Mobilization
People who are a little older generally know about Chairman Mao’s call for a “big steel operation,” but probably few people know about his call for a “big gold rush.
Of course, there is no documentary evidence for this; I only heard about it from the production team secretary at the “Great Gold Rush” mobilization meeting. The biggest official I could see was just the secretary of the commune, and down the line, the secretary of the brigade was also a very big official. The secretary of the production team said in the meeting, Chairman Mao said, old Maozi can produce five thousand tons of gold every year, we only have five hundred tons, so we have to pan for gold. Someone below said, “Five thousand tons, is that so much? The brigade secretary overheard and said, “This is what the county revolutionary committee said, the county leader said it from above, who dares to ask him? Come to think of it, the county head should be much older than the commune secretary! But I remembered, I read in geography class before, the world’s highest gold production in South Africa, but also more than two hundred tons a year, according to the secretary said, with five hundred tons of production China is the world’s first. What is so great about the old Maoists? They come across the river to meet with us, they gobble up dumplings, and when they see Chinese cigarettes, they hold one in their mouths and clip one between their ears, so they have nothing to eat and nothing to smoke. Why did they find ten times as much gold as we did? The brigade secretary then went on to say, the county has been assigned to the task, each production team should go to the gold, this year to hand over four two. The brigade party branch and the leather committee got together, our team out of ten people, to the Taiping gully nine li village to pan for gold, now go, on the big freeze before coming back. It was already August, and the big freeze in November, about three months to go.
Can you find four taels of gold in three months? We were young intellectuals who had come to be re-educated, but of course we knew nothing and had no voice. At this time, the poor and middle peasants had a lot to talk about. Ten people, three months, at least nine hundred laborers, four taels of gold is only four hundred and eighty yuan, is this a good deal? I whispered to the farmer next to me, “Isn’t gold ninety-something dollars a tael? Four taels of gold would be less than four hundred yuan. A few of us intellectuals were just discussing a few words, a few old farmers overheard and said, young people (the local people will go to the countryside knowledge youth shortened to young people, not called intellectuals) know nothing, to find the native gold, native gold is more expensive than the gold in the bank. So it is true that you can’t even say the word “virgin gold” without being re-educated. There are a few gold in the village, the old head of Liu is one. The old head of Liu, all day long, leaning on a wooden stick, people are looped legs, but he is below the knees to the sides. He has been wearing cotton pants for almost half a year in the North Wasteland, and there are more than one or two people who wear forked legs like this.
Old head Liu’s hometown in Shandong province, pseudo-Manchu period in the ditch to find gold sand. The first time he panned for ten taels of gold, it was enough to buy land back in Shandong. He used a wide belt to tie the gold sand around his waist and went home. As soon as he got out of the ditch, he was accompanied by someone who was in charge of his food and drink all the way home. Old Liu-tou was careful enough not to take off his belt every night at the car store. That morning old head Liu woke up, his waist was loose, and his belt and gold were gone. Good not to Harbin, even a short job with begging, and came to the Taipinggou. After a few years, he found seven or eight two gold, and wanted to go back to Shandong. But just do not long memory, this time farther away, but also did not enter the customs, not Shenyang, the gold was abducted again. Now the old head Liu did not want to panning gold again, to Zhao Xing Luobei County farming. Therefore, although our Tunzi is far from Taipinggou, but there is no lack of gold connoisseurship, this “big gold” should contribute more of course.
The other place to the north of Taipinggou is called Jiu Li Zhuang, almost 200 miles from Zhao Xing, and you can’t go home. I’m not sure how much I can afford to leave my wife and kids at home. The young man was asked to go. Someone shouted. The young man’s family is in Zhejiang, and he has never married, so Tunzi is his home, and so is Jiu Li Zhuang. We young intellectuals, of course, do not care, “The great motherland is wide and the Chinese people are ambitious in all directions, wherever there is a high mountain, there will be treasures to offer. Go! Maybe we can make a fortune by panning for lumps of gold. But can we rely on a group of youths alone? If you can’t recognize the gold vein, and you can’t pan, you have to have a leader. The secretary of the brigade said, “Whoever leads the team, the poor peasants must take the lead. How about Uncle Sun? I’ve been in ditches before, panning for gold and sand, and I’ve seen it all. A room full of people turned around to have a look at old Suntou.
Old Suntou, of course, was also in the meeting, sitting in the back corner, blah blah blah smoking an old cigarette, as if the secretary of the brigade wasn’t calling his name. When they heard that they didn’t have to leave their wives and children, they were happy to agree: “Old Uncle Sun, the secretary thinks highly of you, and you’ve been with a bunch of young people for three months.
Old Sun said, “It’s not a big deal to go, but how much do you pay for a day’s work? The team secretary was quick to follow the team’s highest score, plus one point, which was an allowance for leaving home. October and November coincided with the team’s mowing season, and the highest score was 15 points, plus one point for 16 points. This year, the soybeans and rice were all good, and it was no problem to pay two dollars a labor, or sixteen cents a labor, which was more than three dollars. If we go to 900 laborers, we will have 3,927, or 2,700 yuan, but we will find four taels of gold for only 400 yuan. Old Suntou muttered. The secretary of the brigade immediately said, what three thousand two thousand, to calculate the political account, we four Tun panned out four two gold, they five Tun is also four two, the entire Luobei County every team is four two, the entire Hejiang area every team is four two, the old Maozi down. This was Chairman Mao’s old man’s call.
If I had just arrived in Heilongjiang, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to exchange 2,700 yuan for more than 400 yuan. In the past, when I read history, I knew that peasants in feudal societies had to work hard, but when I met an enlightened emperor who imposed light taxes and reduced taxes, peasants could work less. Now, after several years of re-education, I understand that even peasants nowadays have to perform labor. As I said above, if you go out, you can add a point, but if you go out, you are working for the country, which is a temporary national worker, you can pick up a shovel to the ground and lean on it for half a day, so the young people like to go out to work. These workers are locally called “cold workers”, that is, workers who do not bring income to the production team. By the end of the year, the cold labor is distributed to everyone’s head. When I first arrived in Heilongjiang that year, I encountered a lot of things, such as the war on Treasure Island, the Rao River to build a national defense highway; forest fires, the production team had to send workers to fight fires, and this year, each person deducted more than twenty cold workers. Now the gold rush, such as out of cold work, and more gold rush can be compared to the old Maozi, whether it is poor peasants or intellectual youth, who have no opinion. Although it was a major political task, the old Suntou did not give an impassioned speech, just said, I go.
The Great President
Old Sun Tou’s name was Sun Wancheng, and the people in Tunshi called him “Big President” in jest. This skinny, shriveled man could hardly be associated with the Big President, but it was not without reason that he was called the Big President. Old Suntou had a series of big hats on his head, and the President was just one of them.
When I first arrived in Heilongjiang Province, I had just settled in the Qunli Brigade of Zhaoxing Commune in Luobei County, Heilongjiang Province, and I often attended the battalion meetings upon arrival. In the northern part of the country, there were many horses and few cows, and a production team had dozens of horses but only two or three cows. The place was called a stable, but it was not called a barn or anything like that. There was not much difference between feeding the horses in the stable and “teasing” the cows in the conference room. There is a row of benches in the meeting room. Although Zhaoxing is not in the forest, driftwood comes down from the Heilongjiang River as soon as it thaws, and not only the production teams but also individuals often retrieve thick red pine from the river. Therefore, Tuen Li is more wood, the bench is particularly heavy, the same as the Guanli, but the bench is three times thicker than the bench in Guanli, but the bench and then thick, not more than one person can sit.
The front of the conference room is three meters wide, not a bench, that is the leadership of the podium. It has also become a place for the “cow ghosts and snakes and spirits” to stand. I don’t remember how many “cow ghosts and snake gods” stood in this row, but I remember one of them, a very young man. In winter, the poor peasants wore black cotton clothes, and the “Cow Ghosts and Snake Gods” also wore black cotton clothes, but the “Cow Ghosts and Snake Gods” all had a large white cloth hanging behind them, on which were written words like landlords, rich peasants, bandits, and so on. On the white cloth behind this young man’s back was written “Current Counter-Revolution. People of a certain age would be shocked to hear this charge. How could a young man become a “current counterrevolutionary”? It turned out that there was a song with the lyrics: “Newly built house, snow-white walls, and a portrait of Chairman Mao hanging in the house”, but the young man wanted to sing “A portrait of so-and-so hangs in the house” in winter. What about pictures of yourself? But this was a song in praise of Chairman Mao, which could not be sung indiscriminately, and so he wore the hat of “current counter-revolutionary. His waist was bent at ninety degrees and his head was bowed very low during the criticism meeting.
Later, he took off his hat and shoveled in a rice field. At that time, the saying was, “When you work, you fight the red flag, when you sit down, you study. The first breath was very long and the work was tiring. That day, the first breath break, said to sit down and study, in fact, is just blind chatter. I asked the “current counter-revolutionary” if you were particularly afraid during the criticism. I can’t believe he laughed and said, “What am I afraid of? I ask again, why don’t you look up? He said, “Can I hold my head up? When I look up, some people make me laugh, and I laugh along with them, and a few kids take the opportunity to push my head? Isn’t that asking for trouble? Are you not afraid to wear this counter-revolutionary hat until you are old? He didn’t even want to think about it and replied, “I’m not afraid to wear it until the next life, so I’ll just be a farmer. The local authorities call it “going to work” if you eat the government’s food and take the state’s salary. To deal with counter-revolutionaries and rightists in the past was to be sent to the countryside as peasants, but not Suntou.
He had a thousand and one reasons to be identified during the Cultural Revolution, and he was certainly the number one “Cow Ghost and Snake Spirit,” so he was always the first one to appear in every criticism session. As soon as Lao Suntou reached the front row of the Bull, Ghost, Snake, and God, the people sitting on the front bench shouted, “Down with Sun Wancheng, the traitor, down with Sun Wancheng, the spy, down with Sun Wancheng, the landlord, down with Sun Wancheng, the bandit, and down with Sun Wanda, the traitor. Old Sun also shouted from above, “Down with them, down with them, down with them! The leading members of the Revolutionary Committee, who were sitting in the front row, pointed at Sun Wancheng and shouted, “Sun Wancheng, what other crimes have you committed? I sat down and thought, “If you are a landlord, how can you be a rich farmer? But everyone shouted together, “Down with the rich farmer Sun Wancheng! After shouting for a while, someone else said, “Sun Wanchen, what other evil deeds have you done? Old Sun, whose waist was already bent low and whose head was no more than three feet off the ground, raised his head, swept his bony eyes halfway around the field, stretched out his hands from in front of his back parallel to the ground, and shouted, Down with President Sun Wancheng! The people below shouted the same: Down with President Sun Wancheng! After a few moments, someone thought it was wrong and yelled, “Sun Wancheng, what are you playing at? Old Suntou was stunned and didn’t say anything, just lowered his head even further. Later I asked him why he was shouting “Down with the President”, and he said, “I can’t think of anything else to add after the big word, but I am not the emperor of Manchukuo. He said, “I can’t think of anything else to add to a big word, but I am not the emperor of Manchukuo.
At that time, there was no entertainment in the countryside, and no cultural trips to the countryside, even if it was forty degrees below zero, could not be shown in an open-air movie. Even in the new century, it was “three months to plant the land, three months to prepare for the New Year, and six months to celebrate the New Year. These meetings became the entertainment of the poor peasants, including the “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and they entertained everyone.
After the Heilongjiang River ran through the ice raft, the ground thawed, and the production teams were busy planting, the black jackets were taken off, and the white cloth hung on the black jackets of Sun Wancheng’s men naturally came off as well. The intellectual youths, who were familiar with the old man, inevitably called him “Big President” a few times. He just laughed and laughed when he heard them. I heard from people that Old Suntou used to be a fighter of the Anti-Democratic Alliance. Once I sat down to rest, I asked him, “Old Uncle Sun, did you really join the Anti-League of Resistance Fighters? He said with a serious look on his face, “Is this a lie? So you’ve seen Yang Jingyu too? Of course, I’ve even spent time with Cho Sang-ji. So you can sing the songs written by Yang Jingyu? Of course I can sing. Old Suntou looks very serious. Then you can sing a few lines for everyone to hear. Old Suntou coughed and sang, “The fire roasts in front of the chest to warm it, the wind blows behind it to chill it ……”. Old Suntou’s voice was hoarse and cold. A group of people sat on the row of crops and listened. Although the sun was very hot in the summer hoeing, I could clearly feel the cold behind me. I asked, “So, you are an old revolutionary, why are you still climbing the row of ditches? Old Suntou’s face was expressionless when he heard this.
Later, I asked other old people in the production team, and all of them gave the same answer, saying that Old Suntou was indeed a resistance fighter, which was true. Then why did he crawl the track of the earth? It turned out that after the Japanese had fought off the Japanese, the People’s Liberation Army came and the Kuomintang troops never came to Zhaoxing. Soon he led the team into the Xiaoxinganling Mountains and invited the Oroqen brothers to settle down in the mountains. We saw on TV that the Oroqen compatriots all went down the mountain happily, but the Oroqen brothers he met were not like that, they refused to go down the mountain, which made the old man angry, he ordered his men to burn down the Oroqen bark houses and sent them all down the mountain – we always do something wishful thinking. Thanks to the old Suntou, he made a mistake, and was punished by being expelled from the Party and returned to his home village to work. Isn’t it said that there is an objective law of social development? However, he always liked to interfere with the process of social development. I really can’t think of a word to add in front of this treatment, but I don’t think it’s quite right to use “treatment for five-guaranteed households”. Old Suntou, his mother, his wife, had three children, and later had five children, and received eighty-eight hundred and sixty-four yuan a month, which at that time was comparable to the income of a big cadre. In addition, the production team earned work credits, and at the end of the year they could share the money. In today’s terminology, it would have been a very large sum of money.
According to Lao Suntou, after the anti-Japanese allied forces were scattered, they all retreated from Zhaoxing to Lao Maozi’s side. Old Suntou said, “I arranged for these people to cross the river. He had to deal with the Japanese and bandits in order to carry out his work, and of course he worked mainly for the Anti-Japanese League. “In the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, because of his connection with the Japs, Suntou was a big traitor and had contacts with the beard, and he was a big bandit in Zhaoxing. So he put on a series of hats, including traitor, spy and bandit. The first time I saw this was when I was in the middle of the night. The traitor should have provided information to the Japanese, so he must have been a spy. So except for the president, all the other charges were logical. With so many charges, you can’t get state subsidies, and Lao Suntou’s 64 yuan a month subsidy will be gone in no time.
Without $64 a month, old Suntu had only a white shirt inside his cotton coat. In May, the vegetables in the kitchen cellar had almost been eaten, but the earth had not yet thawed completely. When I walked into his house, I saw a big plate on the bedside table, on which was a big gray cake, that is, a cake made of fermented rice noodles, and then a bowl of miso and gray salt vegetables. There was also a plate of greenish, indistinct food. When I asked him what it was, he said it was diced granny smith. Diced grannies? What is this stuff. Old grandson said, “Dandelion, dandelion, don’t you know? I just remembered that there was already some thin green on the ground, but it was dandelion, and it was edible. It didn’t look like it had been fried in oil, just mixed with salt.
The family gathered around the bedside table to eat, and a circle of people sat around the bedside table. Those who could not sit down stood at the edge of the pit, holding rice porridge in their hands. When I said I had already eaten, he was not shy about it and just bit into the big cake in his hand. The food of an old warrior of the Anti-Federation League was really sad to see. I asked, “Old Suntou, why did you think of joining the Anti-Fighting League? Old Suntou said, “The Japs are so bad, who wouldn’t want to fight them? I said, “You people outside the border always wait for us from the mainland to fight the Japs. Yang Jingyu is from Guanliao. Old Suntou immediately said, “What are you talking nonsense, Commander Yang is from outside the customs. No, Commander Yang is from Qingshan, Henan Province, and is from the Guanli. Old Suntou shook his head and said, “No, he is from outside of Guanli. I didn’t argue any further when I saw that Old Suntou had said so. So I changed the subject, “Old Suntou, tell me, how bad is the Japanese? How is it bad? Have you ever been to Fengxiang? Looking north is North Mountain, isn’t it? When the Japs were there, every now and then you could see a long line of big carts heading for the mountains, with a Japanese soldier escorting a car owner, delivering nothing, no one knows, none of those car owners came back. The Wutun old Fan head, then still young, was also caught by the Japanese to pull goods. The horse went slow and pulled behind. The car was just on the north mountain, and it flipped over, and the kid was buckled underneath the car, screaming underneath. Fan family that kid, look at that is also good, the kid crawled out is not a shot to kill him, take a shovel hit the ghost head. He cut off his head and ran to the other side of the river. To go to the other side of the river, the old Maoist told you to bring me a Jap’s head, plus a 38-gun.
These were all things that happened shortly after we arrived in Heilongjiang, and in the era of the great gold rush, we, a group of young intellectuals who joined the team, became even poorer than poor middle peasants. It was too tiring to work in the fields, and it was a refreshing change to go to the ditches to poke for gold, where everyone wanted to go and the poor peasants couldn’t do without their wives and children to warm their beds. So it was only natural that the “youth” became the main force behind the gold rush. Old Suntou himself also promised to drill into the ditch. After three days, the production team sent out two large carts with ten men, shovels, baskets of earth, and wooden dustpans, and went on their way – time was of the essence at that time, and no one cared to sit on the carts and drive slowly.
Jiulizhuang
The place where you can find gold is called Jiu Li Zhuang, in the Taiping Gou Commune.
JiuLiZhuang is not because it is nine miles from Taipinggou, and there is no village. There was only a long line of houses. The walls of the house were made of wine bottles, and a layer of mud was plastered on top. The roof was thatched like any other house in the area. Eighteen old men and one old woman lived in this house. These people had been panning for gold here in the past, and they would drink wine in exchange for the gold, so there were so many bottles that the walls could be barricaded. When they ran out of money and got old, they lost their strength to panning for gold and couldn’t go back home, so they cleared some land in a ditch, planted rice, went down to the mountains every other day for some salt and some cloth, and from somewhere they found an old woman to cook for them. They lived at ease in the mountains. Whenever they met someone who went up to the mountain, they would ask, “How many years has it been since Kant’s reign” – they had no idea that the Japs had fought them off, and that the emperor had become a war criminal, and later a member of the CPPCC.
We had just entered the mountains and had no house to live in, so we had to borrow their house for a while. On the first night, Lao Suntou asked us to make dumplings. There were so many dumplings that after they were cooked, they were served in a big plate. When the dumplings were cooked, a few of them reached out their hands and tried to eat them, but Lao Suntou said with a glare in his eyes, “Who told you to eat them? I have never seen such a fierce old man. The group of people withdrew their hands. As the saying goes, the first pot of dumplings and the second pot of noodles, the first pot of dumplings were cooked and cooled, but we couldn’t understand it. It was a good thing that the second pot was ready, but the old man served it to the old men in Jiulizhuang. They had to eat the third and fourth pot of dumplings. Since it was rare to have dumplings, we didn’t care which pot it was, so we tried our best to have a full meal. Then we fell down on the bed and slept. When we slept on the bed, our heads were facing the house and our feet were facing the window. So we opened the sacks, took out the blankets, and lay down like that. As soon as we lay down, Old Sun, who was still sitting on the edge of the bed rolling an old cigarette, shouted, “Transfer it here, transfer it here. We were all stunned to hear that, which day didn’t we sleep like this? The old grandson went on to say, “It’s in the mountains, it’s in the mountains,” you know? I don’t know who muttered, “What’s wrong with the mountain? Old Suntou said, “There is a black blind man on the mountain, does the black blind man know? It’s just a big black bear that can’t help but burrow into your house at night, and then he reaches out his claws and grabs you on the head, and you’re still alive? Everyone had to turn around.
The black blind man did not break in at night. We were still asleep, and we heard the old grandson shouting, “Get up, get up. His shouting woke everyone up, confused, really do not want to get up. We didn’t want to get up, but we saw that Old Suntou was sitting cross-legged on the bunk and rolling old cigarettes, so we had to dress slowly. After having cold dumplings, he asked everyone to carry a saw and a shovel on their backs, threw an axe and asked me to carry it for him, took out a red cloth from somewhere and hung it around his neck, grabbed a bottle of “North Wilderness” liquor and put it in his bosom, then picked up the plate with dumplings in it, said, “Let’s go! When he arrived at a red pine tree, he put down the dumplings, took an axe from the nearest person and chopped it on the tree. The axe sank deep into the tree, and the axe handle didn’t move. He took the red cloth from around his neck and tied it to the tree, then waved his hand to us and said, “Kneel down. As he said that, he was already kneeling in front of the tree. The only thing I saw was his back, and immediately I heard his voice: “It’s not easy for us poor guys. Those young people in Zhejiang have a white-haired old woman at home. Today, I came to the mountain to look for gold and asked the mountain gods to bless me with ten people in peace and safety, and ten to ten to go back. He said he took out the wine from his bosom, opened the bottle, poured the wine on the ground, and then took the plate of dumplings and poured them under the tree. After that, he went to the forest to cut down the wood and prepare to build a nest.
After a long day’s work, I saw that it was getting dark, and then I called it a day and headed back. The axe was still on the tree, the red cloth was still tied to the tree, but there were no dumplings left on the ground. Old Suntou said, “Look, the Mountain God will bless us after we have eaten the dumplings. Someone muttered, “The beast ate them. The old grandson looked back and stared, “Who is saying, Be careful how you work in the future?
Amoy Sands
It was really up in the mountains panning for gold. The old head of Sun led us to a holding area, which is not far from the Heilongjiang River. In the past, it has been a long time since the first time I was in the middle of the country. Old Suntou pointed to one of the large pits and said, “There is gold here. Is there gold here? A group of intellectuals looked puzzled. Lao Suntou did not even look at us and jumped into the pit to dig the sand. A shovel went down and was thrown out of the pit, he said as he waved the shovel, what are you waiting for, come down ah. We jumped into the pit and swung our shovels to dig. The old grandson looked at it, left his mouth, said a bunch of fools, panning for gold is not how to do it. Let’s learn from me. We all leaned our shovels on the ground to see what Lao Sun Tou looked like. I saw him put his shovel on top of the mud and sand, slowly put out his foot, stepped on the edge of the shovel, and then stopped. After a while Lao Sun wrenched the shovel again, slowly lifted it up, and when the handle was level with the ground, he gave it a sharp shake, throwing the sand and mud out of the pit. Then he said, “If you work like this, you will have a sore bladder in less than half a day. If your bladder gets sore, who will you ask for the four taels of gold? I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that, but I’m sure I can do it. The old grandson said, “You don’t have a wife and children, so what’s the hurry if I don’t hurry? People have been shoveling dirt and sand here for a long time. Panning for gold, shoveling sand, that’s the way it’s always been done.
I’ve been shoveling for a few days, but I haven’t even seen any gold. The old man said, “I’m going to shovel it up now and take it down to the river to poke around, and maybe I’ll be able to dig up some gold, and that will be enough. So we always hoped that we could dig up the gold lumps, but where did such a good thing come from? The old Suntou, who couldn’t resist the urge, said that it was fine to finish panning the sand first, and then shovel the sand after that. He thought that he would soon see gold, a group of people were rushed, the sediment picked to the river, rolled up his trouser legs, and waded into the Heilongjiang River. Heilongjiang River water this cold ah, only feet dipped in the people know. Back home in Jiangnan, the men are still naked at this time of the year.
Everyone used a wooden dustpan to throw sand and mud into the river. The wooden dustpan was sunk, and a large piece of sediment was washed away down the river. The wooden dustpan in the hands of the intellectuals did not listen to the instructions, a shake of the dustpan, half of the sediment leaked into the river, but some remained. However, the rest was still mud and sand, even that which Old Suntou had poured out.
After one day’s work, only a small corner of the huge pile of mud and sand was removed. Old Suntou said, “It would be nice if we could call Old Wangtou from Tunshi. Then why didn’t you call him? Everyone brought it up right away. Call him? He used to smoke pot when he found gold here, but the Japs have fought them off, so he can’t smoke pot anymore. Big Smoke, tastes good, right? We, a group of intellectuals, have asked. The old grandson listened, one hand put down the wooden dustpan, raised his hand, and slapped the nearest Zhiqing on the back of the head, this game can also smoke? Do you want to be like Old King Tut? As soon as they got addicted, they rolled around on the bed.
After panning for a while, we also did the same thing as old Suntou, and pounded the mud and sand out one by one. After a few days of beating, we could see the shining dots in the mud and sand grow denser. Lao Suntou said, “See, this is the golden sand. Everyone said, “Isn’t the mud and sand by the Zhao Xing River also with such golden spots? The old grandson said, “Kid, you go to Zhaoxing and see how much you can find in the panning. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to find in a year, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to find in a day.
It’s hard enough panning for gold, you can learn how to do it, but after a few years of schooling, it takes a lifetime of re-education. It was really frustrating to see the mud and sediment rising and falling, and always a little bit of the gold shining. However, old Suntou was still bumping along like that without any delay.
The dredged mud and sand had been panned several times, and the golden highlights were getting denser and denser. When we finished our work and returned to the shack, we all felt a little uneasy, and said, “Old Suntou, it took us a few days to find it, and several people from the county were also panning. How dare they? Old Sun spoke up and said, “The Mountain God is in charge here. We all grinned and tried to laugh, but Old Master Sun looked at us. Don’t believe me? The dumplings that fell in front of the tree that day were eaten by the mountain gods, you all must have seen them. The secretary of the Commune, Mr. Wang, didn’t believe this either. When his mother was sick, she still asked people to dance with the god. After a long day, no one wanted to talk too much, so we walked in silence for a while, thinking that if only there was a god of the mountains, he would bless us back home with more dumplings.
The Golden Pimple
After a few days of panning, the shovel came up with the sand several times, and finally there were a few pinches of gold dust. Then the news came that a young man in Beishan Town had found a gold lump. What do gold pimples look like? It must have been a gold nugget as big as a fist. Everyone wanted to see it and decided to go to him the next day, so we greeted Old Suntou. What’s there to see in a golden nugget, Old Suntou muttered, but didn’t object.
The gold rush wasn’t far from our shack, and it took less than ten minutes to get there. When I entered their little shack, I saw the man sitting on his bunk, smoking a cigarette. Everyone said, “Good boy, you’ve found a lump of gold, haven’t you? Let’s take a look at it. When the man lifted his mouth, the cigarette curled up high, and the curling smoke made him squint his eyes. Then he spat out the butt and slowly opened the packet. We all stretched our necks and saw that it was just a small golden grain smaller than a soybean. They all shushed him in unison. Are you guys still too small? Let me tell you, our tour leader said that he had been panning for gold for years and had never seen such a big lump of gold before. He told me to hand it over, but I won’t. The leader of the troop has called at Taipinggou. The leader of the troop called at Taipinggou, and the secretary of the troop is coming tomorrow. I want the gold lump, not the two months’ wages, which should be okay. We all said, “The minerals belong to the state,” he said. The man said, “So are we intellectuals owned by the state? We have already dedicated our youth to our country, why can’t we leave such a small grain of gold as a memento? Don’t force me to be anxious, but if I am anxious, I’ll shovel one down and run across the river. We all heard that it wasn’t a good idea, so we left.
The man did go to the other side of the river, but not at that time. When the secretary of the brigade came, the man still refused to hand over the gold lumps. When he returned to the brigade, the police station came and confiscated his gold lumps. He endured the anger and waited for the Heilongjiang River to freeze over. He waited at night at the entrance of the Tunzi Road, and when the secretary of the brigade returned home after playing with the money, he had a chance to put a sack over the secretary’s head, beat him up, and ran across the river.
As for us, although we didn’t find any lumps of gold, we found more than five taels of gold in three months, so it was time to go back to the brigade. Lao Suntou said, in a few days, these days, the team cutting and pulling the ground, the work is very tired, we are here as usual sixteen minutes a day. We will go back after the river freezes over. When the river can drive a car, we take the bus home, the extra one or two gold enough for everyone to take a bus. As a peasant, it was a rare opportunity to take a bus at public expense (of course it was only the group’s money). Of course, we all agreed. The good thing is that it didn’t take long for the river to be closed on November 17. We saw bulldozers pushing ice tracks on the river, so we stuffed our blankets into sacks and went down the mountain, knowing that it would soon be open to traffic. When we arrived at Taipinggou, we really heard that there would be a bus to the county seat in three days.
I stayed in the bus store for two days, and on the third day I took the bus. When the bus drove off, the conductor shouted, “I wish Chairman Mao long life to you now in the direction of the bus. Someone said, “The road curves around and around, and when the front of the car is twisted, isn’t it pointing in the direction of Mao Zedong? After a few laughs, we sat down. The conductor said, “Now follow me and sing the revolutionary song,” and then she sang first: “Down with the American empire, down with Soviet Russia!” The tune was “Determined, not afraid of sacrifice,” and everyone knew it right away and sang along, and she continued, “Down with the Chinese he …… Whose rubber shoes are toast?” It turns out that in cold weather, the exhaust pipe of a local bus passes through the carriage to keep warm. Whoever’s foot rests on the pipe will inevitably get burnt. One kid just sang “Lushchev” and lifted his foot up in a hurry. The car burst into laughter. The man had taken off his shoes, pulled out the felt cushion on the bottom of the shoes, everyone looked, one insole with black thread embroidered “Down with the American empire”, the other is “Down with the Soviet Union”. Did this guy want to smother a busload of people with the insoles? Everyone in the car roared in unison. The man said that the rubber shoes were toasted and he didn’t even let anyone look at the insoles? This is my way of defeating Su Shuo and defeating the American Empire! The smell is also smelling of Su Shuo. Can this guy, the old furry, smell your stinky feet? Old Suntou, sitting in front of this man, turned around and spit back at him. Someone behind him took the opportunity to hit him on the back of the head. The car was a mess. The man suddenly stood up, looked really anxious, and put his hat down on the car seat to strike. Some people said, what’s the hurry, chicken eye is not as big as bull’s eye, save your energy to defeat the American empire to defeat Su Shuo. The people in the car echoed the sentiment. The man probably couldn’t stand the smoke himself, but the people behind him saw the momentum and quieted down. Soon the car sped into the frozen river, and the people’s yawning made the car windows covered with beautiful ice flowers, so that the scenery could not be seen, and no one could see what direction the car was heading except the driver.
Lao Maozi
I finally returned to my hometown. Then I had a chance to meet the man who had found the lump of gold. I asked him how was the old hairy guy’s place.
He said, “It’s okay. At least it didn’t kill him.
Once across the river, the old Maoist soldier grabbed me like a chicken, stripped me naked, and pushed me into a room where the ceiling sprayed me with chemicals without my head. I had no choice but to hold my breath and endure. After a while, the door opened and the old hairy soldier came in, told me to get dressed, and took me to an office. There was an old man sitting in the middle of the office, and one look at his epaulets told me he was an officer. When he said something, the soldier on the other side picked up an iron ring on the table and put it over my head. I sat down at a table and took out a piece of paper with math and quiz questions written in Chinese, such as what province of China are you from, where is the capital, what continent is the Soviet Union, and where is the capital. I’m not a fool, the first time I used the iron ring on my head was to see how intelligent you were, but now it’s time for further testing, and if you pass the test, you’ll be sent to spy school. They say the school is only a month or two of training and send you across the river. Back here, once caught, you can still live? I just scribbled on a piece of paper. As it turned out, the old Maoist didn’t ask me to go to training and sent me to do hard labor …… until I was repatriated to China after the thaw in Sino-Soviet relations in the 1980s.
After listening to that person’s story, I thought about how silly the old Maoist was. In the past, there were a lot of white Russians in Shanghai, and the Shanghai people called them “borsch,” which means “Russia” in Russian. It was only after the Soviet Union became a big brother and could no longer be called borscht and rice bucket, that people gradually forgot the word rice bucket. The iron ring around the head, the head is too big to fit, does it mean that one is highly intelligent? What an idea. In 1929, the Moscow Institute of Brain Research opened a “Exhibition of the Brains of Great Men”, where dozens of brains are kept in special flasks. There are dozens of brains in some special flasks here, including those of Stalin, Kirov, Mayakovsky, Gorky, Stanislavsky and other famous politicians and writers, as well as those of Pavlov, Michurin, Mendeleev and other famous scientists. They came to the conclusion that the weight of the brain is not a measure of intelligence – Lenin’s brain weighed only 1340 grams, while Turgenev’s brain weighed 2012 grams. The scientists concluded that Lenin’s brain weighed 1,340 grams, whereas Turgenev’s brain weighed 2,012 grams. It is true that the word “rice bucket” can be used without delay, but the ring and the hood are just that they don’t treat those who run over as human beings, otherwise they wouldn’t spray them with medicine. The old Maoist called the people who ran to the past as spies, but only to “sow the seeds and reap the thinnest harvest”, there are intelligence gathered in the past, of course, very good; once to the other side of the river to be arrested and shot, dead is not the people of Song. “The first time they were caught and shot at in Tsojiang, they were not the ones who died. But the Zhiqing people want more people to come here, more chances to catch the spies, and more chances to catch one of them to be the “anti-revolutionary hero”. The young people were so envious that they were eager to catch an old Maoist spy and then leave the anti-correction front to become a university student. What kind of person did they catch? No one thought about it, but did they not want to? Is it a refusal to think? Are you reluctant to think? If you think about the closest realistic dream of going home, you will lose the red halo – it doesn’t take much thinking to realize that these spies are our compatriots, and the spy caught by the “anti-repair hero” has black hair and yellow skin. The spies caught by the “anti-repair hero” had dark hair and yellow skin. Maybe the ones caught were still intellectual youths, sleeping together on the same bed a few months ago.
At that time, he ran over a cow and asked Mao Zi to pay 10,000 yuan for it, but he ran over a man and asked him to pay 100,000 yuan for it. When I first arrived in Heilongjiang, I saw a man sent over by Lao Mao Zi. Lao Mao Zi sent him over with a speedboat and handed him over to the PLA of the border guard force. Later on, I saw a few more such things. The strange thing is that we didn’t see any of the intellectuals who went to the countryside to be sent back. Don’t they want to earn 100,000 yuan? What is even stranger is that the young people here know that they are not treated as human beings over there, but they still run over there. There were no dumplings to eat or cigarettes to smoke in the old Maoist town, but no one came over.
I’ve been in my hometown for 30 years, and the time has passed into the 21st century. I walked to work every day for exercise. When I got tired of walking, I sang “Make up your mind, don’t be afraid of sacrifice,” which became “Down with the American empire, down with Soviet Russia,” which reminded me of the past. The Chinese Khrushchev had already been rehabilitated, and he was a proletarian revolutionary of the older generation, and the Soviet Union had become the former Soviet Union. But as Christmas approached, I saw a Santa Claus with a machine at the front door of a store, shaking his head and wiggling his butt, playing the saxophone. Isn’t this a blatant provocation from the American empire? I sang “Down with the American Empire” and then I raised my voice. At that moment, two fashionable ladies walked by and gave me a sideways glance that clearly said, “What’s wrong with this guy? I also had to quickly stop talking and give an embarrassed smile.
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