In early March 1969, I left the city with the first group of intellectuals from Beibei district in Chongqing to the deafening sound of farewell gongs and drums, and took a Jiefang truck to the Daba mountain range.
The Daba Mountains are the border between the provinces of Sichuan (including Chongqing), Shaanxi, and Hubei, and the border between the Sichuan Basin and the Hanzhong Basin, with altitudes ranging from 1,300 to 2,000 meters above sea level. The main crops are rice, wheat, corn, Ipomoea, and a small amount of beans.
When we went to the countryside, more than half of the rations we were given were sweet potatoes, which meant that we had to eat sweet potatoes every day for at least half of the year. Boiled sweet potatos, pickled sweet potatos rice, fried sweet potatos shredded, sweet potatos cake pasted, steamed sweet potatos bun, I ate everything I could think of under those conditions. This physical and psychological rejection has continued to this day, and I have a panic attack at the sight of Ipomoea.
The only two big autumn crops in rural Cangxi are rice and Ipomoea. Because it is a mountainous area, Ipomoea is planted on a large area, and if there is not enough rain to plant rice seedlings, the dry fields where the wheat is harvested will have no water to plant the seedlings, and eventually all the seedlings will be planted with Ipomoea.
The state collects public grain, so naturally Ipomoea is not wanted, because it is not easy to keep and not easy to transport, and people in the city cannot live on Ipomoea for half the year like farmers do. The grain harvested by the production teams must first be guaranteed to be paid into the state grain fund, and the Ipomoea is only digested by the farmers themselves. In the six hydrology teams I settled in, the annual per capita ration was about 400 jin of grain, half of which was Ipomoea, or even more, to fill the gap.
In my last year in the countryside, the sweet potatoes were distributed to more than 1,300 jin. Of course, it was a blessing to have Ipomoea to feed the hungry in February and March, and to thank God for His grace, because few households had kept their sweet potatoes intact until then.
The storage of sweet potaoras was quite difficult.
Local farmers had cellars where they stored sweet potaoras in each household. Usually a rectangular pit was dug in the open space of the family’s kitchen, with a stone slab at the bottom and around the pit. When storing the Ipomoea, first lay the new straw of the year on the bottom and walls of the cellar, then cover it with straw and sprinkle a lot of blighted rice on top, not only to keep it warm but also to breathe, so that the Ipomoea can stay there safely through the winter, not to be smothered and not to freeze. Finally, a wooden board was used to cover the cellar to prevent people from accidentally falling into the sweet potaor yam cellar. I don’t know from which era this method was handed down, but storing the sweet potaoras also had some effect, and if you were lucky, you could save some of them until the following year to survive the spring famine.
But for some unknown reason, it seems that every year there are one or two unlucky families whose entire Ipomoea jar rots unexpectedly after two or three months. It wasn’t a problem with the Ipomoea vault, because the “wheel of fortune” for rotting Ipomoea didn’t always happen in one household. When the Ipomoea rotted, a family’s half-year ration turned into garbage that even pigs couldn’t eat overnight, and in those years, there was almost no way to replenish the ration except by starving, and the less fortunate could only cry to show their great misfortune. At this time, the whole production team was deeply sympathetic, but they were unable to help. Ipomoea is the best preserved, and it’s pretty good that two-thirds of it goes into the mouth every year.
In order to save this ration, the farmers did everything they could. For example, they sliced the sweet potatos when they first got them, dried them into dried sweet potatos, and ground them into flour during the spring drought, which could be steamed into steamed bread, pasted into cakes, or boiled into a paste with pickled vegetables. For more than a month after harvesting the sweet potaor yam, slices of sweet potaor yam were spread all over the hillside on every big exposed stone. But in the late autumn in the mountains of northern Sichuan, the heavens were not very open, often foggy, the sun did not show its face much, and the Ipomoea slices were not dried, so the Ipomoea flour eaten during the spring drought had a musty smell.
According to today’s health standards, such Ipomoea flour should never be consumed, and in times of hunger, all people needed was to fill their stomachs. When drying Ipomoea flakes, if there was a sudden downpour, nothing would be recovered, but fortunately it was only a small portion of the rations, and the loss was affordable compared to a whole cellar of rotting Ipomoea.
My understanding of “bearing the burden of humiliation” reached a certain depth only after three years of living as a Zhiqing, through close contact with and understanding of the farmers. I have never heard anyone complain to the government or city people about why we can only eat Ipomoea after we have worked so hard to grow grain. Nowadays, it’s a bit sad to remember: compared to eating moldy Ipomoea flour, compared to the countryside people who starve most of the time on Ipomoea and often don’t even get to eat it, compared to the city dwellers who enjoy public food rations (albeit only for subsistence), the days might be labeled as “quiet”.
There is a popular phrase that can also describe the “quiet years” of that era – there are no quiet years, just people walking on behalf of you. It was the cropsmen who had to work from sunrise to sunset and were starving and cold.
Now that I live in Germany, I see sweet potatoes for sale in the vegetable market. The Germans call them sweet potatoes, and they cost 3.5 euros (equivalent to about 30 yuan) a kilogram, which is more expensive than many vegetables. When we were in the countryside, a person would divide 500 to 600 kilograms of sweet potatoes a year and take them to the market and sell them for 3 cents a pound, a total price not much different from the price of a kilogram of sweet potatoes in Germany today. Ipomoea was transformed into a gorgeous vegetable aristocrat against all odds here.
In 1969, when Mao Zedong issued his latest directive, “intellectual youth go to the countryside,” high school students in the cities had no choice but to join the army through unusual means, except for a few students with special backgrounds, and the vast majority of ordinary people’s children either went to work as farm laborers on frontier farms or settled down as peasants in rural areas.
At the time of registration, a considerable number of students (especially the relatively young junior high school students) likened settling in the countryside as supporting farm labor when they were in school, and did not take the issue of choosing a settlement partner seriously.
I don’t know if Cangxi County, which receives Zhiqing, will take care of this, but the students from our school did settle in the top wealthy areas of Cangxi County – Yuanba and Qiping districts.
The four students who made up our household were assigned to the fourth production unit of the Five Star Brigade in Nanyang Commune in Qiping District. This production team was not the most affluent, distributing 550 kg of grain, including about 350 kg of rice, 80 kg of wheat, 20-30 kg of peas, beans, mung beans, corn and other grains, and Ipomoea, which was equivalent to about 100 kg of rice.
Later I was transferred to the sixth team of hydrology in Zhejiang Water Commune, and the annual distribution of food was only 400 pounds of grain, removing more than 1,000 pounds of Ipomoea and summer harvest wheat, less than 200 pounds of rice, milled into about 120 pounds of rice, an average of less than 4 two meters per day, not enough for a meal in Chinese middle school when we were studying. With such a small amount of food, even if we cooked porridge, we could only cook it so that we could see the shadows of the people, and hunger became a regular part of our lives.
I remember one time when my sister came to visit me in the sixth hydrology team after the autumn harvest, she opened the rice bowl on the table, and tears rolled down her face as she entered. It was unthinkable that the events in those stories would cross over from the virtual world and settle in our real life, and become a norm.
Shortly after I left the countryside, I walked 120 miles to visit the five teams of Xinmin in Wulong District’s Zheshui Commune, where my sister had settled, and began to worry about the situation there.
When we left the city and home and were thrown into the remote and backward mountains, the brother-sister bond was powerfully highlighted against the backdrop of hardship, and mutual love and care became the strongest desire of the heart. After visiting my sister twice, I made up my mind to abandon the relatively privileged Nanyang Commune and move to the Zheshui Commune where my sister had settled.
In Nanyang Commune in Qiping District, because I was active, hard-working and physically strong, the production team gave me the same treatment as the local men in the full labor force, with ten work credits for each day’s work. The local women were given nine points for each day they worked.
When they first went to the countryside, not all of them were treated as full laborers, but my sister and her three sisters were only given eight work credits for their inability to do a lot of farm work. They soon heard that several female classmates assigned to Xinmin’s sixth team had been given full labor credits since the first day of work, but the production team took good care of the sixth team members who didn’t know how to do much farm work. This disparity made them indignant in their hearts. One night, when the production team held a general meeting, they took the opportunity to raise a ruckus, asking the production team’s cadres: “Why can they get nine points while we can only get eight points when we are the same as the sixth team’s intellectuals? At the end, I was told in a threatening tone that I would sue the commune if I didn’t get the points.
When I first came to their production team, I felt that they were not treated so well by the production team compared to the way I was treated in Qiping Nanyang Commune.
Although the state allocated a per capita amount of money to the rural production teams for the installation of intellectuals in their homes, there were very few production teams that spent all of this money on the intellectuals. All my sister and her family had were: three beds (including an old, dirty bed that had been used by someone unknown); an old, abandoned grain cupboard; a new rolling board, a yellow bucket for water and a pair of new buckets for carrying water; a large pot for cooking pigs in the production team’s communal pig farm, which they bought only after months of repeated urging! A real cooking pot.
There were two particularly heavy hoes, the kind that even the strongest boys in the farmer’s family would not use; three sickles – not sharp no matter how hard they were sharpened, which the farmer told was due to a bad steel fire, but there was no explanation as to why the production team did not buy a good one; and a new pair of buckets for picking up manure.
My sister stayed in the countryside for more than five years, during which time she had to borrow almost all the farming tools from the farmers. Farming tools are the private property of farmers, and it’s hard to explain what it’s like to have to borrow them every day.
Seeing my sister’s and her sister’s resettlement, I was impulsive, and I argued with the production captain in a way that was popular among male intellectuals at that time. While I was arguing with the captain, a number of men, all strong laborers from the production team, came around with hoes in their hands, poking the stone slabs on the road with thudding noises. I was so young and energetic that my anger rubbed against my head, and I put up a front that I was not afraid of their numbers, and the fight was just a last spark away. Fortunately, there were some clear-headed people on the side to intercede, but the fight did not break out.
It was in July of the same year that I left Nanyang Commune in Qiping District after officially completing the transfer procedures. I thought it was only natural that I settled in my sister’s production team, as there were many siblings forming households at that time. I never thought that a conflict with the production leader of Xinmin Team 5 would quickly spread to the commune, and I was locked in as a typical mischievous person. In fact, although I had not been in the Nanyang Commune in Giping for very long, I was named an advanced representative of the intellectual youth for my ability to endure hardship, and was popular for a short time. As a result of that quarrel, my sister and her production team refused to accept me, and the commune dragged its feet in finding another production team to place me.
It was no longer possible to return to the original commune. At that time, there was a policy that intellectuals could move from relatively rich areas to poor areas, but the reverse was not possible. I was hung out to dry and became a “black man,” not even qualified to participate in the most primitive and rudimentary manual labor in exchange for the most basic food rations for survival. This situation greatly exceeded my expectations of the various difficulties in the countryside, and I never thought that in the lowest stratum of rural society, an intellectual youth deprived of a city account would not be able to find a place to live ……
Later, thanks to the repeated urgings of the County Zhiying Youth Office, the commune placed me in the Sixth Hydrology Team, located more than 20 miles away from my sister’s production team on a rugged mountain road. I worked hard for several months in the sixth hydrology team, slowly changing the commune’s bad impression of me.
When I went to the countryside, I had never been so tired after the “double robbery” in summer and autumn, and my sister and some of her classmates wanted to take the opportunity of the National Day to go back to Chongqing. The night before the trip, they invited me to have a dinner together with them at Xinmin’s Sixth Team. I remembered that they had killed chickens and wrapped dumplings, which was very sumptuous by the standard of living at that time, and after the seven of them had gorged themselves, there was enough left for me to have a full meal. The next morning I took them to the river to catch a boat to the county town, and then returned to Xinmin No. 6 Team, planning to clean up all the leftover food, stay overnight, and return to my own production team at dawn.
The courtyard where the young men of Xinmin Team 6 lived was called “Heitanggou,” and their houses faced the front door of the courtyard house. That night, as soon as I went to bed, I heard noises outside, and at first I thought it was the members’ meeting of their production team at night, so I went to sleep on my own. Soon someone shouted, “Why didn’t Chen Xiaomin and the others come out to the meeting? Call them out!
Answer, none of them are here, it’s the brother of Jiang Rong from the 5th team who is inside.
Yelling again, I’ll call him out! The next thing I knew, someone came and pounded on the door with a loud thud. I didn’t pay any attention to it, trying to calm down. However, instead of being calmed down by my patience, the yelling and pounding outside escalated step by step, finally reaching the height of the conflict between us. Pull him out! Pounding on the door has also become very rude: open the door! Open the door! I’ll break down the door if you don’t! It was as if there was a class enemy with blue fangs hidden in the house.
I felt that something was wrong. The intellectuals from the sixth team had gone home on leave from the production team, so why would they suddenly come to a meeting with them at night? Moreover, when I returned from the river to Heitanggou and entered the courtyard, many people saw me and greeted me. I don’t know who is shouting at me from outside the door right now to arrest me. Or was it the Xinmin Team 5 people with whom I had a conflict (Xinmin Team 2, together with Team 5 and Team 6, is known as Xjiawan, a large family group)? For sure, they knew I was the only one in the house and were planning a fight with me – to settle the score!
After I was recruited to work in the coal mine, I heard from the Zhiqing recruited from Fengdu County that there was a brutal armed fight between peasants and Zhiqing in the area where they went: hundreds of peasants in a production brigade, armed with hoes, machetes, and skewers (locally used to pick straw, wheat straw, and firewood; the difference between a skewer and a common flat burden is that it is sharpened at both ends and covered with iron), hunted down and killed a dozen or so Zhiqing who had settled in the brigade. All the intellectuals were killed. Of course, I cannot guarantee the authenticity of this incident, as the Fengdu Zhiqing did not inform the local commune and the county revolutionary committee of the reaction and handling of such a serious incident.
That night, what happened to me was highly consistent with what happened to the legendary Fengdu Zhiqing.
In the midst of all the yelling and cursing outside the door, the first thought that came to my mind was, “A good man doesn’t suffer instantly” – it would be better to follow the old adage of avoiding their attacks. They could have broken down the door and poured in, or even attacked from above, and I would have been left with no way out. Leaving was the only option I had.
I dressed, went to the door, calmed down a bit, and pulled the door open while the peasants were in a tizzy. What I did was far beyond their level of prediction and imagination – I dared to come out alone in such a crowded situation! The sudden opening of the door caused a blockage in their thinking, and the “drama” was suddenly cut short, leaving the courtyard silent and them all bewildered and stupefied.
Seizing the few seconds of blankness, I leaped out of the room with one step, rushed out of the courtyard gate, and ran into the field.
Someone sobered up and shouted, “After them!
Dozens of people then rushed out, running and shouting, Get him! Shoot him!
After running around for a while, I looked back and saw that they were chasing me, flashlights and flashlights swinging behind them in a murderous rage.
I didn’t have any illumination, and I didn’t know the terrain well, so it was very likely that I wouldn’t be able to escape. In a moment of extreme urgency, or in a life-or-death situation, the kung fu I had practiced during my martial arts days saved my life. I lay down quickly and rolled into a ditch by the side of the road, lying motionless at the bottom of the ditch, my breath and rhythm under control as best I could. The only sound I could hear was the exhilarated shouts and rapid footsteps passing over my head, although there were many of them, with “weapons” in their hands, and they were very powerful but not courageous.
The group of people ran away, I did not move, and continued to crawl in the ditch, waiting for them to return without success. As a matter of fact, after a while, I heard those people walking back and forth in twos and threes, as they walked, foul language, Mom that x, let him fucking escape, or catch him, whack him to death!
The cursing, puffing, panting, and chaotic footsteps faded away and disappeared, leaving dead silence and endless darkness. I crawled out of the ditch and snuck over to my sister and her family’s house. To the left of their house were only two families and no dogs; to the right was a large piece of land that belonged to several families, so they could sneak in unnoticed.
I didn’t realize how dangerous my situation was that night, but I was a little scared in hindsight. It was dark as ink in the middle of a deserted mountain range, and I faced dozens of people barehanded, with hoes and flattops in their hands, knives and axes in their hands, and if they caught up with me, I would not only be unable to fight them, but I would also be unable to cry out to heaven and earth, and if I were maimed or even killed, I would probably not even be able to catch the murderer. I was fortunate that I had been through the field training of martial arts combat and the test of real firearms, and was quick to react with good tactics, otherwise, I might have ended up in the Fengdu Zhiqing told the version of the Cangxi Zheshui Commune that was outnumbered in an armed fight.
Many years later, my sister bought some documentary literary books about intellectual youths, in which she recorded the tragic fate of the intellectual youths all over the country: male intellectuals were tied up, imprisoned and beaten to death; female intellectuals were humiliated, raped and had to submit to the coercion of rural cadres and certain labor recruiters at all levels in order to return to the city. …… The facts described in the book made my mother feel frightened.
My mother said to us after reading the book, “I had no idea you were like this in the countryside. In fact, even if parents knew the actual situation in the countryside back then, absolutely no one dared to stand up to them and prevent their children from going down there? The parents of those intellectuals who lost their young lives for various reasons in various rural and frontier farms all over the world did not know what kind of grief and trauma they felt in their hearts during the long years that followed!
In his latest instructions, Mao Zedong specifically emphasized that “comrades in the countryside everywhere should be welcome to go”. The countryside also had to follow the directive to accept and accommodate such a large number of high school students.
Most of the places where our Chongqing Zhiqing went to the countryside were poor and mountainous areas, such as Youyang Xiushan, Pengshui, which belongs to the Wuling Mountains, and Guangyuan Cangxi, Levant, which belongs to the Daba Mountains. The arrival of intellectual youth has increased the burden on the countryside: with no increase in land, no increase in grain production, and no reduction in public rations, the production teams receiving the Zhiqing suddenly have several unnaturally growing and unrelated populations, so where does the food come from? Of course, it could only be taken out of the peasants’ bowls.
At that time, the food produced in the impoverished mountainous areas was not enough to meet the needs of the existing local population, and the first time we saw such poverty in the countryside was a great shock even to us, who had been brainwashed by all kinds of glorified propaganda of the new socialist countryside since childhood. To say that the extremely poor peasants, who were barely clothed and not necessarily fed, had no complaints about the intellectual youth falling from the sky, would be a fantasy.
However, being forced to go to the countryside gave them an inexplicable anger that they had no place to vent (at least that was the case with the Chongqing Zhiqing I met), and when they first went to the countryside, they unknowingly took out their anger on the locals, unconsciously putting themselves in opposition to the locals and showing little respect for, let alone friendship with, the local rural people. All the childish behavior of the Zhiqing caused the negative feelings of the local people and the leadership to accumulate and overlap, resulting in a great tragedy.
Not long after we arrived in the countryside, there was a murder case in which one of the participants was a young man from the 23rd high school in Chongqing. I later heard from a number of sources that, of the several people involved in the murder, the young man from the 23rd high school was actually the least serious. I don’t know the reason for the killing, but only heard the general story of how it happened: a couple of cognoscenti pinned one of the victims to the bed and covered him with a pillow, during which a cognoscenti from Chongqing’s Intermediate School 23 held down one of the victim’s feet. After the incident, several local youths from the Nanchong area (including the main culprit) had a network of connections and were able to escape justice through various connections. Cangxi County, however, insisted that a “Chongqing Zhiqing” be killed anyway as a warning to others. In this way, this high school student, who had just left his hometown and his parents, was shot to death.
After he was shot, the authorities took a lot of pictures of the deceased from various angles, printed them as posters and posted them all over the streets and alleys of Cangxi County, and ordered that they should not be covered within a month. It can be seen that the leadership at the time of the good intentions of the determination of the huge. More than a month after the incident, I went to Cangxi County, and saw the death penalty notice and the before and after pictures of the high school student being shot all over the city. One of the pictures became an imprint in my mind through my eyes, and is still vivid and vivid today, decades later: the middle school student, after being shot, collapsed in a kneeling position on a pebble beach in a river dam, his hands tied behind his back, with a wooden marker stuck in his back, his head beaten to a bloody pulp, planted in a large puddle of blood and brain matter.
On that occasion, I stood in front of the picture for a long time, chilled all over, grieving, and feeling sadness like a stream flowing in my chest. I didn’t know the student in Form 23, and with my knowledge and cognitive ability at that time, it was unlikely that I would be able to think more deeply about some issues, but I had a certain hazy feeling that his tragedy made me suddenly feel that intellectual youth, after being sent to the countryside in batches from the top down, had become an exiled group, without dignity, without justice, and it seemed that there was no longer any organization, institution or group. To provide them with a minimum of protection.
……
Several decades have passed, and looking back at my 1969, I have a lot of feelings. In the remote and backward mountainous areas of Daba, the people were simple and honest, and most of the individual farmers were very kind to the Zhiqing. The arrival of a large number of Zhiqing was actually food from their mouths, which was a challenge to their survival as they had been half starved and half satiated for years, and they had their helplessness, which could not be delivered with the warmth of spring at the first time. But after the dust settled on the Zhiqing settlement, they unleashed their kindness on the half-grown children who had been forced to live far from their hometowns and families. They taught them the basic skills of productive labor to support themselves; they gave them a lot of sincere care in their lives.
In this way of life, they gradually established sincere relationships with the simple people who had lived in this way of life for generations: parents, brothers, sisters and sisters like Xiaofang. Many Zhiqing returned to the city and considered the places they had been to as their second hometowns; some successful businessmen even funded the economic development of the production teams they were in and sponsored the poor children’s schooling ……
Whether it is gratitude or giving back, it should be noted that all of these things can only be attributed to individual emotions and actions, and have no necessary causal relationship with the political movement of going to the countryside.
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