I can’t say for sure when my hometown, Nanyang, started using combine harvesters. I only remember a sad story. My childhood friend’s grandmother knelt in front of a combine harvester, begging the harvesters from afar to help harvest the few acres of wheat in her family. Her son was a village cadre before his death from a terminal illness, and from then on, she had to ask for help with everything she did.
Rushing to harvest is rushing for food, which is also rushing for life. If you haven’t experienced the famine of more than sixty years ago, you won’t agree with the elderly’s feelings for food. Seizing people’s land, destroying people’s crops, and stealing people’s food were once as corrupt as stealing people’s wives and digging up people’s ancestral graves for countless years. Because these will lead to the extinction of the family.
I find it hard to accept the logic of Tanghe County not allowing combine harvesters to get off the highway for several days in a row. There are many certificates and documents in the legend, but with the current rain, the window period for harvesting is only a few days. You cadres don’t have to worry about food and drink, but should the people’s wheat ears be left to sprout in the fields?
Sprouted wheat is not inedible, but it doesn’t fill you up. This afternoon, many of my friends shared their experiences of eating sprouted wheat on their WeChat Moments. Most of them are from Henan, and also from Shaanxi and Shanxi. Of course, I’ve eaten it too. It was in the 1990s, about two years. Now, thinking about the taste of sprouted wheat buns, my throat feels a little nauseous.
It’s a bit sweet, but with a musty taste. Even if the buns are steamed for a long time, they are still soft and sticky, sticking to the teeth and throat. This kind of flour can’t be used to make noodles either, it will rot when boiled in the pot.
But farmers still have to pay public grain, and the grain depot doesn’t accept this kind of wheat. In that year, you either had to hand in old wheat, or directly pay money to the town government. In the second year, you sell some good wheat to get money. This is also the reason why we only suffered a rain disaster for one year, but ate sprouted wheat for two years.
I wrote before that before I went to junior high school, I was basically not full in the spring. When the wheat was harvested, I could eat my fill. Although harvesting wheat was hard work, it was very energetic. Often before dawn, I was woken (beaten) by my mother, holding a sickle and walking to the wheat field a few miles away, and I kept cutting until noon. The scorching sun of more than 30 degrees Celsius outdoors is not terrible, the most uncomfortable thing is the back pain. You can’t stand, you can’t squat, you can only bend over and arch your back, embrace a large cluster of wheat awns, and then cut them down one by one. Sweat flowed continuously from your forehead into your eyes and mouth, the floating dust on the wheat stalks was flying all over the sky, and everyone’s face, body and nostrils were full of black ash.
The first time I felt despair in my life was in the wheat field. A skinny boy of about ten years old, after being extremely tired, hot and dirty, stood up straight, but the wheat waves in front of him still couldn’t see the end, and his parents were still urging or even scolding. That’s called despair.
Having to endure hardship is probably the most common kind of despair in the world. After being in despair for a long time, people are bound to submit. At that time, when harvesting wheat, my father, who was about forty years old, joked several times that if he could invite Sun Wukong to conjure up a hundred little monkeys to help us quickly finish harvesting this piece of land, how great would that be? – He didn’t even dare to think about letting the Great Sage conjure up a few banknotes for him.
My father almost starved to death when he was six or seven years old. In order to share some food with him and other children, my great-grandfather, my grandmother’s father and grandfather, all starved to death. You won’t know their names, and if I don’t specifically ask, I won’t know. In history, they don’t deserve a character’s position.
A few days ago, the wheat harvesters and Nanyang farmers, who were separated by the inspection station, were anxious and desperate under the tumbling dark clouds, and they had nowhere to turn for help. They must have been very desperate, but they really don’t deserve to have names. – Next, which person with a name, a surname, and an ID number will have to tighten their belts next spring, we will never know.
We will only be told that the people are all full. It’s just that some officials, they eat too much and make trouble. They really don’t deserve their ancestors to save on food and clothing to raise them.
(My father just told me on the phone that my family has more than ten acres of wheat, and it has also rotted in the field)
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