Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
As my body grew, filling my stomach quickly became my greatest aspiration. In the early seventies, the "Three Years of Natural Disasters," which people spoke of with fear, had passed, and we were no longer in the "evil old society." However, the supply of goods was still quite scarce, and it was difficult for me to have enough to eat.
Our staple food was rice, but I was still growing. With the addition of a younger brother and sister, our family of four (excluding my grandparents who did not eat with us) relied solely on my mother. She worked at the Production Team, and aside from the basic rations, the millet from the Production Team was distributed based on work points. The basic rations were allocated according to age: adults received two hundred jin of grain per year, while children received less than one hundred jin. Our family's share of rice was minimal and could hardly satisfy the three growing mouths, let alone support my mother, who had to engage in heavy physical labor every day.
The staple food was far from sufficient, so we had to think of other solutions. My mother first considered sweet potatoes, which were the most popular supplementary food. Under the banner of the People's Commune, every rural household retained a very small piece of "private land." On this tiny plot, nearly all farmers would plant sweet potatoes.
sweet potato This thing is really easy to grow. As long as it has a place to take root, it can grow strong. It seems to be resistant to diseases and pests. If the soil is loose and fertile, it can grow very large, and a single plant can produce several. What's even more amazing is that sweet potato has a high yield. With a good harvest, a single plant can produce over ten pounds. If it were rice, you would only get a few dozen pounds from a small plot of land, and after milling, it might not even be twenty pounds. If hungry adults were to eat it, it would be gone in three to five days. Even if it were used to fill my little belly, it probably wouldn't last more than ten days or half a month. But if you plant sweet potato, you can harvest at least three to five hundred pounds. With some careful management, it can provide a relatively abundant winter for our family of four.
However, the children can't stand eating sweet potato every meal. In order to survive with the help of sweet potato, the mothers have come up with many ideas:
In a pot, place about ten sweet potatoes, and on top of them, use a small bowl to hold around two ounces of rice. While the sweet potatoes are cooking, steam a bowl of fragrant white rice. When it's time to eat, divide the rice into three smaller portions so that each of us three children can have one, along with one or two sweet potatoes. However, our mother can only nibble on the sweet potatoes herself. This method can only be used during the sweet potato harvest season when they are moist and slightly sweet.
After a large harvest of sweet potatoes, our mother often chops them into small pieces and dries them in the sun during the autumn. When winter comes and fresh produce is scarce, she washes a bowl of rice before cooking it. Once the rice starts boiling, she adds a bowl of the dried sweet potato bits. When the rice is done, it comes out as a colorful bowl of red and white rice that tempts our appetites.
When cooking or preparing pig feed, we can also choose two or three medium-sized sweet potatoes and bury them in the ashes beneath the firewood. The gentle warmth from the ashes slowly roasts the sweet potatoes, making them more fragrant and easier to eat than when boiled.
During the harvest season of sweet potatoes, my mother would occasionally select a few, peel off the skin, and slice them thinly. She would first drizzle a few drops of oil in the pan, add the sweet potato slices, and stir-fry for a while. Then she would add a large spoonful of water to cook them through. When serving, she would sprinkle some salt on top and add a few pieces of homegrown green onions and ginger to entice us with their color, aroma, and flavor.
When she had more free time, my mother would use tools like wooden buckets, sieves, and bowls to process the sweet potatoes through steps such as washing, crushing, filtering, bleaching, sun-drying, and soaking until they reached a tofu-like consistency. She would then stir-fry this mixture for us. This method took a lot of time and had a slight bitterness to it, but it was still better than boiled sweet potatoes.
Despite my mother's efforts, eating sweet potatoes seemed quite challenging for us; however, when I was hungry, I would often eye the easiest sweet potatoes to "steal" from the fields and eat them raw. After working outdoors for half a day, when my stomach was growling, I would rush over to any sweet potato field I spotted, regardless of whose it was or which production team it belonged to. I would dig one out from the hard soil with my hands and wipe it on the nearby weeds. Sometimes, when I was too hungry, I would directly bite into the sweet potato even if it still had quite a bit of dirt on it. At that moment, white sweet potatoes were my favorite; their flesh and skin were both white and much sweeter than the red or purple varieties. To me, they were truly sweet to the core.
Apart from sweet potatoes, there are many wild things to eat. In my search, I can find wild fruits, wild grass, wild stems, and wild leaves that are edible. Occasionally, I can also find one or two wild eggs, or a small, pitiful wild animal. Uncle Wan and the "stubborn old dog" from the neighboring Changtangchong Production Team once caught a wild goat when they were in primary school, and their teacher ended up having to deal with it.
Among the wild fruits, I eat "cat eyes" and "black bubbles" the most.
"Cat eyes" grow on a plant that climbs all over the mountains. They are relatively small, green when immature, and turn dark black or purplish when ripe. I usually choose the ripe ones to eat, but if I'm hungry and most of the "cat eyes" are not yet ripe, I will grab the just-formed ones and put them in my mouth.
The "Black Berries" grow on thorns, and they are not abundant. In the direction of the yard leading into the mountains, there is a family whose fence produces these wild fruits in abundance. Every summer, almost two children from the production team would squeeze in there to search for them. Day after day, even if we could only find two or three in a morning, it never felt like a wasted effort.
There are also two other types of berries that are plentiful but have a shorter season. One grows on the thornbushes by the fields, while the other grows on the thornbushes in the mountains. The adults call them "Field Berries" and "Mountain Leaf Berries." To catch them, my arms and feet were scratched countless times, and in the end, I developed a resilience that made me feel invulnerable.
These wild fruits often have juice that is red with a hint of purple. I always tossed them straight into my mouth as soon as I found them, so whenever I ran outside for a while, my face would be covered in juice. When I stuck out my tongue to check, it was definitely stained.
I also dream of finding fruits like peaches and plums to eat, but those trees have all been cultivated by the public, so they can't be considered "wild," and certainly not something one can just pick and eat. I heard that a child was beaten to death by adults for stealing oranges from a horticultural area near the county town, which made me keep my distance from other people's fruit trees.
Yet, I still long to have my own fruit tree. For a while, I would walk with my head down, hoping to discover a wild sapling by the roadside. I envisioned carefully protecting it and sending my younger brother and sister to fetch a hoe from home. We would gently dig up the entire sapling and bring it back to plant in our yard. Even in my sleep, I would smile at the thought—dreaming of it bearing sweet and crisp peaches and plums that would make everyone drool.
Comment 0 Comment Count