Article: Rural Collectors
In August 1949, my father returned from Shandong and took my mother, me, my sister, and my brother to live in Yanggu. His father's job was as a teacher at Yanggu Normal School. The school site is in the northwest of the county seat, a rural town thirty-five miles away from the city - Anle Town.
The school was a new cultural school opened by our Party in the old revolutionary areas at that time. The school building is a foreign church reconstruction, and the house is not redundant. So we, along with a few faculty and staff families, only rented houses in the town.
As soon as we arrived in Yanggu, we saw that the rooftops of the people's houses there were completely different from the ridged grass roofs of the old home in Feng County.
It is said that Yanggu County is very susceptible to wind disasters because it is close to the Yellow River, so the houses there are all flat roofs. The lower level of the roof is a flat shed with thick wooden sticks on the roof wall, and the wooden sticks are laid horizontally on a layer of high beam poles, and the sorghum poles are covered with thick wheat straw, and then the wheat straw is smoothed and compacted with soil.
Such bungalows are indeed resistant to wind disasters, but they are not safe. Because the walls of the house are all made of mud, when it rains heavily, the roof is aggravated after the mud is soaked, and the wall collapses when the mud wall cannot be supported.
Every summer during the rainy season, there are several tragic incidents in the town where the walls collapse and the houses collapse and kill people. My classmates Liu Xuemeng and Zhang Shanglun's grandmother were dying of food when it was raining heavily.
So every time it rains heavily, my parents are afraid to sleep all night. But I don't know how to be afraid, and I often fall asleep in my father's arms...
Later, the school leaders worried about the safety of the families of our teachers and staff, and in order to enable my father and several of his teachers to teach with peace of mind and not to distract their energy, they divided the school's large hall into several temporary small inner rooms, and let us move in for three months every summer.
In 1961, the state delegated urban hukou personnel to the countryside, and in July after the wheat harvest, my mother took a few of our brothers and sisters back to our hometown in the countryside of Feng County.
We have not returned to our hometown for thirteen years, and the original three grass houses on the old house have long collapsed and disappeared. After returning to Murakami, the captain of the production team enthusiastically placed us in an empty cattle house in the breeding room. Then send a few male laborers to the west end of the village to clean up the old yard house for us. And put a new layer of wheat straw on the roof to clean the house. Bring the iron pot of the breeding room and support the clay pot stove in the house.
Two days later, the captain let us stay in the old yard house with our luggage. A half-and-a-half old yard house, the area of the house is only eighteen square meters. Except for the place occupied by the clay pot stove and the board furniture, the remaining place is not enough for a family of eight to make a bed (floor) to sleep, so only my brother and I trained two boys to take a mat and sleep under the tree outside the house. Then on a rainy night, my brothers sat on a stool in front of the house and leaned against the door. In this way, in the autumn, a triangular nunnery was cultivated in front of the house with straw from the team, and at night my brothers slept inside to avoid the cold. It was cold in winter, and my brother and I had to go to the nursery to spend the night in the grass hut where the forage was placed.
Two years later, in the summer of 1964, it was particularly rainy here. There was a wall collapse in the village. The captain was very worried that the old house where we lived would collapse, and after consulting with the branch secretary of the brigade, let us move to the idle oil mill house of the brigade. Although the oil mill house is dilapidated, the brick wall tile roof is relatively safe. However, it was two miles away from the village, and there were more than four miles away from the farmland of the production team, so we went to the team to do three jobs a day, go home to eat three meals, and run twice as many miles a day as the other members of the team
The team leaders and the neighbors of the village sympathized with us. In particular, the production captain Mu Liangong, who was in a anxious mood no worse than us, wanted to help us build some houses.
Just after the winter, the superiors sent us wooden sticks for disaster relief, and the whole brigade received a total of thirty trees, and Captain Mu asked the brigade branch secretary to ask for twenty-one trees for us. So my family first had enough sticks to build three grass houses.
At the opening spring committee of the following year, Captain Mu raised the issue of helping my family build a house. After studying, the team cadres decided that the team would support us with two thousand pounds of wheat straw to build a house, and decided that the team would work to pick up the earthen wall and roof for us. The walls were built with soil and foundation stones for us to solve ourselves.
At that time, the thirty yuan sent by my father every month was not enough to buy grain and eat. You can't afford to buy stones and pull soil. But my mother thought that the superiors and team cadres who built the house for us had already carried most of the platform, and she must not be passive. So I quickly asked my uncle to borrow thirty yuan to buy stones, and I asked my second uncle to run a few collars of forest sticky foil, and asked my neighbor Lao Yu to help push the soil.
The cousins Wang Yougang, Wang Youchang, Wang Youjun's cousin Wang Yi'an, and neighbors Sun Yuxiang and Tian Zhongxin, who helped pull the stones, were very enthusiastic and brought their own flat cars.
In 1965, after Mai, my family finally lived in a new grass house that belonged to their family after returning to their hometown.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, I returned to my hometown to participate in agricultural production after the school was closed.
A year later, the "movement" continued to flourish, with no signs of school reopening. I was twenty years old, and I was at the age to get married. Relatives and neighbors came to my house to introduce me to the object, but I did not say it in succession. The reason is that my family has not built a marriage house.
My mother was very unconvinced. "It's not the first two years, and it's not easy to build two new houses?" The children don't go to school anymore, they don't have to pay tuition fees, his father saves a year's salary, and the two marriage rooms are not built!"
"Dry! Pull the soil when you have time, first pull the soil enough, and next autumn you can build a new tile house and say a good daughter-in-law!" My mother said to me
I know that when my mother says tile house, I mean whether the roof is tiled, the walls are still earthy. Such earthen wall tile houses, look at the surface and grass house is only the difference between roof tiles and wheat straw. But when it comes to spending money, it is more than twice as much as the cost of a grass house. For example, tiles are many times higher than the money used for wheat straw.
My brother helped, and we insisted on going outside the village every night after dinner to pull up fifteen square meters of soil before going to sleep. Before the autumn, we had enough soil to use. I thought I saw the shadow of the house, but I didn't expect that my father's salary was unreliable. In December of that year, my father suddenly did not send his salary on time, nor did he send a letter. I wrote to send it, and my father replied with a postcard with only a dozen words written on it for us to work hard.
Three months later, in the spring of 1968, my mother sent my brother Xunping to walk to Yanggu to see, and half a month later my brother returned with heart-rending news, saying that his father had been criticized and injured by the "rebels" and was locked up in a hut with Principal Ren and Director Zhao for "quarantine and examination." Their salaries had already been withheld by them.
Since then, I have looked at the pile of yellow soil every day, and no one has mentioned building a house.
After the autumn, my family's new house was not built, and two families with no salary source in the team built two new houses. When she learned that the family had planted three points of raw land (Chinese medicinal materials) and sold five hundred yuan to build a house by keeping their own land, my mother was moved. It is said that next year we will also plant half an acre of raw land in the self-reserved field, which is more than two points than them, and sell more money to resolutely build our tile houses!
My mother was a tenacious person. I was not pessimistic and disappointed by my father's precarious situation. In the spring of 1969, when planting raw land, in order to plant the raw land well, my mother gritted her teeth and cooked the thirty pounds of soybeans that she kept to eat and put them in the field as fertilizer. I hope that after the autumn, I can sell more land and sell more money.
Before the autumn came to an end, my mother's dream came to naught: one afternoon after the wheat harvest, the brigade Revolutionary Committee began to "cut the tail of capitalism and crack down on capitalist ideas", and the militia battalion commander and the teachers and primary school students of the primary school pulled out all the seedlings of my family's own fields.
My mother was angry and annoyed and did not dare to say, and she calmly said to us: "Your father is not a counter-revolutionary!" The Communist Party is by no means to let the common people live without food, clothing, and housing!"
After the autumn of 1970, we finally expected a letter from our father and a remittance slip of 1,500 yuan! From the letter, I know that after the "Qing Team" father was liberated! I got back to work and paid back my salary! At the time, I was overjoyed.
In the spring of 1971, three new tile houses with glass doors and windows were built. Then I made a deal. The day before the autumn wedding, my father rushed home on the autumn break at school. Putting down his duffel bag, he was busy writing me a happy couplet, waving a pen on the big red paper and writing the four big words "The situation is very good", pasted on the center of my wedding door...
Ten years later, in the 1980s, the spring breeze of reform and opening up blew across the motherland. Like thousands of households in the rural areas of the country, after the implementation of the responsibility system of dividing the fields into households, my family not only produced enough grain to eat, but also sold a lot of surplus grain to the state. Under the guidance of the government at a higher level, the agricultural structure has been readjusted, and economic income has increased by a large margin year by year.
Together with the villagers, I planted several cash crops such as asparagus, yam (Chinese medicine), apples, etc., and the family also raised several pigs and a dozen goat sons to work idly out to work. When the big collective did not dare to dream of ten thousand yuan households, my family took the lead in realizing it in the village.
In the nineties, it was time to build a house for my son and get married. Neighbor Sun Jianzhong advised me that if I didn't have any money, I would build a building! You see that the rural economy is developing so fast, I don't believe you look at it in a few years, every family will have to rip off the bricks and tiles to build buildings!
Listening to Xiao Sun's words, it only took me ten days to build a two-story building with eight rooms on the bottom for my son.
There is money to do. It is easier to build a building than to build two grass houses in the past. To huashan set brick and tile market to contact a few cars brick and tile to deliver to the doorstep, two days to send it. Cement sand floor slabs, a phone call to send.
The small construction team in the village also has tamping machines, mixers, cranes and large machinery, and the construction speed of housing is now much faster.
I was satisfied with building a building for my son and marrying my daughter-in-law. But my son's family lived in the building I built for less than five years, and then they moved to the building he bought in the city. He also took me and my wife to the city to live in his house.