Soon, my brother and I began to taste the difficulties of independent life. My brother and I were registered as commercial grain households. Each person's monthly food ration was only 18 catties, which was 62 meters per day on average. This amount of food was really difficult for us brothers who were at the puberty stage. At that time, food was still in short supply. In the first semester, the school canteen only provided vegetables and porridge for breakfast. The canteen did not provide rice for lunch and dinner. The students prepared rice and bowls themselves. They were placed in the steamer specially prepared for students in the school canteen. The canteen was responsible for steaming them. The amount of water in the bowl was filled by the students themselves. If they added more water, they would be steamed into porridge. If they added less water, they would be steamed into dry rice.
The food of us brothers was controlled by my elder brother. He bought the rations from the grain station. In order to ensure that the monthly rice could be eaten until the end of the month, my elder brother sawed a small bamboo tube to measure the rice for steaming rice. He was very good at doing this because he had helped the sixth aunt in Qing Dao to make a living before he was 10 years old. He had learned how the poor lived. 18 catties of rice had to be distributed in 31 days. Each person could only eat 5 taels and 8 coins a day. Drink one or two meters of porridge for breakfast (He took the rice to the canteen and exchanged it for a meal ticket). He still had 48 taels of rice left. Lunch and dinner were 24 taels of rice each. He thought of a way to borrow a small scale and weighed out 24 taels of rice. Then he poured it into the small bamboo tube and gently shook the rice in the bamboo tube flat. Then he used a pen to draw a line on the height of the small bamboo tube and steamed the rice according to the standard measurement of the rice inside the bamboo tube.(The events of that era are hard to understand now, because nowadays, people eat meat, eggs, and milk every day. A person can't even eat one or two meters a day.)
When my aunt came to Zhoutian that year, my mother had reached an agreement with her. She would help my family with ten yuan of living expenses every month. Now, the ten yuan of living expenses would be sent directly to the school as my brother's living expenses. Mother would no longer send money to my brother and me from my father's monthly salary of forty yuan. My brother and I received bursaries in class.(Brother gets 4 yuan for the second class, I get 3 yuan for the third class) 7 yuan, a total of 17 yuan, a semester for five months, a total of 85 yuan, and from this we have to save 20 yuan for their tuition fees and books, as well as 10 yuan for their travel expenses (from home to school by mother). In fact, my brother and I only have 55 yuan for a semester's living expenses, an average of 11 yuan a month, 5.50 yuan for each person. 1.2 cents for a catty of rice, 2.16 cents for 18 catties of rice, and 1 yuan per month for firewood in the canteen for steaming rice. The remaining 2.34 cents. If he did not use toothpaste, soap, and all other items, the daily meal fee would be 7.5% and 40 cents. Excluding the fact that he did not eat any food in the morning, the average meal fee for lunch and dinner was only 3.7% and 50 cents.
The school cafeteria's food prices included pumpkin, eggplant, beans, loofah, green vegetables, white radish, and so on, which were three cents a serving. There were tofu, chili, and tomatoes for four cents each. There were steamed eggs and stir-fried diced meat with salted vegetables for seven cents each. The best dish was braised pork that cost 20 cents a serving (once a week). And my brother and I only have 3.7% and 50%. We can only eat pumpkin, eggplant, beans, green vegetables and radishes for every meal.
I had one or two meters of porridge for breakfast. After the first class, I peed and ran out of calories. I eagerly looked forward to the end of class at noon. Then I would eat the rice that cost two taels of rice and a dish that cost three cents. When I first started to steam rice, I was so happy. I no longer had to mix vegetables like my mother. I could eat white rice every day. The first few meals of two taels and four cents of dry rice were still passable because we were in the happy and excited period of eating white rice every day. However, after a few days, my brother and I were so hungry that we couldn't stand it. The water in the steamed rice bowl became more and more until it almost overflowed from the side of the bowl. From the initial dry rice, it slowly became soft rice. After eating it, we were still hungry. We had to add water and it became porridge. After eating it, we were still hungry. We had to add water. In the end, it was as thin as rice soup. However, my brother and I are getting hungrier and hungrier. When the cook found that the rice was too thin, he said," You two don't understand this principle. The thinner the rice is, the easier it will be digested. The faster you will be hungry, the more water you add, the bigger your stomach will be. Of course, you will be more hungry." The cook's words were reasonable. However, if he didn't add more water, the dry rice would have long been in Java for a 13-year-old boy. It was better to have some water than nothing.
The threat of hunger had returned to us brothers. The return of hunger should have been my own choice, and thus dragged down my brother. My brother had always had a big appetite. Before the family moved away, Mother could still let us brothers eat until we were full. Even though she had mixed vegetables to cook, now my brother and I began to starve all day long. However, her brother was also elected as the class labor committee member. Middle school was not like primary school. The primary school labor class did not have too much work for the students to do. At most, it was cleaning and the like. It was different in middle school. All the labor classes were heavy on physical strength. They cut firewood for the canteen, dug vegetable fields for the school, planted trees on the campus, leveled roads, and dug football fields. Especially in the first semester of school, the school had just moved to the copper mine. The campus construction was all solved by the students 'own efforts.
The older brother was hungry and still had to take the lead in labor class. The students really treated him like a cow. When they went up the mountain to cut firewood, the older brother carried his own firewood back and immediately returned to help the female students carry it. One trip after another, until he was so tired that he could not get up. Each male student was given the task of planting trees in the campus. They were required to complete the task in five days (at least eight holes were to be dug every day). The size of the holes was 50 centimeters square and 80 centimeters deep. The hillside where the trees were planted was full of stones and sand grains. When they encountered big stones, they couldn't even dig a hole in a day. This was undoubtedly beyond the limits of their physical strength. The bold students didn't really take this task seriously. They would do it as long as they could. However, my brother risked his life to do it. Because my brother was a labor committee member, I didn't want to embarrass my brother. In order to complete the task of digging the tree planting pit, I still worked in the dark until ten o'clock in the evening. Later, I was so tired that I couldn't even straighten my back. Among the boys in the class, my brother and I were tall. The students thought that we were stronger than others, and the teachers thought so too. However, in fact, we were not as strong as the children of the cadre, nor as strong as the children of the farm workers. They said that my brother and I had great strength, but it was nothing more than pushing the heavy work of the class to us brothers to do. They wanted us brothers to be honest and easy to talk to.
If we can eat our fill and have the strength, it's fine to do more work, but my brother and I are hungry all day. We can't bear to do more heavy work. At that time, most of the students who ate in the school canteen were the children of farmers and workers who had passed the examination in the primary schools below. They had many private plots at home, so they were not in short supply of food. When they steamed rice, they put a lot of rice in their bowls. Sometimes, it was more than the daily food quota of my brother and me. Therefore, they often threw the rice away when they could not finish it. Every time at this time, my brother would watch them pour the snow-white rice into the swill bucket. The classmate who poured the rice had already walked away, but he was still stunned by the swill bucket. After a long time, the students who poured the rice estimated that my brother was not full. Seeing them pour the rice away, one of the farm children asked his brother,"Are you willing to eat the rest of our food?”，Brother nodded, and a few students brought the rest of the food in front of him. Brother wolfed it down. The children of the farmers looked at their brother's appetite and said,"You really can eat. Why don't you steam more rice?”，Brother said that we eat commercial grain and only have 18 catties of grain a month. The farm children don't believe what brother said. How is that possible? We bring 15 catties of rice from home every week to eat."(In this way, each of them eats 60 catties of rice a month, while my brother and I only eat 36 catties of rice a month.)
The school knew that our ration was too low, so they told him that we could get a certificate from the school to the grain station. The ration for middle school students could be increased to 28 catties. When we sent the certificate to the grain station, the grain station really increased our ration by 3 catties, becoming 21 catties instead of 28 catties. After asking again, it turned out that the ration for middle school students was 28 catties (added by the farm itself), and the ration for commercial grain was 21 catties. My brother and I knew that the commercial grain account could be transferred, but the farm account could not be transferred, so we did not dare to change the account to the farm account, because it was almost impossible for the farm account to be transferred back to the commercial grain account.
I was also hungry, but I was a little better than my brother. Because my body wasn't in good condition, my hunger was also a little weaker. I was too embarrassed to eat the leftovers of my classmates, even though those leftovers could alleviate my hunger and increase my strength. I was too proud of my face and was almost a young man. I noticed that some female students from the branch primary school were secretly looking at me. No matter how hungry I was, I had to pretend that nothing had happened. They still did not know my poverty and inferiority. I could not carve the impression that I was poor into their minds. I want to give them the impression that "I have the same background as the other cadre children in this class." I want to use all possibilities to cover up my poverty and inferiority. The students who came from the branch aren't likely to imagine how poor and humble my family was from the way my brother and I applied for bursaries from the class. Because my family was hundreds of miles away, they wouldn't have the chance to see it. As a result, when the class was evaluating the bursary, the students from the branch didn't believe that my brother and I would also apply for bursary. Of course, the children of the officials who came from the same primary school as me wouldn't say anything to those who didn't know just because they knew about it. Of course, there was a possibility that we might not be able to get the bursary. The children of the officials from the same primary school agreed to give my brother and me a first-class rating (5 yuan per person per month), while the children of the farmers from the branch farms insisted that they could only give me a second-class rating (4 yuan per month) and a third-class rating (3 yuan per month). In that case, they would use the loss of the bursary as the cost to rebuild my brother and my image of not being poor. "As for the quota of 18 catties of grain for my brother and I, that doesn't prove that we are poor. That is the regulation of the country's commercial grain. If you say that my brother picked up the leftovers of his classmates to eat because he didn't have enough to eat, you can only ask the country's grain station. What does it have to do with me and my brother being poor?
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