The Taste of Life Zhang Baotong 2018.10.1

People's extravagant hopes and desires for happiness and pleasure never end, just as people's possession of money is never satisfied. Because people are excessively pursuing material wealth and cannot see the end of material enjoyment, there will be a kind of debt that they will never be able to pay off in this life and in the past life, so they are endlessly asking for life.

Many people will never be satisfied with happiness and joy, and not only will they not be satisfied, but they will also have more and more demands for happiness and joy. But the more they ask for it, the more they feel that they are not happy enough, they are not happy enough. We can see this phenomenon very clearly in the children's generation.

Their generation is almost twenty or thirty years old. Most of them are only children, they have received a relatively complete education, many have gone to college, have a house and a car and a good income, and their parents are not only not a financial burden to them, but have been supporting them. They work easily, live a superior life, like to wear famous brands, and enjoy the wealth and fruits of modern civilization. However, they often complain that they are too tired at work, too little in salary, not big enough in their houses, and not good enough in their cars. It's as if life will always owe them too much.

In contrast, my mother said that her life is now celebrating the New Year every day, and even the New Year is not so good. In fact, my mother still lives in a red-brick and red-tiled bungalow built by the Agency in the sixties, and since the death of my stepfather more than 10 years ago, she has basically lived alone. But she is very satisfied and content with her life, and she also feels very happy.

The reason why she feels very satisfied and content with her current life, and how happy and happy she is, is because she has experienced too many hardships and tribulations in her life.

My mother is 88 years old this year, and she is one of the few elderly people still alive in the family compound of the sixth division of our Iron Fourth Bureau. Almost all the staff members of this engineering agency are veterans who came down from the battlefield to resist US aggression and aid Korea, and almost all of those who are still alive are in their eighties and nineties. They all experienced the extremely difficult life of the early years of the Republic.

My mother was a child of a poor family, and at the age of sixteen she was favored by my father's family and married my father. At that time, my grandfather was the tax director of Pingliang City, Gansu Province, and my father's family was a large family in the countryside of Su County, Anhui Province. Because my future mother-in-law didn't like my mother's big feet, she forced my mother to start binding her feet. At that time, my mother was already a little old, and it was very painful to bind her feet, but in order to meet the wishes of her future mother-in-law, my mother insisted on wrapping her feet every day and wrapped a good pair of feet into small feet. Soon after we got married, the country was liberated, and my father went to work in Gansu. My mom lives with my mother-in-law. However, because my grandfather found a little wife in Pingliang and didn't go back to my hometown in Anhui all year round, my mother-in-law was very angry and in a bad mood, so she always liked to find my mother to be angry. My mother was very stubborn and couldn't stand my mother-in-law's anger, so she went all the way to Gansu alone to find my father. At that time, there were almost no roads, no railways, and it was mainly on two legs. My mother is illiterate, and she has a pair of small feet, thousands of kilometers from Suxian County, Anhui Province to Wuwei, Gansu Province, and my mother walked for two or three months on a pair of small feet before arriving at the railway construction site under the Wushao Mountains. At that time, railway workers lived in shacks made of iron sheets and wooden planks, and their families had no place to live. So, my father and his co-workers dug a hole in the side of the hill, blocked the hole with a broken sack, and stayed. In this way, my mother followed my father from the Baolan Railway to the Baocheng Railway, and then went to the Luohe River at the junction of Pucheng and Dali in Shaanxi Province in the early 60s to build a railway bridge, and my mother took my brother and sister to live in the cave with me. At that time, there were wolves at night, and there were often hungry wolves who would burrow into the hole through the hole covered by the sack, and my mother was often afraid to sleep at night.

Later, my dad was transferred from the railway construction site to work at the Xi'an station. The Agency no longer supplies food and goods to our families. When our family ran out of food, my mother took my sister behind my back and took me to the farmer's field to collect sweet potatoes and ears of wheat. It was the early 60s, and people couldn't get enough to eat because of natural and man-made disasters, so you didn't have enough to eat, so you didn't have enough food. In my family, I often cook a big pot of rice with a sweet potato, and give my brother a thicker one to eat, because he has already gone to school and has to walk a long way every day. Half-thick and half-thin for my sister and me to eat, and my mother drank the rest of the thin soup herself. In my father's fourth month at Xi'an Station, he was wiping a switch in the early morning of a foggy day when he didn't notice a train coming towards him, resulting in a work accident. A few days later, my mother took my four-year-old me and my two-year-old sister to Xi'an for the funeral. Due to the flooding of the Wei River, I could not cross the river, so I was forced to wait on this side of the river for three days and three nights, and my poor sister died by the river the next night because of a sudden high fever and nowhere to treat it.

After my father's death, we could no longer live on the railway site, and the only way to retreat was to return to our hometown in Suxian County, Anhui. Although there are many houses in my hometown and a large area of land, just one pear orchard is almost the size of a football field. However, my mother didn't want to go back to her hometown because she was afraid of living with her mother-in-law. At that time, my grandfather was already in government custody, and my mother-in-law was in charge of his hometown. Just when our family was in the brink of extinction and forced to return to our rural hometown, the UNRWA leadership introduced my mother to my stepfather. The stepfather is an anti-Japanese hero, there is still a Japanese warhead left on his right arm, he is in his thirties, and he is not married. He was almost 8 years older than my mom. Although my mother didn't take a fancy to him, she decided to marry her stepfather in order not to take us back to our rural hometown to suffer and suffer. It was only then that we moved out of the caves on the construction site and lived in bungalows in the family quarters for the first time. Since then, our family's life has also started to improve a little. Later, my mother gave birth to another boy and two girls for my stepfather, and with my stepfather's salary of 50 yuan and our monthly pension of 29 yuan, we raised our six children to adulthood.

Mother has suffered a lot of hardships and sins in this life, and she knows that life is hard and difficult, so she lives this kind of life without worrying about food and clothing, what she wants to eat, what she wants, what she wants, and the days when there is a stove in winter and air conditioning in summer, I feel that this kind of day can not even enjoy the old wealth of the landlord in the past. Therefore, she feels that she is enjoying happiness every day and celebrating the New Year every day.

By comparing my mother's life experience with my mother's life experience, I realized that a person's feelings of happiness do not depend on the conditions of life, but on one's life experience. Only those who have experienced hardships and hardships can appreciate the hardships of a peaceful and stable life, and only those who have experienced hunger can appreciate the preciousness of food. If you don't eat Coptis chinensis, you don't know the sweetness of honey, and you don't know the warmth of spring without going through the cold. It is not uncommon for rich families to eat meat every day, but the last time a poor family eats dumplings, it is like the New Year. Mothers have spent most of their lives in poverty and hardship, and children have grown up in honeypots almost from an early age. Because they have different life experiences, different measures of happiness and different values, they have very different tastes and feelings about life today. For example, although Bhutan is much poorer than my country, its people are much happier than our own.

In order to let children know that today's life is not easy to come from, so that children can cherish today's life, we often tell children stories of the past, hoping that they will not look at money for everything, do not talk about pomp and circumstance compared to superiority, and do not blindly pursue material enjoyment. However, the child just took these stories as stories, or even as legends. This makes us feel very helpless. Because what the child has experienced is a period of national reform and opening up and the country's gradual prosperity. Just as yesterday's sun can't dry today's clothes, the life experience of the older generation cannot become the life experience of the next generation. There are many contradictions and helplessness in life itself. It is completely impossible for us to want our children to live a comfortable and happy life, and at the same time want them to have the same values and outlook on life as we do. Therefore, whether the taste of life is sweet or light, it is up to them to taste and feel it.