Whenever I was faced with a table full of sumptuous meals, and the children yelled that they didn’t like this or that, I always had to tell the story of those hungry years.
In 1960, I was a junior high school student in the second middle school in Benxi County, more than 20 miles from my hometown. At the beginning, the monthly ration of 28 pounds, although a thin porridge, but still fill the stomach, but less than six months, the ration dropped to 15 pounds, the stomach began to goo vomit up. When we were growing up, our stomachs were not full, wanting to eat all day long, eating the last meal looking forward to the next, the teacher was breathless in class, the students were listens listlessly, listening to the hunger down. Once, the language teacher Liu talked about “Dream of the Red Chamber”, “Shi Taijun two feast Da Guan Yuan” Liu Lou Lou in the banquet eating delicacies, the students opened their eyes wide, really know what is called mouth-watering word. Ms. Liu also said humorously: “Cao Mengde quenched his thirst by looking at plums, and I used the banquet to quench my hunger.” The night was even harder, so hungry that I tossed and turned and could not sleep. In the middle of the night, I conspired with my bedmate Zhang to steal vegetables from the school’s vegetable cellar to eat. During the day, Zhang reconnoitered the location of the cellar, the cellar door on the big lock, only the vent has a basketball hole, Zhang will prepare a bean frame, tied to a pencil sharpener knife. In the middle of the night we came to the cellar, the bean frame into the vent to tie carrots, not waiting for the second tie up, the first eaten up. That night we ate more than two dozen carrots, and although our stomachs were full, bloated like drums, and our stomachs hurt, we didn’t dare to say anything, so we just had to hold it in. Later, the school probably found that the vegetables were lost, and the vent was blocked with an iron sieve.
The school also tried to solve the Food problem by all means. The so-called “incremental method” was to put the cooked thin paste in a big pot, then put it on the table after it cooled down, and cut it into small pieces, which looked like corn cake, but it turned into thin rice Soup when you ate it. Our classroom was far away from the cafeteria, and during the fourth period of the morning, everyone looked forward to eating early after class. The teacher was also hungry and only taught half of the class, and the rest of the Time the students packed up their textbooks in preparation for the bell to ring. In the cafeteria, there was a table for every eight people, and each table took turns to be the table leader, who first received the meal tickets for eight people, and then lined up to receive the meal for eight people. Whenever it was the table leader’s turn, the table leader took off early in the fourth period to go to the toilet, which was very close to the cafeteria, the table leader hid in the toilet, and when the bell rang, he ran out of the toilet and was the first to rush up to the cafeteria to sell rice.
Later, cornmeal also became less and less available. Physics teacher Lv Tongyue assembled an electric mill, and the students gathered leaves, corn bones, and roots from the mountains and fields a dozen miles away, then ground them up and added some cornmeal to make “food substitutes”, which were bitter and astringent, but filling. The school became famous for this, and the county school board held a field meeting at the school to promote it.
The following spring, the famine became more severe. The school plowed up the playground and planted corn. When the corn pods were starching out, the students sneaked into the ground and tore the pods apart, went up and chewed them with their mouths, gnawing on a mouthful of corn pulp and fluff, wiping their mouths to jerk the corn pods up again to prevent them from being discovered. This corn field has not yet reached autumn, the young ears of corn have been chewed up by students.
During the summer, I returned Home, but I couldn’t find it. The original home was occupied by the newcomers from Shandong. It is said that they moved to my village to build a reservoir there and gave it a fancy name, “Branching Out”. Several families lived together in the village, and the house was vacated for the relocated Shandong Family to live. I met my second sister at the head of the village, and she led me to my new home. My mother told me that the village was running a large canteen, and all the families did not cook, but went to the large canteen to eat, and all the food was taken away from the house, the pots and pans were taken away, and the hinges and ruthenium on the cabinets were also taken away and sent to the blast furnace to make steel. In the east house, Feng Er hid a bag of corn in the woodpile, but he didn’t expect to be found collecting firewood in the canteen, and the firewood was taken away and the food was confiscated. Feng Er was criticized for opposing the canteen.
The canteen was located in the middle of the village in the house of a wealthy family, which was given to two poor peasant families during the land reform. Now the two poor farmers have moved to other places. In the courtyard, there were five large pots and pans, and the spade used to turn them was a flat-bottomed spade. When the bell struck, the whole village came and squatted along the edge of the room, drinking thin rice and snotting and squealing. It is said that this is the entry into communism, eating without money.
But the good times do not last long, eat less than a month, the rice is getting thinner and thinner, until thin to shine out of the shadow of a person. Finally, a pot of water boiled a basket of leaves, and a more serious famine spread in the village. The leaves are gone to grasp the bark tree root grass root, the best food to be counted grain bark bran, grain bran again grind fine, chew in the mouth will also make a rustling sound, swallow down rubbing throat, tilt down the chin and stretch the neck to send into the belly. People’s stool is dry, the village west of the two Gui because of colon can not pass stool, suffocated alive. More is swollen, body a press a pit, face oily, and thought to be eating large canteens fat. Later, I do not know who invented the “small ball of algae”, is the use of boiled potatoes in the bottle, a few days later the potatoes on the block of green hair, said to be nutritious. But people eat nausea and vomiting, poisoned. Most women have a prolapsed uterus, amenorrhea, in those days, no woman in the village is pregnant, and no one married a daughter-in-law. Most of the young and strong laborers went to build reservoirs and hydropower stations, and those who stayed in the village went to the mountains to cut firewood for the big canteen to burn food. In less than a month, the dense mountain forest became bare, and even a rabbit could be seen running.
At the beginning of August, a heavy rain, the back of the mountain landslide, collapsing several houses, but no one died. A dozen reservoirs on a river broke their banks, one after another, and the more they washed away, the more fields were washed away, houses were washed down, and a dozen people in the village lost their lives. Since then, the large canteen also with the yellow. Nowadays, when we talk about those three years, it is said to be “three years of natural disasters”, but the villagers say, “Don’t blame the gods, the rain was not too big, not too small, if we didn’t make the Great Leap Forward, didn’t have the big canteen, didn’t cut down the trees on the mountain, didn’t build so many reservoirs, where would be the famine! So far we have not heard an official account of what really happened during those years.
School started on September 1. I found that several students were missing in my class, some died of hunger, some died of floods, and some died of diseases. The school, according to the instructions from above, began to “anti-rightist, pull up the white flag”, fearing that students would know the truth and talk about starvation and death. In fact, everyone knows it, but they don’t dare to talk about it, because they will be rectified if they do.
These years have been full of food, but forget those years of hunger, those heartbreaking pain. I talked about it at the dinner table, the children said it was a story, the young people said it was nonsense. Time can fade into oblivion, but how can anyone who experienced those years forget that painful page of history!
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