In the early 1960s, there was already a precedent for returning young people and urban junior and senior high school graduates to the countryside, and in the late 1960s, there were two major categories of young people who went to the countryside on a large scale, one being those in the Production and Construction Corps, who had a fixed salary, which was higher and more stable than the income earned from work in the countryside, but the labor intensity was particularly high; the other was those who went to the countryside, and although many of them could not support themselves with their labor, they were relatively free in the countryside. Although many of them can’t feed themselves, they are relatively free in the countryside, and the intensity of their labor is entirely up to them.
At the beginning of the rural-urban movement, I heard that we, the 68th junior high school graduates from Taiyuan (who had actually attended only one year of junior high school), were assigned to factories. I didn’t want to be a worker because I thought it was boring to be a worker doing one type of work and doing one thing over and over again. If I chose to join the team, I mostly obeyed the school arrangement and went with my classmates. There was also a policy: voluntary combination and joining friends and relatives.
At that Time, Zhao Erhu, the son of Zhao Shuli, who lived in the same courtyard as my Family, and some of his classmates were going to join the brigade in the hometown of an acquaintance, and asked if we were willing to go together. Zhao Erhu said he had been there, living in a kiln, warm in winter and cool in summer; although the local hilly and dry land, but the production of wheat, half of the year can eat white flour. After hearing his introduction, my second sister and I agreed to go with them, and my Parents did not object. Zhao Erhu was a neighbor, and my parents were relieved that the children of the two families were together.
At the end of 1968, we went through the formalities to join the army, and after the Spring Festival in February 1969, we went to the countryside.
People in the village regarded the land that could be filled with flood water as a treasure
The place where I joined the team was called the South Shandi Squad (village) of Guojiajie Brigade, Mingjiang Commune, Hongdong County, Linfen District, Shanxi Province at that time. Looking from 20 miles away, the village looked like it was hanging on the half-way point of the Huoshan branch. When we got off the train, the production team’s carriage walked more than 40 miles to pull us to the village, the village was situated at the foot of the mountain in front of us, as if it was the starting point of the mountain and the landing point of the mountain.
The whole village, about 30 families, lived in kilns. The kilns follow the mountain trend, with one layer high and one layer low, in a staggered manner. When the sun sets, people working in the fields far away look at the curling smoke of the village and listen to the sound of chickens and dogs, which is a very warm feeling of Home.
There is no river in the village, drinking water is taken from a well more than ten meters deep, the water is a mountain spring, cool and sweet. People in the village have to carry buckets of water up and down the slope. The good thing is that the village is not big, it is quite convenient to get water, unlike in some arid places in the northwest, either to accumulate rainwater and Food, or to more than ten miles away to pick river water.
Our village well, there are village people with stones chiseled trough, inside the chiseled into the sloping rubbing board, trough side there is a mallet pounding clothes smooth stone plate. A huge soapberry tree in the village is shared by the whole village, the tree is a constant source of self-produced soapberry. The clothes are rubbed into the soapstone and beaten with mallets to make them clean. The more dirty clothes, then use lye noodles.
People in the village knew about the soap we used, but they couldn’t afford it, so they just envied it. The well was in the middle of the village on a dirt slope, and when I stood in front of my house and looked down, the sink was empty, so I could go down and wash.
In the middle of the village there was a ditch covered with small and large pebbles. Every year, when it rains heavily in August and September, the ditch will roll in a huge flood. The villagers could bring the flood water into the terraced fields one layer at a time. People in the village call the land that can be filled with flood water “Mandi” and consider it as a precious land. Because the floods brought the rotten leaves from the mountains and the manure of sheep, rats and birds, the land was very fertile without fertilization.
Such terraces, wheat yield 500 to 600 jins, higher than the yield of the watered land around Pingchuan. Therefore, it is a good place to eat fine grains for half a year, which is really attractive.
Of course, in case of drought, the yield will be cut in half if it doesn’t rain for a long time. When there is a flood, the villagers also have a big harvest, which is to fish for wet firewood. That is the dry firewood from the mountains washed down the mountain by the heavy rain and flowed with the water. Young and old take the wet firewood from the river home and dry it in the sun, it is very good to burn.
I once read a novel about fishing for firewood, and the scene was the same as what I saw in the village. Usually, the flood ditch in the middle of the village is dry, and people on both sides of the ditch walk around as if they were walking on flat ground.
Each family does not have a door, with a curtain to block
There were also people living in brick kilns, which cost much more than pure earth kilns. As far as I can remember, only one family had a brick kiln with four sides to the roof, that is, a brick house like a kiln, and the man was the director of the commune credit union.
The front face of the production leader’s family’s earthen kiln was made of green brick, which was also more conspicuous. Although this village can burn bricks, but few people can afford to buy bricks. The village’s earthen kilns, large and small, have the impression that Uncle Chen Fake, who herds sheep, is an outsider, he is single, and the kiln is the smallest.
In general, the kilns are three holes in a row, one in the middle, equivalent to the hall, and one on each side, to live. Unlike the brick and tile houses in Pingchuan, the aisles stretching to the two sides of the kiln are longer and have particularly good sound insulation. The outside could not hear what was said in the inner kiln.
Therefore, each family no longer has a door at home, and is blocked by a cloth curtain. If you are afraid of inconvenience when entering, just cough. The three-hole connected kiln often has parents living on one side and children living on the other, with a hall room in between. If a son marries a daughter-in-law, another kiln is built, mostly in the same courtyard, or in two holes connected inside and outside.
The kiln in our village is not quite the same as the single-hole kiln in the TV series “The Ordinary World”, maybe people are doing it for the convenience of filming.
The large kiln in our village also opened our eyes: dozens of people went in without being too crowded. Big kilns are often old. The village’s 50-year-old Ji told me that his family’s kiln was there when his grandfather was alive, and I’m afraid it has been hundreds of years.
The roof of the old kiln is embedded with three very thick beams, the color of which is dark bronze. The kiln is very cool in summer and not cold in winter. Wealthier people have small kilns on the north side of the kiln, blocked by a cloth curtain, and after entering, it is not small, but there are no windows, and most of them are large jars of grain, and there are also wooden cabinets for clothes, which are not damp. If a small kiln and a small kiln, piled with sweet potatoes dug out in the fall, when taken out are very fresh, and no shrinkage.
Our landlord is two middle peasants, uncle brothers. The reason is simple – poor farmers do not have extra kilns for us to live in. There are no rich peasants in the village, most of them are middle peasants. There were very few poor farmers, and when asked, they all fled from Henan.
The two landlords have a lot of large jars in their kilns, and they told me that in the past, the kilns were replaced year after year and even put a few years of grain and wheat. How much to eat, dig out how much to grind into rice and noodles. During the day, when you want to eat tofu, cut meat, buy watermelon, measure oil, make vinegar, whatever you want to eat, you dig out the grain from the jar to exchange.
To hold a wedding, you have to dig out the grain to the market to sell, in exchange for response supplies or money. Marry a daughter-in-law to set a gift, said how many stones, to dig grain in the kiln. The old sesame seeds and rotten grains will not go bad in the jar.
When we went there, the family rarely had the next year’s grain. When the time came, we were looking forward to the return of the grain.
People here talk about class struggle, a little bit of “I don’t know there is a man” flavor
Our small village, once the old revolutionary area. Two large families in our village, both surnamed Li, are relatives of each other, but a little farther apart. Ji Da-bo, who later introduced me to the Party and lived in the big kiln, was a middle peasant, a 38-year old member of the Party; the other introducer, Li Da-hu, was also a middle peasant, a 43-year member of the Party.
During the anti-Japanese war, the middle peasants here were the ones the Communist Party relied on. Fortunately, this village is remote, there are no rich peasants, and the middle peasants cannot fight the middle peasants, the poor peasants do not have family power, if they want to fight with the middle peasants in the village, I am afraid they would have been driven away by the village people.
The poor peasants miss the village people from their hearts for taking them in, such as the sheep herder, Uncle Fako. So, I have never heard from the mouth of the villagers that they are engaged in class struggle, so that people here talk about class struggle, a bit “do not know there is a Han” taste.
The villagers were curious at first, and they felt new about our clothes and utensils. The villagers didn’t understand why the students from the city had to go to the countryside and learn from the poor peasants; because Chairman Mao told the young students to go to the countryside, they had to do as they were told, but in fact they were psychologically resistant to it.
Although in the first year we were supplied with commercial food by the state, from the second year onwards, we had to share the rations of the village people. The land is still the same, the yield is not more, but let us a few young people to share more than a thousand pounds of summer and autumn grain.
People in the village are burning firewood, to burn coal to get 50 or 60 miles away to pull, and there is no money to buy coal. We went to the mountains to cut down the shrubs they rely on for firewood, which is equivalent to letting us take up a lot of their limited production and living resources.
Later, they saw that we worked very hard, especially the girls, and grabbed to do things that women in the village did not do, such as carrying dung, jumping into the hemp pit to step on the stinky green hemp, plus we treated them with respect, calling them uncle and aunt, slowly changed the psychological discomfort and wariness.
Rural Shanxi precious women, except for the busy season, women do not go to the land to do farm work. They said: these children are not easy, never suffered, can come to our area, it is good, their parents know may be more heartbroken it!
When we were in the army, there were no electric poles in the village, and there were no electric lights at night, so the light was taken by kerosene lamps. There were all kinds of oil lamps, including brass tall ones, bowls, and lamps made of small ink bottles with kerosene and twisted cotton. When we used the stove in front of the kang to burn rice, the smoke went through the kang duct and the kang became warm.
The walls of the kiln were thick and the windows were small, so with the hot kang, it was actually very warm. In winter, besides cooking, women sat on the kang to spin thread, make shoes and clothes. The feeling of a hot bed really made people feel warm and comfortable. This is what we know as “a hot bed for wife and children”.
The waist was always bent, carrying the weight of cotton, often too painful to straighten up
When we first arrived in the village, before spring, we were doing winter work, such as carrying stones to the lime kiln and making bricks at the brick kiln. The village’s side business was mainly a lime kiln and a brick kiln, which produced lime and bricks to be sold. Our village’s year-end dividend is worth five or six cents a work point, which is much better than the few cents a work point in some poor places.
The work of the brick kiln is to carry the dried adobe bricks to the brick kiln, or to carry out the fired red bricks and green bricks from the kiln. Every morning, the production leader first sent us to deliver manure to the fields on the hillside. The village land, there are far and near, far away from the village for several miles, a morning work, two hours, only to the ground to carry a load of dung, then close work home to eat. After the meal, we were sent to the kiln to carry stones.
At first, the stretcher pressure on the shoulders swollen, swollen; from the well to carry water home, only half a bucket at a time. Later more than ninety pounds of a load of water, up and down the slope without problems.
We feel the most tired and hard to bear, one is the summer in the sweltering corn field hoeing, the second is the autumn picking cotton. The dryland crop in autumn is about hoeing to preserve moisture. The village people believe that a season of three weeding, even if there is no rain, you can still have 70% of the harvest.
When weeding, the village men are naked, a towel on the shoulder to wipe sweat; male youth also follow the village people naked, and we girls, we have to wear sweat-absorbing clothes, buried in the green tent while weeding forward, suffocating breathless.
When it came to picking cotton, a sheet folded two layers tied around the waist, while walking and picking cotton into the waist. The cotton in the dry land does not grow high, picking up flowers almost always bent over, from the ground side to the ground side, all the way down, the cotton in the waist pressure can no longer walk, only to take out the cotton on the monopoly road, before the end of the work to come back to take.
The work is calculated by the weight of the cotton picked. My back was always bent, and with the weight of the cotton, it often hurt too much to straighten up. This picking a few days, my waist feels like it is about to break. Later, I fell into a serious lumbar strain disease, arms also sunburned into a deep bronze color, until today, but also did not return to its original color.
The female youth dared to go to the mountains to cut firewood, which made the village people fall in disbelief!
In the fall, I went to the mountains to cut firewood, but also my Life is an unforgettable experience. After the autumn harvest, before the first snowfall, it was time for the village people to cut firewood, intermittently for about two months. The old folks were burning last year’s firewood, or even earlier, that year. The firewood cut in the year is placed around the yard, the wind and rain, the sun, the more dry and transparent the better to burn, but also the more economical.
Therefore, to see if a family will live a life, enter the door first look at the firewood stack. The more affluent the family, the higher and thicker the firewood pile. The young people do not have any family money, naturally there is no firewood every other year, cut the wet firewood, the year to burn. The firewood was scarce and wet, so I was always stretched to the limit in terms of burning firewood.
Cutting firewood really gave me some experience. Late autumn, early in the morning, woke up, find both wearable, but also relatively worn clothes to wear, hurriedly ate breakfast, bring a meal of dry food, firewood knife hooked on a thick rope, step on a pair of sneakers, with the old folks went to the mountains.
The landlord brother became our master, along with the teenage children we mixed with, they are most willing to teach us to do this and that. As the autumn color deepens day by day, our departure time seems earlier and earlier, sometimes there is just dawn in the sky, we went up the mountain, the moon hanging on the canopy, only to return to the village.
The old folks are most afraid of snow, once it snows, they can not enter the mountain, because the mountain road is too narrow, the snow is very slippery. The women in the village do not go into the mountains to cut firewood, but the female youths have no right to let the male youths do it for them, despite what the village people say, they also want to go into the mountains.
Our reason is that Chairman Mao said: men and women are the same, what men can do, women can also do. The female youth alone dared to go up the mountain to cut firewood, so the village people were shocked.
The path up the mountain is more than two or three feet wide, except for the steps to pick up, is the gravel surface, if you walk too fast will be slippery feet. After 20 miles up the mountain, there is no more firewood to cut, as long as the villagers have been cutting bald year after year. The newly grown shrubs are too thin to be worthwhile, so the villagers let them grow. The villagers let them grow. Going deeper, you can see the shrubs that are getting denser and thicker.
When they arrived at the place where they could cut firewood, a group of village people spread out and found their own favorable terrain to cut up. Of course, try to cut some of the dead firewood, there is really no longer cut into the shrubs.
A bundle of firewood tied to each side of a stretcher step a trembling, is very dangerous
Southern and northern mountainous areas how to cut, how to bundle, how to carry firewood, are different. The terrain here, encountering narrow mountain roads, one side is a tall mountain, the other side is a deep bottomless ditch. Such as the southerners a stretcher on each side of a bundle of firewood a step a trembling, is very dangerous. If the stretcher is not careful to hit the mountain, the weight is unbalanced and will throw people into the deep ditch.
Our village people cut firewood is about two feet long two bundles of firewood at the top of a cross, with a thicker stick across the middle of the two bundles of firewood, respectively, bundled solid, the middle of the two firewood this stick will act as the shoulder stretcher.
When going down the mountain, the shoulders carry the cross stick, both hands hold the bundle of firewood on both sides; this shoulder is tired, a twist, it is replaced by the other shoulder. At first, we could not cut firewood, we could not tie it, and we could not carry it on our shoulders, so we were taught by the village adults and children.
The first time into the mountains, because the shoulders can not bear the force, all the way to walk all the way to throw, back, we each hold with carry, the body of firewood is also 20 to 30 pounds. Later, we were able to cut firewood with the village people, shoulder, each time down a weigh, girls can carry 80 to 90 pounds, boys can shoulder more than 100 pounds.
Once, the inertia of walking down the mountain, so that my sneakers slipped, fell, a load of firewood rolled out of hand, planted in the bottom of the ditch, but fortunately the boys behind pulled a hand, talent not a piece of rolling down.
Every time I walked 20 to 30 miles down the mountain with firewood, I was so tired that I was going to be deflated when I came back. After eating a large bowl of noodles (about a pound of noodles made), the body suddenly had the strength to go down the slope to pick a load of water is no problem. After all, you are young!
It is not known how deep the mountain is, and we saw the mountain again after we went up this mountain. Once, we went to the mountains nearly 30 miles deep and saw a family living in a small house made of slabs of green stone, with a shallow well of mountain springs in front of the door. When we asked, the owner had fled the famine from Henan, and it sounded like the famine in the 1960s.
They did not participate in the local commune production team, did not belong to any village, did not have a local household registration; various movements came, and no one educated them on class struggle; of course, the children had nowhere to go to school when they grew up. They eat their own potatoes and melons, which are grown at a high altitude here with a short frost-free period. Crops from the mountains cannot grow here, and they can only grow some potatoes on the edge of the woods and on the slopes.
Their potatoes are very tasty, steamed and blossomed, and they taste sandy and noodle, unlike the astringent ones down the mountain. The owner was very happy to see us and immediately steamed potatoes for us to eat. Some people in the village knew them and when they saw us, the city people, they were even more hospitable and friendly.
We asked, “How can we eat only potatoes all year round? They said that they also carried some potatoes to the mountain in exchange for corn and millet, but they were already very rare and precious. The salt and vinegar they ate were also exchanged for potatoes, and they also picked some mountain herbs to sell.
Although the year-round labor is very hard, but we are still optimistic in spirit, can be said to be tired and happy. Later on, the biggest headache for us was not the weekly work, but the family conflicts in the village.
We could tolerate small things, but the most powerful one happened
This village Li family is a large family, but for some reason, this is the same clan of the two Li family, become arch enemies. Because we live in one of the two kiln holes of the Li family, naturally and this side of the Li family yard outside the yard of relatives, neighbors get very good relations; invariably let the opposite party of the Li family is not happy, always find fault with us.
For example, the Li family of the opposite party had some power in the production team, and always deducted some from us in the distribution of food, vegetables and oil. We clearly borrowed corn from the production team, but when we returned the food, we said we borrowed wheat. In the village, the villagers never borrowed anything with IOUs, and as a result, they suffered losses.
We can tolerate small things, but one of the most powerful things happened. When the village brick kiln was ready for outsiders to buy bricks, there were always people from outside the village who came in the middle of the night to steal bricks. The captain felt that the youth were more honest and had no interest in the villagers, so he let the male youth watch the kiln day and night.
Zhao Erhu drove away several times at night people from other villages who coveted to steal bricks, and they harbored a grudge, so they secretly colluded with the village people to teach the youth a lesson. One day, we and members of the community are in the production team’s vegetable field to turn the ground to collect radish, only to see a dozen strange faces on all sides, and see someone in the village to give them a sign, they swarmed with sticks, hoes towards Zhao Erhu chopped.
When we reacted and went to stop, Zhao Erhu’s head had been broken and his face was full of blood. The beating people see the village people are pouring in, rushed to run away. We couldn’t care less about them, so we asked someone to find a thin door plate and carry Erhu to the commune hospital 20 miles away.
A few good boys in the village helped us to take turns to carry people, Erhu was carried to the commune hospital stitches, a few stitches, tetanus shots, took Medicine, returned to the village is already midnight.
Hongdong people are strong natured, good fight, in Jinan is notorious. I saw with my own eyes, uncle and brother while hoeing, while quarreling, talking, one side swung a hoe to the other’s head, immediately opened his nose, blood flowing a face.
Afterwards we learned that the village people who helped the outsiders to fight Zhao Erhu were the opposite party, the Li family, who intended to have a problem with us. Soon, the commune and the county youth office found out about the incident and issued a document to the effect that anyone who harmed the youth would be punished as counter-revolutionary, raising the seriousness of the incident to a high level.
From then on, the attitude of all parties towards us was much better, and the village people thought that we were backed by the government. But from that moment on, the sadness in my heart was also born. Is this the poor peasants that we should learn from? Is this the wide world where we want to be rooted in the countryside? Are we really going to stay here forever? Pessimism struck me, and my mood of watching the sunset every evening was different.
When we arrived in the countryside, we realized what the vast world of China was like. This special life experience made us mature quickly, but also paid the price of wasted youth. At the age when we should learn knowledge and develop our spiritual and cultural horizons, we went to such a closed spiritual space. Therefore, how can one say that youth has no regrets?
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