In recent years, it is common to see the slogan “youth without regrets”, especially for recalling the youth who went to the mountains and villages, or experienced the Cultural Revolution and various political movements, in order to express the optimism of the recollectors, to show their “revolutionary pride”, and to influence the young generation who do not have such experiences. I do not approve of this.
This is a complete distortion of history. The so-called “no regrets” can only refer to the choices that individuals have made, while the fact is that the vast majority of people did not have the freedom to choose at all, but were forced or deceived to participate or get involved, which can only be described as helplessness.
This is a total deception. Since there is no regret, why not do it? But those who sing “no regrets” are basically officials, entrepreneurs, scholars, rich people, celebrities, and international students, who have at least returned to the city to settle down and become well-off, and how many of them are still fighting in the rural and mountainous areas? Since they have no regrets, they can go back or send their children there, but do any of these people still do so?
This is an extremely dangerous tendency. The things that those people “have no regrets” about are closely related to the Cultural Revolution and the previous ultra-leftist line. Could it be that they want to have another Cultural Revolution?
Therefore, when I recall my own experience from the Great Leap Forward, the Three Years’ Natural Disaster and the Cultural Revolution, I feel that the youth of our generation was not chosen by ourselves. Rather, it was created by this history. Yes, we have been fooled, deceived and suppressed, and we have also been incited, promoted and used, both as the “driving force of revolution” and as the “object of revolution”. Of course we should reflect deeply on our youth, after all, youth is helpless!
Naturally, I have fond memories of my high school life, especially when I reached middle age, I could not help but lament that the years are merciless and youth is hard to come back. But I would rather die for the sake of the future than look back on that hopeless youth. However, for the sake of our future generations not to experience such a terrible era, I have to recall and record this helpless youth again and again. Here are two excerpts.
The “Great Leap Forward” for middle school students
I entered middle school in 1957 and was in my second year when the “Great Leap Forward” began, and the frenzy and absurdity of that time are still fresh in my mind.
I remember several things most vividly, one being the “satellite release”.
At that time, the newspaper was “putting up satellites” every day, and all kinds of miracles kept emerging and production doubled every day. All day long, we sang “catch up with the British in less than fifteen years” and “communism is just around the corner”, immersed in the frenzy. I don’t know if it was due to the school leadership, or the pioneers out of revolutionary enthusiasm and spontaneous action, or both, the school also began to “satellite”.
At the beginning of the slogan is still relatively cautious, such as some classes proposed to “eliminate failing”, but in other classes “to eliminate 3 points (five-level scoring system, equivalent to passing)” slogan, someone immediately released a “all 5 points (excellent) However, in front of the slogan of “eliminate 3 points (5-point scale, equivalent to passing)” of other classes, someone immediately released the “satellite” of “all 5 points (excellent). But within a few days, the slogan of “all 5” also seemed conservative and backward, because it was said that other middle schools had proposed to finish the high school curriculum in the junior high school, and some students were ready to write books.
So, a specific “satellite” was put up. Such as three days to eliminate typos, the way is to test several times a day, the teacher is too late to correct, organize students to correct, or even the same seat each other to exchange correction. Soon a class reported to the school party that the latest quiz proved that the class had eliminated typos. The news spread, other classes also spread the good news, in less than three days the whole school released the “satellite” “elimination of misspellings”.
Another example is that all students passed the standard of “Wei-Lao system” (labor and national physical exercise system), although junior high school students are beginners, but there are also specified indicators, such as 60-meter run, 400-meter run, etc. have specific time, how can all be achieved in just a few days? So the students who didn’t pass it kept running in the playground, and when they got tired, they took a break and ran again. In this case, as a rule, it is impossible to run faster and faster, but over and over again, the number of people who do not pass will actually be less and less. Until dark, I do not know whether the students really run faster and faster, or timing teachers also put the satellite, the miracle finally appeared, the whole school students all meet the standard, the gong and drums to report the good news to the party branch office door.
The second is the great steelmaking. The “steel marshal rose tent” seems to be the top priority at the time, remember the specific slogan is “for 10.8 million tons of steel”, and later the target became 18 million tons. Soon it was the middle school’s turn to “make steel”, teachers and some tall and strong students built a steel furnace in the playground, and all the other students went out to collect “scrap steel”.
The school was surrounded by shantytowns, all very simple houses, almost no steel can be demolished, so we ran to the residential area south of Suzhou River, will be the entrance of the alley iron gate, some houses on the iron fence all demolished and smashed, some students also brought home iron, some factories on the road parts were also carried back as scrap iron.
In the evening, the playground furnace fire, teachers and students to fight at night, finally the “scrap iron” furnace into a pile of black “steel”, and then is to carry this “steel” to report the good news! –Not to the party branch of our school, but to the district committee.
Then there was the elimination of sparrows. In addition to the usual methods of accomplishing this “political task”, there were also centralized actions. I remember that on the day of the city’s sparrow eradication, we arrived at the school early in the morning, and I was assigned the task of climbing up to the third floor roof with a group of people and shouting to chase away the sparrows when they flew by, not letting them stay. There were firecrackers, gongs, drums, flags, running and hooting all around, and I’m told the results were brilliant. Although we didn’t catch a single sparrow on the roof, we all believed we had done our part in the “four pests”.
In addition, I had a personal “Great Leap Forward”. After we visited the educational revolution exhibition at Yucai Middle School, the school proposed to implement “electrification of education”. I responded positively and suggested to the geography teacher to make an “electrifying teaching aid”. It was very simple, it was a large wooden frame with a map of the whole country, and small light bulbs of different colors were installed underneath with different lines, controlled by switches, and the lights were turned on as needed to show cities, railroads, rivers, etc. during the demonstration. The school gave us a sum of money to purchase small light bulbs, wires, etc., carpenters for us to make the wooden frame, a classmate and I worked around the clock for a few days to make, sent to the exhibition to the party. But we never saw this teaching aid again, and naturally the teachers did not use it.
Hungry memories
When I was in junior high school, a canteen was set up in the street near the school, and although it was not yet as “free to eat” as some “communist” models or rural areas, the prices were quite cheap, so I was able to save a few cents from the limited meal money to buy books. But by the time I entered high school in 1960, the importance of food stamps was well known. Originally, you didn’t need food stamps to eat at restaurants or buy breakfast at dim sum stalls, but there were fewer and fewer places that didn’t charge food stamps. Especially in the cheap restaurants and dim sum stalls, the daily supply was so small that customers had to line up in advance or wait for a long time to buy a limited supply.
In order to save food stamps, the family went to a noodle store on Zhejiang Road several times to queue up for a bowl of vegetarian noodles (that is, a few small pieces of winter melon on top of the noodles) per person if they got a turn. Soon, all the loopholes were closed – restaurants and dim sum stalls were supplied with “dining coupons”, and cookies and pastries from food stores were supplied with “pastry coupons”, which were rationed as strictly as food stamps.
After I entered high school, I always ate in the school cafeteria, lunch and dinner were eight people at a table, the amount of food could be set by each person, each person had a fixed number of bowls. Most of the female students set three taels a meal, male students generally four taels, some set five taels, the canteen according to the number of set rice steam.
As the cooks put rice and water may not be accurate, sometimes four taels of rice is not as much as three taels, sometimes the same ration but a big difference, at that time, although the students are still quite restrained, but the heart can not help but calculate. If the students took the wrong bowl, the ration of less ate the ration of more, it would be more embarrassing.
The turn to eat meat once every ten days and a half months, everyone is like a holiday, but the turn to share the burden of the students will be particularly heavy, if the eight pieces of meat in the pot of similar size can be done, if there are large and small is a problem. At first there were enough greens in the bowl, although there was hardly any oil; later even the greens disappeared, and there were only some old cabbage leaves.
In the winter, the rice bowl is often “glory vegetables”. The so-called “glory dish”, is the original feed tofu dregs mainly, put a few vegetable leaves, tofu cooked in a pot. The taste is not to be considered, and again this is the “political” position, and then bad also have to eat. Because of the amount of a lot, eaten when very full, just can not last much time.
At home, eating is also not enough, because in addition to the vegetables bought by head with the small vegetable card (basically old leaves of cabbage) and a few taels of meat and a few cents of tofu bought with a ticket, all sources of food have been cut off, so every family is in order to make this little rice, no rice cooked to fill the stomach of the family and show their skills.
A popular method is to cook rice before cooking, it turns out that a bowl can be turned into a bowl and a half, although all happy when eating, but can not solve the hunger before eating the next meal. The newspaper also introduced the production of chlorella, using human feces to feed pigs, saving the feed to seep into the grain together.
The school’s biology teacher coached everyone to raise chlorella, and there were bottles of greenish water everywhere, but no one ever ate the chlorella, which was said to be extremely nutritious. It is true that feeding pigs with manure was practiced, but people themselves were already extremely deficient in oil and nutrients, so how many active ingredients could there be in manure? So the pork that we occasionally ate at that time was also a thin layer of skin with thin meat.
Most of the unlucky ones were the housewives and mothers of each family, who often had to endure hunger themselves in order to let their families and children eat a little more. But in some families with many children, even if the mother starved all day, but also can not solve the fight between the children, often have to take the system of sharing food. My neighbor’s family has six or seven children, the oldest being my classmate. Every morning, my mother divides the family’s food for the day according to each person’s ration, and then each person decides for himself how to eat. So his family’s coal stove was not empty all day, especially after the distribution of flour, some of them made noodles, some spread cakes. Of course the mother had to distribute the food after she made it, otherwise it would not be possible for each person to eat it.
In the days of hunger, after eating the last meal, they were waiting for the next one, especially during the fourth period in the morning, hoping that class would end soon. At that time, high school students did not have watches at all, and individual students who had money at home did not dare to wear watches. When it was our turn to sit in the window row, we put a pen holder on our desks and wrote down the length of the sun’s shadow, using this method to estimate the time and telling other students by hand signals or notes.
Starvation and malnutrition not only delayed the growth of those of us who were sixteen or seventeen and short in stature, but we also suffered from various diseases, and new tuberculosis patients were discovered at every physical examination. I was found to have infiltrative tuberculosis during a physical examination in May 1962 and had to be immediately suspended from school, barely resuming a year and a half later and transferring to the next level because my original class had graduated. However, by the time he graduated from high school in 1964, the tuberculosis had not yet calcified, and he still failed the physical examination and lost the opportunity to enroll in college.
Regular situation reports and political studies convinced us that the hunger was caused by “successive natural disasters” and “Soviet debt”, and that it was temporary. When we heard the news that “Chairman Mao no longer eats meat”, we were even more moved, because after all, I had two taels of meat tickets every ten days! The life of the great leader was even harder than ours, so we gritted our teeth and saved one or two pounds of food stamps to hand over to the branch.
We believe that two-thirds of the world’s people are still unliberated, and the people of Taiwan are living in dire straits, and although we do not have enough to eat, the Party and the government still ration food and necessities. If they had been hit by a natural disaster of this magnitude, I wonder how many working people would have died of hunger!
In the area of the North Railway Station near the school, there were some starving people who escaped from the countryside, all of them were so thin that they were skin and bones, and first they asked for food, saying that they were dying of hunger and begging for their lives. So they started to grab food, grabbed the cakes and doughnuts from others, and desperately shoved them into their mouths, no matter how they were beaten and scolded, they endured it all, only not to spit out the food that came to their mouths. The real can not eat a bite, such as half a bowl of thin rice, will also spit on a mouthful of spit, so that you have to let him eat.
The school immediately carried out ideological education, explaining that these people are the rich and the bad in the countryside, unwilling to honestly accept labor reform before escaping. We have no doubt that they deserved it, and that there would be people starving to death under the leadership of the Communist Party.
(From “Ge Jianxiong’s Collected Works”, Volume 6, “Traces of History”, published by Guangdong People’s Publishing House in 2015)
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