People, there are always some strange places, sometimes this strange person can't even find where he is. All my life experiences, the nameless grass by the roadside, the nameless rocks and buildings in Kobanawa will remain in my memory forever. Although I am getting older, this memory has become clearer.
Apart from mom's smiling face, the most unforgettable thing is the river in front of the door. The river winds through the front door from north to south in the distant Qinling Mountains.
In spring, the water is clear and transparent. When the little friend is thirsty, he drinks enough water with one hand. Summer is where we play water games or swim naked.
There are fish and crabs in the river. Catching fish and crabs is our happiest thing, and it is also the thing we do the most, and we don't need parents to arrange it. By catching fish and crabs, we can improve our lives.
Children with better family scenes will take fish and crabs home and let their mothers fry them with vegetables. Children who have no oil at home will gut fish and crabs, sprinkle salt on them, pick tung leaves from tung trees by the river, wrap them in the hot ashes of the fire hall and burn them for brothers and sisters to share.
When the water rises, branches float on the river, the Yellow River carries sand and stones, and the waves beat the riverbeds on both sides, making a frightening roar. Going to the river to see the water and the cows is our happiest thing, and it is also my mother's biggest worry. Whenever the river rises, many mothers who live by the river will come to the river with a long thin bamboo pole and yell loudly, driving all the children home like ducks to prevent them from falling into the river and being washed away by the water.
People born in my generation in the 1950s, although the country has been liberated, it is impossible for the old society to change greatly after leaving poverty for a while.
My childhood, to be exact, is the childhood of generations living on both sides of a river, that is, watching flowers in spring, listening to waves in summer and enjoying the bright moon in autumn, growing up and getting old slowly in this almost primitive environment.
This river witnessed the bitterness of the older generation, took away their childhood and their hair, but did not take away their poverty, helplessness and hunger all their lives, and did not take away their dream of walking out of the mountains and becoming a literate and literate person.
Although living in an era of great social change, the physical governance, backwardness and harsh natural environment of the old society doomed this generation to misery.
They have no culture, and their dream is to be a pillow and break through the ground in the cycle of sunset and sunrise.
Although the living environment of the homeless in the old society has changed, they are no longer afraid of being robbed by others, but they still live a hard life day after day in drafty huts everywhere. Their only big dream in the Spring and Autumn Period is to hope that their children and grandchildren can read in the future, go out of the mountain, go to the other side of the mountain and find another way of life different from their own.
two
In the early days of the People's Republic of China, in order to let more people bid farewell to illiteracy, the government set up night schools in various ways to teach farmers to read. Mountain people who have worked all day, regardless of fatigue, take an active part in night classes. Reading and literacy is their lifelong dream.
They want to learn to write their own names through evening classes and see what their names look like. This is the greatest wish of this generation.
In order to let school-age children go to school, the government set up a school in a village using temples and idle huts. If there is no desk, build an earthen desk. If there is a student's home, he must bring a board to school, set the table and let the students write on their bellies.
It is in this school that I learned to write people, hands, feet, mouth, ears and eyes. Memory: The beginning of life is good ... and one of the new three-character classics: New China, good boy, love learning and labor, learn from workers and peasants since childhood, join the army when you grow up, defend the motherland and serve the people.
Without a schoolbag, my mother cut a piece of cloth from the old clothes, folded it in half and sewed it with a needle and thread.
There are more than a dozen people in a class. Sitting in the first row in grade one, sitting in the second row in grade two, and the higher the grade, the last row.
A teacher gets three grades, the teacher is him, the principal is him and the parents are him.
There are more and more students, and simple school buildings can no longer adapt. The brigade called on the whole village to donate money and materials to build a new school.
Raising money to build a school is the most positive thing for parents and the happiest thing for students. Every family sends the best wood to school for their own house maintenance. In order to let students live in brick houses, bricklayers were specially invited from other places to burn bricks.
Children in the deep mountains are many times more difficult to learn than children in the city.
Get up early in the morning and walk a few miles over the mountains. After school, I am already hungry. I watched the path home and tried my best to go home. You can't stop on the road, try to get home before dark, and help your parents do housework as soon as possible.
Although the conditions are difficult, it has not affected our enthusiasm for learning at all. As we all know, we are the eldest son or daughter of our family, and our brothers and sisters have to go to school when they grow up to school age. Because of the lack of labor at home, you may lose the opportunity to continue your education because your parents have made a promise. If they don't study well, they go home to herd cattle, and whoever studies well will continue to go to school.
Brothers and sisters study hard and do housework in the dark. In order to study more, besides studying, I squeeze out more time to finish the farm work arranged by my parents in advance and make more time for school.
Parents' requirements are not high, except for one child who studies very well, the rest should strive to finish primary school. Primary school culture is the most literate person in their eyes.
Some of our classmates are very clever. In spring, they go to the mountains on Sunday to collect herbs, cut wild leeks and pick bamboo shoots to sell in the market. Another student learned to be a carpenter. He didn't study or made some small farm tools to sell in the market on rainy days, and bought new clothes, shoes and socks without his parents' money.
After the third grade, go to the commune to attend the fourth and fifth grades. Because it is far from home, everyone has to live on campus. The school only provides cooking stoves, and there is no full-time chef. Teachers' lives are also solved by themselves.
Firewood for cooking is always prepared at home, and you can pick up daily necessities when you go to school.
After school, the boys who live on campus go to the river to fetch water, and the girls wash rice and cook, eat dry rice or porridge. Everyone shows their hands and votes. Before going to school on Sunday, a fertilized egg must be eaten for a week.
At the end of primary school, many students dropped out of school, mostly girls. Most of the reasons for dropping out of school are that there are many brothers and sisters at home and they have graduated from primary school. At home, they are considered as people who have doubts about the university. They leave the opportunity to go to school to their brothers and sisters who have not yet gone to school and help their parents with farm work. The dream of going out of the mountains by going to school was shattered in the face of this cruel reality.
After graduating from primary school, students who continue to go to junior high school and high school will go to the district office.
There are 5 communes and 27 natural villages under the jurisdiction of the whole region, and each village has a brigade. 27 villages are located in the depths of the mountains, with a total area of more than 400 square kilometers. There is no road, no electricity, kerosene lamps for lighting, and only torches made of turpentine or bamboo poles are used for lighting in villages in remote mountainous areas.
The hardships of natural conditions and the unimaginable poverty left by modern people in the old society, the only hope for people in deep mountains to change their living and living environment is to learn knowledge and culture.
The school where we go to school ranks twelfth in the county, so it is called the twelfth middle school in our county. It is the reconstruction and expansion of an old school in the old society for the children of large families to go to school. Students in junior high school have to walk dozens of kilometers, and some students still live more than 20 kilometers away from school. It is conceivable that students have to face difficulties in going to school.
Every time we go to school, we go hand in hand, carrying food and vegetables for a week, putting on our sandals and walking along rugged mountain streams and narrow paths. Senior students naturally have to take care of junior pupils.
The main reason why girls drop out of school after finishing primary school is that the journey is too long.
Sometimes I occasionally meet a familiar face, with a delicate face, messy hair and a child on my back. She is our primary school classmate.
She called her son our uncle with tears in her eyes. The harsh environment shattered her dream of going out of the mountains to seek knowledge and being a wife and mother.
We can only hold her tender but cocoon-covered hand and accompany her to shed bitter and helpless tears.
When I was in high school, the school had a simple kitchen and no canteen. On weekends, the first thing students do when they arrive at school is to go to the logistics teacher's office to pay meals, pay 30 cents a week for meals, and compile tables according to the order of registration, regardless of grades.
Eight people make a table, and the rice basin says: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... Students remember their table numbers, and powerful students will take out a bowl of rice while eating and find a free place to share with the whole table. The teacher in charge of logistics is named Zhang Huiyuan. Although he has been dead for many years, I think these students will remember and miss him.
The firewood for cooking was cut by the students on the mountain named Huaqiaowan under the guidance of the class teacher.
There is no electricity and no self-study class at night. Students with a strong thirst for knowledge can use a dim kerosene lamp to read picture books, novels and extracurricular reading materials bought by the teacher at the second-hand book stall in the county.
Any classmate who has several comic books and novels will be sought after by the whole class, because his books contain a fresh world that everyone pursues and yearns for. Books are an ocean of knowledge, and we can explore many unknowns in their hearts in the ocean of knowledge woven by words and pictures.
People born in the fifties and sixties were the luckiest generation at that time. Fortunately, I was born in a new society. I have no exploitation in life and no oppression in politics. I have the conditions to study.
Although it is very simple, we have realized a literacy dream for our parents that has not been realized for generations! The most unfortunate thing is that we studied during the period of national unrest, and for a year or two, students didn't even have textbooks.
Chinese teachers give students some composition topics to teach them to write, and well-written composition teachers comment and praise them in class as model essays; The math teacher, under the muddy kerosene lamp, compiled a lesson plan for students to learn.
The saddest thing is that our generation has completely broken the dream of university, and universities have stopped enrolling students. Zhang Tiesheng, a rebellious student, has become a trendsetter of the times. Learning from agriculture and opening up schools became the school-running policy at that time.
We students, who didn't even have textbooks, climbed mountains and waded into schools from the depths of the mountains, then picked up hoes and went into the mountains to run farms, pharmacies and factories.
There is little land in the mountainous area itself. Where can the village team provide a good farm for the school? In order to complete the task, wheat was planted about one kilometer away from the school. When harvesting, wormwood is taller than wheat, so students have to look for wheat in wormwood.
School-run farms are really not suitable for schools in mountainous areas. The old headmaster risked being dismissed and asked his superiors for flexibility, and finally changed the farm into a self-built campus. Students from junior high school and senior high school in the whole school went to a place called Fengxiangyan ten kilometers away to carry wooden rafters, and lesbians went to a closer place called Yuexigou to learn how to carry bricks. The students are thirsty and the teachers are tired.
There is no money, no means of transportation, sand and gravel for building schools, and students carry them with schoolbags and shoulders. In this way, our two-year high school has completed the road to study.
The old headmaster bid farewell to our graduates with heavy voices and tears at the graduation ceremony. He knows that his class of seven or eight people is the most unfortunate.
The old headmaster's earnest words are still ringing in our ears:
"Diploma is not everything, only knowledge is everything, and gold will shine wherever it goes. The school doesn't have the knowledge that the professor gave you. After leaving school, you will study in social practice. I think you are the most ideal students. You started in adversity and graduated in adversity. I believe you will learn more knowledge and make a difference in a broad social school! Finally, I warn you not to blame society at any time. Society is a public platform for everyone's survival and development. Only by learning to integrate into society and working hard can we have a bright future. The social environment you live in today is very different from your parents and grandparents. In Fiona Fang, a mountain of several hundred square kilometers, you are already the most educated generation. You came from the mountains with your parents' dream of studying, and returned to the mountains with your parents' dream of studying. You are a child of Dashan. You should go step by step on the long road of life, walk out of a happy road and change the poverty and backwardness of your hometown. With my unremitting efforts, I wrote a brilliant life worthy of mountains and rivers ...! "
The most unforgettable thing is that the old class teacher called several students he liked to his office the night before we left school:
"When you leave school, it doesn't mean that you will never lose the opportunity to study again. At present, the phenomenon in education is very abnormal. I warn you, this must be a temporary phenomenon. It is only a matter of time before the country resumes the college entrance examination. You must not forget to teach yourself when you step into society. Many people have taught themselves through the ages. You should do two things well, one is to obey the law, and the other is to strengthen self-study. If you have any questions, come to my school, and my door will always be open for my students ... "
With the teacher's inculcation, we became attached to the school and the teacher, and with the high school diploma with the principal's signature and red seal in our arms, we returned to our respective homes in what bay, what beam and what ditch. ...
As long as there are students returning from graduation, the battalion chief and the production captain are very happy. They are happy that our primary school teachers don't have to go to other places, and they are happy that a bookkeeper and accountant of a production team have settled down.
In a blink of an eye, we are all nearly seventy years old, and most of the teachers who taught us knowledge have passed away, but their morality and their inculcation have benefited us for life! Many students have become private primary school teachers, shouldering the heavy responsibility of teaching and educating people.
They earn work points in remote mountainous areas, eat the food and vegetables carried by their own families, care about the smart and lively students who come out of the mountains although they are in rags, and send away a batch and usher in another crop. They have worked hard for more than ten years.
three
1983, the state issued a support policy for the old liberated areas, underdeveloped areas, border areas and poverty-stricken areas. The policy stipulates that a group of outstanding young people with high moral character should be recruited in rural areas to the grassroots organizations of the party and government for selection and key training. The nature is contract system, and you will be officially hired after three years of examination.
Top students who are favored by principals and teachers in schools are mostly selected to grass-roots organizations.
There is an old private school teacher named Yu, who teaches on a mountain called Fujiaping. Students have a long way to go to school. He took the initiative to shoulder the dual responsibilities of teachers and parents, and made a school uniform printed with the words "Fujiaping Primary School" with the income from work-study programs. Students get free accommodation at school. After being reported by the media, he was awarded the national "May 1 Labor" medal and received by the party and state leaders! Although this respected teacher has passed away for many years, we all miss him very much.
The sons and daughters of these mountains have come out of the small river in their hometown and have been highly recognized by their superiors with their life-long struggle and dedication. Some were rated as excellent teachers and educators. Some have been promoted to leading posts in the Party and government, and some have become rich leaders who drive one party to get rich first. What is even more proud is that some of them became generals in their military career of defending the country; (There is a detailed introduction in the book "The Military Strategist" by writer Ye Wen.) There are war heroes who lead the troops to defend the front line of Laoshan.
This hero is one of the outstanding children raised by Dashan. He was the political instructor of the 7th Company of the former Red Army Hammer Corps.
Whether the troops have combat effectiveness or not, and the high degree of unity of officers and men's thinking is the key to determining the outcome of the battle. As the chief political officer of the grass-roots company, his responsibility is more important than Mount Tai. How difficult is it to ensure victory and minimize casualties? It is a miracle that he and his comrades-in-arms fought side by side in the guard post for more than 90 days and actually achieved zero casualties.
There is a family named You in the mountains, who has raised seven men, three women and ten children, five of whom were sent to join the army.
After liberation, there were more than 100 soldiers who went out from the mountains to contribute their youth to national defense, and few of them were promoted because their culture could not meet the requirements of promoting cadres. Many of them were rewarded for their meritorious service.
After their glorious discharge from the army, they put the military medal at the bottom of the box, hid the honor given to them by the army in their hearts, carried shiny hoes ground by hand, put them into agricultural production, and ran around in various industries that made a fortune.
Deep in the mountains of the village, there lived a veteran named He, who had served in the 8O26 Army of the former Xinjiang Military Region and was awarded meritorious service in the army. After retiring from the army and returning to his hometown, he found 1600 yuan in cash and returned several hundred kilograms of food stamps to the owner of the pujia team of Shaanxi Railway Bureau. This cash can be regarded as a huge sum at that time. According to the wage income at that time, it is the total income of a person's five-year salary. It is commendable to find the money, and his deeds have been written into the county annals.
There was a veteran named Ren who worked outside all the year round and supported two college students with hard-working hands, one of whom was a graduate student. He is just a very ordinary person. The calluses on his hands and his dark face all show that he wrote his responsibilities and responsibilities with unyielding will and strong belief.
These people all went out from the unknown school of No.12 Middle School. They have been loyal to their duties all their lives, and no one has been punished for violating party discipline and state law. This is the pride of Dashan and his children.
What people can't forget is the old secretary who has worked in the mountainous area for nearly 20 years. His surname is Ye, and his pen name is Ye. He is a member of the Provincial Writers Association and vice chairman of the Citizens Association. After coming to work in the mountainous area, he was full of affection for the mountains and rivers there and the people in the mountainous area who lived in a difficult natural environment. He walked around all the natural villages in his jurisdiction with his tireless legs, and everyone else was moved. He is still rooted in that poor but hopeful land. He was deeply infected by the spirit of the mountain people who are not afraid of difficulties and actively move forward, and changed the backward face with their hard-working hands. The simplicity of the mountain people is one of the reasons why he doesn't want to leave. With his affectionate pen, he recorded the whole process of mountain people moving from poverty and backwardness to prosperity step by step.
After retirement, he still loves mountains. At the age of seventy, he visited some farmers who were still out of poverty when he left. Under the presbyopic glasses, he used tens of thousands of words to record the decades of hard development in mountainous areas, the beautiful and magical town of XX.
I'm going to give it to his beloved mountain people to encourage them to get rich regardless of difficulties. Because the cost of printing books is too high, I can't afford my retirement fee. I went to the local government for help, although I was warmly received, but there was no following!
Today, I wrote this essay with a little pen and ink, which can be regarded as a deep gratitude to the old secretary and old friends for their deep friendship with the people in Wanshan District.