- The Movement
I learned about the “Cultural Revolution” earlier than many people my age.
In the early spring of 1966, when my father returned from a meeting in Beijing, he excitedly opened a roll of photos early in the morning for my mother to see: “On the closing day of the meeting, Premier Zhou received us. Look, I’m standing in the third row behind the Premier.”
He pointed to the two people sitting in the first row, “This is Meng Qiyu, the first announcer of Yan’an Xinhua Radio; this is Mei Yi, who translated How Steel is Made.”
I was sitting on the sidelines, savoring the “Yili” bread my father brought Home. It was the first Time I had eaten this foreign stuff, just like Piggy Bank had eaten the Ginseng fruit. When I heard him mention the book he was reading, I rushed over to look at it.
Dad went on to say, “The Premier mentioned in his speech that the country will soon start another campaign.”
“Hey! This time I don’t know who will be unlucky again.” Mom let out a long sigh.
“What’s a campaign?” I asked.
“The movement is the three anti-5 anti, anti-right four clear.”
“Isn’t that all about fixing the bad guys? What’s the downside.” I answered carelessly.
My mother’s face began to become grave: “What do children know! Every time the movement is not to the death of the whole. The back row of our Family lives Ernier, ‘three anti’ when her father said corruption, was punched in the chest as far as possible, the opposite side of the person then dislike the same back. Two people like playing ball to push around, almost did not get killed.”
I listened to the sweat hair began to stand up a root. The two mouths are my mother’s factory workers, her lover cut a partial head, sagging hair always love to cover the eyes, walk a few steps to shake. This habit later became a quirk, a group of children in the yard will quietly follow the imitation. I tied two twisted braids, how to learn it does not look like. The actual fact is that you’ll be able to get a lot more than just a couple of hours to get a lot more than just a couple of hours.
The arrival of the movement caught people off guard.
Late at night, I was awakened by a noise. I opened my eyes in a daze and saw that my house was ransacked by thieves: boxes were upside down on the floor, books were scattered everywhere, and even the bedside cloths were ripped off. My sisters were standing by the bed with frightened faces, and a woman was shoving them while shouting in Mandarin: “You have to stand firm as a class and distinguish yourselves from the gangsters.
I later learned that the woman was an announcer.
Dad’s work unit is the mouthpiece of the Party, responsible for the voice of the Party Central Committee Chairman Mao spread to the four corners of the world. As a child, I listened to the powerful “Nine Comments” on the radio and remembered that there was a country called “Difficult (Nans) Raf” and that Comrade Togliatti had differences with us. But I don’t understand why this sweet-voiced woman, with a red cuff, became so hysterical.
The gang fought for half a night and finally found a bank book from the bottom of the box. They gleefully announced that they would go to the bank at dawn to freeze the “counter-revolutionary activities funds” and then left with a whimper.
Faced with a mess, I remembered the conversation I had with my mother not long ago and realized that it was an “old athlete’s” heartfelt fear – it was my family’s turn to be “unlucky” this time.
There was a glimmer of light outside the window, and the earth began to wake up. God always turns the page on time, never late. But my Life will never be the same again.
The horrible memories began this summer.
“Revolution is not a treat, not an article, not a painting embroidery, revolution is a riot ……” the highest instruction became the pass to destroy. The rebel faction opened Pandora’s Box in the name of revolution. They ran everywhere, raiding homes, criticizing, parading and beating people became a daily routine everywhere. The madness of smashing the old world plunged the land of China into unprecedented turmoil.
The Chinese Propaganda Department, known as “the temple is small, the demon wind is big, the pool is shallow, the king is many”, was the first to bear the brunt, and Lu Dingyi and Zhou Yang became capitalists and big gangsters. My father came back from a meeting in Beijing and had just delivered their speech, which became his initial crime.
Dad was put into the “cattle shed”, and in addition to censorship and criticism, he had to wear a high hat and parade through the streets. He had a strong character and would not bend, refusing to admit these charges, tearing up several high hats and stamping them to pieces with his feet. In the general environment of “those who obey me will prosper, those who oppose me will die”, his insensitivity and “unrepentant” angered the rebels, and he was beaten and then tied up and dragged to the road.
A bigger test was yet to come.
One day, I went to the boiler room of the factory to turn on the water. When I passed by the dining hall of the canteen, I suddenly heard someone shouting slogans. Curiosity drove me to peek through the glass window, and it turned out that a criticism meeting was being held inside. A man was standing in the middle, with a large one-meter square steel plate hanging on his chest, and two thin wires worn on the plate were strangled deep inside his neck. The man’s neck obviously can not support the heavy steel plate, the waist was pressed almost bent into ninety degrees, so I could not see the face.
When I walked across the street to change the angle, I saw that the steel plate had Dad’s name written on it! My heart suddenly shrunk into a ball, want to turn around, but feel the legs and feet weak into a puddle of mud, only to shiver there silly. It was hard to get over it, and I couldn’t be bothered to fetch water, so I hurried home with my head down and slipped around the corner.
I secretly told my sister about the scene I saw, and we waited fearfully until dark, finally waiting for our Parents who were extremely exhausted. Dad had been crushed by the steel plate for so long that he couldn’t stand up straight, and he lay down on the bed right after entering, trying his best to suppress his moans of pain. Mom choked up and told the children that the rebels in the factory had gone to the higher authorities to rebel and pulled Dad over. She was also dragged up to fight with them.
My mother, who was not from a good background, was also sent down to work in the workshop because she was implicated by my father. Every day, she faced humiliation and shame, and her head turned white in her thirties.
At that time, I was in my early teens, and my brother was only eight years old, “teenagers do not know the taste of sorrow”. Occasionally, I would play with my friends, and when my mother saw me, she would let out a long, sad sigh: “Your father is still suffering in the cowshed, and you two can still laugh!”
Laughter became a big disrespect to my father. The house was filled with melancholy and fear all day long, and all the joys and Dreams that once existed were buried in that summer, enclosed in a suffocating depression.
A childhood that should have been carefree ended in a hurry.
- In the cowshed
When my father was locked up in the cowshed and couldn’t go home, my mother asked me to send him a change of clothes. I was torn between the desire to see my father and the fear of the men who would raid the house that day. I was stumbling along the way, taking three steps back and two steps forward, feeling that the road was like a stretched monkey skin, and I couldn’t get to the end.
The door of the hut is guarded by the two generals. In order to prevent the “cattle and snake gods” and family members from passing on information, everything I brought to the house had to be checked: clothes were shaken open, trouser pockets and even shirt cuffs were repeatedly pinched, and even the two leek and egg pies my sister cooked for my father were lifted by those salacious hands layer by layer. After the inspection, they impatiently waved their hands, indicating that I could go in.
I was so nervous that I was sweating because I had a “slip” in my coat pocket, a little note from my mom to my dad. I secretly opened it and read it: “You have to trust the masses and the party, they will never wrong a good person. Think more about the children, do not go to the end of the road.”
My mother’s fears were by no means empty. During that time, “deaths were a common occurrence. In addition to the souls who perished under the sticks and belts, we often heard news of people committing suicide. A few days ago, someone from the next unit jumped down from the chimney and turned himself into a “stinking shit” that “killed himself to the party and the people”. And my father said after the first parade: “If they humiliate me like this again, I’ll run over a telephone pole on the side of the road and die.”
Apparently, this statement became a thorn in my mom’s side. She just wanted to get a promise to help her pull out this thorn.
Before coming, my mother repeatedly told me to be more careful, do not be found out. My father was an underground worker during the war, but I never thought I would take over from him in this way more than 20 years later.
The room was dimly lit, and the “cows and snakes” were lying on either side of the table, writing their accounts.
Undergoing the double torture of mental and physical, Dad has lost all the energy of the past: his hair is disheveled and bearded and black and thin, and the strangulation marks on his wrists are still clearly visible. My nose was sore and tears filled my eyes. But think of this is not a place to wipe tears, and try to hold back.
An uncle saw me and asked, “What grade is this girl in?”
Dad was stunned for a moment and asked me in return, “What grade are you in?”
The uncle nodded at Dad’s nose: “You’re really not qualified to be a father, you don’t even know what grade your child is in.” Dad showed a bitter smile of embarrassment.
I was so aggrieved, I said in my heart, “That’s right, still dad! I can’t even figure out what grade I’m in! Then I replied with a pout, “Fourth grade.”
I handed my dad his clothes and Food, and when I saw the uncle lower his head to write again, I dared to slip him the little note.
Dad quickly scanned it and whispered, “Tell your mother not to worry! I’m not going to go off the deep end, still waiting to clear my name!”
With this piece of mind, I was finally able to make the trip.
On the way home, my mind reeled, spelling out all the bits and pieces of my dad’s past. My mother identified my father as a good man in the note, and I also felt that he would never be anti-party or anti-socialist and must have been wrongly accused. The reason why I was so “confused between the enemy and me, unable to stand firm” was based on the intuition of a child.
In my childhood memories, the bad guys in books and movies were always drunk and intoxicated. But my dad didn’t smoke or drink, and when he got paid, he went into the bookstore. In addition to working in the dark, he came home either holding a book, or writing something, never took us into the park, store. His discipline of the children was to urge us to read and study. The fatherly love he showed was not the love of his children, but more stern. Although I was the youngest daughter in the family, I never dared to pamper myself in front of him.
I remember in the third grade, I learned to write a draft, the hand from the table to tear a piece of manuscript paper to transcribe again, but my father quarreled: “This manuscript paper is my unit to write materials used, you can not use the public things.”
I rolled my eyes at him and thought to myself, “What a “stingy son of a bitch”, making a fuss about using a piece of public paper! Now that I think about it, how can such a good comrade, who is so strict with himself and has a clear understanding of public and private affairs, be a bad person!
Besides, Dad came back from a meeting in Beijing, naturally, to convey the speech of the higher leadership. He also did not know that the head of the Central Propaganda Department anti-Party and anti-Chairman Mao, because of this he was said to be a gangster, and was also beaten by fighting, I can not think!
“The question of who is our enemy and who is our friend is the primary question of the revolution.” More than that, it is a big dilemma in the eyes of a child. Since the raid, this dilemma has been like a mass of hemp wrapped around me, cut and tangled.
How do I choose between my father, who is inseparable from me by blood, and the Party, which is great and glorious and right, on the other side? I believed that my father was a good man, but I never dared to question the radiant Red Sun.
“The Cultural Revolution allowed me to enter the adult world early in my ignorance, but I could not understand the rules of this world where everyone was in danger and everyone was crazy. I felt like a blindfolded donkey pulling a stone mill, unable to turn in this strange circle.
- Get away with it
The destruction brought about a temporary power vacuum. After knocking down the principal and criticizing the teachers, the school was also in chaos. Parents were criticized for supervising their own care, we, a group of “three days without hitting the room to uncover the tiles” of the little rascals, neither like the Red Guards whistling in the streets “to break the four old”, nor when the royalists vowed to defend so-and-so, so became no one to discipline the “They were left to fend for themselves in the society.
“The Cultural Revolution was in full swing, with Chairman Mao waving his giant hand at Tiananmen Square and the Red Guards shuttling across the motherland in large groups. The Red Book was issued to a handful of books, the loudspeaker yelled every day “you should be concerned about national events ……” out of the house, full of eyes are covered with large-printed slogans, leaflets scattered like the autumn wind whistling leaves. Every day in this environment, who can really get away from the movement!
Besides, since we can understand, we have been taught to “think of the motherland and the world”. So even though we are wearing rags and often hungry, we are still concerned about the two-thirds of the world’s people who are struggling in deep water, and we think about our compatriots in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. On behalf of the great motherland, even for the United Nations, we are working on behalf of the young Chinese heart.
The family home pals went wild that Chiang Kai-shek’s smelly wife, Song Meiling, bathed in milk every day and washed it before letting the Nationalist soldiers drink it. Hearing this news, everyone could not help but think of the pool of mud Soup in the bathhouse, first disgusted to vomit, and then angry to death. They all said: As soon as Chairman Mao gives the order, they all have to sign up to join the army to liberate Taiwan.
The ignorant are always fearless. At that time, we religiously believed that “power comes from the barrel of a gun”. Besides, we grew up watching war movies, so war was never a difficult task in the eyes of the children, and we practiced countless times since we can remember: in kindergarten it was taking over the slide, and in elementary school it was taking down the hill in the park. In each case, the enemy was beaten to death, and the “Red Army” sang all the way to the top. Finally, the little red flag symbolizing victory was raised on a tree branch – I don’t know which student’s red scarf.
But really want to liberate Taiwan or have to plan, a group of children began to talk to the globe: some said first let the navy land, and said first send planes to bomb, each like the Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting to plan the general. After each village has offered its own high ideas, only to find that their red scarf is not yet worn old, and their height is not as high as the gun.
Later, I do not know who read from the leaflet, the Red Guards in the country after cleaning up all the vermin, the next step is ready to “flatten the White House, the Red Square”. Seeing that the Third World War is about to break out, the little ones are even more excited to get their blood pumping! This life did not catch the ghosts to fight the Kuomintang, regret it! So no one wants to be absent from this war. We can’t wait to go to the front tomorrow, as long as we can wipe out the U.S. empire Soviet from the earth, not hesitate to cut off their lives.
As the movement continued to grow, the mass organizations began to fragment into different parts and mountains. The famous February 7th Memorial Pagoda became a holy altar of polemics for all factions. There were many battle groups with many names, and they sang and sang in chaos. The debate of “it’s fun to fight with others” was going on every day.
It is a child’s nature to “watch the fun”. Anyway, with nothing to do and wandering around like a fly on the wall every day, a group of children in the courtyard often went to watch the debates in pairs.
The debaters were all fervent revolutionary theorists, each quoting scripture, and when they got to the point of exuberance, the pimples on their faces rose high. The supreme instruction was like a sword, accompanied by spittle to sweep the heresy, invincible.
We are a group of ten-year-old “raw melon eggs”, in school but just know a circle of heaven and earth, what discriminatory ability ah. After listening to the “two seven commune” speech, immediately clapped their hands and cheered for them; and so the opposite side of the “river to make a total” a rebuttal, and feel that they are also justified. Just like the grass on the wall, blown by the eight sides of the phoenix to dizzy. I didn’t remember to go home until my stomach was so hungry that I protested.
On the way, a small friend asked me: “After listening for half a day, which faction do you actually support?”
I had no words to say. I felt like there was a cavalry company galloping in my head, stirring those big theories and new terms into a pot of mush. It took me a long time to remember that the Garden Road leads north and south, and the Yellow River Road runs east and west.
When I got home, I tried to describe it to my sister, but couldn’t put together my own version. To think that those who participated in the debate were not even a few years older than me, yet they were all armed to the teeth with revolutionary theory. In addition to the supreme instructions, they also flung out from time to time quotations from Mann and Lenin that I had never heard before, and the four-word and four-word idioms were like machine gun bullets, “bursting out”. Why do people know so much ah!
It seems that there is still a lack of ink in my stomach. Anyway, also tired of wandering, I decided to stop for a while, to find a few books on the bookshelf to see.
- picking bookshelves
The habit of picking up bookshelves started in the second semester of first grade. At that time, I had just finished learning to read the dictionary, so I wanted to find a book to practice. At first glance, I saw “A Concise Course on the History of the United Communist Party”, but I couldn’t even read the title smoothly, and I didn’t know whether the “cloth” of the United Communist Party was a flower or a blue one, so I ignored it.
Next to it was a brand new copy of “Red Rock”, which I opened by hand and looked up in the dictionary. When I got impatient, I guessed and read half of it. After all, my seven-year-old brain was a blank sheet of paper, so I quickly remembered the words I had looked up and read the book faster and faster, stumbling through it in no time.
The first attempt got me hooked. The Red Sun”, “Red Flag”, “Song of Youth”, “Forest and Snow”, “Red Flag”, “Dedicate Everything to the Party”, “Copy of Poems of Revolutionary Martyrs” …… read all the way down, the base color is basically revolutionary literature.
There are also foreign books on the bookshelf, the Soviet Union the most. I only read the most famous “The Story of Zoya and Shura”, “The Road to Guria” and “How Steel is Made”. The main reason is that the names of the old Maoists are too long, Zoya Shura’s pronunciation is okay, Paul Kotzakin is also fine, but those a long list of Skii, Vicky, which has Zhang San Li Si Wang Er Ma Zi good to remember ah, so I did not read a few pages I gave up.
I’ve been going through the bookshelves since I was a kid, and my parents never interfered, because they believe that “opening a book is good for you”. But at the beginning of the fourth grade, I found a book on my father’s bed, and was looking at it in excitement, but was taken away by my mother, and also received a quarrel: “This is an internal book, the organization rules that only your father can read, even I can not read. The children’s home blindly open what”.
I was just scared of Stalin and Beria in the book, and was confused by the noise: books are still divided into internal and external? To read a book need to organize approval?
Within a few days, I saw a newspaper called “Reference News” on my desk, with strange names in front of each article: Associated Press, Reuters, Ansa, Kyodo, and the content was newer and more interesting than the Chinese Youth Daily. When my mother saw it, she said the same old thing: “The organization has rules that children can’t read this kind of newspaper.”
I had just celebrated my tenth birthday, and the only organization I joined was the Young Pioneers, but I could already feel the organization’s omnipresence. After the third grade, if you hadn’t joined the team, it meant you weren’t a good student, and you had to be isolated and spurned by the whole class. But I never thought that the rules of the organization would penetrate into my home. Besides, I was reading it with great interest, and I was so upset with the organization and this bullshit rule that I stuck my neck out and talked back to her: “Isn’t the newspaper printed for people to read? And this is at home, who reads it or not the organization does not know.”
Although my mother is not in the “organization”, but the organization rules like a god: understanding to implement, do not understand also to implement, even if no one to monitor, but also to implement the uncompromising.
The consequences of confrontation with the organization became apparent within a few days, and these internal books and newspapers soon disappeared and were presumably cleared away by the walls.
The good old days of randomly going through books came to an abrupt end after the raid. All the big “poisonous weeds” in the house were put into sacks and hauled to the scrapyard. The bookshelf was filtered down to “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist stand in the front row, Lu Xun Hao Ran follow”.
At the moment, the hardcover of the complete collection of Marxism-Leninism is placed in the most prominent place. Although I also want to arm myself with Marxism-Leninism, but looking at those large, fourth-grade schoolboy vainly gulped spit.
The Communist Manifesto was a single volume, the thinnest, and I intended to read it first. Who knows, when I opened the book, I could recognize the words, but when I joined them into sentences, they were cloudy. It is better to learn Mao first.
The “Old Three” have been memorized to “melt in the blood”. I first found a book “Contradiction”. Opened it was internal and external causes, subjective and objective stirred up five confused three. The concept of this term is too big, and the age of elementary school students is really not appropriate, I no longer have the confidence to read on.
Next to a book of “Chairman Mao’s poems”, the loudspeaker yelled all day long, “the four seas tossing clouds and water anger, five continents shaking wind and thunder excitement”, “the number of people, but also look at the present day” I am familiar with, no effort two days to memorize. In the evening, I started to live and learn, playing solitaire with my sister. Until the sleepy pillow “northern scenery” into the sleep.
Mr. Lu Xun’s books the rebels dare not spoil. When I opened the book “From the Bacchus Garden to the Three Flavored House”, I was immediately attracted by the vegetable beds, cicadas, crickets and centipedes written inside. This is all too familiar, and can often be seen in the crop fields outside the family compound walls. The next thing I read was “The Blessing”, and I cried for the misery of Mrs. Xianglin in the “wicked old society”. When I read the few grains of fennel beans discharged by the old man in “Confucius”, I broke into tears and laughed again.
“Bai Qiu’en, who came to China from far away, was the most famous white coat in those years. The novel “Dr. Bai Qiu’en” also became a relic of the copycat family. Ever since I learned the three old stories, Dr. Bai was a god-like being in my heart. After reading this book, he began to become flesh and blood to the ground: not only can he cure people to the detriment of himself, but also like ordinary people and his daughter-in-law quarrel, divorce.
Another book also attracted me, called “Is the Soviet Union a socialist country? In the book, it was written that the conditions for young people in the Soviet Union to find a husband were: “housing, a car, and no one from the older generation”, which really made my jaw drop. I didn’t expect that the Soviet Union was so rich and the young people were so money-obsessed that they wanted a house and a car to get married. In China, the house and car are public, which can let you get married as a bride price ah!
And they really “repair” to the incorrigible, but also said what “not the old generation of people”! Which is not married to curse people’s parents to the West, conscience really let the dog eat. Think about it or our Chinese youth are aware of high, marry a wife and save money. My mother’s factory beautiful girl looking for a date, only requires the other party members from a good background, is a party member, holding four volumes of the “Red Book” will be married to themselves.
After reading this book, I got hooked on a book “Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Activities”. In it, there is an article called “Study of Sports”, which is said to have been written by Chairman Mao when he was a student in Changsha and has never been published. The article mentions: “To civilize its spirit, first from the barbarism of its body. Although I was confused by the half-written words, I felt that it was about the importance of physical exercise.
I grew up not loving sports, but whenever the school held field day, always sitting in the audience. Seeing that Chairman Mao attached so much importance to sports when he was young, I also wanted to save up and start exercising. At this time, the tannoy also came the great news: Chairman Mao first drank Changsha water, and then went to eat Wuchang fish, and then went to “the Yangtze River crossing”.
Ahhh! I didn’t expect that his body is still so solid in his seventies, why choose a successor? How can one live forever in good health? Looking at the crowds of people beating drums and cheering on the street, this treacherous thought suddenly flashed through my mind. But I only dared to tell the roundworm in my stomach, not anyone.
The power of example is infinite, not to mention that it is the leader who takes the lead. Chairman Mao waved my hand and I marched! People all over the country have jumped into the big rivers and small ditches in their hometowns to pounce, all want to experience a “leisurely walk” in the “extreme eye Chu Tian Shu.”
My hometown is far from the Yangtze River, but the Mother River beckons from dozens of miles away, is a little too much sand in the water. The good thing is that there is also a Jiangang reservoir on the outskirts of the city.
On Sunday, I arrived at the reservoir in my mom’s factory truck. With the help of my two best friends, this dry duck buried his face in the water for the first time in his life. The body just floated up, and suddenly felt that there was no foundation under the feet. All of a sudden, the fairy tale of the dragon king, the night fork, shrimp and crab have come out of the cage, each one is pulling me down. Panic, I struggled desperately on my hands and knees, and easily escaped the siege of spirits and monsters, only to find that the water had not yet flooded over the shoulders.
The first time I went into the water, I made a fool of myself, but I was still there, my heart was not dead, and I went to the pool with my girlfriends. Several times, people are like a fish in water, I in addition to filling a stomach of dirty water, even a dog paddle did not learn.
Not being able to “hit the water in the middle of the stream” did not defeat my strong belief. I also read in this book that the predecessors of the New People’s Association, in addition to pointing out the rivers and mountains at the head of Orange Island, also rushed to Mount Yuelu on stormy days to exercise themselves. I can’t just be a verbal revolutionary either! Although there is no Aiyan Pavilion in my hometown, there is no shortage of stormy days.
One day when the rain was pouring down, my girlfriend and I discussed that we should also go “through the storm and see the world” like our predecessors. The two of us rushed out of the house to nature, despite the thunder in the sky. Not much farther to be drenched into the soup. After returning home for a few days, or drink a bowl of ginger soup to wake up. Originally we both intended to learn from Mao Zedong and Xiao Zisheng, walking to the Yellow River at the head of Mang Mountain to do social research. A look at the small body so not to withstand the torment, before breaking the “body without money, walk around the world” idea.
Since I went to school to recognize a few words, I have been convinced of everything said in the book. But this book made me confused for the first time: Chairman Mao in Yan’an kiln and Snow’s conversation, mentioned that the “New People’s Society” has a tenet of not talking about women. But another article recalling Yang Kaihui said that Chairman Mao and Yang Kaihui, Cai Hesen and Xiang Guangyu, all met and fell in love in the New People’s Society and later became revolutionary partners.
I couldn’t believe it at first reading, but after reading it again and again, I finally confirmed that even black words printed on white paper can be inconsistent. I was thrilled with my great discovery.
The book also talks about the love between Chairman Mao and Yang Kaihui, especially Yang Kaihui’s loyalty to the Chairman. She would rather sacrifice her life after her arrest than break off her relationship with Mao. This reminds me of what I read in “The Youth of Marx”, where Marx and Yanni fell in love at the age of eighteen.
The young girl really does not know what love is, but to see it written in the book so romantic and beautiful, ignorant of a hint of yearning. And it makes me think that love is not the exclusive enjoyment of the bourgeoisie, nor is it as yellow and dirty as the big words say. If not, how could even the great teachers and wise leaders have fallen into it, unable to resist it!
My sister also sometimes borrows some of the raggedy books with little skin and no hair, and I remember a time when we sisters read “Dreams of the Golden Spring” and “Miscellany of the Guardsman” and teased each other with the old Chiang’s catchphrase, “Motherfucker”. Anyway, at that time, we were used to hearing “smashing the dog’s head on the ground”, so no one would feel bad about foul language.
These books also greatly affect the stability and unity of my family: because there are people lined up behind the rush, time is tight, the task is heavy, so the three of us are grabbing books, no one wants to do the grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning the court chores. But “people are iron, rice is steel, a meal is not hungry”. Finally, we had to reach a compromise: we took turns to buy food and cook every day, and were responsible for handling all the chores. Now that I think about it, we got a taste of the benefits of the “contractual responsibility system” at that time!
- Run like crazy
In addition to the large parts that could not be gnawed and the deep theories that could not be understood, the bookshelves were quickly swept away by me after the robbery. Although the school began to “resume”, but in reality, the play is still learning Mao’s election, criticism will, camp pulling and other kinds of revolutionary drama. When I returned home, I was still bored and had nothing to do. The good thing is that the kids can always find new excitement in the madness everywhere.
I don’t know which naughty ghost in a watch repair store to explore the head, found a beautiful woman sitting inside. One by one, one by one, the boys ran there like green flies, provoking a bunch of us yellow girls also followed the fight. When we are excited to repair the watch store, in the door shrunken head to look at half a day, only to see a few balding grandfather sitting in front of the operating table, squinting one eye, the other eye on the clip a bizarre magnifying glass.
It’s a real bummer! When I got home, I heard that the beauty was frightened by the throng of people, and the unit was also harassed, and simply did not let her come to work.
The older kids in the senior class were much more tossed around than we were. They would ride their bicycles to Huayuankou to see the “sun rise and fall, and the Yellow River flow into the sea”; they would go to the airport to see the warplanes roar into the sky; and the most exciting thing was to chase the prison van to “Sha Tu Gang” to see the shooting of people.
The movement was so deep that the ranks of the “class enemy” kept growing, as if countless criminals had emerged overnight to kill people. The streets were often plastered with bulletins, and the names of the prisoners were marked with big black crosses. The stadium held “public trial meetings” twice a day, after which large trucks carried the criminals through the streets and to the execution grounds.
The children who dared to watch the execution were not only curious, but also courageous. They came back to the scene, I do not know how many cowhide mouth interpretation, become indistinguishable from the real and horrifying: the prisoner’s sky was lifted by a bullet, living in the vicinity of the villagers swarmed, with a small tea jar to dig hot brains, to the “crohn’s disease” of the child cure. I was creeped out by the sound of it, but could not suppress my curiosity.
The temptation to travel far is too great, especially to see people shot! But these places are not accessible by public transportation and far from home, so I was determined to learn how to ride a bike!
The bicycle at home was “two-eight weighted”, and even with the seat down to the lowest level, I couldn’t reach the pedals on it. I had to take a support group with my girlfriend Yuying to help each other learn to “set legs”. I don’t know how many falls, every day with the gentian violet and red mercury to the body painted a thousand red. Finally, I was able to go on the road, but these two little greedy cats only focus on “chatter”: either take the snack ticket to buy “small golden dates” and “peach crisp”, or go to the fruit store to buy melons. The “original intention” of the trip has been left behind in Java.
- Filling the belly
During the “three years of natural disasters”, I was just a little kid in kindergarten. The most impressive thing was that the aunties climbed up the trees to pick poplar leaves, and the children picked them up and brought them to the kitchen in their flower pockets. The leaves were wrapped in buns, bitter and astringent, so no one wanted to eat them, but if they didn’t, they had to go hungry. My brother was even younger, so he couldn’t even enjoy the leaf buns. He would only shout to his grandma, “Grandma, I’m hungry”. Grandma would break a section of the cooked carrot and give it to him.
In addition to hunger, I also have a craving for sweets. I remember at kindergarten, the teacher added a spoonful of brown sugar to the bowl of a child with hepatitis, and all the children at the table looked eagerly. At that moment, I think all the children were praying for their own hepatitis, just like me.
The children in the hospital also discussed whether the “pagoda candy” for worming or the “cough syrup” was better. One of my best friends flatly denied both, saying that she had just stolen her dad’s “hawthorn pills” the other day, and they were so tasty and sweet! The first thing we heard was the rat boss in “The Adventure of the Little Head”, “squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak” for half a day, and then we all said that we would let our parents go home to the factory infirmary to prescribe hawthorn pills, we must try the sour and sweet taste.
My elder sister went to a boarding elementary school. The school issued a small bun on the weekend, she did not want to eat, take home first handed to Mom, my mother took a look and handed to grandma. Although the grandmother was already hungry and swollen, she gave it to her brother.
The actual fact is that there is no hunger, but definitely a very small number of. My sister had sat at the same table with the child of a provincial leader in elementary school. One day the child was not feeling well, she and several students to help send home, to enter the mysterious southern courtyard of the provincial party committee children. After coming back, she first lamented that the big leaders live in a small building, there is a house dedicated to ping pong table. Which is like our three sisters crowded a bed, at night a careless will have to chew stinky feet. Then she fussed and said: the leadership of the family raised birds, eating snacks are the end. Listen to me straight swallow “harrumph”.
We live in the hospital are mostly ordinary workers or cadres, not many double workers, many housewives. The monthly salary is paid, after buying the ration on the food book there is very little left. If you don’t calculate carefully, you will not be able to “eat the wind and defecate” until the end of the month.
“At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the youngsters in the family home were in the age of “half a kid, eating the old man to death”. Although the rebel faction “fried and burned” many class enemies, but these kind of people can not be used to feed the hungry. When we were hungry, our mouths sang “Heaven and earth, father and mother,” but in our hearts we thought that filling our stomachs was the biggest thing, and white steamed buns were the closest.
Although the words “poverty” and “hunger” are not written on your head, you are constantly reminded of them. The tragedy about food is staged around every day.
My family has many girls, small meals, the monthly ration is barely enough to eat. But the neighbors, the two half-grown boys are growing up and eating a lot. Almost every meal time, you will hear the two brothers crying and fighting: either because who broke the rolls nest block big, or when serving thin rice fished the rice away. Later, his family had to give their youngest daughter to relatives in Xinjiang because it was too difficult.
Within a few days, C greatly began to miss the child. Later on, it developed to the point that when she saw the girls in the yard, she washed her face with tears. Seeing her become crazy like Mrs. Xianglin, the family got scared and had to send the child back.
My family had a chicken that died of illness and just threw it in the garbage when it was picked up by a woman who lived in the back row. I told her that the chicken was sick and could not be eaten. But she said, “I’m not afraid to gut it. So good chicken meat, do not dare to spoil.”
Summer after eating watermelon to dump the melon rind, and ran into this lady, was she a lecture: “good melon rind why throw away? Peel off the green rind, and keep it for cold dishes at night, or find a string and dry it in the sun, you can also pickle.”
The good thing is that our yard and the “wide world” adjacent, through a small door of my mother’s factory, is the production team’s farmland. Nature gave this land endless charm and brought us constant surprises and gifts: picking willow and digging shepherd’s purse in spring; collecting wheat ears in summer; stroking acacia flowers and slipping sweet potatoes in autumn. After school and in summer and winter, we often find food for ourselves in the crop fields.
The provincial capital’s phacelia has become a climate. Every summer, there were childhood fun buried under the big trees. When the sun went down, happiness came knocking at the door: when the “crawling forks” (larvae of cicadas) started to come out of their holes, we used flashlights as searchlights to catch them.
When it rains, it is a time of great harvest, and the “crawlers” will be eager to burrow out. So we don’t wait for the rain to stop before rushing out of the house, and if we’re lucky, we can catch a teapot full of them in one night. When we got home, we washed and salted them and fried them, and they were a plate of “meat dishes” that didn’t cost us any money or meat tickets.
We also often went to the small ditch to fish small fish and shrimp loach frogs, with homemade slingshots to shoot birds. Whether flying in the sky, crawling underground, or swimming in the water, as long as it can satisfy the appetite, the same will not let go. In the era of material scarcity, when we saw meat, we were all glowing, eating like animals, living like bandits who had just come down from the mountains.
We lived in a bungalow, and almost every family had chickens. So in addition to finding ways to improve our own lives, we often went to the crop fields to catch grasshoppers, love dragonflies, catch crickets, dig earthworms, poke the “hornet’s nest” and find “live food” for the family’s chicks.
With the harvest in the field, then go to work in the kitchen. In order to make 30% of the mixed grain to make a pattern, we learned to sweet potato noodles pressed into “buckwheat”, eaten with garlic sauce; in the coarse grain with sesame sauce and salt steamed into rolls; white flour wrapped in sorghum flour branded into cakes. Neighbors came to a northwest relatives, a time, the families on the table are added to a kind of food called “cat ears”. A young girl from Hunan Province came for the summer and taught us how to make “tiger skin peppers”, and at a young age we were trained to be versatile.
- Learning female red
“At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, it was like a second spring for the women of the neighborhood. They walked around the streets every day, pulling out their voices and issuing orders: let the big wives and small wives of landlords and capitalists all go back to their places of origin.
My grandmother, the landlady, also escaped the fate.
While the mothers were celebrating the expulsion of the vermin, my family was in the predicament of having no one to unpack the cotton sewing sheets. My mother was supervised in the workshop and had to attend endless political studies at night, so she had no time to take care of chores. We three sisters entered puberty one after another and began to grow in size. In the past, the clothes were small and worn out, so the reality forced us to pick up the needle and thread and learn how to make women’s red.
When we were young, there were no nylon socks, and the threaded socks on our feet were “mangled” within a few days. Grandma couldn’t keep her hands busy with the four pairs of children’s feet, so she had no choice but to let the three girls learn how to cassock themselves. My sisters were all neat and tidy, like soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army walking in formation; only I was as messy as sesame seeds sprinkled on a burrito. So her old man decided that I was the dumbest.
It turns out that my grandmother is really hot-eyed. Ever since I learned needlework, I had accidents: I broke my finger sewing a button, I sewed a quilt onto a bed sheet, and I learned to make shoes by putting the top of my left shoe on my right foot. My sister knitted half of the sweater, and once I got started, either the thread was pulled too tight or the needle was accidentally removed and the work was lost.
Fortunately, I have two sisters. I heard people say “a sister, better”, my happiness is doubled! In addition, they are all handy, the eldest sister carved paper cutouts, has been the girls in the courtyard to copy the template; she made the family sewing machine cover, more beautiful than those bought in the mall. The second sister is the old mother knitting sweater “right hand needle, left hand thread” unique skills to carry forward. So my “stupid paws” will be content to sit back and enjoy it.
At that time, ready-made clothes were scarce and expensive, and people mostly had to buy cloth to make clothes. But each person only had nine feet of cloth tickets per year, and a child nearly one meter seven meters tall had to use seven feet to make a pair of pants. I remember my mother often lamented to her daughters, who were taller than her, “What’s the use of being so tall, except to wear two more feet of cloth”. So “three years new, three years old, three years of sewing and mending” was the norm in my family.
I remember when I was in the fourth grade, my mom made a corduroy jacket for me. Later, as I grew taller, first my sister let go of the hem, and then it grew by about two inches. So this dress, which came in three different shades of color, was worn until I graduated from high school. Before going to the countryside, my sister also took out my mother’s “Lenin suit” from the 1950s and remodeled it for me to wear from the farm to college.
- sighs the flow of years
From the age of ten and a half to fourteen, the age when you should suck in knowledge like a sponge, I spent most of my time in the Revolution, running wild in the countryside, and spending my youth in the five lines of eight works. I went through my youth half-crazy and half-stupid.
Now, all those sad and happy past have become smoke and mirrors. I was forged out of the absurd time half-finished products, but also to the age of “contemplating the past to stand the sun”. It is supposed to be a spring trip and a song, enjoy the retirement time. The reason why the keyboard is still tapping on the memory of the old, not just to vent emotions to comfort loneliness, but want to use the text of the history of Noah’s Ark, leaving a personal record of the end of the micro. This is a warning to children to never repeat the same mistakes.
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