This article is transferred from: New History
Summary:
In the famine, the ethical order that our ancestors adhered to no longer existed. Long-term hunger has starved the impact of thousands of years of education on people, starved people's humanity, only animal nature remains, and only half of animal nature is left - appetite, all I want is to eat, and I eat to live. To eat is to eat by yourself, and to live is to live by yourself. Eating is everything, and living is the only purpose. The other half of the animal, lust, has been exhausted by hunger. Husbands and wives no longer sleep together, and there will be no ugly things that violate morals and customs. In those years, no woman was pregnant, and no one married a daughter-in-law or a daughter-in-law. Hunger makes everyone extremely selfish. Death by starvation is a big deal, and nothing else can be cared about.
This article is transferred from Zhou Tongbin's "Classical Wilderness"
1
The taste of hunger is unforgettable and unforgettable.
Forty years ago, after graduating from high school, I was admitted to a junior college. The school is located in Wollongong, Nanyang, with a quiet environment and suitable for studying. In the first semester, I was still able to concentrate on class and listened to the teacher's talk about "Lisao" emotionally. The next year, the meals began to be quantitative, the amount was very small, and the stomach was hungry all day long, and no matter Li Bai, Du Fu, Han Yu, and Liu Zongyuan, they couldn't draw their attention from their stomachs to the books. I always think about eating. Eat and look forward to the next meal. I always have a fever in my stomach, it's really hungry, it's always grunting, it's really hungry, I want to eat it regardless of whether it's good or bad, it's really hungry. The days are long, the nights are longer, every minute and every second is sad, and when I see the word "bun" in the book, I am also salivating. Reading "Dream of Red Mansions" and reading the section "Shi Taijun's Two Banquets in the Grand View Garden", I really want to replace Grandma Liu and eat all the delicacies and delicacies. In my dreams, I always get food, and I wake up before I can eat it. Publish a small poem in the local tabloid, get a two-yuan manuscript fee, and immediately go to the black market to buy a pound of hot sweet potatoes, one large and one small. I wanted to enjoy it slowly, but I quickly finished it. Sweet potatoes under the belly, like two small pebbles falling into the deep pool, disappear in an instant, not only not full, but even more hungry, as if there are dozens of catties of sweet potatoes can not fill the empty stomach......
Prolonged starvation creates a stubborn hunger consciousness. Eating is not only a physical need, but also a psychological need, even if the stomach is bulging, there is still a feeling of hunger, and you still want to eat. Hunger eroded people's ideals, and the highest ambition at that time was to have a salary after graduation and go to the black market to eat hot sweet potatoes once. Hunger erodes human dignity, and at that time he conspired with a good classmate to sneak into an orchard to steal peaches at dusk, and was discovered by the garden keeper, who scolded us as thieves, and failed to succeed, and shed a lot of saliva. Hunger turns people into villains, and hunger sweeps people away.
At that time, my fathers and fellow villagers were also starving. My hunger is nothing compared to them. After all, I get a small bun and a bowl of non-thick mush for each meal. They, ah, are struggling to die.
2
The home is the most basic unit of rural society. Cooking at home has been like this since ancient times. If there is a pot and a stove, it is home, and if it is stirred in a pot, it is a family. The wisps of cooking smoke in the courtyard of the farmhouse paint the tranquility and peace of rural life into an eternal landscape, which is very classical and poetic. Regardless of whether the rice is good or the rice porridge is thick, each person takes a bowl, eats slowly, and says some plain words while eating, so that they can eat out of warmth, comfort, long taste, and harmonious family affection.
Suddenly, one day, families stopped cooking and couldn't cook. There was no rice and flour in the house, and even the baskets and pots for grain had been collected. There were no iron pots, and the iron pots were gathered, broken, and thrown into the furnace, and at the same time the iron rice spoon, the iron spatula, the iron teeth in the hearth, and the iron scales, and the ruthenium, and the iron ingots for spinning cotton thread, and the iron pegs nailed to the ground to tie sheep. The steel-making furnace made of adobe and yellow mud burned down the big and small trees in the village, and the cabinets, tables, chairs, benches and wooden piers in the house. There are only four walls left in the house. The houses of the whole village have also become public property, and the village cadres will live wherever they say. I often change my residence, everywhere is home, everywhere is not home. Except for clothes and jobs, there are no selfish things. A large canteen was set up in the village. The canteen occupies the only tiled house in the village. It was originally the only rich family's property in the village, and it was given to two poor peasant families during the land reform. By this time, the two poor peasant families had taken up residence elsewhere. There was a pot stove in the tiled house. The cauldron was five feet in diameter, and the pot was built five feet high with green bricks and white ash upwards. The tool for stirring the pot was originally a jujube stick tied horizontally between two trees to tie an ox. The tool for stir-frying was originally a long-handled shovel used to shovel soil and manure. The chimney grinding disc is thick, arching out from the half-slope of the house, stretching high over the roof, the smoke is black and thick, jumping straight up, smoking a large piece of the sky, often carrying sparks, as if it can burn the white clouds. At the door of the canteen, half an iron wheel was hung, and when the bell struck, the whole village gathered and crowded a large area in a chaotic manner. Wooden scoops rice, shovels divide vegetables, nest heads and sweet potatoes are piled up in wicker baskets, and they can be eaten casually. So many people are standing or squatting, or sitting on the spot, forming an unprecedented big dinner field, drinking porridge and snoring, drinking thick rice and snoring, can only eat lively, can not eat warmth, can only make the stomach full, absolutely can not taste the taste. Only on rainy days is it allowed to bring the food home, and the home is just a place where adults lead the children to sleep, even if the family sits together to eat, it is difficult to eat a comfortable family taste from the big pot of rice.
In those days, it was said that it had entered communism, and the sign was that there was no money for food. Meals that don't cost money, but they taste so awkward.
3
The whole village can eat on their stomachs, and after eating for a short time, each person can only get one nest head per meal, and it is getting smaller and smaller, until it is as small as a donkey's dung egg. Later, the small nest head was gone. The porridge can be drunk as much as you like, but it gets thinner and thinner, until you boil a basket of elm leaves in a pot of water. The consommé is unlimited, and even an old woman can drink five or six bowls. The big-bellied man stayed, and at most he drank twelve bowls in a row, and his stomach protruded, like a pot buttoned, and he urinated a few times, and he was deflated. Later, the amount of clear soup and little water was also limited, because it took strength to carry water, and the person who carried water no longer had so much strength.
A famine is spreading in the countryside.
During the Spring Festival that year, each person was given 20 dumplings and one bun. The dumplings are made with soybean flour and cornmeal mixed with the crust, and the sweet potato leaves swept back from the field are filled; Immediately after that, there was a shortage of food; in fact, there was still too little, not enough for the village cadres to eat. So, the villagers ate chaff, elm bark, and spoiled sweet potatoes left in the fields. In March, when the plants and trees sprout, they eat wild vegetables and leaves. I have eaten all the things that have been eaten in the famine years in history. I used to eat it and boiled it in a small pot. Nowadays, it is a big pot to boil soup, and the big pot is too big, and no matter how much bran vegetables are thrown in, it will not be thick. I also ate things that I hadn't eaten in history. For example, dried sweet potato seedlings, corn stalks, and wheat straw are all crushed, and the powdery thing under the sieve is named "starch", which can be put into a pot and steamed into hedgehog-like dumplings. The dumplings were the best food at that time, sweet to chew, very delicious, but difficult to digest, and the human stomach is not the stomach of a cow and a donkey after all.
Families cook their own wild vegetables. If there is no pot, use a basin, an iron box, or a clay pot instead. Ma Erye couldn't find anything else, so he boiled it in a commode. Leave the second grandmother to believe in the Buddha, hide a bronze half-foot high Buddha statue, the Buddha statue is hollow, hungry, it is hung upside down as a pot, while cooking while saying "sin, sin". Cadres have sharp eyes, and during the day, they see smoke coming from someone's house, and at night, when they see someone's house having fire, they will go to smash the cooking utensils, and they will drag them to the mass meeting to criticize and fight. Cadres are also villagers. The villagers don't care about the villagers, they don't think about the ancestors of the family, they don't think about living in the same village for decades, and they don't have four fingers close. Seeing the villagers starving, I didn't sympathize at all.
In the famine, people's hearts are harder than iron, and human feelings are thinner than paper.
Everybody learned to steal. Of course, it is to steal the collective, and there is nothing for private individuals to steal. One is stealing pea seedlings. Pea seedlings are more delicious than spiny horn sprouts, maoni cabbage, and neem seeds. It is stolen from the moment of emergence, and it is stolen until flowering and pod-setting. And then there's stealing sweet potatoes. There is a cellar of sweet potatoes, which was originally intended to be planted and raised after spring. Everybody went to steal. The cadres sent people to guard them, and the guards also stole them. The cadres personally guarded it, and the cadres also stole it. The four dogs went to steal, and as soon as they pulled out three fingers as thick, the cadres found out and beat him while pulling him to the brigade headquarters. He didn't drop the food in his hand, and as he walked, he filled his mouth with sweet potatoes covered with dirt. When I walked to the brigade headquarters, I had eaten it all up. The cadres said that the men, women and children of the whole village were shameless. In fact, he is shameless, not only shameless, but also conscience.
In the famine, morality and dignity no longer matter.
The fifth master is an old straight bar and never touches the light of the collective. He has been the head of the breeding team. The five cows he raised were all fat, and at the livestock appraisal meeting of the whole commune, all five cows had red colored silk wrapped around their heads. He distributes cattle feed to other breeders every day and pours it directly into the feed water tank to prevent it from being eaten by his family. Later, he himself put the cattle feed in his pocket