The story to be told this time, I heard from the elders in the family for a long time, but I have never written it, because I don't know where to start.
The protagonist of the story is my great-grandmother, that is, my father's grandmother and my grandfather's mother. But not only had I never seen her, but even my father hadn't seen her—she had died too early and didn't seem to have left any photographs.
Due to the vague impression, it is usually difficult to find a suitable head or time node to tell her story. To this day, when discussing the hometown of female astronaut Wang Yaping with a friend, I suddenly remembered that my great-grandmother was not also from the Wang family of ZhangGezhuang in Fukuyama? Therefore, it was decided to use the place of origin as the starting point to tell the story.
Of course, this is not done to "climb the celebrity". Because, there is a phenomenon of "one generation of relatives, two representatives, and three generations" between in-laws, from my great-grandmother to me, it has gone through four generations, even if her mother's family has direct descendants, it is not called relatives. What's more, it is said that she has only sisters and no brothers. In other words, although Zhang Gezhuang's Wang surname may be her same lineage, the blood relationship is already quite distant.
My great-grandmother married my great-grandfather, around the year 256 of the Republic of China, based on the date of birth of my grandfather, their eldest son.
After passing through the door, the two had three sons. In the countryside of that era, having three sons was also a matter of pride. But with that comes not just pride, but also pressure.
Influenced by traditional ideas, great-grandparents began to prepare for the marriage of their three sons very early, to put it more bluntly, that is, they wanted to save three houses in advance - whether it was a tile house or a straw house, whether it was built or bought, in short, there must be three.
Similar to many of his contemporaries, his great-grandfather also traveled to kanto. It is said that because of tongwenmo, he worked as an accounting office in a pawnshop in Dalian for many years and saved a sum of savings. Unfortunately, due to various changes, this savings later almost disappeared.
By the mid-to-late 1950s, the pressure on the shoulders of great-grandparents had increased dramatically. On the one hand, life in that era was generally the other hand, the eldest and second sons were getting older, and it was imminent to start a family. At this time, there was only one ancestral house in the family. If the eldest son is arranged to get married in the ancestral house, where is the second son's new house?
"You must buy another house soon." At that time, the great-grandparents probably thought so.
But if you want to buy a house, you can't do it in a hurry, you also need to have money or something equivalent to money, such as food. Unfortunately, at that time, it was not easy to eat enough, so where was the excess grain to buy a house? As a result, they may have been looking for potentially suitable homes long ago, but they have been unable to put them into practice.
The roof leaked during the overnight rain. That year, a major typhoon hit the Jiaodong Peninsula (in fact, before the 1980s, typhoons often caused disasters in Jiaodong, and then gradually weakened the impact), and the cultivation and production of many villages was greatly affected, making it more difficult to eat a full meal.
In this case, many people who are already weak are easily sick, and the great-grandmother is bedridden. Illness is not a serious illness, but it needs to be recuperated. Of course, the premise of recuperation is to eat a full meal.
Be "blessed" by misfortune. The great-grandmother's family, after hearing that the daughter she married off was ill, behaved generously (which may be related to the fact that the great-grandmother had no brothers and did not have to buy a house at home), and sent a large bag of sorghum rice, which is said to be a hundred pounds.
A hundred catties of sorghum rice is not remarkable today, but at that time, it was obviously a great "wealth". It's big enough to buy a small grass house.
Perhaps when looking for a house before, great-grandparents inquired about the price of several houses. Therefore, after the great-grandmother got the grain given by her mother's family, she made such a decision with her great-grandfather: she would not eat it and buy a house immediately.
In this way, this hundred pounds of "emergency-saving" sorghum rice was replaced by a three-room grass house, and the second son's future new home was available.
However, the great-grandmother did not wait for the wedding of any of her sons. Due to a lack of nutrition (which may be the elegant expression of hunger), her illness dragged on for a long time and eventually died at the age of thirty-nine.
The story is not complicated, but I feel emotional every time I listen to it. I remember once when I was chatting with an old man in Laiyang Village, he once said such a sentence: "When you do something (referring to the marriage of your children), you will think about it." And this sentence may be the original intention of the great-grandmother. Alas, poor parents in the world. (Author: Ear Left Moon)