With the bitten fruit in my mouth, a strong smell of Camphor rushed straight to my brain through my nose. A disgusting feeling immediately rushed to my throat. A stream of clear water came out from the tip of my tongue and flowed out along the corner of my mouth. I was so scared that I spat out the fruit in my mouth. My tongue was still sticking out. I hurriedly lay down and soaked my face in the water. I tried my best to absorb water into my mouth to eliminate the smell of Camphor. I kept thinking that I must have been poisoned this time.
After washing my mouth in the water for a while, I sat back on the big rock and waited for the poison to take effect. However, after waiting for a long time, there was nothing abnormal. My mind was still very clear, and my hands and feet were not numb. Other than the smell of camphor in my mouth, everything was normal. Even the feeling of nausea gradually subsided. I licked my tongue and actually felt a faint sweetness in my mouth.
I was secretly delighted. Could it be that this little black fruit was really edible? I licked my tongue again. It really felt like there was sweetness in my mouth. I became bold and climbed down the stone. I picked up the small fruit that I had thrown into the water and carefully stuffed one into my mouth. I slowly bit it open. The smell of camphor filled my mouth again. I resisted the urge to spit it out and used my tongue to suck the juice in the fruit to adapt to the smell of camphor.
After the fruit in my mouth was sucked dry, I spat out the seeds and swallowed two more. After I endured the disgusting feeling, I began to taste the sweetness of the small fruit.
Hunger made my disgust for the small fruit gradually disappear in the faint sweetness of the small fruit. In the end, only sweetness was left. I finally found something to eat here. I thought that perhaps by eating this small fruit, my family would no longer be hungry.
Why didn't I notice that there were such small black fruits on the Camphor tree just now? I looked carefully at the leaves of the Camphor tree. It turned out that the small fruits on the branches of the Camphor tree were green and not ripe yet. Only the black ones were ripe and fell from the tree into the water.
I plucked a few green fruits. When I pinched them, they felt as hard as stones. I put them under my nose and smelled them. I quickly determined that they were inedible. I waded through the water and went upstream to look for it. Sure enough, not far away, there was a small Camphor tree with a string of black fruits hanging on it. They were ripe. I was happy and picked the big and soft fruits under the tree to eat. After eating dozens of fruits, I still felt disgusted again. I knew that I couldn't eat too many tree seeds at once. Alright, I'll only eat these today.
He also picked some big ripe fruits and put them in his clothes. He brought them back to let Mother and the others taste them. If they can get used to them, our family won't have to worry about not having enough to eat.
Unknowingly, I stayed by the river for a long time. When I returned to the shed with some Camphor tree seeds, my mother suddenly shouted at me," What did you eat? Why are your lips all purple?”He rushed in front of me and opened my mouth to take a look. He saw that my tongue and teeth were all purple-black. It turned out that the little black fruit had a dye component. After eating it, my mouth would be dyed purple-black. The water by the river was shallow and too clear, so I couldn't see my shadow. At that time, I didn't expect my mouth to be dyed, so I didn't know what color my mouth was.
Mother had always been worried that we would eat something poisonous. Now that she saw the color of my mouth, she was scared out of her wits. I quickly told her that I was eating a small black fruit, which had a sweet taste and would be fine. As I spoke, I showed her the tree seed in my hand and asked her to taste one. Mother took one and broke it with her fingers. She smelled it with her nose and immediately frowned. She said that this could not be eaten. If I ate it, I would die. She also ordered me not to go out and look for these messy things to eat.
However, hunger made me unable to resist the desire to find food. After that, I still secretly went to the river to eat the Camphor tree seeds. In order not to let my mother find out, I ate while rinsing my mouth with the river water, trying not to dye my mouth purple-black.
In order to make a living, my mother racked her brains. She asked my father to plead with the cadre of the mine and asked us to weigh my father's meal ticket back and not go to the canteen to get rice. This was more affordable than getting rice. At that time, in order to ensure the physical strength of the workers, the mine generally did not allow the workers to bring rice home. However, the mine considered that our family was living too hard, so they agreed.
In this way, the order of cooking was changed from cooking vegetable soup before adding rice to cooking rice soup before adding vegetables. Before adding vegetables, she would first fill some rice soup with rice grains for my sister and let me feed her. When I saw the rice soup without vegetables, I felt like a hand was reaching out from my throat. I couldn't stop myself from feeding my sister the spoon I fed her. I just pitied my sister. In that era, she didn't even have a bowl of porridge.
One day, a kind-hearted cook in the canteen said to my father," Your family is so pitiful. There's no oil at all. After such a long time, the child's body will be bad. There are some cooked pig bones in the canteen. You can cook them again and drink some soup. It's better than having no oil at all."”
His father went to the canteen and brought back a large basin. The bones had already been cooked to snow-white color. They were smooth and there was not a single shred of meat hanging on them. They were as clean as porcelain. Father used a hammer to knock these bones apart. Sure enough, there was bone marrow in some big bones. Mother put the broken bones into a big basin used as a pot and filled it with water. Then she boiled it again. The surface was covered with oil stars. Mother put some rice into the soup and didn't put any vegetable leaves. She let us brothers drink enough. Because we hadn't touched the oil stars for a long time, the taste of this big bone soup was so delicious!
We were so happy during that meal that it felt like the New Year. I couldn't help but have a sudden idea and suggested to mother to keep these bones and not throw them away. If you crave them, you can cook them into soup and drink them. It's better than nothing. Mother heard me say this and turned her head away without saying anything.
Where did the big bones come from? It turned out that the mine would get some meat from the provincial capital every month, so there should be a big bone to pick up every month. However, since then, Dad never got a big bone from the canteen. Because our family was so poor, there were many people who wanted to get a big bone from the canteen. The kind cook could only be kind to our family once.
Finally, Mother couldn't bear the pressure of not having food and relaxed the control on us finding wild food. One day after school, my mother called my brother and me to the front and said," Go out and look for wild vegetables. You can decide whether you can eat them or not. If you think you can eat them, pick them back. Because there is nothing left in the house to cook, you can't come back empty-handed.”
My brother and I walked along the path that led to the school headquarters. I had been there before and knew that the path was covered with green wild vegetables. There were often local peasant women cutting pig grass there. We followed them to see which wild vegetables they were cutting. When we saw clearly that they were cutting wild vegetables that the locals used to make wormwood, we also pinched the sharp seedlings on the wormwood with our hands.
Wormwood was a single plant, an annual herb that stood upright without forking. Its leaves were slender, and the surface of the leaves was covered with fine hairs. It could be seen on the roadside or on the hillside in spring, summer, and autumn. It was a relatively common wild vegetable. However, at the end of autumn, the Wormwood would become old and dry, and the hairs on the leaves would turn into powder. A slight touch would give off a choking smell.
It was September at that time, and the wormwood was still growing and edible. My brother and I cut a big dustpan and carried it back. On the way, we met workers who knew us and asked if we had pigs at home. They thought we were cutting wormwood to feed the pigs.
His mother boiled water and put the wormwood into the pot to cook until it was half-cooked. She took it out and soaked it in cold water. Then, she cut it into pieces and added rice to cook it into vegetable porridge. It was the first time she ate wormwood vegetable porridge, and it was very difficult to swallow. After eating it for a few days, she felt that it was not so difficult to swallow.
When we first came to the mine, because of the busy production, Dad had to work overtime in the workshop on Sunday. However, there was no food at home, so Dad couldn't work overtime on Sunday. He asked for leave from the workshop and wanted to find a way to get some food from the countryside.
His father picked up his old job in Dafutun. He would put a grindstone on one end of the orange and nail a clip for the knife on the other end. Every midnight on Sunday, when the rooster crowed, he would get up, carry the orange, and carry the sack to the countryside in the north and Qiujing. He had to rely on " sharpening scissors and snatching knives " to exchange for some food to feed his family.
When his father returned, it was already midnight. Other than his tools for sharpening knives, he also carried rice husks, dried vegetables, some powder ground from unknown tree roots, some rice, and sometimes eggs.
It's midnight, but we didn't sleep. We waited for Father to come back. As soon as he got home, he sat on the ground half-naked to rest. He said that he felt that the ground was cooler. Of course, we know how far Dad has to walk in a day with Bancheng on his back! He wouldn't complain about his hardships and tiredness in front of us. He endured all the hardships silently. His temper made us not dare to ask too much. He never heard any comforting words from us. It seemed that he didn't like to listen to those useless empty words.
The sawdust that my father brought back from the countryside was actually ground from the root of a common plant called " Kudzu vine " on the hillside. We didn't know that it was Kudzu root powder. Because it tasted like the elm bark powder in Dafutun, it would be a little sticky when cooked into porridge. My mother had always treated Kudzu root powder as elm bark powder. She even asked us brothers to go to the surrounding mountains to look carefully for elm trees. However, we had never seen elm trees in the woods. This kind of vine grew in clumps by the roadside.
Her mother treated the powder of the root of the vine as the powder of the bark of elm trees. She knew that elm trees were not poisonous. She was also relieved about wild vegetables like wormwood. Since pigs could eat it, humans could also eat it. In this day and age, how was human life better than pigs?
In the following year, the root powder and wormwood became the main food supplement for our family.
In those years (1960 - 1962), the south did not suffer from severe droughts, insect plagues, and other natural disasters like the north. The mountains of Zhoutian were lush, and the crops of the surrounding farmers were also full. There was a bumper harvest, and there was no reduction in grain production. But why were people so hungry? The country called that period three years of economic hardship, but they didn't understand it at the time, and they didn't figure out the real reason for it for a long time until recently.(2011) When he reread the content of his conversation with Gorbachov in the third volume of the ** anthology, he found out that the reason for the so-called "three years of economic difficulties" was that during the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, China sent volunteers and the Soviet Union provided arms, but China had to bear half of the arms costs, so it owed the Soviet Union an arms debt. After the relationship between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union forced China to pay the arms debt, and the country did its best to repay the debt, making the already difficult economy even worse. During this period, the people of China suffered greatly.
This book comes from：m.funovel.com。