The cold and warm life of an old man in the countryside

Xu, born in Xutun Village, Tongxu County, Henan Province, 1937. He has a high academic background, swam the waves, served as a soldier, mentioned work, loved love, worked as a farmer and experienced difficulties and hardships. Finally, I can spend my old age comfortably. At the age of eighty-three, I wrote a composition and reviewed my bumpy and legendary life.

Wandering, surviving, joining the army, farming

Marriage, children, neighborhood, future

For more than 80 years, great history has been magnificent.

This is the life memory of ordinary rural elderly in the great history.

Plain words make readers feel the real warmth and coldness.

Vivid details move us and make us think.

1937 February, I was born in a small village in the eastern Henan plain. Although my parents are both farmers, they have no land. They really have no house or land. My father does some small business and has some meager income, but he can't support his family. My mother goes out to beg from time to time.

This year, the Japanese invaders trampled on the land of China, and my hometown became an occupied area. Japanese invaders burned and looted everywhere, traitors and lackeys ate people, and local tyrants and evil gentry ran rampant in the countryside. In order to prevent the Japanese army from going south, the Kuomintang burst its banks in the Yellow River, and my hometown is in the Yellow River area.

The war continues, the river overflows, the poor live in dire straits and die, while the living are hungry, scared and hiding in Tibet. My family is poor, eating chaff and living a hard life. However, when the Japanese came, the days of bran bark to satisfy hunger could not be calm.

194 1 year, my hometown was completely occupied by the Japanese invaders. The maintenance society, the home returning group, the township head and Chang Bao all became traitors. Then, the land of the Central Plains suffered from natural disasters, and the grain in the land was not harvested, and it was hungry and cold, and it was full of sorrow.

In order to escape the war and gain a chance, the people of the Central Plains began to flee, going west to Xi 'an, Lanzhou and Xinjiang along the Longhai Line, and east to Anhui and Jiangsu ... Today, there are still many Henan people living in these places. They are tenacious with their hardworking hands and fighting spirit, and they are thriving in different places.

According to the county annals of our county, 1942, more than 3,000 people died of hunger and cold in the county,164,000 people fled to other places, more than 9,500 people sold their children and women, and many families were destroyed. It can be said that relatives have no worries, and the living compete for food!

This year, I just turned five. A 5-year-old child is innocent and snuggles up to his parents. A 5-year-old child may not remember everything that happened around him at all. Maybe he just has a little memory and some vague impressions of the people around him. And in my mind, I often see pictures deeply engraved when I was five years old. ...

A skinny child is hungry, lying under the wall, crying when he is hungry, sleeping when he is tired of crying, waking up when he is hungry, crying, sleeping, etc., watching the door eagerly, expecting his father and brother to come back and feed him.

In this way, in the cold, I am hungry, asleep, waiting and expecting every day. I wonder how many days have passed. It was the twelfth lunar month of 194 1. In fact, I was less than 5 years old.

Later I learned that my mother had fled abroad with her adopted orphan daughter (my brother's child bride) and her sister with the villagers. My father, my brother and I stayed because in my hometown under the rule of the Japanese aggressors, men were not allowed to go out freely, and they had to hold a "good citizen's card" to go out, otherwise they would be arrested, put into prison and even executed by the Japanese aggressors, traitors and puppet troops.

I don't know how this "good citizen's card" came from, only that it is very difficult and takes a long time. In order to escape from other places, in cold weather, my father and brother got up, burned a little boiled peanut cake, woke me up and gave me a small bowl of soaked peanut cake. After eating, my father said to me, "Go and play in the yard until I come back." Then he locked the door and left with his brother. This house is actually a straw shed with earth walls, and our family lives in it.

This small bowl of soaked peanut cake is a life-saving food for a day. Wearing my father's torn cotton-padded jacket, I curled up under the wall of the yard, hungry and cold. Facing the empty yard, my heart is full of fear. With the attack of hunger, I am helpless and have to cry for it. It is a child's only weapon and talk to the world, but even though I cried myself hoarse, no one cares and resigned myself to fate. I am looking forward to my father and brother coming back in hunger and cold, but I don't know when he will come back. When I woke up, it was already the fifth watch of the next day, and I began to repeat the suffering of the previous day.

Probably tired from crying and hungry, I was carried into the house by my father and brother who came home late in the state of half sleeping and half waking. So one day, two days ... I don't know how many days have passed. In the memory of a 5-year-old child, such days seem endless ... Later, I learned that for more than a month, a child under the age of 5 only ate a little peanut cake every day. Not a miracle of life, but my desire to live!

Finally, one day, my father and brother stopped going out. They got a "good citizen card". Just after the Spring Festival, about the third day of the first month, my father and brother simply packed up their luggage-a broken quilt, a few rags, shouldering heavy burdens, and took me away from the land where my ancestors lived, leaving my hometown, and looking for a way to make a living along the escape route of my mother and sister.

I have no clothes, and I still only wear my father's torn cotton-padded jacket, wrapping my whole thin body inside and stumbling behind my father and brother. Cotton-padded jacket mopped the floor, accidentally stepped on his foot and fell down. He quickly got up and chased his father and brother.

Just walk, run, fall and climb, as if there is no end.

But I know very little. I can't slack off. I must keep up with my father. I'm afraid my father will abandon me. After walking all day, I stopped at a place called Xinglong Ji. I finally breathed a sigh of relief and then fainted to the ground, unconscious. A child less than 5 years old, following the footsteps of adults all day, did not drop a drop of water, what kind of vitality is this!

My father woke me up at dawn the next day. I only remember that my legs were sore, I was weak and my stomach was unbearable, but I didn't remember what my father made me eat, so I hurried on. A pair of short legs, a broken cotton-padded jacket, hungry, stumbling, but following in the footsteps of his father, who is the child's god!

Walking and walking, I finally arrived at the railway station.

The railway station was crowded with people fleeing from the desert. The waiting room, the platform and the open space outside the station are crowded with ragged men, women and children. There is no room to move, or even waste. Children cry, old people sigh, sad and terrible.

Trains come into the station from time to time, but normal buses do not allow refugees to get on, and there are trucks dedicated to transporting refugees. A coal truck came, and as soon as it stopped, refugees poured in, making it impossible to stand.

My father, who is over 50 years old, carries the burden in one hand and pulls me into the car in the other, but he can only squeeze into the car with the crowd. At this time, a young man around me saw that it was really difficult for my father and son to get on the bus, so he grabbed me with both hands and threw it into the car. I was immediately stepped on by the man who rushed into the carriage. When my father finally squeezed in, he pulled me up from people's feet and said to himself, "Not dead, not dead!" " I endured the pain, but I was rational and didn't cry.

There are so many people on the train that I can't move or even breathe. I was crowded by the crowd and fell asleep slowly. Maybe I passed out. Anyway, I have no memory of the experience on the train. I'm just glad I don't have to run anymore. My sore leg can have a rest. When I woke up, my father dragged me out of the car. The destination of this train is Xuzhou station, but our destination hasn't arrived yet, so we have to wait for the southbound train to climb again.

Xuzhou station is also crowded with refugees fleeing from the desert, waiting helplessly for empty cars going south. I don't remember how long we waited in Xuzhou, nor when we got on the truck, how we got on the truck and when we got off the truck. I only remember that when I got out of the station, I started running endlessly again, running during the day and sleeping on the side of the road at night.

Finally, I found my mother. No matter how bitter, no matter how tired, no matter how cold, as long as the family gets together, it is a kind of happiness. The moment I saw my mother, the family cried and finally got together, but the orphan girl adopted by my sister and parents (that is, my brother's child bride) was cheated and sold. How did my mother, an illiterate rural woman, live alone with her two daughters who were far away from home during the war? How to protect children? Maybe being cheated and sold can find a way out for the children. In that precarious age, what can parents do except cry?

Although the family is reunited, life is not guaranteed, except begging. However, there are too many beggars for local residents to give alms. Many times, they can't get food. At that time, on the second day of the second lunar month, there were no leaves on the trees and no weeds in the fields. The hungry people had no way to satisfy their hunger, so they had to dig up the roots of weeds. Hungry people have dug up all the places where weeds grow in the wild, and gradually the roots of weeds can't be eaten by roadside ditches, river banks and puddles!

The whole family was trapped in a local family's car house because of hunger. Father sighed, and mother cried all day, starving to death in a foreign land. ...