When I was assigned to the hydrology brigade, there were only two production brigades that arranged for young people. I had no contact with the other Zhiqing, and I took the initiative to come to the door once. It was quite embarrassing to be ignored, in stark contrast to the excitement and camaraderie I felt when I was waiting at my sister’s place and saw the Zhiqing from other brigades of the commune visiting each other and taking care of each other.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Hydrology Brigade and the original Cooper Brigade to merge and become Hydrology Brigade for two reasons: firstly, the area of Hydrology Brigade and the original Cooper Brigade were doubled and expanded, and the young people from the original Cooper Brigade also became Hydrology Brigade young people; secondly, the young people who had been placed in the rare firewood brigade of the commune were transferred to Hydrology Brigade. I quickly became acquainted and good friends with the young people of Teams 2 and 9 of Hydrology.
Hydrology Team 6 was located halfway up the mountain, and Hydrology Team 9 bordered on Team 6, with the boundary from the mountainside to the top. Like most of the other intellectuals at that time, the three of them were poorly housed by the production team in a temporary warehouse converted into a house in a drying dam. Their houses faced the long courtyard on the hillside where I lived, and I could hear them when I stood by the sun-dam and shouted. A few friends added a lot of warmth to my former loneliness. Whenever there was something good, such as rare pork, or fish or dead beef that the production team had distributed, they would shout, and I would go up and eat with them after work; when I got something similarly good, I would cook it at their place, and we would eat and enjoy it together.
I don’t remember when it started, but the group of us started a party we dubbed the “Hundred Chickens Banquet”, the name of which needs no explanation because it was transplanted from the revolutionary drama “The Mighty Tiger Mountain”. Of course, the “Hundred Chickens Banquet” for several people could not have one hundred chickens, that is, each of us bought one chicken, slaughtered and cooked it together and ate it together, which was then called “playing fair” but is now called “AA system”. “It was not long before four friends from the second team joined us. When the “Hundred Chickens Banquet” was opened, there were only three friends from Team 9 and I. Soon after, four friends from Team 2 also joined the restaurant.
Not many of them were able to support themselves in the full sense of the word, and most of them had to rely on family subsidies and food stamps (the amount of subsidies depended on the family’s economic situation) in order to properly appease their hungry bellies. My sister and I received money and food stamps from our parents about two or three times a year at that time, usually 10 yuan per person at a time, I don’t remember the number of stamps, and if we went home to visit our relatives, we would take some money, food stamps and groceries with us when we returned to the countryside.
There is one incident that I remember very well.
It was the first time I had ever been in a position to do so, and I was so impressed that I was able to do it in the first place. I was able to wear all of my clothes and pants after the boat docked, and I relied on the complementary nature of the clothes and pants to keep me from getting naked. I had a pair of liberated shoes on my feet, which had been shuffled along like slippers, with my toes exposed in front and heels at the back. The first thing I noticed was that I was not able to do was to wash my hair, take a shower or change my clothes.
When farmers come to Guangyuan, they take the money from the production team to buy a special food product, which they call “foot-tied cakes”. It’s actually a kind of unleavened bread, shaped like a human footboard. I also buy the cakes, which are very porcelain, chewy and can be stored for a long time, which can be taken back to the production team’s home to have a little bit of porridge soup to supplement. But I had to go to a restaurant to eat a big meal in addition to buying the cakes, and without the money and food stamps subsidized by my family, the long-awaited meat and oil meal would have been a disappointment.
At that time, like a slender man at the bottom of society, I didn’t care about my ragged clothes and odor, and walked my own way in the city without a care in the world, ignoring the strange looks from people along the way. People look at me like a beggar, but I am a “beggar” with money in my pocket, and my rags are full of energy.
I left the ship into the city to get a good meal at a restaurant.
When I walked into a restaurant, the waitress at the door, who was selling tickets, was furious, holding her nose, frowning and shouting, “Go, go, go! She didn’t yell “roll” and was quite polite. I quickly pulled out my money and food stamps to buy the food sign, which at once effectively stopped the waitress from discriminating against people by their clothing, although her eyes were still full of wonder and suspicion – a screamer actually has money? The money and food stamps subsidized by my parents put my status as a gourmet in perspective.
In those days, it was hard to buy pork even if you had money. The door of the butcher’s store in our commune’s countryside was never opened more than a few times, and when it was opened occasionally, it was always dark, with no meat for sale. Fortunately, although the country is extremely poor in material resources, the farmers would take their chickens to the farm to sell them in exchange for some money to buy salt, kerosene for lighting lamps and other necessities of life, so that Zhiqing had the opportunity to buy chickens to fill their stomachs without oil.
The town of He-ling (also called “He-lin”) in Jiange County, which is about 30 to 40 miles away from Hydrology Mountain, is bigger than the town in our commune and has more goods. We can’t go there every time, and our family allowance is limited. At that time, farmers did not sell many chickens from their homes, because chickens could lay eggs, and if they were alive, the eggs were inexhaustible, and the eggs could be exchanged for money to buy daily necessities. Life.
When we first held the “Hundred Chickens Banquet”, we were like the bandits in “Mighty Tiger Mountain”, stuffing chicken into our mouths like wolves with red eyebrows and green eyes. With the “Hundred Chickens Banquet”, the group turned the supposedly gentle and frugal meal into a “revolution”, and no one had the slightest intention of being gentle and frugal. I remember the time when I was so engrossed in eating that my eyes fell completely into the pot of chicken, and Siwazi (nicknamed) quietly threw the bones he had chewed into my bowl one by one. The good thing is that the feast of “hundred chickens” has been “robbed” until the intestines to support the belly, and then into the mouth to fill the stomach to burst, at this point, there will be some leftover soup in the pot for us the next day to savour.
Every “hundred chicken feast” before the general excitement and the chicken blood, but there are particularly annoying situation. In one case, we bought chickens, but the party was scheduled for the next day and we had to carry them in our back pockets that night. We bought the chickens for meat, but the chickens didn’t know what we were doing, and the rooster that Siwazi had bought was still alive and doing his job, crowing and yelling endlessly, which annoyed us. In a fit of rage, I got up, grabbed a knife, and caught the rooster, not knowing that its death was imminent, and killed it beforehand. When I think back on it now, I feel a bit bad. Was I too cruel to the rooster? ……
Because of the “Hundred Chickens Banquet”, it has become a regular thing for us to kill chickens in the countryside. One time, a twenty-pound pig in the production team’s collective pig farm suddenly stopped eating, and the farmers said that the pig must be sick if it didn’t eat, so it would be better to kill it early so that it could eat some meat.
There were special pig killers in the countryside, and every household had to kill pigs near the New Year, and the pig killers were on the job at that time. The slaughterers were rewarded with a few pounds of pork, some pigs in the water, and a full meal at the master’s house. There was a saying in the countryside that it was bad luck to kill a pig that didn’t weigh enough. Someone thought of Zhiqing and asked me, “Jiang, do you dare to kill it? I was just a young man at that time, and I hadn’t completely gotten rid of the habit of “punching the cannon” formed in martial arts, so I wasn’t killing anyone. With that in mind, I grudgingly agreed to do it.
I took my hog-killing knife and pushed the pig against the cliff-ledge. The pig was small enough that there was no need to tie its feet or ask someone else to do it for it. I don’t know where I got the courage to lift the knife and poke it in the neck. I had only killed poultry before, and the long, thin necks of poultry are easily severed when the trachea and blood vessels are exposed with a pinch of the fingers. The pig’s neck was thick, but a layman like me hardly had a neck at all, so I had no idea where its vital parts were.
In the production team, I had seen many times that the pig slaughterers would kill the pigs, and when they stabbed into them, the blood would come out like arrows. I imitated the action of the pig slaughterer and stabbed the neck of the little sick pig, which howled desperately but no blood leaked out. I was not convinced, so I stirred the knife in the pig’s neck, and the miserable pig howled, but no blood flew out. At this moment, a farmer with experience in killing pigs could no longer stand idly by, took the knife from my hand, and stabbed the blood into it, and the little pig was quickly cut off. My knife did not pierce the aortic vessels, but only opened a deep and long gash from the throat to the front blade. Although pigs are bred to be eaten by humans, that scene, when I remembered it later, still made me feel that humans are indeed a bit cruel.
I can’t remember how many times we went to Heching to catch the piglets, but one time was very different, and I still remember it vividly. It happened to be the 15th day of the 7th month in the lunar calendar, the folkloric Bon Festival, which is called “Ghost Festival” by the farmers. I don’t know if I was haunted by the ghosts that came out of Hades.
That day, I went with Duck, Siwazi and Jianhua to buy chickens at Hering. Huring is on the other side of the Jialing River, and the ferry is located at the hydrology team 7, upstream of the hydrology team 6, about two miles away from our production team. When we reached the ferry on the way back, someone suggested that we should swim across. The duck was a “dry duck,” and he took all the chickens and the clothes we had taken off and boarded the ferry, from which Jianhua, Siwazi, and I jumped into the river and swam to the other side. The upper reaches of the Jialing River are only about half the size of the Beibei area, so if we only counted the straight line between the two banks, I, who was not a very good swimmer, could swim to the other bank without any problem.
At one point, all the laborers from the production team were picking manure from a field not far from the river. Before the work started, we were gossiping about the swimming problem. Most of the local farmers, although they had lived on the Jialing River for generations, were “dry ducks,” and only a few of them knew how to swim, and the kind of swimming they did was the most substandard “dog paddle. I was so proud to say that I could swim back and forth in such a narrow river without any trouble. The peasants had never seen me swim before, so they all said, “Don’t believe me, show us. The production captain said, “If you swim over and back again today, you’ll be out of work for three days, and you’ll get your pay.
I stood up, walked to the river, threw off my clothes, jumped into the water, and swam to the other side of the river with little effort. When I got to shore, I walked upstream for a while, but I guess I came back just where I had just been, so I jumped into the water again and swam back. The whole process took about half an hour, but the farmers didn’t seem to understand, and each one was dumbfounded without any expression on their faces. I didn’t bother, I picked up my clothes, put them on, picked up an empty bucket and proudly walked home, leaving the stunned production captain to fulfill his promise.
In retrospect, I really didn’t know how generous I was. I had only swum in swimming pools or small rivers with relatively gentle currents, and I had never been down the Jialing River. That day, with no protection, no first-aid measures, and not even a single person better than me in the water, I rashly jumped into the swiftly flowing Jialing River alone, performing the role of a cross-river dragon, which was completely typical of an intellectual. Fortunately, nothing went wrong.
After that experience, I became more courageous and swam in the river alone many times. So that day, when I got back from Heching, I jumped in without even thinking about it once they suggested it. I jumped in and realized that something was very wrong. The crossing was completely different from the feeling I had when I went down the river in the production team’s territory, where the current was fast and furious. I quickly regained my composure and tried my best to swim out of the rapids.
I had never swum in such a fast current before, and only knew how to do breaststroke slowly, but I felt like I had been swimming for a long time, but I still couldn’t get out of the current. I tried a few strokes of the freestyle, which I wasn’t very good at, and immediately got choked up again. I couldn’t hold on any longer. I felt like I was hollowed out and couldn’t swim any more. I hurriedly opened my throat and shouted, “Jianhua, I can’t do it anymore!
Both Jianhua and Siwazi were much better swimmers than me, and they had already swum through the rapids. When he heard me shouting, Jianhua turned around and swam against the current toward me. But he was downstream and I was upstream, and the current was so strong that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach me. When I saw this, I knew that if I didn’t try my best, he couldn’t help me. I had no choice but to summon all my strength and swim towards Jianhua, who was waiting for me against the current. When I finally reached him, I grabbed him, put my hand on his waist and let him carry me to the other side. When we got to shore, we were already at the boundary of our production team. We had been swept downward by the water for a full two miles!
When I got to shore, I couldn’t even take a step in fear and exhaustion, and I fell on my butt like dough, and it took me a long time to recover. When I got home, I suddenly remembered that today was “Ghost Day,” and I couldn’t help but feel frightened: was there really a ghost haunting me? If it wasn’t for Jianhua’s help, I would have become a “lonely ghost” running around the world today.
I don’t know if this kind of encounter can be considered a catastrophe, but I had one other near-death experience like this, and it happened to be the day after I turned twenty. On my birthday, I went to my sister’s place. I don’t remember what they made for me, but it was a little better than usual, either dry rice or noodles, and after eating the rice, I made a dragon gate formation for a while, and it was my birthday. The next day I got up at the crack of dawn and went back to the production team to go to work. When I reached the production team, I was already at work.
It was already winter, and we were entering the stage of farming and leisure. I don’t know what I did in the countryside before the People’s Commune, but after we went to the countryside, our winter labor was mainly to clear the land and clean up the weirs and ponds and build reservoirs. The so-called land preparation is to remove the stones in the ground, in fact, those stones are half buried in the ground do not know how many years, clear or not to clean up does not matter, I am afraid that the land preparation is also to provide everyone with a reason to earn credits. The small stones in the ground directly skid out, the big stones will be blown up with dynamite, and then skid, pull, carry, and transport away.
That day, our production team was clearing stones from a field. I didn’t know beforehand which field the captain had arranged, but as I was walking, I suddenly wanted to urinate, and when I saw that there was no one around me, I went to the field near me and stood in the corner of the field next to a big stone. Suddenly, I heard many people shouting in the distance: “Chiang, run, the cannon is going to fire! Only then did I realize that the stone at my feet was creaking and smoking. Oh no! Fire! I didn’t know how long the fuse was going to be, but my heart was suddenly in my throat. My life was at stake, and I didn’t have time to think about anything. I jumped onto the field and jumped behind the field with a harrier somersault.
I didn’t even blink an eye before jumping down, and I adjusted my posture so that I couldn’t move a bit as I clung to the steep slope. A loud bang followed, and dirt and debris flew over my head, blowing past me. When the dust settled, I climbed up the steep slope and looked into the ground, and the scene before me was really shocking. My heart was pounding like a rabbit’s. It was a fate unworthy of death, or else I would have been just twenty years old and would have become a mass of broken flesh along with the stones.
However, when death came, not every Zhiqing had the luck to pass it by.
My sister was told by a classmate who was a team member in Yongning Commune that a female Zhiqing went up to the mountain to cut firewood, and when she was returning from the mountain, it was almost dark, the slope was steep and the road was slippery, so the female Zhiqing slipped and fell into a paddy field.
There was a female intellectual in a commune in my district who fell in love with a male intellectual and became pregnant. At that time, some young male and female intellectuals, who were not too old, secretly fell in love and lived together because they were bored by the monotony of rural life and ate forbidden fruit. They were young and ignorant and became pregnant, but did not dare to go to a regular hospital for an abortion. Back then, the social environment was not as liberal as it is today. Just look at those life service TV shows, nowadays it is common for singles to fall in love and live together. In our time, unmarried men who lived together and got pregnant were hated as hooligans and women who were spurned as broken shoes in the eyes of the public.
Pregnant young women swallowed large amounts of quinine after hearing that it could be used to get an abortion. I don’t know what the consequences of overdosing on quinine are, but I heard that the young woman was taken to the district hospital with a black face, dying, and was left there unattended. Several girls who took her to the hospital begged on their knees with tears streaming down their faces: “Doctor, please save her, please. The doctor, however, took the moral high ground and denounced the young woman as a shameless, broken shoe. The pregnant girl died with a reputation as a shoe-shiner in a hospital whose duty is to save lives and help the injured.
Years later, many of these memories just linger in my mind.
As a matter of fact, we – thousands of our contemporaries – lived like that in those days, and it was like losing more than ten years of our lives in vain.
Before going to the countryside, although the cities were not wealthy, we really had no idea that there were such remote, isolated and poor places in the country. Many of the older farmers there had never seen a city larger than Cangxi County in their lives, and most of them, especially the women, had never even been to the county seat or even the township. In my sister’s Xinmin brigade, there was an old woman who was basically incapacitated. She used to sit in the courtyard and sigh, “Hey, I have no idea what Cangxi City is like in my life, but when I die, I must become a wind and go there to see it. Not only had they never seen the county seat, they had never seen a car, train or plane, and knew nothing about life in the city. To them, a big city like Chongqing was like a foreign country in the eyes of city dwellers before the reform and opening-up. Some Zhiqing joked with the peasants that the money used in the city was different from theirs, that it was as big as a bathtub, and that they had to roll around on the ground, which the peasants believed.
After leaving the countryside, I gradually realized that while we were planting our youth into the crops with our hoes, manned rockets from the Soviet Union and the United States had already sent humans into space and to the moon; microcomputers had become office equipment; undersea fiber-optic cables had been installed at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to connect the two coasts; and robots had replaced manual work in the production lines.
At that time, we were like the peasants in the cities at that time – we knew nothing about these major events that changed the human condition. If another eight or ten years passed, how much more would we know about the world than the poor farmers in the remote mountains? If someone had told us about the wonders of computers, would we have heard the same myths?
My sister said that after she joined the Sichuan Vigneron factory in the mid to late 1970s, she once heard her teachers (college graduates before and after the Cultural Revolution) chatting about “genes”, and she was lost in a myth. At that time, she was already an instrumentation worker who had learned a little transistor circuitry and electrical engineering and had some cultural knowledge.
During my three years in the countryside, the only two books that I read seriously were “The Feudal Classic” and “The Biography of Yue Fei”, which was a historical book. It was only after I left the countryside that many of the formerly forbidden books were circulated among the intellectuals.
I don’t know who borrowed it after I read the book, and it was never returned. The Legend of Yue Fei is not a novel, it has neither a good plot nor exciting content, and no one wanted to borrow it, so it stayed with me until I left the countryside. At that time, there was really no book to read. For three years, almost every day at lunchtime, I took the book out and read it, and later I could recite it almost by heart.
At that time, I had never read a book at night, first, because the supply of kerosene was limited, and the kerosene lamp was too dim, so I didn’t feel good about reading; second, because the daily heavy physical labor exhausted me, and as soon as it got dark, I just wanted to fall into bed and sleep. Every night when I returned home from work, the farmers in the same yard would bring bowls of food to eat, but I was the only one who had to cook in a cold pot with a cold stove.
In order to save firewood, I made two meals at noon and heated them in the evening. After the meal, I used the residual heat in the pot to heat up some water to wash my face and feet, then brought the meal to bed, or simply sat down in my bed, ate the meal, and fell asleep. I slept until the next morning when the production captain shouted, “Let’s go wow” outside our yard.
Looking back on the best years of my life, more than ten years were spent in the absurd years, in the remote and isolated countryside and in the sunless coal mines. If not, I would have gotten my PhD at the age of 28, which was the golden age of my life, and how much more could I have done.
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