According to my father's recollections before his death, the Nie family in Liudian Village, Fugou County, Henan Province, in the period after the Republic of China, could be regarded as a well-off family: some fields, and a workshop for boiling alkali salt.
The change in the family's fate began with two accidents. First, the grandfather was kidnapped by the bandits, and in order to redeem the grandfather, the family sold most of the fields. Since then, the family road has begun to decline.
The disaster was not alone, and then something happened that made the family completely impoverished.
It is said that my grandfather Nie Wenliang, when he was young, sold livestock to a certain place in the north and dreamed of getting rich. Unexpectedly, it wasn't long before he returned empty-handed and cried in front of his old father. The cattle he sold, now I can't remember whether they were robbed by bandits halfway or cheated, but the result was the same anyway: the business was lost.
The old lady saw that the matter had reached this point, and did not blame her son too much, so she had to resign herself to fate. Since this incident, the family has been in a state of collapse. The old lady of Xuekong was born in Xiucai, and was forced by her livelihood to open a private school to support her family.
As the old saying goes, good fortune depends on each other, and it makes a lot of sense.
At that time, the two flying disasters plunged the family into poverty, which was indeed a disaster at the time. After liberation, according to the degree of poverty of our family, our family must be poor peasants. Judging from the important impact of family composition on individuals after liberation, these two disasters have become a blessing for future generations: if it were not for the poor peasant component, my father would not have been able to enter the Fugou County Party Committee as a correspondent just after liberation; my uncle would not have been able to go to Korea as a soldier in 1958.
My father's aunt works for a neighborhood committee in Beijing's Fengtai District. In WG, people suspect that she is not from a good background and will not let her do it: who has the daughter of a poor family who is literate? Just by virtue of this article, it means that your family must be a landlord's family.
Coincidentally, my father went to Beijing to do foreign transfers, and stopped by to see his aunt. After the meeting, the old man asked: Did you bring a letter of introduction? Let me take a look. Puzzled, the father took out a letter of introduction in doubt. The letter of introduction said that my father was a member of the Communist Party of China. The old man read the introduction letter, raised his eyebrows in joy, and said: This is good. I used it and took it to the neighborhood committee for people to see. My nephew is a member of the Communist Party, how can I be a landlord?
So, the old lady took her father's letter of introduction and went to the leader of the neighborhood committee to theorize. After reading the introduction letter, the people did not want to say anything more, so they had to agree that the old lady would return to the neighborhood committee to continue working.
Grandpa was a farmer all his life, raising livestock, or melon handles. Probably when I was in elementary school, I returned to my hometown during a winter vacation, and I saw my grandfather, and his wrinkles on his face blossomed. He quietly stuffed something into my hand, because it was late afternoon and he couldn't see what it was. He said, eat it, the more you chew, the more fragrant it is. I took a bite and chewed a few times and it was really yummy. It turned out to be a piece of peanut cake.
Suddenly, Grandpa has been away from us for almost 40 years...