Original text:

When I was a child, there was always not enough food at home, so there were many stories about food.

At that time, the most important day of each month was the day when rations were distributed. The production team leader shouted from the ridge at the head of the village, and people from each family gathered in the old ancestral hall, carrying baskets of grain, waiting to pick up their own grain. The rations are calculated according to each family's work points. If the family has more strong laborers, the work points will naturally be more. After picking up one load, you can pick up another load, making other families jealous.

My uncle’s family has four boys, and his daughters basically work full time, so they always get the big share of the food. Of course, there are also misfortunes. For example, my fourth uncle's family across the mountain is very pitiful. When it is time to distribute rations, my fourth aunt always goes to the old ancestral hall with hope, but always returns empty-handed, because my fourth uncle is fooling around in other places. The children are young, and the work points are not enough to meet the basic level, so she does not get a share of the rations.

When it got dark, the fourth aunt would move a wooden ladder up to the wall of her house and cry bitterly while calling her husband's name. She cried so hard that the smoke from every house in the village could not be lifted. A woman who has a bad temper will inevitably have to go to the ladder to persuade her. I don’t know who came up with the idea, saying that as long as the patrons cry and call like this every day, the men will become flustered outside and have to go back to their hometown.

As a result, the fourth aunt's voice was certainly suffering a lot, and the men, women, and children in the village were also quite miserable for a while. I even hid far away from the fourth aunt's house every night. Place to go. Later, when the fourth aunt got tired of crying and the fourth uncle didn't come back, and there wasn't even an extra ration of food, the fourth aunt stopped talking and beat the child at home to vent her anger.

Later, the fourth uncle came back gloriously, bringing back a set of hard qigong, capable of breaking bricks and stones. It is said that he even got through the big and small Zhoutian, and his children immediately forgot about it. After feeling hungry, he became proud.

The first time I heard the words preserved egg and cake was from the children of my fourth uncle’s family. Because the fourth uncle has traveled far and wide, there is no doubt that he is well-informed, so it is logical that his children have eaten cakes, although my friends and I are sometimes a little disdainful.

I still remember when his children talked about preserved eggs, it was on a winter morning, under the low ridge of his house, when the sun was a little rose-red, there was no warmth but it felt very warm. When we were kicking pebbles and showing off the most delicious food we had ever eaten in a hungry state, the eldest son of our fourth uncle mentioned preserved eggs. His high-spirited look made our souls spread the wings of our imagination.

At that time, I had a serious confusion in my heart: Eggs made of skin should be very hard, how can they be delicious? However, I didn't have the nerve to ask at that time because I was afraid that my fourth uncle's well-informed son would laugh at me. However, I do remember that morning. What I cannot forget is the rose-colored sunshine in the winter morning.

My father was a teacher in a middle school at that time, and the three main workers in the family were all women, so the work points were always very low. My mother said that dozens of dollars of basic food were always deducted from my family. Jin, so being hungry is a common thing.

Once, the food shortage at home was so severe that my father went to the street and bought a load of rotten sweet potatoes. He cooked them for us to eat without even scraping the skins off. It is said that the children in our family eat very well.

Among the worse foods, I have also eaten rice cooked with yellowed rice. There is plenty of rain in the south, and it often rains during the harvest season. Sometimes, a large piece of rice is cut down by the hot young laborers, and God starts raining. The rice loses its transparent luster in the muddy water, and sometimes even sprouted.

The rice cooked by retting rice is extremely unpalatable. I don’t know exactly how unpalatable it is. I only know that adults always denounce retting rice and regard it as the source of all evil. One year, the captain probably made a mistake and planted too much glutinous rice. Unfortunately, the glutinous rice was soaked by the rain and turned into retting glutinous rice. Now everyone in the village suffered.

That year, my stomach and intestines never seemed to be refreshed. I thought the whole world was so slimy and dull.

Of course, poor and lower-middle peasants also have their own delicacies. Because rice is always in short supply, my mother always adds sweet potatoes and other things to the rice. Peel the sweet potatoes, cut them into pieces, and put them together with the rice. When the rice is steamed, the sweet potatoes will become golden. I like eating sweet potatoes very much, and I don’t look down on them at all because they are whole grains.

Sweet potatoes are also very good when eaten raw. They are very crisp. The red-fleshed sweet potatoes are particularly sweet and are called pumpkin sweet potatoes. We little thieves who are used to stealing sweet potatoes can tell the shape of the seedlings at a glance. I recognized the pumpkin sweet potato. Once, another friend and I were chased all over the river beach by the adults in our family because we stole someone else's pumpkin sweet potatoes. Another good thing about sweet potatoes is that they can make sugar.

Chop the sweet potatoes, cook them with rice, and add malt, then use a bean bag cloth to filter out a large pot full of juice, and keep boiling and boiling until the juice dries up and becomes sticky. The syrup will come out. Most of the time when we were making sweets, we kids would circle around the big pot just to lick the deliciously sweet spatula.

Sweet potato candy is just as good. After boiling, put it in a clay bowl and put it on the upper shelf of the cupboard. Sometimes when I get greedy, I will secretly pick some up with chopsticks and put it in my mouth to taste it carefully.

When New Year's Eve is approaching, my mother will soak the bowl containing sweet potato candy in warm water to make the syrup become softer, then fry a lot of soaked rice and use the syrup to stick the soaked rice. Use the back of a knife to pat it into squares and carefully cut it into pieces. That's the best rice krispie treats. What if it is crumpled into a ball? That's sugar cake. You can hold it in your hand and eat it while having fun by the mountains and rivers.

There is also something special about making soaked rice. It seems that on a sunny day, the rice is half-cooked and placed on a large bamboo strip dustpan to be exposed in the sun until it becomes dry. Even though the dried rice is very hard, it is very crunchy after frying.

Another thing that makes me drool just thinking about it is pumpkin boiled glutinous rice balls. It's probably the beginning of September. The mung beans are ripe, the pumpkins have been stored in the house for a few days, and the slender glutinous rice is waiting impatiently in the jar. This season is the time to take supplements.

Knead the glutinous rice balls into glutinous rice flour and cook them together with the cut pumpkin pieces, mung beans and oily noodles. You can see the golden pumpkin pieces and the white glutinous rice balls dancing in the boiling water, giving rise to a kind of A wonderful taste that cannot be described in words.

At this time, my mother would always fill a big bowl for everyone, without any restrictions like usual meals. The piping hot pumpkin glutinous rice balls are sweet and salty, glutinous and refreshing, warming and relieving. It is truly an unforgettable childhood meal.

When the new wheat is ripe, every family will steam buns once. Southerners don't know how to make pasta, so steaming steamed buns once in a while is like celebrating a special occasion. It should be around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival, when the smell of new noodles wafts through the village, it will make us excited for a while. One year during the Dragon Boat Festival, I remember that my sisters and I went fishing in the river and had quite a harvest, so there was a delicious dish on the table at home that day.

At that time, the commune had to hold "exchanges" once or twice a year, which was actually a large gathering. One of them was on the day when new wheat was born. During the "exchanges", farmers could buy Some daily necessities that are not easily available. One year during the exchange, we hired a chef from nowhere who knew how to fry fried dough sticks. The fried dough sticks he fried could bring the elderly back to life after eating them - a bit exaggerated, right?

But I still remember how crazy people were when they bought youtiao. It is not an exaggeration to say that people are stepping on people. Everyone rushed like crazy towards the iron fence that smelled of fried dough sticks. I can't describe the scene.

The most extravagant time to eat is probably during the Chinese New Year, but I really don’t have much of an appetite during the Chinese New Year, so I might as well not mention it. Shortly before the Chinese New Year, the family's big fat pig was sold to the supply and marketing cooperative. As usual, the parents left the pig's waste and oil to their children and the elderly. A big pot full of pig intestines, lungs, liver, etc., steaming, I think it is a symbol of the so-called good life.

No matter what others may think, when I think back to this scene, I feel that all the illusions of life can be fully explained in this image. No matter how many times you have been hungry, how many tears you have shed, or how many times you have been beaten for stealing food, as long as this image is still there, as long as there is still a big steaming iron pot, you should not be disappointed in life.

Perhaps because of food shortages, theft occurs from time to time. My friends and I have stolen sweet potatoes and peanuts. Hold the sweet potato that has not yet grown up in your hand, rub the mud on your torn pants, and eat it with a crunch, which is sweeter than anything else you eat. Peanuts can be eaten raw or cooked over fire.

Often a group of children go to the mountain to collect firewood, and another group of children go to the river beach to steal the peanuts from the group across the river. Then they light a fire and simmer the peanuts until they are steaming hot, and then they can peel them and eat them. . Some peanuts are still very tender. After simmering, they are just a packet of sweet water. If you are not careful when peeling them, the very hot water will be squeezed out, which will cause pain on your face.

If it’s not a big deal for a child to steal some snacks, then stealing things for adults will cause big trouble. I still remember when I was very young, people in the village caught a yam thief. They tied the thief's hands and hung him from the beam, and dropped a few bricks at his feet. People always come up with all sorts of tricks to trick others. As the captain whipped the thief, he made a terrible cry.

I heard from adults that during that time, dead yam vines were often found in the yam fields. After checking, it turned out that someone had stolen the yams but buried the seedlings so that they could not be seen for the first few days. Strange, but when the weather clears up, the yam vines buried that time will wilt and eventually die.

So the people in the village set up ambushes in the fields every night, and finally caught the yam thief. It turned out to be someone from a village not far away. It was said that he was a distant relative of someone in our village. My friends and I went to the place where the thief was hanged. I thought the thief was not evil at all and was very pitiful. However, the adults said he was bad, so I accepted it with some skepticism.

But I still don’t like to hit people, just like I never like to see aunts burning incense, worshiping Buddha, kowtow and chanting sutras. I have a natural rejection of violence in real life. I hate to treat someone from the past The landlord and the father of my classmate hung themselves from a big camphor tree to criticize me. I hated my neighbor using a flexible but sharp bamboo branch to beat my playmates, and I hated my teacher slapping my classmates with poor grades.

I can’t remember how long the yam thief was hung, and I don’t know what happened in the end. I don’t dare to go to that room again.

Sometimes, people in the village also steal from each other. Someone's pumpkin disappeared, someone's cowpeas were picked, it happens all the time.

Women are very clear about their own things. How many beans are on the shelf and how long they have grown? How many flowers are there on the pumpkin vine? Which one is the male flower and which one is the female flower? How many pumpkins are there and what they grow. I remember the appearance clearly.

If a pumpkin that is about to mature is picked secretly, the pain will be like heartbreaking. Painful women would cry and curse at the village for an hour on the western ridge when work was over, mainly cursing how the person who stole the pumpkin would die badly, how he would not be able to poop after eating the pumpkin, and what would happen if he gave birth to a child. No arsehole or anything like that, just extremely vicious.

Whenever I encounter this kind of situation, I look at the thin light of dusk and endure the hail of curses amidst the chirping of birds returning to their nests. I always secretly swear in my heart that I must Get out of this cramped and scary place.

In order to make more food for the family, all children have to work, especially during the summer double grab season. When I was a child, I mainly picked up rice ears, which meant picking up the ears of rice that were missed by the adults who were doing the work, and handing them over to the team, and they were credited with work points by the pound.

Miller seems to have painted a painting, and the name seems to be "The Gleaners", which is what it is about, but the people in the painting are some very fat or materialistic women. , rather than children. What I do most is look at the rice fields. There was a flat cement field on the ridge behind the village. It was the only cement field at that time and was used to dry public grain.

The old custodian in the village would pick out the grain in the ancestral hall every sunny day and spread it flat on the cement floor to dry. Since sparrows, chickens, and pigs all like to eat the public grain, even people will take some from time to time. Oil and water, this requires a child to watch. Because I am more responsible and have always had good academic performance, I am often entrusted with the important task of looking after the rice fields.

I call the old custodian Lao Shuiye. When the sun just came up, he picked the millet to the rice field. I used a rake to spread out the piles of millet, and used the wooden handle of the rake to draw waves on the surface of the millet so that the millet would have more moisture. Lots of sunny side. Then, I had to stay under the eaves of a small room next to the rice field all day long, staring at the sun shining golden on the rice with my big eyes.

Sometimes I doze off, sweat sliding down my dark skin, and dream of a mountain muntjac unable to extricate itself in a mud field. Suddenly, a loud shout woke me up, and it seemed as if a wolf was about to escape from Old Shui's eyes - while he was dozing off, chickens and pigs had already visited me several times.

If God suddenly rains heavily, the strong laborers in the village will come from the fields to help us collect grain. With everyone working together, the pellets will be returned to the warehouse soon. When the weather is good, in the evening, I have to gather the grains spread out into piles of rice, put them into the basket, and have Old Shui carry them into the ancestral hall.

When the wooden shovel, millet and cement floor were rubbed together, they made a very unpleasant sharp scream, but what comforted me was that the summer sunset had a loud lemon yellow color. As it slowly fell, my shadow was reflected on a white wall below the rice field, like a movie. My shadow was so clear, so soft, and so long, as if I had performed that way for several lifetimes.

Extended information:

The description of the natural environment at the beginning of the text uses the description of the natural environment to highlight the characters, develop the plot, and depict the characters. The environment where Lu Jinyong moved was also the environment where the unknown warriors moved. Therefore, this description of the natural environment paved the way for the appearance of the unknown soldier and his heroic actions, and highlighted the Red Army soldiers' fearless and tenacious qualities.

I am deeply touched by the words "food is the first priority for the people". When I was a child, I learned how important food is to people in my grandfather’s arms. At the dinner table, grandpa saw us brothers and sisters pulling out the rice and throwing away the rice grains. He picked up the rice grains one by one and put them in his mouth with distress, while talking about the days when he was short of food and rice: "My son, when I was like you, you How can your grandfather support your father? He has long been sent to the landlord's house to graze cattle and beg for food! At that time, a bushel of rice could buy a large field!"

Afterwards, in my father's nagging There is still some history of hunger in Japan and China. I don’t know how many people starved to death in the three years of natural disasters. Those who almost starved to death but survived naturally regarded food as extremely precious and had their own share of it. Special feelings.

In the 1950s, Wang Yuanjian, a young military writer, visited the revolutionary base areas during the Second Civil Revolutionary War for interviews. Inspired by this, he wrote a number of red-themed works, which produced a certain response. However, after the publication of the first few articles such as "Party Fees", "The Story of Food", "Little Guerrillas"... both the author Wang Yuanjian and the critics were a little dissatisfied.

In Wang Yuanjian, because these works are still relatively strong in storytelling, they only write about characters. “I don’t have a deep understanding of the ideological meaning contained in the story, and I don’t think about it thoroughly. I can only write in a dull way. Simply retelling a story cannot give readers anything new” (author’s words). Then there’s the form of expression.

Wang Yuanjian felt that it was a bit monotonous: it was always written in the first person. "Writing the first few articles like this can express meaning and express feelings, and it is easier to use, but it becomes boring after writing." Therefore, I also wanted to try something new in terms of expression. One of the rewards of trying is "Seven Matches".

The story of "Seven Matches" is very simple. A Long March soldier who was chasing a large army encountered a rainstorm with hail on the grass. After the heavy rain, everything is wet. At this time, the warmth of the fire becomes everyone's hope.

At this time, he discovered a seriously injured comrade. The comrade was completely unable to move and was lying in the mud. But he called to the soldier and took out a paper package from under his armpit.

In the paper package was the party card, which contained "a small pile of matches placed side by side. Burnt matches." There are seven matches. On the long journey, fire is something that plays an important role, and fire is so rare that it should be maintained with life. His comrade died, and the seven matches he left behind inspired the soldier.

He speeded up and caught up with the main force. Using a match, he ignited clusters of bonfires, so that the soldiers who had been tumbling in the wind, rain, and mud for several days could have a hot meal and dry their soaked clothes... With the remaining six matches, he Carefully and solemnly, count them one by one and hand them to the instructor.

After "Seven Matches" was written, it was quickly published in Tianjin's "Xingang" magazine in early 1958. The novel was well written, but the response it generated was not great.

Wang Yuanjian's novels are very distinctive. They take carrying forward the revolutionary tradition as the main theme and carefully, intensively and creatively depict the shining points of the characters' souls. He used vivid brushwork to place the protagonists in a sharp struggle environment to highlight their lofty ideological realm and loyal character. Whether it is characterization or plot description, it is full of a strong flavor of revolutionary romanticism.

As some critics said, in some fragments, the spiritual beauty of the characters is just a flash of brilliance; although this flash is short, it is dazzling, dazzling, and contains a lot of emotions. Full of passion and thought-provoking power of thought. Wang Yuanjian is honest, humble, elegant and very popular. In his interactions with me, he never promotes himself and always praises the achievements of others.

Wang Yuanjian had the opportunity to meet Mao Dun, a literary senior, in person. In the early spring of 1961, Wang Yuanjian and several young writers were chatting at a tea party of the Writers Association. Suddenly, Mao Dun and the old writer Ye Shengtao came over. Yang Mo, the author of "Song of Youth", introduced Wang Yuanjian and others to the two elders, and both seniors greeted him cordially.

Before Wang Yuanjian could think of a reply, Mao Dun said to him: "You write well, you can write better than us!" Wang Yuanjian was stunned by this sentence.

Mao Dun added with emotion and some relief: "We can write better than when we were this age!"

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia - Wang Yuanjian