The story of being sent down to the countryside feels impossibly distant to me now, as if from another life. That is precisely why I have long wanted to write about it yet always felt my heart was willing but my strength insufficient. Even so, fragments of those years keep churning in my mind. Though they cannot be woven into a continuous narrative, these memory shards are etched into the deepest recesses of my mind. The "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages" movement was our generation's rite of passage.
I was among the very last cohort sent down after the Cultural Revolution, catching the very tail end. At the time I did not meet the age requirement and could have remained in the city by policy. But the reality then was that staying in the city and waiting for job assignments often meant permanent unemployment — unlike being sent down, where after a few years you might be called back for factory work or even college (as a so-called worker-peasant-soldier student). Besides, under the influence of the era's ethos, those who stayed behind seemed somehow lesser than those who went. I had a close classmate, an only son, who stayed in the city. When we met afterward, he no longer carried himself with the same proud bearing we sent-down youth had.
The Three Brothers of U Village
The place I was sent to was a remote mountain village in southern Anhui called U Village, just beside the town. Three of us were sent to this village together. Brother Chen came from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners — steady and honest, he brought half a trunk full of medical books. Brother Yu was the son of a demobilized soldier veteran, a bit of a slacker with a devil-may-care attitude. I brought along Bo Bing's Concise English Grammar and a transistor AM radio, hoping to keep up with the radio Broadcast English lessons. The moment the three of us got off the bus at the town, Old Party Secretary of U Village led a crowd banging drums and gongs to welcome us in. We were temporarily housed in the home of a commune barefoot doctor for two months. Later the village used the state resettlement allowance issued for the three of us to build three large, warehouse-like rooms — drafty as could be — and only then were we properly settled.
The first month we ate "assigned meals," rotating through every household day by day. The farmers were mostly simple and hospitable. On the day we ate at a given home, the host would usually prepare more dishes than usual. Still, circumstances varied from household to household, and the food was hit-or-miss — some meals were truly hard to swallow. But fearing we'd be mocked as soft city kids, we could only grit our teeth and eat. The worst part wasn't the quality of the food but the hygiene. One evening, as dusk was falling, I pushed open a door to go to dinner and my hand landed on something sticky. Back home, the three of us compared notes and realized it was either snot or phlegm residue. We were all sick to our stomachs.
Eventually the three of us decided to cook for ourselves, dividing up the chores. I still remember rising at dawn to carry water from the pond — my slender frame utterly mismatched with the water buckets — shivering in the early spring chill. Still, cooking for ourselves was far more satisfying. Every day as we worked, we looked forward eagerly to getting off early and enjoying our own dinner. The most common and most delicious dish was salted pork braised with soybeans. The salted pork was sent by my parents to improve our diet. Each time I'd cut off a small piece of fatty meat and slowly render it over the fire — those glistening, oil-soaked soft soybeans were simply irresistible. The soybeans and charcoal were both rations allocated to us educated youth by the production team. I'd fill a small clay pot with soybeans, fatty pork, and water, set it on the charcoal before heading out to work, and by the time we returned, fragrance would fill the air.
Such delicacies could not last, of course. So we started growing our own vegetables. Taking the path of least resistance, we chose the easiest thing to grow and planted two big patches of cucumbers. Cucumbers, once they start producing, are unstoppable — we were drowning in them. No matter how many we picked and ate, we could not keep up with their growth. We'd snack on them raw throughout the day, then make cucumber soup or stir-fried cucumber at night, until the very thought of them made us want to vomit. This left quite an aftershock. For a very long time, I regarded cucumbers as the lowliest of vegetables — fine for an occasional raw nibble, but never as a proper dish. Yet as the years turned, somewhere in my wandering life overseas, cucumbers suddenly became precious. My wife and daughter both love them. Those English cucumbers from heated greenhouses, two or three dollars apiece, have become a staple in our home. Sometimes when there aren't enough vegetables and I worry my daughter isn't getting balanced nutrition, I'll wash a cucumber for her, and she always munches it contentedly, never tiring of it.
Cucumbers indeed don't make great dishes, but if you happen to have eggs, they work well either stir-fried or in soup. On their own they are no proper dish at all — nothing to go with rice. Eggs were extremely precious. We didn't raise chickens so we naturally had no eggs, and we couldn't bear to buy them either. Later someone in the village borrowed money from us educated youth in an emergency but couldn't pay it back, so they scrounged some eggs from under their hens to repay us — that's how we finally got a taste of them. One day the bald team leader came to inspect, saw our cucumber patch, and gave us a ferocious scolding. "You lazy bums, who told you to grow cucumbers? You haven't planted a single proper vegetable — what the hell are you going to eat?" By "proper vegetables" he meant peppers and eggplants — the kind that, with just a bit of rapeseed oil and without eggs or meat, could be made mouth-wateringly delicious. But tending those was no easy task. Besides watering, you had to fertilize — ideally with manure diluted in water, which made things grow best.
When we could no longer stomach cucumbers, with nothing else good to eat, we turned to stir-fried sweet potatoes. This trick, I should say, was taught to me by the village cowherd boy. This cowherd was a sharp one; ever since we educated youth arrived, he always found excuses to hang around. He was the one who told me sweet potatoes could be cooked as a dish, prepared just like stir-fried shredded potatoes. Sweet potatoes were our staple ration, so we had no shortage of them. We tried shredding and stir-frying them with oil and salt, and the result was much more palatable with rice than cucumbers had been. One difference from potatoes, though: the heat had to be just right — overcook them and they'd turn to mush, which was no good at all.
From the cowherd boy I also learned to ride an ox. The old ox may have looked clumsy, but its gait was steady and sure, every step deliberate. At first, looking down at the narrow paths along the field ridges, I kept thinking the ox would slip and topple into the ditch or paddy at any moment — but the old ox never made a mistake. The cowherd let out a shout, and the ox obediently leaned forward and lowered its horns. With the cowherd's help and encouragement, I stepped onto the horns and swung myself onto the ox's back, then began my trembling, fearful ride. The biggest impression was how uncomfortable it was — the ox's spine was all creaking bone, with no flesh to speak of, nothing but hardness against my backside. It was nothing like the idyllic joy of a shepherd boy riding an ox that I had imagined.
Working the Land with the Female Militia
Not long after being sent down, we hit the "Double Rush" — the frantic harvest of early rice and planting of late rice. It truly worked people to the point of collapse. The Double Rush was the prime season for earning work points — double points were given, sometimes even triple — for over twenty straight days, rising before dawn and returning only at midnight. Even the strongest men would be flattened before getting a half-day's rest. The People's Commune's deployment of double work points — this disguised bourgeois "material incentive" — was brutally effective. No matter how exhausted, no one dared slack off. If you feared the exhaustion and showed up less, those work points would be earned by someone else, and when accounts were settled at year's end, your share of rice, sweet potatoes, and fragrant oil would be correspondingly reduced. In truth, the wool comes from the sheep's back — every year the production team's total harvest was a fixed quantity. Giving out more or fewer work points was simply a method of redistributing wealth. If they had relied purely on the peasants' socialist zeal, keeping the Double Rush at the same work-point rate as usual, the total work points would drop, the unit price per point would rise, and the material incentive that drove such frantic effort would be gone. Who says economics had no use in the "one big, two public" People's Commune?
The production team took care of us city kids by giving us higher work-point ratings. So the three of us educated youth were each assigned seven and a half points — the equivalent of a woman's full-labor rating — which included two hours of early-morning work before breakfast. Without that it would have been only six and a half. That year, ten work points were worth 0.65 yuan. I worked among the women for over half a year, and at the year-end settlement, I earned back all my grain rations plus half a bed's space of sweet potatoes and four or five jin of fragrant oil.
The full-labor women were mostly young unmarried girls or recently married wives, every one of them a skilled hand at farm work. The dozen or so young women of U Village in their prime had formed a "Female Militia Squad" — restless and spirited, their activities had been lively and impressive, once quite famous in the area. By the time I arrived, however, they had already passed their peak, since most of the core members had reached marriageable age, with matchmakers near and far making the rounds, and collective activities could no longer continue. Even so, growing up together with the female militia in the vast world of fields and sky still carried a certain revolutionary romanticism that was intoxicating and exciting. It took away more than half the hardship of farm labor.
Our village head was shrewd but hot-tempered, and bald to boot — I both feared and disliked him. Yet his family's four sisters were each as lovely as flowers. I never recall meeting the eldest; she must have already married out. The second and third sisters were both mainstays of the Female Militia Squad. The youngest, just fourteen or fifteen, had fair, tender skin and blushed whenever she saw anyone; she worked in a commune-run workshop. The second sister — I called her Sis II — had just married the younger brother of our village's Old Team Leader, a tall, handsome young man with a slightly reckless air. It was a love match, making her the luckiest among the girls. Not long after my arrival, Sis II was assigned to thresh grain on the drying ground rather than working in the paddies. I worked alongside her — just the two of us on the threshing ground — and she always looked after me. That was when I first developed the habit of letting my thoughts wander, until one day I noticed her belly growing larger and only then realized she was different from the other militia girls: she was already a married woman. Later, working in the paddies with Sis III and a group of young women, pulling weeds with rakes to keep the paddies clear, Sis III was always encroaching on my territory, reaching her rake over to help me. Without her help I probably couldn't have managed even half the pace. I kept scolding her: "No trespassing!" She would only smile and say nothing, continuing as she pleased. Sis III was very pretty, slightly plump, sturdy like an Iron Girl, but perceptive and considerate — her temperament was gentler than Xue Baochai's. She was the one I was most fond of. At the time a matchmaker was arranging her marriage. Not long after I left the village she was married off. When I heard the news, a deep unease settled in my heart.
To me, all these farm girls were celestial maidens. Raised in such harsh conditions from childhood, they were nonetheless each in the full bloom of youth, spirited and valiant, yet never losing the simple kindness and crystalline intelligence of country girls. I felt no local man was worthy of them. They themselves tried to resist fate and the matchmakers, but in the end, one by one, they all married away and vanished into the sea of humanity.
朝华午拾·第十章：插队山村（一）
插队的故事对我是太久远了，恍如隔世。这也是我一直想写，却感觉心有余而力不足的原因。虽然如此，插队的片断却不时在心中翻腾。虽然连不成篇，这些记忆残片却是刻印在脑海最深处的。上山下乡是我们这辈人的成年礼。
我是文革后最后一批插队的，算是赶上了末班车。当时年龄不达标，按照政策可以留城，可是当年的情形是，留城待业常常是永久失业，不象插队，几年之后，还有上调招工或者升学（工农兵学员）的前途。另外就是，由于时代风尚的影响，留城的好像比下乡的矮人一截似的。我有一位同班好友，独子，留城以后，见面说话就没有我们下乡知青那样器宇轩昂。
尤村三兄弟
我插队的地方是比较偏远的皖南山区，叫尤村，就在镇子旁边。当时一起下到这个村子去的一共三位，陈兄是中医世家，人很老成憨实，带来了大半箱子医书。俞兄是退伍军人的子弟，有点吊儿郎当玩世不恭的样子。我随身携带的是薄冰《简明英语语法》和一台晶体管中波收音机，希望还能继续电台《广播英语》的学习。我们三人从镇上一下车，就被尤村的老书记带领一伙人敲锣打鼓迎到了村里，暂时安置在一位公社赤脚医生的家里，住了两个月。后来村子利用国家发给我们三人的安家费，盖了三大间仓库一样透风凉的屋子，我们才算独立安家落户。
第一个月是挨户吃"派饭"，每天各家各户轮流转。农民大多朴实好客。我们吃饭的那天，东家往往要比平时多预备一些菜肴。可是，各家家境不同，伙食还是参差不齐，有些确实难以下咽，但又怕人笑话知青娇气，只好硬着头皮吃。最糟糕的不是伙食的质量，而是卫生状况。有一天天擦黑，推门去晚餐，手上黏黏糊糊摸了一手，回来后我们几个一合计，发现不是鼻涕就是浓痰的残迹，都恶心得要吐。
后来决定哥仨自己开伙，分工合作。还记得清晨起来到河塘担水，身子骨瘦小的我与水桶不成比例，在早春的冷风中瑟瑟发抖。不过，自己开伙还是受用多了，每天干活就满心盼望早早收工去享用自己的晚餐。最常做也最美味的菜肴是咸肉炖黄豆。咸肉是父母捎来改善伙食的，每次割一小块肥肉，慢火烧化，那泛着油光的软黄豆实在太诱人了。黄豆和木炭都是队里照顾知青配给的，弄个小瓦罐盛上黄豆、肥肉和水，上工前置于炭火上，收工回来就四香飘溢。
这样的美味当然不能长久。于是自己种菜。我们图省事，挑最容易的菜，种了两大片黄瓜。黄瓜这玩意儿，一旦结起来，就不得了，瓜满为患。怎么摘怎么吃也赛不过它生长的速度。平时没事就摘了生吃，到了晚上再做黄瓜汤，或者炒黄瓜，直吃得想吐。这个后遗症不小。很久很久，我都把黄瓜当作最贱的菜，偶然生吃一点可以，从来不拿它当菜。可是斗转星移，不知流浪海外的何年何月，黄瓜忽然金贵起来。太太和女儿都爱吃。暖房子里面出来的英国黄瓜，每根两三块美元，一样成为我们家的必备。有时伙食中蔬菜量不够，怕孩子营养不平衡，就洗根黄瓜给她，她总是美滋滋地啃它，从不厌烦。
黄瓜确实不好做菜，但要是赶上了鸡蛋，炒菜也好，做汤也好，都不错。单做就不成菜，不下饭。鸡蛋是非常珍贵的，我们不养鸡自然没有鸡蛋，也舍不得买。后来还是村子里有人从我们知青这里借钱急用，可又没有钱还，就从鸡屁股下抠出一些鸡蛋来偿还我们，我们才有了些口福。有一天秃头队长来巡视，看见我们的黄瓜地，就狠狠剋了我们一顿。说，你们这帮懒虫，谁让你们种黄瓜来着，一点正经菜也不种，你吃个屁。他所谓正经菜，是指辣椒茄子一类，那样的菜只要有点菜籽油，不用鸡蛋不用肉，就可以做得让人垂涎欲滴。可是拾叨起来不容易，除了浇水，还要施肥，最好是粪兑水浇了才好长。
黄瓜吃腻了，后来没的好吃，改吃炒山芋（北方叫红薯）。这一招说来还是村里那个放牛娃教给我的。这个放牛娃很机灵，自从我们知青来了，就总找机会来套瓷。是他告诉我，山芋也一样可以做菜，就跟炒土豆丝一样做法。山芋是口粮，我们不缺，于是我们尝试切丝红炒，添上油盐，做出来比黄瓜好吃下饭多了。不过，有一条与土豆丝不同，炒菜的火候一定要适可而止，否则烂成糊就不好吃了。
从放牛娃那里学会了骑牛。别看老牛笨乎乎的，走起路来却非常稳妥实在，一步一个脚印。起初我看田埂头的羊肠小道，老觉得那老牛一不小心就会折到沟渠或水田里，其实老牛从不出差错。放牛娃吆喝一声，那老牛就乖乖地倾前身，低下犄角，我在牛娃的帮助和鼓励下，蹬着牛角，翻身上了牛背，开始胆战心惊的骑牛前行。骑牛的最大感受是不舒服，那老牛的脊背咯咯吱吱的，感觉不到皮肉，满屁股都是骨头，根本不象我以前想像中的牧童骑牛之乐。
与女民兵并肩修地球
下放不久赶上了"双抢"（抢收早稻，抢种晚稻），真地把人往死里累。双抢是一年挣工分的好季节，给双份工分，有时甚至给三倍，连续20多天，天不亮起床，到半夜才回，再壮的汉子都要累趴下才能休息半天。人民公社给双倍工分这种变相的资产阶级的"物质刺激"很厉害，不管多累，人都不敢懈怠。你怕累少上工，工就给别人赚去了，到年底分红，你分的稻谷、红薯和香油也相应减少了。其实，羊毛出在羊身上，每年生产队的收成是一个定数，工分多给少给不过是一种财富再分配的方式而已。如果单纯依靠农民的社会主义干劲，双抢跟平时同等工分数，工分总量下来了，单位工分的价格提高了，就没有物质刺激出来的积极性了。谁说经济学在一大二公的人民公社没有用处？
生产队照顾城里娃，工分给高些。于是给我们三个知青各开七分半工，相当于一个妇女全劳力的工分，包括早饭前上早工两个小时，否则只有六分半。那年十分工值RMB0.65元。我在妇女堆里干了半年多，年底分红，赚回了所有的口粮，外带半床红薯和四五斤香油。
妇女全劳力多是年轻的姑娘或媳妇，个个都是干农活的好手。尤村的十几位风华正茂的姑娘组成了一个"女民兵班"，不甘寂寞，活动有声有色，曾名噪一时。不过到我去的时候，已经式微，因为其中的骨干大都到了嫁人的年纪，近亲远媒各处张罗，集体活动不能继续。尽管如此，跟女民兵在广阔天地一道成长，在当时是充满了革命浪漫主义的色彩的，让人沉迷和兴奋。干农活的辛苦也去了大半。
我们村村长人很精明，但脾气暴躁，又是光头，让我既怕又厌。倒是他家四个姐妹一个个如花似玉，大妹妹记不得见过，应该是外嫁了。二妹三妹都是女民兵班的主力，小妹妹刚14-15岁，皮肤白嫩，见人脸红，在社办一个作坊里做工。二妹（我叫二姐）刚嫁给本村老队长的弟弟，一个高个帅气的小伙子，感觉有些愣头青的样子。自由恋爱的，算是姑娘们中最幸运的了。刚去不久，这位二妹被照顾在场上打谷，没有下水田。我跟她一起干活，场上就两个人，总是她照顾我。从那时就落下了心猿意马的毛病，直到有一天发现她肚子越来越大，才意识到她跟其他民兵姑娘不同，原来是媳妇级的了。后来跟三妹及一帮姑娘媳妇一道，在田里薅草（就是用耙子在水田里把杂草掀翻，不让杂草长出来），三妹总是侵犯我的领地，把她的耙子探过来帮我。没有她帮忙，我大概一半的速度也赶不上。我老指责她，"不许侵犯"，她总笑而不答，我行我素。三妹模样很好，稍微有些胖，很壮实，象个铁姑娘，但善解人意，脾气性情好得赛过薛宝钗，是我最心仪的。当时媒婆正在给她提亲，我离开村子不久，她就嫁了，听到消息后心里很不是滋味。
这些农家女在我看来都是仙女。从小在那样的艰苦环境中，却一个个风华正茂，英姿飒爽，而且不失农家女的善良朴实和冰雪聪明。我觉得当地没人配得上她们，她们自己也企图跟命运和媒人抗争，不过最后都一个个嫁走了，消没在人海中。
From Morning Glory at Noon (朝华午拾) series. Original Chinese: 朝华之十: 插队山村.
