I stayed in the countryside for more than three years, from 1969, when I went to the countryside, to 1972, when I was recruited to work in the coal mines. During those three years, there were only two kinds of farm work that I had never been involved in: plowing and harrowing the fields.
The reason the production team wouldn’t let me do these two jobs was because of the cattle.
The cattle, as a means of production, were the collective property of the production team in the days of the commune, but their breeding was not collective and they were scattered among the families. This way of raising cattle gave the collectively owned cattle the stamp of private property, and the peasants were clear about who owned which cattle.
Generally speaking, people only used their own cattle, whether for business purposes – plowing and harrowing the production team’s fields or other purposes; or for private purposes – grinding rice and flour, plowing and harrowing their own land, but if they wanted to use other people’s cattle, it would be similar to borrowing money.
As a result of such a clear separation of public and private affairs, no family, such as mine, who had never worked with cattle before, would be willing to put their own cattle at my disposal for fear that I would not understand or care for them, that I would tire them too much, that they would be injured accidentally, or that some other bigger accident would happen. If the cattle die of old age or accident, although the production team will not claim compensation from the breeder, it is unlikely that they will soon get another one if they lose one, and in the absence of cattle, basic living such as grinding rice and flour will be affected.
In addition to plowing and raking the fields, I have missed all the other agricultural and sideline jobs, the most memorable being those days and nights on the Jialing River as a slaver, the “double robbery” in the summer and fall, repairing reservoirs during the agricultural lean season, carrying wood in the deep forests and helping private individuals carry slabs, all of which required tremendous physical strength and hard labor.
First, planting seedlings and sowing wheat
Farmers say, “Agricultural work is busy for forty days, but one day’s work is nine days’ worth of grain”. This is a saying that has been handed down from generation to generation, and even in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when we settled down, we were still in this situation where we had to rely entirely on hard work and sweat in order to survive.
There were two times a year when the local farmers were busy, once in early summer when they were harvesting wheat and planting seedlings, and once in late summer and early fall when they were threshing grain and digging sweet potatoes for wheat. When the farming season is busy, they go down to the ground just after dawn and can’t finish until it’s dark. The whole team of men, women and children as long as they can work breathlessly, there is no one idle not to work, back to their mothers’ homes, the families, to catch up with the …… including the production team to run by-products, including wooden boats, all stopped, it was a time of unity, in the face of all adults and children a year’s livelihood, who dare not have the slightest slackness.
The food crops in the area where we went to the countryside were mainly rice. Some of the paddy fields in the local countryside have two seasons of crops: one season of rice and one season of wheat (or broad beans or rape), which are called dry fields; others have only one season of rice, which is used to store water after the autumn harvest (as a supplement to the insufficient water in the production team’s weir ponds) for planting rice seedlings next year, which are called winter paddy fields. In summer, after the wheat is harvested from the dry fields, the water from the winter paddy is put in and the seedlings are planted. During the busy farming season in early summer, both the winter paddy field and the dry field had to be planted with rice seedlings.
For me, the most torturous of all the farming jobs was planting the seedlings. I had to step in the mud with my feet, bend over and squat while inserting the seedlings into the mud. The first three or two days were bearable, but the rest of the day was filled with back pain like breaking. When it was time to rest, I fell to the ground, found a moderate rock to hold against my waist, and made myself a bridge to slightly ease the pain. My only wish was to lie flat on my bed and say goodbye to planting rice seedlings in my sleep.
The order of planting rice seedlings was winter paddy fields first, followed by dry fields. In the winter paddy fields, where water is stored for a long time, the soil is soft and the mud is knee-high, and the bending of the waist is not too much, so the seedlings only need to be gently planted. If the whole process of planting was like this, it would not be an ordeal, but when it came to the dry fields where the wheat was harvested, planting became a dead end. The growing season for wheat is about 8 months from planting to harvest, and the soil is crusty after harvest, so you have to rush to plant the seedlings before the water can loosen the soil.
In the dry fields, the soil is crusty and still unevenly distributed after harrowing and plowing, so when the seedlings are planted at regular intervals, sometimes there is a hole with no soil and no place for the seedlings; sometimes there is a large piece of porcelain hard soil on which my fast-moving fingers hit, and the pain often reminds me of the torture of “nailing the fingertips with bamboo sticks”. Another big difference between the dry field and the winter paddy field is that the dry field is so shallow that even the mud you step in doesn’t reach your ankles. For us, the rural people who can barely squeeze out some grain to make a few meals of dried pickled vegetables to fill our stomachs during the busy farming season, this kind of extreme physical exertion will leave us completely paralyzed and reduced to a pile of mud after one day.
I’ve only been planting seedlings for three years. The farmers who have lived here for generations have been doing this for decades, until they run out of oil. Bai Juyi described the hardships of the farmers in “A View of the Mowing Wheat”: “The earth is steaming and the sky is burning. In the 1970s, more than a thousand years later, they were still suffering from the sun and rain, and still had to work their shoulders and feet on the grass; they still did not have enough to eat and did not have enough to wear. This was the situation I saw in the countryside: farmers generally had only one cotton coat to keep them warm in winter, but no cotton pants.
Planting rice seedlings is one of the more skilled farming jobs. One or two rice planters from each production team are the first to go into the field, break open a field in the middle, and plant the five rows of rice seedlings in a straight line from the beginning of the field to the end. Other people lined up on either side of the five rows of seedlings and planted the seedlings in the field in a row. “When the rows are straight, the field is arranged in rows and rows; when the rows are twisted, the whole field looks like a mess. Although this “mess” does not affect the growth of the grain or the yield, the visual effect is poor, and the aesthetics of the farmer is combined with his labor skills, making the messy rice field an object of ridicule and gossip for a season.
From the first time I planted rice seedlings in the field, I tried hard to learn how to do the rows, but I was unable to master the skill until I left the countryside. However, I didn’t learn how to plant rice seedlings, but I did learn how to shovel the wheat when sowing the seeds.
The basic instructions for shoveling wheat are similar to those for planting seedlings: one person goes down first, shovels a straight trench from the middle in a shallow line with a hoe, and the others line up on the left and right sides of the trench, one right next to the other, and shovel until the whole field is shoveled with such a shallow trench, and the wheat seed is scattered in the trench and grows out. In just three years, I went from being a rookie to being the number one shoveler on the team. In just three years, I went from being a novice to the first in charge of shoveling wheat roads in the whole team. In the first year, I shoveled behind others; in the second year, I shoveled half of the production team’s land; in the third year, no one went down to shovel the “marked road” until I was in the ground.
Harvest Season Stories
During the harvest season, the farmers worked hard, and the noon break was automatically canceled during the idle season, but all those who earned wages (including schoolchildren who were on agricultural vacation from school), regardless of age, left their rice bowls after lunch and went to work.
During the summer harvest, they carried a yoke (a tool for threshing wheat) to the drying field to beat the wheat. The wheat harvest is not a major harvest season in the local countryside, but farmers rely on it to survive the grain shortages of late spring and early summer; in autumn, they go to the fields to cut and thresh the grain. At this time, men, women and children sweating like rain saw before them the most simple truth: a bead of sweat is a grain of grain.
During the autumn harvest, the production team never let me into the mixing bucket (shaped like an enlarged bucket, a tool for threshing grain). I couldn’t figure out why, but later I guessed that one reason was that I was afraid I wouldn’t get it right and scatter the precious grains in the field; another reason might be called peasant cunning, a bit of secret bullying of outsiders.
Grain that fell from the mixing bucket had to be carried to the drying field in a back pocket, a job called carrying water grain. In the eyes of farmers, carrying grains of water, like carrying slabs, is the heaviest physical work in the countryside, and whether or not one can carry grains of water is one of the criteria for evaluating whether or not a male laborer can get credit for all his labor. “I was the only one who was assigned to carry the heavy paddy grains every year.
Under the heavy pressure, the swampy mud in the winter paddy fields sank into my thighs, and the tremendous physical effort required for each step forward was indescribable. There was no decent road up to the field to the sun-drying site, but only some narrow fields, with slippery steps. Fortunately, I was young at that time, so I got my strength back when I slept.
The remaining half of the harvest was to dry the wheat in the summer and remove the husks, and in the fall to dry the chaff that had been knocked out of the fields. My sister, who was a junior high school dropout, wrote a little limerick at that time, describing the busyness of the drying fields during the harvest season.
Dust in the wheat field
Sweating profusely, everyone is busy
Shouting like a shuttle
Windmills clank, clank, clank
Sieve the sieve, bump the bump
Carry on your back, carry on your back.
The sun sets over the western mountains and never stops working.
Who cares if the belly is empty?
The wheat and grain harvested in the summer and fall were first paid to the state (at that time, it was called “public grain”) in accordance with the prescribed indexes, then the seeds reserved by the production teams and the reserve portion were collected in collective warehouses, and finally they were distributed to farmers’ households. Fortunately, unlucky weather was rare. We did not encounter it even once during our years in the countryside. Usually, the sun was so poisonous during harvest time that by midday, you could hear the air bursting with the sound of it cooking. The people in the city cursed the heavens with the heat, but to the farmers, this weather was a blessing from the heavens. As Xin Qiji said, “The city’s peach and plum trees worry about the wind and rain, while spring flowers with camelia at the head of the stream,” the difference between town and country has never changed.
In addition to competing with God for grain during the harvesting season, there was a special battle to prevent animal harassment when the bale was ripe.
There is a local animal that farmers call “pig hedgehog”. We have never seen what this animal looks like, nor do we know if any of the farmers have actually seen their faces. Usually, people perceive their presence from the crops they spoil, which is a bit mysterious.
Every time when the budding grains were ripening, the “pig hedgehogs” became active and came every night to steal their food. They are not actors in the harvest, but they are actors in the world of politics, and they enjoy the fruits of other people’s labor. Just like Sun Wukong at the Queen Mother’s Peach Banquet, they ate whatever they could grab and threw away whatever they could, and then ran away. In the morning, when people came to the field, they saw that the budding grains had been trampled down, and the newly ripe or even immature ears of the budding grains were scattered all over the ground, and each one was thrown away after a few bites. Therefore, every year when the buds were ripe, the male laborers and children of all production teams would take turns in the evening to watch the buds and blast the “hedgehogs”, and naturally the male intellectuals were no exception. I have been in the countryside for three years, and I fought with the peasants for three years to protect the bale harvest from the “hedgehogs”.
Watching the bale is not a good job, although it does not require much physical strength. In the wild, the mosquitoes in the summer night are a group, and the legions of mosquitoes buzzing and stirring like the tide as one sits in a simple shed watching the bale of grain. There is no such defensive barrier as a mosquito net in the field, and the usual methods of dealing with mosquitoes such as slapping are useless here, completely ineffective. However, farmers are not helpless, they use some damp straw, weeds compost pile of smoke, smoke fumigation is an ancient and effective weapon against mosquitoes, mosquitoes in front of the smoke can only flee, unwilling to escape or escape speed is not fast enough to die.
After eliminating mosquitoes, you still can’t sleep soundly, because the main task of people sleeping in the wild is not to fight with mosquitoes, but to fight with “hedgehogs”, who are not afraid of the smoke and burns, so people must go back and forth from time to time to the edge of the valley. They walked around, shouting “jo ho-, jo ho-,” and drove the “pig hedgehog” away. I was so sleepy and drunk that I couldn’t even stand up. As soon as the task was completed, I rushed home and fell into bed, falling asleep until the production captain shouted, “Let’s go,” outside the yard.
However, there was a little compensation for the hard work: at night, the “hedgehogs” did not dare to come, so the person who blew up the “hedgehogs” went to the field instead of the “hedgehogs” to break up a few young grains, and used the mosquito fumigant to smother them. The fresh young budding grains were cooked by fire. At that time, there were basically no pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and the fresh young grains filled with pulp were fragrant and sweet, which was the real green organic pollution-free food.
After the grain harvest, another chore was to pay the public grain. The production team I was in was more than twenty miles away from the market town, and the grain depot where the grain was purchased was located halfway up the slope of the mountain that ran through the market town to Xinmin brigade, so all of us in the hydrological production team had to climb over the mountain to deliver the grain.
Eighteen years after we left the countryside, my sister and I went back once to the place where we had settled. At that moment, I suddenly saw myself eighteen years ago, carrying 145 pounds of grain on my back, walking along a mountain road submerged in clouds and mist. At this time, I was standing in the real time and space, looking at my young self in the distant past so unrealistically, as if I were looking at a distant dream.
Carrying Wood in the Mountains
In addition to the extraordinarily physically demanding farm work during the busy farming season, I did a lot of heavy physical labor in the countryside that is unheard of for young people in the city today.
For example, going to the deep mountains to carry timber in the old forest.
Like all the production teams along the river in the commune, our production team had a wooden boat as a side business. The boat was old and often in need of repair. The logs used for repairing the boat were so thick that a man could saw the suitable lumber. Such logs could not be found in all the forests of our zheshui commune, and had to go to the deep mountain forests of the neighboring mandarin-xi commune to get them. Such a long distance, we had to rely on the production team’s boat to bring the wood back. When they bought the wood, they pulled the boat to the nearest river and waited, then carried the wood to the river, put it on the boat, and brought it back to the team.
The process was described as “Sun Wukong driving the somersault clouds”-a fleeting event, but the actual act was a thrillingly difficult and dangerous one. The ten people who entered the mountains had to carry the logs, which were four to fifty centimeters in diameter and two to three zhang in length, down the mountain from the completely roadless forest to the river, a process that the farmers called “struggling” (meaning struggling).
When I watched movies as a child, there were scenes of people carrying logs on their shoulders, walking rhythmically, “ut yo ut yo”.
The weight of the log was estimated to be no less than one thousand jin, with an average weight of over one hundred jin per person. If ten people were to lift a thousand pounds on a flat piece of land, they might be able to learn from movies and create some rhythmic artistic effects. Unfortunately, due to some special historical reasons, this large country with a large population and abundant resources has been very destructive to the forests, causing many forests to disappear. “.
Lifting the trees out of the deep forest is a steep descent, and the weight of the wood is not evenly distributed on everyone’s shoulders. From time to time, someone steps on a pothole or slips, the whole person falls short, and the weight on that person’s shoulders suddenly falls on someone else’s. If several people fall short at the same time, the rest of the person’s shoulders suddenly fall on the others. If several people suddenly dwarfed at the same time, the weight on the shoulders of the remaining people would often be several hundred pounds at once. The jungle is full of moss and rotting leaves and dead grass, which makes the tread slippery, and from time to time someone will slip and fall, and the weight on the shoulders of others will also increase steeply from time to time.
Otherwise, if the rest of the people couldn’t carry it, the logs would crash to the ground and roll down the mountain to a place under the cliff where people couldn’t go at all, not only would they have to look at the cliff and sigh, but also wasted the hard-earned money of the whole production team. If a person could not dodge it, he or she could injure a few people, or lose his or her life as a ghost in the mountains. When I think about it decades later, I still feel a sense of panic, which, to use the popular Internet language, is called “extreme fear”.
There is a trick to lifting wood in such a steep, deep forest: don’t lift heavy objects upward as you would on flat ground, just shoulder the logs on both sides and squeeze them in the middle as hard as you can, just like the game we used to play as children called “squeeze the dregs” – “squeeze the dregs”. -It’s cold in winter, and everyone squeezes the logs from both sides to the middle to keep warm – same thing. However, the main purpose of carrying the logs and squeezing them is to keep them from falling off, and if they don’t fall off, it’s more than half the battle, but as for the soles of the feet, they can barely move by stumbling. “The people threw down the logs and collapsed on the ground, unable to recover their human form in half a day.
Fourth, the people whose houses were built were “central”-carrying the stone slab.
In rural Cangxi, many buildings are built with slate. The mountains there are hydrogenetic rocks, which can produce slabs of various sizes with almost the same thickness. Each production team in our commune has its own stone quarry. The so-called quarry is a place on the slope of the production team where the slabs are cut. After removing the topsoil, a rock-ledge about two meters long, half a meter wide, and half a meter thick was cut out from the rocky hillside.
After the slate was carried home, it could be used as a wall for houses, a yard for paving wheat and drying grain, an Ipomoea cellar, a dung pit, a pigsty, a water tank, etc. It was widely used and needed by every household. The quarry of the production team was for public use, and whoever needed stone slabs would hire stone masons and laborers to go to the mountains to dig and carry them home.
The family that used the stone slabs needed at least eight male laborers: six to carry them and two to carry the material. However, even the family with the most brothers could not have eight strong laborers at the same time, so they had to hire others to help them. The local word for hiring someone is “Yang Ren,” which means “to ask. Carrying the stone slabs was also a very difficult task. Generally, from the start to the end of the day, the workers are not allowed to see the light at both ends, and the working hours are the same as the double robberies, about fifteen slabs a day. Our production team’s stone quarry is near the river, the terrain is low, and all the people live above the half-slope, therefore, to carry stone to any one household is to climb up the slope. Carrying a stone slab round trip for a couple of miles, doing a day equivalent to carrying more than a hundred pounds of weights to climb more than ten kilometers, the pain and fatigue can be imagined.
It was hard and tiring, and there was no pay. However, no family can proudly claim that they do not use the slate, and this is the way to change jobs: I will carry it for you today, and you cannot refuse if I need it later. In individual families where there are no strong laborers, it is more difficult for the “central man” to change jobs with others.
I have a special status in the production team, a “singleton” as the peasants say, and I have never had the intention of “taking root in the countryside and doing revolution for the rest of my life”, so I don’t have any requirements for housing and various utensils, just muddling through. I do not engage in any infrastructure, do not need to move to the home stone tablets, farmers are well aware of the “central” me, belonging to the “central” is not central “central” is not central “central” and also the nature of the central, there is no change of jobs Pressure, so I went to the production team soon after, began to be “central” to carry the slate. At first, I was a little embarrassed to be “central” to this “educated” family, but when they saw that I could not resist and was particularly hard-working, every family came to “central” me. In the end, “Yang” me became a matter of course, all the families first divided by their own men and me, and then counted the need to “Yang” several people.
Although the work of the “central” was bitter, but not yet paid, but I am more than happy to accept the “central” peasants. One day’s work in the production team, the wage is only two triangles of money, not enough for me to go to the countryside to eat a full meal, so not to work is not a big loss. I helped carry the stone slabs, and had several days of “anchor meat”, dried rice and dried rice soup (very dry porridge) to eat, which was a hundred times better than the porridge I had to eat at home for three meals for one day’s pay.
In the family where the stone slabs were carried by the “yang” people, the two meals were sour gruel with chopsticks that would not fall over in the morning and evening, and sometimes noodles in the evening. The noon meal was a continuation of the previous meal, and it was necessary to make sure that the stone carriers were well-fed, to show the host’s compassion for the employees who had spent a lot of energy, and to ensure that the employees had the energy to continue working in the afternoon. In addition to dried rice with pickled vegetables, the meal included deep-fried gnocchi and “anchovy meat.
The “anchor meat” is a local rural speciality: the fattest part of the pig is cut into the size of a teenager’s fist, cooked in a pot until just cooked, and then put on the table. The reason why it is not cooked until it is rotten is that it is “chewy”, if it is made into the city kind of salty, sweet pork, put into the mouth a sip will melt away, the working people will feel the same as if they had not eaten, not addictive, and the host family took out the most precious meat but still can not fall satisfied. So, the two big lumps of “anchorages” per person at the table need to bite and tear, squeeze out the oil down the corner of the mouth, biting into the mouth can also “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ji” indiscriminate wild chewing for a while, chewing such meat, the hard laborers can be satisfied. In the past, in the city, I have seen the largest meat on the table is the buckwheat, and the kind of “pyridine meat” that we eat with the stone slab can almost cut out half of the bowl of buckwheat, such a large amount, in those days of consumption in the countryside, every time, I can, in the same thunderous way as the peasants, two lumps of my own name effortlessly. Eat it.
Cangxi’s countryside is simple and unpretentious. When a Zhiqing first went to the countryside, almost all of them had the experience of being invited to dinner as a guest of honor. The peasants had nothing to do with inviting a Zhiqing to dinner, but they just felt that it was “strange and pitiful” for a Zhiqing to come from such a faraway place without his parents. In some cases, when they had guests at home, or when they were hosting a wedding, they would invite them to dinner as well. As a “singleton” in the Sixth Hydrology Team, I was often invited to a meal by farmers.
I remember when I first came to Qiping Nanyang Commune, the production team also went from house to house, inviting us to eat. Having just left the city, we had not yet tasted consumption, and with the state’s rationed grain supply, the farmers’ invitations of “anchor meat” or “palm meat” (the same as “anchor meat”) were not uncommon. (“similar, just a little different form, than carrying slate eat “anchorage meat” smaller size) didn’t even look at. Later no meat to eat, repentance thoughts increasingly strong, to the Zhejiang water commune hydrology six team, most of the time to eat only drink shine can see the shadow of the porridge, so far, I on the farmers table things, is the attitude of all-comers.
V. Reservoir Repair
Before I came to the countryside, I had never seen a real reservoir. When I was in elementary school, I saw the movie “Lullaby of the Thirteen Rising Reservoirs” and after watching the movie, I still had no idea what the Thirteen Rising Reservoirs looked like, but I was left with the impression that the reservoirs, or all reservoirs, were closely related to communist ideals and were full of lofty and romantic revolutionary sentiments. When I went to the countryside and participated in the construction of the reservoirs, what disappeared first was the connection between the reservoirs and the great ideals, and then the romanticism of the revolution as exemplified in the “Thirteen Lings Reservoir Fantasia.
The reservoir in front of us is not at all as magnificent and glorious as we might have imagined; it is just a mud dam built in a canyon between two mountains to stop the water flowing from here (mainly mountain water caused by the rainy season), and when the time comes to plant seedlings or irrigate in times of drought, the gates will be opened and the water will flow along the repaired channels to where it is needed. In fact, every production team has one or two weir ponds to store water, and reservoirs are just enlarged versions of weirs.
The reservoir we built was located at the Happy Brigade, a few dozen miles away from our production team. It was said that our production team would also benefit from the completion of the reservoir, so we had to send workers. After the autumn harvest, when the wheat seeds were planted and the winter farming season was over, all the laborers of the production team, except for those who pulled the boats, had to go to the reservoir site, which brought together all the farmers from the beneficiary production teams in Wulong District.
The labor to build the reservoir was monotonous, with only two types of work: digging and carrying. The earth from the bottom of the reservoir is excavated and carried to the dam, where it is compacted with tractors and human-powered stone rammers to build a high dam to hold back the water. The embankment was estimated to be six or seven stories high, and the road up to the dam was a long slope with no place to rest.
I saw my sister when I was carrying the earth on my back, she was bowing her body and walking step by step, she didn’t even have a “crutch” (a kind of tool that can support the bottom of the root and root of the backbone to rest her legs) in her hand. The bottom of the reservoir was dug up and filled with earth, and most of those carrying the earth were men. I quickly gave her my “abduction steak” so that she could take a break on the way up the dam.
Standing on the high embankment and looking around, people in the reservoir area were as busy as ants, the scene somewhat resembled the kind of vigorous rural life depicted in novels of the 1950s, and if one had time to look at it from afar, it could arouse some poetic feelings and even the creative enthusiasm of young artists.
However, as members of the reservoir construction team, although we are also at the most passionate and imaginative age, we do not have the elegant mood and qualification of “looking across the mountains to the peaks”. The lowly chores. For example, before closing time in the evening, each production team had to send someone to the dam to take care of the “reservoir headquarters” to check the fonts. The so-called square measure was to measure how many cubic meters of earth a production team would bring up to the dam in a day.
As a rule, the public would be given subsidized rations in proportion to the results of the soil measurement. When it comes to food, the measurement of the earth becomes a serious concern for each production team and each reservoir builder. Originally, the “headquarters” stipulated that each team sent a person with the test side, but by this time, no production team is not a surge of a bunch of people, in order to measure the earth and the “headquarters” of the surveyor argued with each other.
During the period of the People’s Commune, the commune, district, and county all had the power to recruit rural laborers to build roads and reservoirs within their jurisdictions, and the task was delegated to the production teams, and it was absolutely impossible not to send workers. As to whether or not the reservoir will really benefit after it is repaired, farmers often do not look that far ahead, and many of them come to the reservoir for the subsidized grain that is rationed every day according to work efficiency. With this ration, they can at least have a dry meal, which they can have at home only a few days a year during the New Year and farming season.
I used my knowledge of books to overcome the selfishness and cunning of the peasants who had been living in isolation for a long time by eating at the reservoir.
As soon as the lid was lifted, everyone scrambled to press a bowl full of rice for themselves and then went to work. It was a particularly tense time for the first bowl, because after everyone had poured out a full bowl (the bowls everyone brought from home were all quite full), there would be some left in the pot. Who gets the rest of the rice? There is neither style nor egalitarianism to speak of here, but competition. The first person to finish the first bowl of rice rushes to add another big bowl for himself, while the slowest person finishes the first bowl and the pot is already empty.
In terms of the speed with which I could swallow the same amount of rice, I could never catch up with the peasants, and in the first two days, I was always too slow to add a second bowl. Whenever I saw a few people who had finished one bowl before me and then loaded up a second one, they were still there slowly and desperately “stuffing” – up to their throats – after everyone had finished. -No wonder the Great Leader said, “The serious problem is to educate the peasants. The problem is that the Great Leader’s instructions are too high and too far away to scratch the itch of the selfish peasants who are now robbing their own food, and the Great Leader’s instructions are broken here. The Great Leader’s instructions are broken here. It is useless to hate the peasants so much that I can’t help them to change their selfishness and let them share some rice with others. I had to find a way to “save myself”.
I suddenly thought of the story of “Tabby the Horse Race” in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Stories that my father bought when I was in elementary school. At noon that day, I applied this book knowledge of how to use clever combinations to win over the disadvantaged to my own eating practice. I first added half a bowl of rice for myself, which was not only twice as fast as I could eat a full bowl of rice, but also much faster than all the farmers who ate a full bowl of rice. After finishing the half bowl, I firmly pressed a big bowl into my own bowl, which, like the farmers’ first bowl, was completely satiated, a solid foundation for the hard work of the afternoon.
I was secretly proud of my masterpiece. Unfortunately, although the peasants saw my initiative clearly, they stubbornly maintained a narrow-mindedness and could not accept the “irrational” foolishness of looking at a big pot full of rice and putting only half of it into their own bowls. So, until the end, no one else followed my example and ate the “arranged combination” rice.
After the reservoir construction project came to an end, I talked about this with my friends from the 9th Hydrology Team, who were also involved in the reservoir construction, and they laughed at me. They laughed at this story and said that they also used this method to deal with the farmers. It seems that the “cunning” of the Zhiqing is also common.
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