An unforgettable New Year's Eve
Before the Spring Festival in 1965, I was worried about the New Year's Day without money, and what I never dreamed of was that I received an eighteen-yuan remittance mailed from the provincial city, which made the whole family of five have a happy and happy Spring Festival.
In 1964, the rural people's communes launched a socialist 'four cleansing' education campaign. At that time, shortly after the Great Leap Forward in the countryside and the production of the large corps stopped, the agricultural production situation was in a period of low prosperity and the labor of the members was worthless. At that time, in cooperation with the rural social education and political movement, I wrote a rural story entitled "A Story Told by an Old Poor Peasant", which was sent to the "Commune Member's Newspaper" (now Sichuan Rural Daily) run by the "Sichuan Daily" in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The money I received this time was the newspaper's remittance of my eighteen yuan for the manuscript fee.
At that time, according to our production team at that time, when the year-end final accounts of a rural working day (ten divisions of labor) were calculated, it was equivalent to the remuneration I received for ninety working days, so why wasn't the whole family happy about it?
When I got this remittance slip, I first went to the brigade (that is, the current village) to stamp the official seal, and then went to the office of the people's commune to stamp the official seal of the certificate, and then went to the commune postal agency to retrieve the manuscript fee and go home, when I handed the money to my wife, she said to me happily: "It is almost the New Year, let's use the money you earned from writing articles to make new clothes for my grandmother and mother." I listened to my wife and thought to myself; my wife and I have been married for more than two years, and we have no money to add a new dress to the two old men. This time, I got so much money, so I sewed a set for each of the two old people. I agreed with my wife's idea and said, "If you want to make new clothes for the second elder, make one set for each." My wife smiled and nodded, agreeing with my idea.
The next day, just as the commune was rushing to the market, my wife and I took the cloth tickets of the whole family of five and the five pounds of meat tickets (1 kg per person) and two and a half pounds of sugar tickets (half a catty per person) issued by the government for the New Year, and went to the supply and marketing cooperative on the street, spending less than twelve yuan in total, and bought more than two hundred meters of the best blue card machine cloth at that time.
When I took the cloth home and handed it to my grandmother and mother, who were very good at needlework, the two old men burst into tears of joy and did not know what to say to me.
On the day of the New Year, the grandmother who was over eighty years old and the mother who was nearly sixty years old put on the set that was more than their figure, and the two old people cut together, stitched and sewn new clothes together, and the whole family gathered around a table, eating the Tuanyuan New Year meal, the two old people seemed to be more than ten years younger at once, and the happy and happy look, which has passed more than sixty years so far, often appears in my dreams and appears in front of my eyes.
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Editor-in-charge
Yang Zhiqiang
About author:Yu Yuxi, born in June 1936, aged 84, retired senior agronomist of the Agricultural and Rural Bureau of Chuanshan District, Suining City, Sichuan Province, member of the Suining City Beauty Association, cartoonist and literature lover in Sichuan Province.