Thinking back, not long after the Great Famine, I heard that in the large rural areas around our southwest division, many production teams had starved to death in varying amounts. But at that time, I was still young, and had never experienced the miserable situation of the peasants, who were lying at home dying of desperation, waiting to die.
When I went to the Daba mountainous area, I was amazed to hear from the farmers that there was no natural disaster. It’s because we were starving in public canteens in those years. Until then, there was a certain degree of skepticism about the term “natural disaster,” but the complete change from “natural disaster” to “famine” in our minds was made by reading Yang Jijuan’s The book on the Holodomor was written with an unspeakable sense of shock and grief.
Although I grew up in the city, those years coincided with a period of growth and development when my appetite was particularly strong, so I still have many vivid memories of the famine.
People in the cities could feel intolerable hunger because of guaranteed food rations, and direct starvation was unheard of. However, due to chronic starvation and malnutrition, many people got puffy and died as a result. At that time, I was studying at the West Division Elementary School, and on my way to and from school, I saw more than once dead people tied to stretchers and wrapped in white cloths being carried across the road outside the back door of the school.
Once when I was walking home from school, my classmates and I were playing while we were in the midst of our fun, when suddenly a shout came from behind us: “Watch the road! I was shocked, and turned my head to see two people carrying a corpse has been to the front, dodging can not, I had to crawl under the stretcher to get through. The first time I came into such close contact with a dead body, I felt my scalp go numb and my legs go limp.
Since ancient times, China has been a country with frequent natural disasters, a “land of famine”, and the food problem has been an issue of great importance to the rulers in the past, requiring considerable energy to deal with. When I was a child, we were told by the media and various propaganda that the three years of famine were caused by natural disasters.
In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, when we had just entered elementary school, we took part in the Great Iron and Steel Movement. In addition to collecting all the iron-stained items from home and turning them in to the school, we also searched for scrap iron in the rubbish piles on the street corners – all the cracks and crevices that belonged to the city – and found a rusty nail every day after school. and was more ecstatic than finding a dollar bill. At that time, one of the most popular songs sung by the energetic college students was this.
Five-year plan looking at three years.
Three years of hard fighting to see the first year.
Catch up with that English.
In less than 15 years.
Hi-ho hi-ho hi-ho.
Fifteen years and fifteen years.
Hehehe fifteen years.
Due to the “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Steelmaking” to catch up with Britain and overtake the United States; due to the boastfulness of local officials at all levels who were eager to claim credit, the whole country was swept away; perhaps also due to the changing fortunes of international relations, and so on, the last thing to be implemented on the people’s heads was hunger, hunger, hunger ……
In November 1953, the state introduced the collective purchase and sale of grain, edible oil, cotton, etc., and in September 1955, the rationing of food for urban residents began. As far as I can remember, I have never had a full stomach since I was in elementary school. I remember that the food ration for primary school students was 21 jin per month, and the average was seven taels per day: two taels for breakfast (a bowl of gruel and half a steamed bun, or a steamed bun without gruel), three taels for lunch (a small steamed dry rice), and two taels for dinner (half a steamed dry rice). 21 jin was the standard, and I’m afraid no one knows what scientific basis there is for it. The ration for adults – state cadres in institutions and institutions and the unemployed (workers in factories are given rations according to the type of work, and the standards vary) – is 28 jin per month, a little more than we are, but in the years of famine, the little quota that was already small is still They had to save a few kilograms a month (I don’t know where the saved food went) to respond to the Party’s call, and their generation was in its prime, so it was easy to imagine how hungry they were.
The coarse pottery small pot of steamed rice is so deeply implanted in my mind, until now as long as the mention of the canteen, “pot rice” will suddenly pop out from the depths of memory, and become synonymous with the canteen. At that time, when people went to the cafeteria to buy rice, they would pass the bowl in through the window, and the cook would take the canister in one hand and a long piece of bamboo in the other, stick it through the edge of the canister and pour it over. The buyer watched the cook’s movements intently, lest a cloud of rice might remain at the bottom of the pot. No matter the level of education, no matter how high or low, no one is willing to be ambiguous when it comes to rations that can barely keep the hunger at bay.
Around the fifth grade of elementary school, I was selected to go to a summer camp as a student of good character. I knew about the summer camp by reading Soviet literature, especially the popular book for children and teenagers at the time, Sasha’s Diary, which I read over and over again. These works told me about summer camp as a place of woods, creeks, tents, campfires, singing and friendship that evoked endless longing and imagination. The summer camp I attended, however, had nothing to do with the countryside, camping, or campfires.
We, selected students from various elementary schools in Beibei district, were gathered in Chaoyang elementary school, another key school in the district, and put together classroom desks to make long bunk beds, and then spread our own mats to be our barracks. Summer camp what activities I forgot all about, the only thing that remains in the memory is the ordinary rice we ate.
In those years, due to the rationing of food, many people got creative on the issue of cooked rice – to make more rice out of the same amount of rice, of course, even the fools know that the only result was to make the rice sticky and soft, put it in the mouth twice and then it was gone.
It wasn’t that the food there was the big fish and meat we were expecting, or that there were delicacies we had never seen before, but that the dried rice in the restaurant was spread out in a single grain.
Before the Great Famine and from 1962 to the Cultural Revolution, the city’s foodstuffs and light industrial goods were controlled by the state, but in addition to food rations, residents also had a ration of foodstuffs, cooking oil and meat, as well as an abundance of vegetables, and we ate in the cafeteria, where the meat and vegetable combinations were decided by ourselves. When the famine came, the food ration did not increase, but vegetables, cooking oil, meat and other non-staple foods disappeared, so the ration could not meet the demand.
When you eat in the canteen, the meal ticket, which was originally under your control, is replaced by a meal card, and the ration of each meal belongs to the canteen. One person has a meal card, which is divided into many small compartments, and the twenty pounds of food for a month is divided into two or three portions. Every time a meal was bought, the cook crossed off a compartment. If one square was not enough to eat, or if one more square was crossed off when a guest arrived, there would be no meal at the end of the month.
At the hardest time, the rations were not enough to ensure the quality and quantity of food, and for a long time, the rice we fought in the canteen was covered with a thick layer of tares. We were told that the tares mixed with the rice would cause appendicitis, but we were reluctant to throw them away, so we took off the layer of tares and dried them, and then put them in the pot to fry and eat as a snack. Vegetables have also disappeared from the cafeteria, and every meal is served with a few pieces of old ginger soaked in salt water by the cafeteria. Long-term consumption of such meals, in addition to no oil in the stomach, there are extreme malnutrition. However, compared to rural people who eat banana roots, wild vegetables, and even “Guanyin soil” to fill the stomach can not be burst to death, we are considered to live a superior life.
One time I went to the canteen to fight food, saw a dark brown gnocchi, a few years old child’s fist that big. The canteen master told me that the gnocchi did not charge a meal ticket, when a sudden burst of ecstasy, I immediately bought a dozen of them, the pot of rice are almost unable to put, happily ran all the way home. For my sister and I, who hadn’t eaten sweets for a long time, the dozen or so “gnocchi” that didn’t have rice tickets meant that we could have snacks outside of meals for many days, and the excitement was palpable.
When we got home, my sister and I grabbed one each and couldn’t wait to nibble on them. After just one bite, my sister resolutely gave up her craving for snacks. Since we entered kindergarten, we have been told that the working people in the old society lived a hard life of eating bran and eating vegetables, but we don’t know what “bran” actually looks like. That day, I bought a “snack” from the cafeteria, and it suddenly pulled me into the suffering of the working people in the old society, the coarse bran dumplings had to make a lot of effort to be swallowed. I have a first-hand understanding of the meaning of the phrase “the suffering of the working people”.
However, I am still reluctant to throw away these “sufferings of the working people”. My activity, hungry fast, no oil and water in the intestines and stomach is often screaming, hungry front chest paste back when I heard people talk about eating “Guanyin clay” are straight gulping, bran dumplings down the throat, but can drive away the feeling of hunger pangs, I spent a few days, a little bit of the dozen bran dumplings a left into the intestines and stomach.
Some time ago, I heard that the biology department of Southwest Normal College had made a research result, which proved that a kind of algae called “Chlorella” has much more nutritional value than eggs and meat products. Chlorella was so popular that all the canteens in the college mixed it with rice and steamed buns, which turned the rice and steamed buns dark green. Many years after the famine had passed, we learned that the so-called chlorella was an algae plant in a common pond. The water in the pond was not flowing and eutrophic, so these algae plants multiplied very quickly, and in a few days, the water in the pond turned into a green, sticky soup. I wonder if hunger makes people’s digestive organs so tough that their immune systems become so strong that they can take in and resist anything.
China is a big culinary country, with eight major cuisines and various local snacks of dazzling colors, aromas and flavors. I was invited to eat it once at a classmate’s house, and I was crazy about it for quite some time afterwards. The yellow pulp baba is made from corn residue and is pale yellow in color.
“Yellow pulp baba” is mainly corn residue, pale yellow in the form of a paste, steamed in a small tile jar of steamed rice, the taste is delicate and slightly sweet, is the wheat bran rice bran can not be compared to the superior food. Before the famine, how the pharmaceutical companies do not know how to deal with these pharmaceutical residues, the famine came, these residues shake, became no connection with the pharmaceutical companies of the public can not reach the treasure. I asked my classmates where it came from, and after school, I went to the Daxin Pharmaceutical Factory on the other side of the Jialing River to try to buy “yellow pulp baba” for the first time. I wandered around the factory for a long time, but I never saw any “yellow milk baba” for sale, and each time I was hopeful, disappointed and then dejected. Finally, one day, unable to endure such emotional ups and downs any longer, I summoned the courage to ask my classmates about it, and was told that the employees of the pharmaceutical company were the first to have access to it, and that it could only be sold occasionally in the middle of the night, when the relatives and friends of the employees were informed in advance. The same student also said, if it is sold openly during the day, I’m afraid it will be robbed to death.
Those years, in addition to more beggars on the street, there is a new way of begging, more precisely, food snatching, our city called the snatching of food as “catching the essence”. “Catch” is more than some half-dozen teenagers or young people, there are also some thirty or forty-year-old middle-aged people. They are in restaurants or food stores every day around the door, but whenever there are old, weak, women or children with food, they will rush up and grab it and run away. The children who were robbed were shocked and overwhelmed, and could only tear open their throats and cry; the old and weak women wanted to chase and couldn’t catch up, and could only watch their own fruit food go far away with the “sperm catchers”.
“Another method used by the sperm-catchers was very “creative”. At a time when no one had rich food rations to give to others, if there were no women, the elderly, the weak or children to rob by force, they would aim at the food in the hands of young adults and shoot arrows at them to spit in the food of others. The “sperm-catchers” were extremely dirty and smelled badly, so the average person would run away from them, not wanting to eat anything contaminated by their saliva, so the “sperm-catchers” took the food stained with their saliva with ease.
One Sunday, we were able to follow our parents down the street in order to buy a pot, even though there was almost nothing to buy on the street. After the “Great Steelworks”, which wiped out every household container of iron, and after the “natural disasters”, when the country advocated self-help, the “pot” was one of the utensils necessary for self-help. Today, in supermarkets of all sizes around the world, enameled soup pots, kettles, stainless steel soup pots, frying pans, non-stick pots, pressure cookers, rice cookers, stew pots and so on all kinds of cooking utensils, but at the time of the Great Famine, even the aluminum pots that have now been basically eliminated from the shops can not be bought, the only place you can see pots is the white tin workshop, where you can buy artisans with white tin knocked into a pot.
It was already lunchtime, and we stopped by a small restaurant called Nongjiao next to the Beibei stadium for lunch.
“This is not the kind of farmhouse where city dwellers go to relax in the countryside. The reason why the small restaurant is called “farmhouse”, it is estimated that because the farmers go to the city to sell the self-produced agricultural by-products, often stop by to eat a cheap meal. When we went in, we only asked for a bowl of gruel and a steamed bun for each person according to the ration, the gruel was put in front of each person, and the steamed bun was put on a plate in the middle of the table. I have not had time to take the bowl and take the bun, a dirty black hand suddenly reached from between my sister and me to the center of the table, the legendary “grasping spirit” appeared, grabbed a few buns and ran away ……, my sister and I were stunned. Before only in others swinging in the Dragon Gate to hear about “catching sperm” of various rumors, after experiencing it, only to know how horrifying the situation, we did not eat buns, porridge is almost unable to drink down.
The country’s vegetable supply in those years basically stopped, although each person still has a monthly vegetable ticket, the vegetable shop is open every day, but the shop is always empty. It must have been at that time, the suburban rural vegetable production team in order to solve the problem of food, the vegetable fields are planted with grain. From time to time, some farmers would take some vegetables to the market in the city and sell them, and the price was so high that people like us did not dare to ask. Our family’s income was still in the middle of the range at that time, with 70-80% of the family earning much less than us, and some working families with seven or eight members earning no more than 30-40 yuan. I remember the free market that gradually opened up as a result of changes in state policy: eggs, one yuan and fifty cents a piece; live chickens, ten yuan a city jin; a goose for one hundred and eighty yuan. As for vegetables in general, the one that made the deepest impression on me was when my sister was celebrating her birthday and my parents met a farmer on the street who was carrying a pumpkin, and after asking the price, they bought an old pumpkin that weighed eight pounds and cost six yuan and forty cents, which was equivalent to a month’s worth of food for a low-income family.
Once I heard that a few shiploads of carrots had arrived from the upstream city of Hechuan County for as little as twenty cents a pound, and no tickets were needed. This was encouraging news, and when I got home from school I immediately told my mother, who immediately gave me two yuan and told me to go to the river the next day to buy ten pounds.
The next afternoon in the classroom, I accidentally mentioned to my desk that I was going to buy carrots by the river after school, and I even showed off my two dollars. The same table acted very excited and he said he would go to the river with me as a partner. At recess, I put the money in my book and went out, and I never gave two dollars another thought until school was over.
When I packed my bag to go to the river, I noticed the money was gone. I shake out all the books in the bag, a local flip, no, the brain all of a sudden dead machine, can’t think of anything, just like a hot pot of ants in the classroom round and round, looking all around the desk and the body of every pocket, or not. The same desk was also extra concerned and helped me look around ……
It was fortunate that my father had gone to Chengdu to compile teaching materials, otherwise I would not have escaped a beating. My mother didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was upset. I remembered the time he was overzealous in helping me find my missing two yuan in the classroom, and my heart trembled, and at the time, I didn’t dare direct my imagination to “he took my money.
After eating salted old ginger in the cafeteria for a while, I started to eat vegetables, but only two kinds of vegetables – vine vine cabbage (now called hollow cabbage or watercress) and cowhide cabbage (now rare in the market, it is said that this kind of cabbage has low nutritional value and can cause some diseases. (But I’ve seen them on sale in German supermarkets, and they’re not cheap). Both of these are among the most productive vegetables that are brilliant when given a little sunlight. It can be harvested without much cooking, and can be produced fresh in spring, summer and autumn. In the cafeteria every day to sell less oil stir-fried cane, but also homemade pickles – the cane dried semi-dry, pressed in a large tile jar, pressed layer thickly sprinkled with a layer of salt, pickled dozens of jars left for the winter.
Pickled cane, people dubbed “old shuttle”, to eat in the winter, was black sauce, bitter and salty with a stench of decay, it is really difficult to eat, sheep and tough, chewed soft cheeks, to swallow when half to the esophagus and the other half is still stuck in the teeth. The canteen cooks also occasionally use the old pokeberry buns to make buns. Once ate the old pokside bun, my mother took a little vegetable oil from nowhere, we drop a few drops of vegetable oil into the bun, the old pokside bun chewed up full of fragrance, that taste, many years later eat seafood dinner, also never appeared again. I was at the stage of particularly strong physical needs, on the issue of food is often a bit like “the story of the fisherman and the goldfish” in the greedy wife, whenever I eat such buns I always like to further fantasy, if the few drops of vegetable oil dripping old phobian can become meat, how good it would be.
In order to solve the problem of insufficient food and difficulties in the supply of vegetables, under the initiative of the state, every family in the college (at that time, most of the faculty and staff houses were bungalows) dug out the open land in front of and behind their houses and planted all kinds of vegetables. However, the land was raw and not suitable for growing crops, so people managed to leave their own urine behind to solve the problem of fertilizer for watering the raw land, and gradually good vegetables grew in the ground. When it comes to the harvest season, the house in front of the house is like a children’s song: “green vegetables green glowing, chili red like lanterns”, “pumpkin vine bloom yellow flowers, blowing golden trumpet”, “purple hat purple flowers, purple bottle filled with sesame seeds. “, colorful and downright idyllic.
It is the high-yielding psyllium husk cabbage that is grown most frequently in every household. You don’t have to uproot the cabbage to eat it, just remove the outer leaves near the root and the young leaves in the middle quickly fatten up again, and the cycle continues. The thick, fatty leaves of the beetroot are continuously provided for human consumption, accompanying thousands of families through the days of extreme food shortages.
I don’t know how others eat it, but in our family, we use a 26-cm iron pot every night, wash and cut the beefsteak into sections and boil them in boiling water, then bring the pot to the table, where the whole family sits around, using chopsticks to hold it up and eat it with some soy sauce to supplement the hunger caused by food shortages. In fact, psyllium husk cabbage does not have much nutrition, it has become a star among vegetables because it does not require intensive cultivation and high yield, in the case of food scarcity, land resources and limited, its “inexhaustible” leaves can fill people’s stomachs. The first thing that you need to do is to make sure that you have a good understanding of what you need to do.
The two things I was most happy about in those years were the monthly “pastry meal” at home and the “vegetarian tooth festival” at the cafeteria.
When the national economy began to improve, some foodstuffs were restored. For example, with a pastry ticket, each person could buy four taels of pastry – two “premium cakes” – each month. The reason they were called “premium cakes” was that they had fillings in them. Most of the cakes available at that time were sweet, unfilled cakes, like today’s peach cakes, but not nearly as good. Our family gathered two cakes from each person for one meal, which meant that our children were satiated for once. Kids today who are tired of McDonald’s and KFC will never understand what a luxury it was for us as children to be able to eat two “premium biscuits” all at once.
The cafeteria’s “vegetarian tooth ritual” is to eat other vegetables besides “Old Studebaker”, which the cooks will make some tricks, such as coating the pumpkin with flour and frying it; making eggplant into eggplant cakes and so on. A notice was posted the first day that the cafeteria was going to have a “vegetarian tooth ritual”. The next day, as soon as breakfast was over, people started lining up, not just to stand there, but to put an old porcelain enamel bowl or aluminum lunch box or something like that.
By noon, the cafeteria was as crowded as it was on a holiday, with long lines of people coming to the windows and children kicking the bowls and lunch boxes that had been used to line up and whose owners had not arrived in time. The people in the front of the queue squeezed out with their rice bowls, while those at the back of the queue all stuck their necks out to see what new tricks were on offer.
The more often and better the quality of these vegetarian tooth rituals, the closer the year of famine came to an end. The meat that had not been seen for a few years finally returned to the public canteen, and then from the public canteen’s rice window returned to our bowls and stomachs. After the supply returned to normal, the “tooth sacrifice” became the traditional program of the canteen, and was reserved for major festivals.
At the end of 1961 and the beginning of 1962, life began to improve. Gradually, more and more things were available in the shops. At first, a “naked candy” was sold from time to time – a hard candy bar without a paper wrapper, which you could buy without a candy ticket. After an hour or two of waiting, other candies appeared on the counters of the stores and the queues for the low-grade “naked candies” disappeared. Butchers started selling expensive meat without a ticket, and vegetables became cheaper at the free market.
The year of the famine was lost to history as time went by. I now know that, due to the central government’s front-line leaders took some measures that were later criticized as following the capitalist road: the so-called “Three Freedoms, One Package, Four Freedoms” and so on, less than a year after the three-year famine, the economy recovered to the same level as before the famine. I was just a teenager at that time, so I couldn’t know much about it, except that the food was better and more available.
The best part of those days was that every Saturday, my parents would take the three of us kids out to the street to see a movie around six o’clock, and then we would leave the theater and go to one of the restaurants on the street for a meal.
At that time, most of the restaurants (most of them were state-run, but there were some individuals before the Cultural Revolution) did good business, and they never had to worry about customers from opening to closing. The restaurant didn’t need to find ways to attract customers, on the contrary, the customer could only eat what the restaurant sold without complaint, and the dishes written on the menu, when asked, the waiter would throw out an ice-cold sentence – no! If you want to eat, you have to stop, don’t dare to ask more. If you don’t know what to say, the waiter will immediately stare at you with a pair of dead fish eyes, and sarcastic and sarcastic, that look makes you feel like a stinky beggar.
In fact, the hotel is no real sense of the waiter, the hotel is just a little senior canteen: customers themselves in the window line to buy tickets, and then to the food window line up for food. Look now, big to the star hotel restaurant, small to the roadside husband and wife hotel, in order to attract customers, welcome the girl a race a beautiful, a more than one can speak, the waiter’s smile a sweet than one. The customers do what they want to eat, the customers order dishes without a strong apology, a variety of dishes, the main and secondary food should not only retain the traditional “program”, but also constantly renovate the variety. And so, from time to time, we hear: today this hotel is transferred, tomorrow the restaurant closed down, it’s not easy!
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