My father has never left his hometown for work in his life. This kind of super-stable life, in today’s world, is incredible.
In 1968, he left yueyang Normal school, has been teaching in the miluo City, Hunan Province sanjiang township various schools, only in sanjiang Middle school for 35 years.
Today, with the rapid transformation of The Times, I suddenly realized that the attitude of my father squatting in the village itself is a witness of The Times.
From the point of view of identity, my family is the only family in the whole family with urban hukou. In the words of his uncle, “In the whole family, there was not a man who was an official, nor a man who made a fortune. Finally have a national food, or a teacher “.
In an age when entering school can change one’s identity, the results of the conversion from agriculture to Africa did not make a substantial difference to the future of our four sisters. My immediate perception of this identity was that once junior high school was over, every other week, my father would tell me to take my food supplies and ride my bicycle to the town warehouse to buy rice.
In my impression, the amount of food distribution is based on age — most middle and high school students are in adolescence, at 15.5 kg a month. To this day, my father regrets converting his entire family to a commercial grain hukou, but in the early 1980s there was a policy opportunity to switch from farming to non-farming that anyone would have loved.
After all, compared with children with rural hukou, having a commercial grain hukou at least gives them a chance to recruit workers if they have no hope of going to school. In the 1980s, farmers envied the dignity and material security of working as an ordinary worker in any state-owned enterprise, as long as it held the status of a regular worker.
In the social structure of urban-rural dual opposition, people who live in the countryside but have urban hukou often become the neglected group.
In fact, in the past when the employment system did not have a large number of external employees as it does today, the rural population with commodity grain hukou almost included all the civil servants in the government, hospitals, schools (with a small number of private teachers and substitute teachers) and other departments. Compared with the total population, the number is quite considerable.
On the surface, they are not very different from the peasants, but in terms of economic conditions and social status, they are still very different from the peasants. In the face of my mother’s complaints to my father, my grandmother often said, “He is lazy, but at home, the government gives him money”. Although not too high, even most of the family income, rely mainly on the mother engaged in a variety of business, such as sewing, open a shop, do diet), but had to admit that, in the 80 s rural overall poor state, the father of absolute returns each month salary, or a minimum to ensure the family well fed, most of the time, even a savings to help others.
With the help of this “marginal identity”, I prefer to take the existence of my father as an important coordinate system when looking through the transformation and destiny of rural society, as well as the joys and sorrows of the whole family and The Times.
In the final analysis, the perspective of the father’s life itself means the sorting of The Times.
The witness of the grand narrative
In 1949, my father was born in an ordinary peasant family in Hunan province.
My grandmother is the only daughter of a landlord. After several years of studying in a private school, she knows a few words. Compared with other old people, she has a natural passion for education. In 1968, my father was introduced to my mother. In the following years, they had four children: my eldest sister, my second sister, and my younger brother.
Listen to grandma, father 1965 to take the high school examination, originally admitted to the Chengdu meteorological School, but the timid grandfather was afraid of his son to leave his hometown, but cried in the home for a few days, die and live.
My father’s head teacher had to go to the Yueyang Special office to help my father change his wish and finally chose yueyang Normal School, which was “absolutely able to stay in my hometown”.
In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out and the normal teaching order was broken. My father, before he was 17 years old, became the head of the Red Guards and led more than 10,000 students from Yueyang area to Tiananmen Square in series. On the Beijing-Guangzhou line, in order to catch a meeting, my father had applied to the railway station belonging to the Normal School school, a person rode in a locomotive. (Editor’s note: At that time, Yueyang railway station belonged to the High Normal school, which was under the charge of the University’s Wind and Thunder Headquarters. It belonged to the royalist school, which advocated the protection of cultural relics at that time.)
I have been careful not to speak directly to my father about this part of history, fearing that, like some red Guards in mainstream propaganda, he would beat a teacher or burn cultural relics, or touch his innermost feelings. But to my surprise, my father never seemed to notice my caution and care, always mentioning the past in an unintentional way. Compared with the memories of intellectuals with more power of speech, the “Cultural Revolution” in his father’s mouth was more of a country boy’s carefree and casual.
In his father’s narration, the “Cultural Revolution” still left a deep impression on him with some specific people and things. A teacher named Huan Wen was sent to a meeting in the county. He went out for a stroll, got lost and did not know how to come back, so he had to ask for directions everywhere. They asked him, “What is the character of the place you live in?”
He replied, “There is a picture of Chairman MAO in front of the house.”
“What else?”
“The words’ Good revolutionary Committee ‘are printed on the beams,” he replied.
The two “features” mentioned by Hwan are the most unrecognizable scenes during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1968, when my father just started to work, the school was full of artistic atmosphere. There were only a few teachers in the school, one played the piano, one played the flute, and one beat the old iron basin. They could stage a flash mob at any time.
In my father’s account of the “Cultural Revolution”, there is also a paragraph about yueyang ci’s tower.
At that time, some Red Guards said they were going to break the old four walls and destroy the Tower of Charity. Their father warned them, “If anyone brings down the Tower, you will see.” Unexpectedly, it is this sentence, changed the fate of the millennium tower.
He also said that he had secretly protected the headmaster of Yueyang Normal School in the same way when students fought against him. In these troubled times, my father, with only one man’s instinct and kindness, did what seems to be within his power today to be blessed.
These actions of my father make the texture of history more detailed, and the grandeur of politics will eventually be embodied in people with different smells.
My father had lived his life in the simple belief that bad things come back to you, except that for the voiceless, any detail that differed from the mainstream narrative was called into question.
In the age of politics, my father was soon involved in various disturbances and was repeatedly wanted for arrest. With no hope of restoring normal school teaching, he returned to his hometown. After being refrigerated for more than a year, according to the policy, in 1968, my father was arranged in Miluo County Sanjiang Commune Fengform brigade village to do primary school teacher, until The year I was born, just transferred to Sanjiang Middle school, a stay is 35 years.
As a party of the “Cultural Revolution”, my father’s retrospection is full of untold vicissitudes and helplessness. The dislocation and absurdity that happened to a teenage boy make me, as a later generation, unconsciously try to restore the breath and truth of that era from his narration.
For my father, as an ordinary village schoolteacher, the past was an afterthought. He also never realized that he was witnessing an age of grand narratives. The ideal seeds planted in his mind at that time did not disappear in the rapid transformation of the society. In the frantic years that followed, despite the collapse of myth and the landing of another set of values, he stuck to his inner limits through intuition and common sense.
He had two chances to break away from the countryside in the 1980s. Once, in 1980, a teacher in Yueyang Normal School, who valued his father very much, asked him if he would like to be transferred to The No. 1 Middle school in Yueyang city. He only hesitated for a moment and then flatly refused. For years, I wondered why my father had given up a chance to change his life.
He explained that because he had so many children, he was worried that he would not be able to support his four children when he moved to the city. Staying in the countryside, he said, would make it easier to support his family, with a guaranteed wage in both drought and flood and the possibility of farming.
It can also be inferred that at that time, my father was still immersed in the satisfaction of rural benefits in the early stage of the reform, while the income gap between urban and rural teachers was still very small, far from the vast difference that exists today.
Another chance for him to break away from the countryside was in 1986, when wayan took the high school entrance examination. A high school in the county offered to transfer him to Wayan and promised to solve wayan’s high school enrollment quota, but his father was still unmoved. Until last year, I was still complaining that my father had been too conservative. If he had moved to the city earlier so that we could receive a better education, the fate of our four sisters might have been completely different. The father’s answer is, “I believe that your few sisters will better than now, but the students in Sanjiang will eat thanks.”
In the end, the dream of changing people through education always lurked in his heart, and in the hard and hectic life, the only thing he could do to hold on to this dream was to stubbornly refuse.
In my later observations, he was not alone in his country school. But in the era of fission, utilitarian context, this humble group of persistence, has become a bleak silence to adhere to, and sometimes, even become the laughing stock of ridicule. The self-esteem they retain is in short supply in the current climate.
Witness to village education
From 1968 to 2009, for 41 years, my father has been working in Miluo Sanjiang Township, has been in primary school, junior high school, high school (in the beginning of 1980) taught books, mainly teach mathematics.
From 1968 to 1974, when he was a teacher in Fengxing Village primary school, he worked as a teacher in the secondary examination class for several years. In junior high school, he taught biology, geography and politics in addition to mathematics. My father taught me math in the first and second years of junior one, and he also taught me physical health in the third year.
Then, three middle school to father taught mathematics, teaching chemistry, teaching physics Hu Zhizhong Zhang Cangru most famous, the iron triangle of science teaching, in more than thirty years, ensure the quality of the whole villages and towns of science education, also makes for a long time, three middle school’s teaching quality has always been standing in the county have impressive.
But because Sanjiang is located in the old area, the teaching conditions are very simple. I graduated from class 46, because there is no classroom, grade one, the whole year, we can only have classes in the cafeteria. Every morning, the last class, always in the food fumes, a pungent taste.
From 1984 to 1986, when my father was the principal, he made every effort to negotiate with the township government. Under great pressure, he struck tables, cursed and quarreled with the leaders. Finally, he built a decent teaching building and managed to obtain resources to improve the teachers’ accommodation at the minimum cost. Since then, he has become the most difficult in the eyes of superiors.
A father in the village
Compared with the average rural child, my father’s teacher status provides me with many opportunities to learn about the outside world. My father had never imagined what a profound impact the students who came back to him every summer or winter for college entrance examination would have on me.
For many years, we lived in our home village of Duoli, a very remote, single-family village with mountains and water. Although I have always been a foster mother, but every summer and winter, often on the first day of vacation, I would be asked by my grandmother, immediately back to their own home. At that time, when it was time to take a holiday, college students from the big cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi ‘an, Wuhan and Chongqing would appear on the footpath at the head of the village.
There was no phone call or advance notice, but by tradition, early July was the peak time for students to come to my home. The parents would prepare the best food for them, while the students would first help the family with some farm work, such as helping the father pick manure, water vegetables and farm the land, while the mother would devote herself to preparing meals.
They eat the eel made by his father, one by spicy to the head sweat, but also a vigorously shout “delicious, delicious, Miss Huang you want to do more”; They drink, together with his father wasn’t drunk, father lectured in turn one by one, such as “beams YaZi, you do accounting must be locked yourself this, don’t do for the rest of your life, the last into the prison eye”, such as “chi feng YaZi, you normally drink no problem, but surgery, there must be less drink”, such as “at YaZi, you want happy, don’t pull a long face all day long, day happy point, people this lifetime decades”… When the father taught the students, his students took the opportunity to carry eels into the bowl as hard as they could. When the father finished the lesson, the students were almost drunk, so they called each other and joked with each other. In the end, the students ganged up on Mr. Huang to teach them to play dominoes, and to play all night, to fight for money.
Play enough, eat up, night fell, we began to chat together. I always hid aside, listening to my father and students of different majors, talking about strange scientific knowledge, such as oil exploration, aerospace, automobile manufacturing, precision machinery, and even some students of military schools. They would secretly tell me where nuclear submarines were hidden in the South China Sea and China’s nuclear bomb research and development center… This kind of “mystery chat”, wrapped in professional knowledge, has a kind of secret happiness.
In the isolated village, no one could have imagined that father and his students would have enjoyed such a rich spiritual feast night after night. The communication between my father and my students made me understand the differences between various universities at an early age, such as liberal arts and science, the basic distribution of Key universities in China, and even the disciplinary advantages of some universities, such as mathematics and literature of Wuhan University, civil engineering of Hunan University, and philosophy of Sun Yat-sen University.
In my young heart, these college students in the 1980s exude an air and magic temperament. They not only bring me spiritual and knowledge baptism, but also make me feel that through reading, I can not only change my fate, but also recognize the dignity and dignity of human beings.
A very different world unfolded before my eyes, through the path in front of the village, leading to the mysterious cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin (guangzhou and Shenzhen were rarely mentioned at the time). To this day, I still remember it clearly.
Rural education has been hollowed out after the elimination
Closely related to this, is the annual summer holiday, the day of the college entrance examination.
The countryside is filled with the harvest breath similar to the harvest of crops. The dignity, hope, longing and beauty brought by reading are infused into the hearts of villagers, which really makes people have expectations and yearning from the heart.
Although communication was not convenient at that time, within a very short time, the information of the college entrance examination would be transmitted by word of mouth and spread to the whole town immediately. Every child’s score would become the hot topic of discussion in the whole town. The grand victory of the college entrance examination and the bearing of the village people, in the acquaintance society, its solemn, serious, serious degree, no less than the ceremony of marriage, giving birth to a child.
It is considered to be the most solemn and joyous event to entertain students, show movies and invite the troupe after entering the university. I have heard more than once a woman in the countryside say, “I don’t envy others how much money they have. I envy others that their children can study.” When I was a child, I did not understand the meaning of this sentence. Now, looking back, I can see the profound meaning of this simple word. At that time, education had been deeply rooted in the hearts of the village people, carrying pure emotions such as religious belief.
At the end of August every year, it is the peak time for the “winners” of the college entrance examination and the high school entrance examination to treat the students. I have also followed my parents and seen many successful children’s expressions of pride and honor in the noisy banquet. In the countryside in the 1980s, rural children did have room for upward mobility through education.
In my junior high school with the students, for example, in the four grade 160 students, there are eight to one, and that of eight students, then by all means, admitted to Beijing university, fudan university, wuhan university, China university of petroleum and there were several key universities, such as for a primitive conditions of rural schools, it is very rare.
As the senior of Sanjiang Middle School with nearly 40 years of teaching experience, my father’s teaching experience is more telling.
1978, when the national rural popular high school, middle school, according to his father what he taught more than 30 students in a class, at last, through the university entrance exam (restudy), join the army, to “change destiny” has outstretched, stayed when farmers is very low, the yield and has become his greatest spiritual comfort, father also so students and teachers and students in this class forged a deep friendship.
“Every student can’t be guaranteed to be a successful one, but we must not delay any promising one.” Under such a concept, father not only encourages students to read books from the spiritual level, but also helps them financially. At that time, most of the students in this class were children from extremely poor families. Many families were facing difficulties in basic survival and could not afford to send their children to continue their studies. Faced with such a situation, their father always gave them financial aid as much as he could, bought books for those who did not have them, and advanced tuition for those who did not.
I still remember when I was young, my father often said: “to help one more child study, is the most worthwhile thing in the world.”
These students who were born in the 1960s and jumped out of the farm door with the help of their father soon became the backbone of the society. At the critical moment when my brother and I were studying and buying a house, they generously extended a helping hand to repay the support of the teachers in those years.
Up to now, I have maintained a very close relationship with the students in that class.
In the village middle school, my father is a rare “man in the eye”, who holds a passion for education and maintains enthusiasm. What impressed me most was that in 1993, my mother opened a shop in the school. For a while, she was always throwing things away. She kept a stoop for a whole day and finally found the students who were stealing things. The mother said nothing and told the story to the father, but the father did not say anything, but went to the student’s home to investigate, only to find that the child was too poor at home because his parents were away, and he really had a lot of financial pressure.
Instead of blaming the student, his mother and father gave him 20 yuan. Unexpectedly, this small act of kindness, completely changed the fate of a child. From then on, the student who stole gave up his bad habits and studied hard. Finally, he was admitted to a normal school, returned to the village middle school and became a colleague with his father. My father’s respect for life, understanding and empathy for students still give me a lot of inspirations compared with the dogma of basic education, which is falling into the void day by day.
More let me moved, villages in the 80 s, the benign development of education, more and more become an copy the picture, I clearly feel, from the university and axle, many changes have taken place in rural education environment, not only the harmonious relationship between teachers and students are no longer as before, the relationship between parents and teachers, in rural acquaintances society, also become increasingly indifference.
More worryingly, for parents, sending their children to school is no longer their strongest desire. When I was a junior high school, every summer there are a lot of parents to look for father, or let him help to strengthen the discipline of children in school, or let him advice, is to choose let their children to read technical secondary school or high school, also some answer read, because children to seek funding, despite the economic conditions and compare today would be far harder, but if children like reading, there are very few parents let them give up entrance for economic reasons. But now, this enthusiasm from parents for education has completely disappeared, good enough, parents also pay attention to the students, have already tried to transfer to county or other better secondary schools, more parents, children’s study is laissez-faire, “work” has become their children’s fate of the basic judgment.
In Feng-shaped village, I helplessly watched the virtuous and virtuous woman in my childhood memory, already sitting at the mahjong table, and allowed my grandson who stayed at home to be occupied by TV and mobile phone. No working young daughter-in-law, in the face of groaning, eager to accompany the young children, more action is to take out some money from the gambling money, send them to play; Kids who go to college after the merger no longer enjoy the glory of the 1980s, and more often than not, getting into a mediocre school is a fraught deal with uncertain prospects. In the competition of exam-oriented education, the possibility of being admitted to key universities is getting lower and lower. And as teachers of my father’s age retire, more young teachers are being sucked away from privileged places. Not to mention that the relationship between teachers and students has changed beyond recognition.
Having a good time and getting by becomes a natural choice.
Since 1998, when his younger brother graduated from college, none of the more than two dozen subsequent children in the family — mostly Cousins, nephews and nieces — have completed high school. The son of the third brother, Long Long, was admitted to high school very hard, because the third brother in the paper mill by a machine to break a leg leading to high amputation, from now on bear huge psychological pressure, can not insist on learning, finally had to quit school early.
For grown children, the only way out, without exception, is to work outside the home. When the boy is about 20 years old, the parents begin to talk about marriage, and the girl gets married early. Despite the drastic changes, some of the kids who didn’t go to school have found other ways (such as opening restaurants), but they still say, “Fortunately, you were born a few years earlier, so now, you can’t afford to send your sisters to school.”
In fact, based on the father’s experience of witnessing the education in his hometown for several decades, the mission of this spiritual motivation in the countryside is not only to provide rural children with access to a good education, but also to carry a healthy and sustainable value.
A father in the village
“In my impression, the deterioration of social atmosphere began shortly after the merger of universities.”
This judgment of my father is more from a kind of sensitivity to the time node. There is no confirmation of some superficial causal relationship, but the unification of universities and the frequent migration of rural population in the 1990s do have a practical resonance. With the emergence of left-behind children, it is almost an indisputable fact that the dropout rate rises with them.
In the countryside, more children enter the cities in the south. In the upsurge of working, “buy code”, gambling, drug abuse and pyramid selling are then registered on the land of their hometown, which forms a shocking contrast with the decline of rural education.
It was only later that I realized that as a generation born in the 1970s, we had caught the last train of relatively equitable educational resources in rural China. In the 1990s, with the increasing mobility of rural migrant workers and left-behind children becoming the norm, the promotion of market-oriented education finally greatly blocked the channel for rural children to change their fate through reading.
In 2009, my father retired at the age of 60. Since 1968, my father has stayed on the land of his hometown for 41 years. Ironically, in order to improve the school conditions in the 1980s, a middle school principal who dared to hit the table with the leaders, and a teacher who took pride in bringing out good students all his life, was too honest and straightforward. However, in the end, he was reduced to a boiler room plumber with the title of a high school first-level teacher in the employment reform of the school.
The hollowing out of rural education, the fate of the father is a vivid metaphor.
I know that with the death of my father’s generation, hope for a revival in rural education is fading.
conclusion
In the summer holiday of 2006, I went back to my hometown.
One evening, my father took me to a li family in a neighboring village to do ideological work for the mother of a student. That afternoon, the father came to my house and told his father that he wanted to send his son to study, but his wife did not agree and hoped that his father would come forward to see if he could help persuade him.
We later learned that the Li children were doing well in school, but their mother insisted that there was no way out and that it was better to go out to work early to earn money. I don’t know what happened, but after retirement, my father took on this kind of mediation in the village, a tradition that has lasted for years.
In fact, the father had the same responsibility throughout the family.
With the aggravation of population outflow, despite great freedom in rural areas, the living conditions of farmers have become more and more fragile under the circumstance of hollowing out values and failure of social organizations. They are not only vulnerable to the influence of bad social atmosphere, but also fall into the predicament of survival if they encounter a little accident or illness.
In such a case, if no one organizes the power of the family to intervene or help, a seemingly safe family will collapse. Secondly, in some disputes related to public interests, it often needs some honest and neutral fair-minded people to mediate. For many years he had devoted most of his time and energy to dealing with his extended family. Not today to send eight father to See a doctor in Yueyang, or tomorrow to take Feng uncle to Changsha for a film, as well as large and small human exchanges, endless mediation relationship.
I later found out that the most fundamental reason why my father chose to give up in the face of rare opportunities to go to the city was his unwillingness to give up on his relatives and his commitment to the family. The father became the unspoken “word person” of the whole extended family, which was related to his ability and status as a scholar, but more from his responsibility and responsibility as a member of the family. Indeed, in his values, we can see the sense of responsibility and the recognition of the burden of life that the time has endowed this generation.
In the process of raising our four sisters, my father and mother also with to take care of the children, many relatives, big jiu family’s elder brother, my uncle’s house full of LuZhi, li gang, of the uncle’s culture and professional culture, and even distant guangxi’s side home good sister, sister, brother is long or short lived in my house, in which li gang of live the longest, for five years. At that time, what was common in our family was that I lived in my grandmother’s house, and the other children, because of my father’s teaching, tried to get his strict requirements or personal guidance, so they stayed in our house for a year and a half, with their mother in charge of their clothing, food, shelter and transportation. Until today, this kind of behavior of parents still makes me puzzled at the same time, let me more moved and embarrassed.
In 1984, the river aunt died, the youngest cousin was only half years old, in order to take care of the river uncle, parents decided to recombine all family members into a big family, 11 people, 6 children, two old people, only parents and river uncle three adults. That year, river uncle foot was stabbed by glass, lying in bed for a few months, all the burden is the two parents in the back. It is almost impossible to explain the father’s takeover of the river’s tertiary responsibility in terms of the values matched by the current individualised family. I even suspect that the reason why Uncle He was able to leave his hometown without any worries later is also due to his father’s excessive responsibility.
A few years before Uncle Hehe went to Guangzhou, I always remember that my father would come to his house every weekend to see if there were any problems in the life of the two children. Sending rice and oil has become his habit.
In 2004, yuanxiao, three elder brother’s feet in the paper mill was rolled in, the father rushed to the scene at the first time, clapping on the spot, directly to changsha’s big hospital, although high amputation, but finally saved three elder brother’s life. In this safety accident, he did not close his eyes for several days and nights, and in the subsequent process of negotiating compensation with the manufacturer, he did it himself.
Indeed, compared with today’s age of individualism, the life of the father is absent only from the enjoyment of the individual. As the custodian and mediator of the village and the family, I just worry about who will be willing to take on his responsibilities and continue to play that role as he gets older.
When the social soil for this role is missing, how to construct effective social organizations through the power of administration to cope with the real needs and difficulties of the village?
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