In the famine years and months, there were no more blacksmiths to do in the hungry and hungry countryside. Father often came home empty-handed. In the face of the children, Mother could only beg her sister (my sixth aunt) who lived in the city of Qing Dao for mercy. She wanted to take the children to rely on them to survive the famine in the spring. The sixth aunt replied and agreed to Mother taking the children to Qing Dao.
Aunt Liu recorded in her memories that my mother went to Qingdao to survive the famine: "In 1960, there was a famine everywhere, especially in the countryside. Many people starved to death, and those who survived were also struggling on the verge of starvation. Sister Zhiyu (my mother) has four children in the countryside. It's difficult to maintain them. She has repeatedly requested to come to Qing. I'm afraid and dare not ask her to come. Because there were too many children, she was afraid that she could not afford it. One day, I had a dream. I dreamed that corn was falling from the blue sky. I looked up at it and was amazed. A voice said,'Put it away and give it to Big Sister Zhiyu to eat.' When I woke up, it was a dream, so I used this voice to write a letter to call Sister Zhiyu. She was about to bring her three children to Qing Dao. He spent the famished spring in Tsingtao.”
Father was forging iron outside and wanted to leave someone to watch over the house. After discussing with Mother, Father decided to leave me to watch over the house. I was afraid of Father's temper and was also afraid of staying at home alone. I clamored to follow Mother, but Aunt's ability was limited. If more people went, it would be difficult to survive. No matter how I begged, Mother did not dare to agree.
When Mother's carriage left the village, I cried and ran for more than a mile until I couldn't run anymore. I was tired from crying and lay on the road in despair as I watched the carriage go away. Father carried me home. That year, I wasn't even nine years old.
Before Mother left, she prepared some cornmeal for me and demonstrated how to cook by myself. She added water to boil the pot, mixed the cornmeal with cold water, and then poured it into the pot to boil, making corn paste.
Father still went out to forge and came back to see me once every half a month.
I began to live alone. I lit a fire in the stove, added water to the pot, and put it directly into the cornflour. I cooked a big pot of paste. The bottom of the paste was completely charred. I didn't know if it was cooked well. There were no vegetables, no oil, and no salt. I had to eat a pot of paste for five to six days. Other than the first meal being hot, I drank cold food for the next few days. There was no way to heat it up again. Once the fire was lit, the bottom of the pot was charred even more. The cornmeal was mixed with chaff, and there was no oil or salt. After drinking this paste, he often could not defecate for a few days.
There were a lot of insects in the famine years. There was a kind of small beetle which was as big as half of a fingernail. Its whole body was black and looked like the hairstyle of an old woman in the countryside. The villagers called it "Wife Bug". In the evening, the trees would be covered with Wife Bug. When the tree trunk was shaken, black insects would fall on the ground. These insects would not fly away in the evening. Every day after school, I would go to the roadside to collect insects from the small tree and feed the chickens.
I was afraid to go into the house, alone in the house, and I felt scared. I couldn't tell how scared I was until it was completely dark and I had to go in.
She curled up on the pit alone, crying as she endured night after night of fear. She couldn't help but hope that her mother would come back soon.
It was impossible to feed five people for a long time with the pitiful rations of Aunt Liu alone. Mother could not live in Qingdao for a long time, but the children in Doctor's Village were in danger of starving to death.
In order to find a way to survive, the mother and sister thought hard and thought of my aunt. In the early days of liberation, my aunt went south with the army and later became a cadre in Jiangxi. They guessed that there would be no famine in the south. They could ask my aunt to think of a way to help our family move to the south.
They wrote a letter to Auntie, asking her to help my father find a job in Jiangxi. Unexpectedly, Auntie replied very quickly and agreed to help my family, asking Dad to go to Jiangxi first. This matter was written in Aunt Liu's recollection: "He also found a job for brother-in-law in Jiangxi. From the countryside to workers, his sister and children also became the family members of the workers and ate commodity grain. This way, their entire family could survive the famine.”
Because of the famine, nine out of ten households in Dafu Village had been emptied. Many families had broken into the east of the country (Shandong people mostly chose the northeast to escape from famine). The Commune tried its best to prevent the villagers from escaping. Father did not dare to expose the news. In the middle of the night, he came back to the village from other places and found Uncle Zhao (Uncle Zhao's family also moved from other places. He had the same surname as my mother and was closer to my family). He said that he was going on a long journey and entrusted Uncle Zhao to take care of me.
His father steamed the sweet potato noodles he brought back into cornbread overnight. He wanted to take them with him as rations on the way to the south. Before dawn the next day, my father fled to the south. Before he left, he repeatedly told me not to tell anyone about his trip to the south.
Three days have passed, and I think Father should have arrived in the south by now. However, he suddenly returned in the middle of the night. It turned out that the cornbread and sweet potato noodles he brought were moldy. He ate them until his stomach was so bitter that he almost vomited out his bile. In Texas, his stomach hurt so much that he couldn't stand it anymore. He didn't dare to eat those cornbread anymore. Without food, he didn't dare to go forward. Although his father was poor, he would never beg on the streets. After walking more than a hundred miles, he returned home from the Texas train station.
His father had just entered the house, so he quickly took advantage of the middle of the night to break up the previous cornbread with his hands and add some cornflour to steam it again. This way, it would not be too bitter to eat. I advised my father to throw away those bitter sweet potato noodles and take them with me. He said that this bit of cornmeal was my life and must be left for me. He didn't know if he could come back when he went out. I didn't know when my mother would come back. If there was no food, I would starve to death. He said that he couldn't let me starve to death alone at home.
Uncle Zhao would sometimes bring his son (who was about my age) to stay with me at night. His family was also struggling to survive. When he stayed with me at night, he was hungry, so he would secretly get up and drink the remaining corn paste in the pot.
It was dry in summer, and the water in the bay to the south of the village was drying up. One day after school, I passed by the bay and saw many people catching fish in the bay. I also threw my bag down, but I was empty-handed and didn't catch anything for a long time.
I was bending over to feel around in the water when suddenly a slippery thing came out of the water from my arm. I was shocked and thought I had touched a snake. The children next to me shouted "eel" and rushed over to grab it. That thing slipped past my arm and into the water. Fortunately, the water was very shallow. I rushed over and firmly stuck it with both hands. It was a foot long eel.
Uncle Zhao was also catching fish. He came over and told me that this was edible. It was the first time he saw eels in his life. He was still a little afraid and said,"Take it and eat it." Uncle Zhao brought tools and caught a few fish. He didn't want my eels.
I took the eel home and cooked it in the pot. I ate it without even adding salt. This was the first time I ate fish in my life and I thought it tasted delicious.
When Dad arrived in Jiangxi, he found my aunt. She said that she knew the manager of a copper mine in the northern part of Jiangxi. The copper mine had only been opened for two years and needed workers. Before Dad arrived in Nanchang, she had written to the manager about this matter. Dad took the letter from my aunt and rushed to the copper mine to sign up as a blacksmith (still an old blacksmith).
After my father landed in the mine, he proposed to the mine to move his family over. The mine also hoped that the workers would settle down, so they agreed to my father's request and accepted our family to settle down in the copper mine. Mother received a letter from my father in Qing Dao that he had settled down in Jiangxi, so she brought my brother and the others back to Dafutun from Qing Dao.
Father didn't dare to come back. The community was catching people who had fled from famine. They were afraid of being caught when they came back, so they sent back the household registration certificate and asked my mother to change her household registration and bring the whole family to Jiangxi.
Mother is a housewife. It's not easy for her to go through the household registration procedures. Moreover, the local government has already issued a document restricting the migration of rural households. In order to not starve to death, Mother went from village to village and begged for mercy.
There was no means of transportation. The journey from the village to the village was more than twenty miles. In the hot summer, Mother used her crippled feet (which were bound and disabled when she was young) to drag her heavy body back and forth.
Hard work paid off. The villagers finally agreed to move the household registration and signed the household registration certificate sent from Jiangxi. His mother was so happy that she forgot to look at the signature. Regardless of fatigue and hunger, she rushed home under the scorching sun and prepared to go to the county police station to move the household registration the next morning.
As soon as they entered the house, Mother took out the signed acceptance certificate and looked at it happily. Suddenly, Mother's expression became very ugly. It turned out that the acceptance certificate agreed to the women and children moving out, but my father's household registration was not allowed to move.
When she saw the signature, it was like a thunderclap had struck her mother. She was so sad that her voice trembled. She had not sat down or drank any water when she entered the house. The matter of the household registration was like a fire burning her. She immediately turned around and went back to her hometown.
However, the staff were as heartless as stone. Mother begged them repeatedly, but they were indifferent. In this way, my father's registered permanent residence stayed in Dafutun in northwest Shandong (Later, the copper mine made up a registered permanent residence for my father).
Finally, it was time to leave Physician Village. There was no nostalgia, no sadness of leaving home. Although I was born in Physician Village, I didn't have the slightest feeling of hometown. My parents had drifted to Physician Village. Physician Village wasn't my father's root, so my root naturally wasn't Physician Village. I should have been born in Mingshui, where the spring water was rumbling, but fate didn't allow me to be born by the stream that was steaming in winter. This destined me to have no foundation in my life. I was like a leaf of duckweed, drifting with the flow and wandering the world.
Mother gave all the furniture to the neighbors and only used the sheets to tie the bedding and clothes into a few bundles for my brothers to carry separately.
Mother also carried a bundle on her back and my two-year-old sister in her arms. She led the three of us brothers and set off on the journey to the south like beggars.
A kind-hearted person in the village sent us to Dezhou in a carriage. From Dezhou, we took the train south. The train ticket was cheap, so we took the slow train all the way. When the train reached Pukou, we had to use the ferry to cross the river (at that time, the bridge on the Yangtze River had not been built). The south bank of the Yangtze River was the Nanjing railway station, which was crowded with people who fled from famine like us.
The dry rations that she brought from home were almost finished along the way. The rest were moldy and she did not dare to eat any more (the weather was hot and humid in the south, so the dry rations were moldy). Her mother took out some change from her body and asked her brother to buy a few steamed buns from the stall to satisfy his hunger.
Along the way, we ate dry and hard cornbread. We children had long been envious of others eating steamed buns. We happily watched Mother take money to buy steamed buns for Brother. However, just as Brother took the steamed buns from the hawker, a hand suddenly stretched out from the side and snatched the steamed buns from Brother's hand.
It turned out to be a beggar. Before the elder brother could understand what was going on, the starving beggar had already stuffed all the buns into his mouth. The elder brother chased after the beggar and beat him. The beggar didn't dodge but desperately swallowed the buns in his mouth.
Her mother stopped her brother, saying that the beggar must be starving. He was pitiful enough, so stop hitting him. Looking at the chaotic crowd of refugees at the train station, sitting in the square in front of the train station, I actually became worried, not knowing whether the future would be a blessing or a curse.
After suffering all the hardships along the way, they finally arrived at the Nanchang railway station. There were still more than a hundred miles from Nanchang to the copper mine, and they had to take a car to get there.
Due to the lack of food and drink along the way, the whole family was exhausted and very weak. August was the season for the furnace in Nanchang. Mother could no longer drag the family, so she hired a rickshaw at the railway station to pull us to the bus station.，
There was no language barrier between the north and the south. Several rickshaws were fighting for our job. A thin old man didn't care much and rushed to pile our bags on the rickshaw. He also pushed the adults and children into the rickshaw. Due to the large number of people, the rickshaw lost its balance. The thin old man couldn't hold the handle. Just as he lifted the handle, the back of the rickshaw fell down. The weight of the children suddenly pressed on the mother's chest, and the mother immediately fainted. My brother and I were so scared that we cried. The old man pulling the carriage was also frightened. My brother kept shouting and my mother finally woke up.
Just as we were at a loss, the onlookers asked us if we had any relatives in Nanchang. Mother told us the name of my aunt who worked in the film studio. Coincidentally, there was an aunt in the crowd who worked in the film studio. She knew my aunt, but at that time, my aunt had been transferred to the Light Industry College and could not be contacted for the time being.
With the help of the kind-hearted auntie, we found another tricycle to send us to the bus station and got on the bus. After going through many difficulties, Mother finally brought us to the copper mine where Father worked.
After I grew up, my mother asked me what we brothers would do if she really couldn't wake up at the train station. This is a problem that my brothers never dared to think about. We only know that we can't live without a mother in our young lives. At the end of the day, she shouldn't have given birth to me. Without me, she would have suffered less. If she didn't bring me into this world, this world would have less of a repeat of the Romance of Suffering.
This book comes from：m.funovel.com。