Author’s Note: Beijing emigrated to the northeastern province of Jilin in 1958 under the direction of one of the leaders of the city at the time. My family was fortunate enough to be immigrated to Jilin in 1958. Although the number of immigrants this time was not very large, about one thousand, it was, after all, a matter of survival and life of the common people, and the lives and even the fate of the immigrants were affected to a certain extent. I have not seen anyone write about this event so far, so I briefly wrote down what I remember of the situation, in order to prepare a frame.
In 1958, I was eleven years old. My family lived outside the Chaoyang Gate, which was an old-fashioned but prosperous place with a full range of commercial and living facilities, including food, department stores, restaurants, teahouses, photography, banks, theaters, theaters, bookstores, medicine, and lodging, making it a suitable place for ordinary people to live in Beijing.
I was in the fourth grade of elementary school and my family of three lived in a hutong near Chaowai Street, not far from the street. In 1956, when the whole country underwent industrial and commercial socialist transformation, private enterprises with a modest capital became public-private partnerships, and the remaining small businessmen were not qualified to run public-private partnerships because of their small profits, but they could not do so as before. As with self-employment, there was a need to follow the socialist path, so a dozen or so similar small businesses formed a collective “joint store”, somewhat similar to a rural mutual aid group. My father became a buyer and my mother a saleswoman at the store, earning a combined monthly salary of sixty yuan.
One day in early June 1958, my father came home and said that the organization (the joint store was probably under the control of the District Commercial Bureau) had mobilized some people to go to the northeast to “support agriculture” (actually, this was the migration to the northeast according to Peng Zhen’s instructions), and that he had signed up, not saying whether he had signed up voluntarily or not. They are all going away. I don’t know if my parents have discussed this matter or disagreed with me, because I’ve been going to school as usual for the past few days, and I’m not sure about the situation at home. In short, the whole family hurriedly prepared to go to the Northeast: the stall was closed, I had to transfer to another school, the family moved the household registration, sold some things, and prepared the luggage. Although many of my friends and relatives told my parents not to go, saying that we were not used to living there and that the physical work was heavy, we still went.
Early in the morning of June 15, a big truck took the three of us and our luggage (a three-drawer table, two wooden boxes, clothes and bedding) to the Qianmen train station. The station was crowded with people, mostly people like us, who were migrating with their families and luggage. Soon, the luggage was loaded onto the luggage car and we all got on the bus, which was an ordinary hard-seat green bus, but a special train for sending migrants. (This was the first group of immigrants to the northeast. It was said that there were three groups of immigrants, but for some reason the other two groups did not make it after the first group left).
As the train moved, we left Beijing and headed for the unknown. I was young and it was my first time on a train, so it was very refreshing to hang out with some kids in the carriage and even go to the conductor’s lounge to play. I ate my own food on the train, and passed by some big stations where they sold food on the platform. At night, I slept on the floor under the seat in the newspaper-lined carriage. Adults had to lean back in their seats to rest.
The train drove for two days, and on the third morning we arrived at the place we were going – Qianguolos Mongolian Autonomous County, also known as Guoqian Banner. At that time, there was no train service from Changchun to Guoqian Banner, so we had to take a detour from Beijing to reach Guoqian Banner via Baichengzi. After getting off the train, all the immigrants were divided into different villages, near and far. We found our luggage on the platform and the bus from the village we were going to, so the family and our luggage got on the four-horse horse-drawn bus and headed for our final destination, Grainvotun, in Jilatou Township. Five families, all from Beijing but unknown to each other, were assigned to the same village. The oldest child was a girl, about my age. I don’t remember the last name of the other two families, who were bachelors.
It’s about twelve miles from the county seat, in the southeast direction of the city, and when I left the station on the bus, I saw the countryside of Jilin, the fields were very vast, and I couldn’t see anyone as far as the eye could see. The bus traveled along the dirt road for more than an hour, but it had already entered the village. The village was large, estimated to be several hundred families. The five of us from Beijing were assigned to live with different families. When we were in Beijing, according to the staff who mobilized the migrants, your meals and housing were all arranged in the countryside. I thought I would have my own house, but I ended up borrowing from my hometown. My family was assigned to a family in the northwest corner of the village. The family’s yard was large, the walls were made of adobe, the gate was nailed with wooden slats, and there was no gatehouse. The courtyard wall was earthen-yellow, the house was earthen-yellow, and the roof was plastered with mud, not tiled, as most houses here are. There are three main rooms in the northern part of the courtyard, the central one is a hall and also a kitchen, with four cooking pots in four corners, and the east and west rooms are bedrooms and also living rooms, with two big beds in the north and south. The two brothers lived with their father and his children for three generations, with the old man and his second son’s family living in the east room and the oldest son’s family living in the west room. When we entered the west house from the main house, there was an earthen floor on the left and right side of the floor, and the floor was covered with reed mats. The floor was large enough to sleep five or six people. The owner and his three or four children slept in the window bed on the south side of the house, while my family lived in the north bed. In Beijing, I had never seen a house with two beds for two people in one room. But when we arrived here, we had no other choice but to stay here first, even though we were very uncomfortable with it.
The second daughter-in-law brought us a bowl of vegetable congee and some salted duck eggs, and said, “Why have you come from Beijing to suffer in this pimple? We didn’t know how to answer. My mother and I wanted to take a look outside, so we turned northward from the courtyard and came to the village. But there was an empty field, endless, with only crops and sparse trees, almost no people, and it looked a bit desolate. After a while, my heart slowly calmed down, and I went back to the house.
After settling down, rural life began. My father was already fifty-seven years old at that time, so he was assigned to work in a secondary production team, also known as the old man’s team, as a kind of care. I remember that for a long time my father had to go to a construction site to pick up soil, probably to repair some water conservancy facility, and he was very tired when he came back from his daily work. I don’t remember what labor organization my mother was assigned to. I went to a small school, where the students were very friendly and several boys surrounded me, the newcomer, to ask questions. But after less than a week of classes, the school went on “agricultural vacation,” which lasted more than ten days, and students went home to help with farm work and to participate in group work at school. Soon after the farming holiday ended, after a few short days of classes, the school was back on summer vacation. All in all, the few months I spent at this school, I didn’t spend much time in class, but the thing I remember most was the work. During the summer, we had the task of deep plowing the land, and each of us had a certain quota of work to do, and each of us had to plow about a minute of land a day, and each of us brought our own shovels from home. I didn’t have any work tools at home, so I borrowed one from my landlord, and ended up with a large shovel for loading and unloading coal, lime, etc. It had a flat spade mouth without a tip, a large area, and a long handle, almost longer than mine. I was already small, so I had never done this kind of work before, and I had to use such a tool, so I couldn’t finish my quota every day. Sometimes my landlord’s daughter would come and help me turn the huge shovel until it got dark, but my work was still the least productive in the class.
At the beginning of the first month or so, the production team gave us grain according to the population, and we did not have to pay for it. The grain included corn, sorghum, and some white flour, and all of them were sufficient to eat. Around July, the “People’s Commune” was established here, and a public canteen was set up. All the villagers went to the canteen to fetch food and went home to eat, and the staple food was sorghum and rice, and the side dishes were stir-fried vegetables, such as miaoyao cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and so on. I remember someone could eat three bowls of sorghum rice in one meal, and the rice was in two flat bowls, so the amount of rice used in three bowls was at least one and a half pounds. The public cafeteria was not very long, but perhaps it was because the cafeteria was so open-bellied that it could not last any longer, and the families were allowed to go home and cook their own food.
When my family came to Jilin, they first lived in the northwest corner of the village, sharing a room with the family. Although my parents were in their fifties or late sixties and I was still a child, it was inconvenient, as you can imagine, for both families to live in the same room day and night. After about a month or so, my mother rented a small hothouse from a family in the southernmost part of the village, and we moved to the southern part of the village. The family didn’t have many houses, just two north houses and one west house. The north house was divided into an inner and outer house, the inner house was self-occupied by the four members of the family, while the outer house had a stove and a small hothouse. The small warming pavilion was actually an under-bed partitioned off with wooden boards to form a small, enclosed space of only four or five square meters, and we moved here to live in it. Although the area is small, it is after all a separate room, which is a little better than the original. After a while, the eldest daughter and her son-in-law moved away, so we rented the west room, which is about ten square meters and is better than before.
In 1958, there was no electricity in the village, so every night when it got dark, we had to light a kerosene lamp. Kerosene lamps were made of small glass bottles without a cover, so they emitted a lot of smoke, and oil lamps were not very bright, so you had to be close to them to read or write under them, and your nose was blackened by the smoke.
In addition to food, you need fuel to eat in the countryside. There is no coal here, only firewood. When we first arrived in the countryside, we were given some firewood, but after a while, we had to rely on ourselves to make fires. My mother and I had to go outside the village to collect straw from the Songhua River. There is a large area of grass near the river, full of weeds. We went to the river to pick the sturdier grass, cut it with a sickle and tied it with a rope. We had to cut the grass almost every day to make a meal, and the firewood was forbidden to burn.
After living in Jilin for a few months, we gradually got used to life, but there were still many problems. By the end of October, the weather was getting colder and colder, and the arrangements for the winter had not yet been made. At that time, the countryside was settled on a yearly basis, and there was no monetary income, although food lent by the production team was not a problem for the time being, but in addition to food, other expenses relied on the savings from Beijing to buy oil, salt, books, soap, haircuts, school fees, rent and so on. What should we do when we run out of this money? My parents are in their fifties and sixties, and they have never done farm work before. After working all day, my parents couldn’t help but think about it at night, and the more they thought about it, the more difficult it was, the more problems they had, and the less confidence they had in their future. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was no way out here, and that the only way out was to go back to Beijing.
When I first came from Beijing, I had done the formal procedures for transferring my household registration, but now if I want to go back, there is no one to do the procedures for me, and if I go back to Beijing, I will have no household registration and no food supply, so I am sure there will be many difficulties in my life. Thinking about it, it is not easy to go back to Beijing. But I had relatives and acquaintances in Beijing, and I had lived in Beijing for decades, so it was better to go back to Beijing than to live here. My mother and I went to Guoqianqi to buy long-distance bus tickets to Changchun, because there was no train to Beijing, so we had to take a bus to Changchun and then a train to Beijing.
One night in early November, the three of us quietly left Grain Wootun, where we had lived for nearly five months, with our personal clothes and other luggage we had brought with us, and headed for the county seat. The road was dark and unfamiliar, and I don’t know how many detours we took, but after four or five hours of walking, we finally arrived at the county bus station at dawn. We got on the bus and felt relieved. A few hours later, we arrived in Changchun. We went to the train station again and bought tickets for the through train to Beijing that evening. In the afternoon of the next day, the three of us returned to Beijing and saw the tall and majestic Qianmen City Tower.
When we returned to Beijing, we had no household registration, my parents had no formal jobs, and I could not go to school. My father hauled ice for the ice cellar, and my mother did manual work for the hat factory. From time to time, relatives and friends gave us some money and food stamps, especially food stamps (Beijing had not yet entered the “Three Year Difficult Period,” when Beijing didn’t need to buy food products from outside restaurants and cafeterias). (Food stamps, food supplies are not particularly tight yet.) So we made do with what we had. After many applications and nearly half a year later, in March of 1959, the police station finally registered us in the household, and my father was assigned to work as a breeder at the foodstuffs base under the district grocery company for twenty-five yuan a month. (The fifth grade, which resulted in a short stint in Jilin, was a year off from school, one grade lower). It was only then that the family returned to normal life.
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