government deputy high style to support sister institutions, of course, rose to a full position. The old Huang Zhong led the young generals to make their debut. October long vacation, my wife and I traveled to Emei Mountain for a break, on the way to the usual monkeys blocking the road to grab food, the mountain top suddenly downpour, both of them drenched into a soup chicken.
It so happens that a university in Shanghai is in urgent need of talent for the construction of a master’s degree, the leadership of the division of the University loves talent, withholding wife personnel relations released, I have been gracious, completely released.
February 12, 1999, Chongqing, the sky is overcast, we boarded a Southwest Airlines flight husband and wife. Although there were few passengers, because it was almost the Chinese New Year, there were hot prize activities. We won a beautiful model airplane for the good luck. The plane landed at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, clear skies, after 37 years, I finally came back.
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