Mother's love and affection (1) Zhang Baotong 2013.4.5

In "Animal World", I can't help but think of my own mother when she fights to the death to protect her cubs. In the process of raising us, my mother experienced no less danger and hardship than this life-and-death struggle.

Soon after her marriage, my mother ran from her hometown to Gansu to find my father because she was angry in her hometown. My father was building a railway in Gansu, and the conditions were very harsh at that time, most of the railway construction sites were inaccessible in the deep mountains, full of green mountains during the day, and wolves howling at night. The workers lived in a cave, and the family members had to dig a hole on the side of the mountain by themselves, find a broken sack and put it at the mouth of the cave, and live inside.

Whether it is the Wuxiao Ridge where "the snow flies in midsummer, the cold air is skull", or the Baolan Railway and the Baocheng Railway in the deep mountains and wilderness, they have all left the youthful figure of their mother. I have watched Du Pengcheng's "Walking in Lingguan Gorge at Night", in fact, my mother's account is far worse than the situation there. After the Baolan Railway was repaired, the Engineering Bureau went to repair the Baocheng Railway. The Qinling Mountains are the dividing line between the north and south of China, and anyone who has been to the Qinling Mountains will be amazed by its majesty. Otherwise, Li Bai would have written in "The Difficulty of Shu Road": "Oh, the danger is high! The difficulty of Shu Road is difficult to go to the blue sky." ”?

The Pou Seng Railway was opened to traffic on January 1, 1958. I was born in 1957. My name is Zhang Baotong, and the word "treasure" is not the treasure of the treasure, but the treasure of the Baocheng Railway. My name actually means to commemorate the opening of the Baocheng Railway, and the word "Tong" is because I thought this word was too blunt when I was a child, so I changed it to the word "same". Later, when I was in high school, there were more than 10 people named "Baocheng" in our class of more than 50 people, and several female classmates named Baolan.

Because of the construction of the Baocheng railway, my mother has been moving along the railway line with the Agency. Whenever he went to a place, he dug a hole in the side of the mountain and lived in it for a while. I heard my mother say that my family has lived in Cattle Shop, Honghuapu, Shuangshipu and Baoji Shangmaying. These places are deep in the Qinling Mountains, because my father often has to work night shifts and overtime, my mother and my brother and sister live in the cave with me, because the entrance of the cave is blocked by broken sacks, and hungry wolves often enter my house at night. So, my mom was often so scared that she couldn't sleep at night.

After the construction of the Baocheng Railway, our family went to the Pucheng Xiuluo River Railway Bridge in Weibei with the Engineering Agency. This is the place where the fate of my family took a heavy turn, and it was also the beginning of the tragic fate of my mother and my whole family.

You can't talk about my mother without talking about my father. But in my memory, my father was just a title for me, and I didn't have the slightest impression of him. If there is any impression, it is the photo of our family of five that is still preserved in our family. My parents sat side by side, my brother and sister stood on either side, I was not yet a year old and still in my mother's arms. The father in the photo is as young and handsome as I was when I first got married. Because I don't have any impression of him, my feelings for him are only grateful that he has given me a healthy life and allowed me to have so many hardships and beautiful rich experiences.

When I was four years old, my father was transferred to work in the Xi'an railway department because he had gone to school and had some education. Xi'an is two or three hundred kilometers away from Pucheng, but at that time there were no railways, roads were incomplete, and there were no cars, so it was much more troublesome to come back than to go to the United States now. So, my father basically never came home.

Immediately after that, my father had a big accident in Xi'an. When he was scrubbing the turnouts with cotton yarn in the early morning, he didn't see a train coming because of the fog. Since then, the sky in our house has collapsed like this. When the news came, my mother immediately went crazy, lying on the ground and crying. Because my brother was studying in another place and was not in front of me, my sister and I knelt in front of my mother and cried with her all the time. Because I didn't have an impression of my father, I just watched my mother cry very sadly and painfully, and then I followed her crying, not knowing that the fate of our family would change from now on.

Then my mother took me and my sister with me, and my memory of this sister is very vague, because all I remember is that my mother took me to sit in a dump truck that the Agency had sent us on a special trip, with a child in her arms. However, when the car took us to the edge of the Wei River, we had to cross the river by boat. However, the Wei River is flooding, the yellow water is long, as far as the eye can see, and the bank is full of people who want to cross the river for more than ten miles. There were not only rowers on the boat, but also many people in the water pulling the ropes. Because I couldn't cross the river, I just sat and waited by the river, and I waited by the river for about two or three days. At night, my sister had a fever, and there was no hospital, and on the third day, before dawn, my sister died, and a worker who took us to Xi'an took it away, and found a place to bury it on the spot. So, when it came to it, my mom was still gritting her teeth with hatred for the guy who had already gotten the medicine but didn't give it to my sister.

After crossing the river, we took a carriage to a certain place, and then took the train to Xi'an. As soon as I got off the train, my mom was crying like crazy on the platform. Travelers gathered around us and watched us. Someone from the station picked up my mother in the back. Still, my mom went there and cried there. My dad's body was only seen by my mother, in the funeral home of Sanzhao in Xi'an, and it was just an object completely wrapped in red cloth, but in fact, nothing could be seen. My mom rushed over to take a closer look, but she was immediately taken away.

When I joined the work, three trillion came there to inform me to move the grave. My brother and I dug up my father's bones to be cremated. My father's bones were all broken bones, and there were many of the same chemical fabrics used to wrap the body at the time. That's why I didn't let my mother see my father's body at that time.

At that time, the unit wanted my mother to take over my father's class, but my mother was illiterate, had small feet, and had three children, so she did not have the conditions to be a worker. Therefore, there was no way, and the unit had to let the mother go back. But the three of us were paid monthly by the employer at half of my father's original salary. I don't know my father's salary, but I do know that the monthly pension for me and my brother and sister is 29.5 yuan. At that time, the unit also promised that the three of us would take over the work in the unit when we grew up. However, due to the influence of ****, the unit has not recruited workers, so my brother and sister have not been able to take over.

Speaking of the tragedy of my mother's life, another important aspect is that her feet are small feet, which is the kind of "three-inch golden lotus" we see in the movie. However, my mom's older sister and younger sister are both bigfooted. I asked my mom about this, and my mom said that she was caught by my father's family at the age of sixteen or seventeen, and my father was a tax director in Pingliang City, Gansu Province at that time. So my father's family is a big family in the local area, and the pear orchard at home alone is bigger than a football field, and there are many houses. And my mother's house is an ordinary family in the village. My dad's mother asked my mom to bind her feet, otherwise she would look ugly everywhere she went. My mother was forced to wrap her feet. However, after liberation, the shape and concept changed. But by this time, my mother's feet could no longer change. Not only is it unsightly to walk, but it is also very inconvenient to walk, and my feet are full of cocoons, and I use scissors to cut them all day long, which is very painful. Therefore, she has been scolding her mother-in-law all her life, saying that her mother-in-law cheated her and hurt her.

My father is gone, but life has to go on. But the days that followed were even more sad. Although, my dad is no longer in the Agency. But my mom and the three of us still live in a cave next to the railroad site, but life is even more difficult. At that time, it was the end of the ************, and it was very difficult to feed a family of four with more than 20 yuan. So, my mother washed the clothes for the workers on the construction site, and it took half a day to earn five dimes. Especially in winter, the rivers of the Weibei Plateau are very cold. My mother squatted by the river and washed for most of the day, so the rheumatoid arthritis on her wrist fell at that time, and when she got older, when it rained or winter, her wrist hurt so much, and sometimes she couldn't sleep all night. When I wasn't doing the laundry, my mom would take me to dig sweet potatoes and pick up ears of wheat. However, the sweet potatoes in the sweet potato field have long been dug up by the farmers, and my mother can only dig up a few sweet potato roots or a few sweet potatoes after digging in the field that others have dug for a day. My mother used the sweet potatoes to make a pot of soup and put the thickest ones in my brother's bowl because he was going to school. The half-thick ones were served in my sister's bowl and me, and she only drank the thin soup that had been multiplied.

I remember one time, when I followed my mother to a far away place to collect the ears of wheat, the peasants had finished harvesting all the wheat, and the ears of wheat in the field seemed to be gone, so we didn't care about them, but in the afternoon, when we had picked up a large bundle of wheat, the peasants suddenly came and harvested our ears of wheat and snatched my mother's blue turban. The headscarf my dad bought for my mom was the only thing my dad left for my mom. My mother knelt on the ground and cried and begged them to give us back the headscarf, but the peasants still didn't give it. My mother saw that it was already dark, and it was useless to beg again, so she took me to the house. After walking for more than 20 miles without a village, the wolves roared in fear in the wilderness, and I was so frightened that I clung to my mother's hand.

My father used to be a foreman of the Agency, and he had a bold personality and liked to entertain guests, so he had a good relationship, but he was no longer there, and there was no point in us staying in the Agency. And the Agency has no longer had a duty to look after us. If the Agency is relocated, we will no longer be able to follow them. Therefore, we are not only faced with the difficulties of life, but also the embarrassment of having nowhere to live.

At this time, someone introduced my mom to my stepfather. His stepfather was the machine gun squad leader in Lu Zhengcao's troops, and in a brutal battle in 42 years, he served as a counterattack against the devils and covered the retreat of the large army. In the end, all the people were dead, and so were the bullets. He himself was shot in the left arm. At this time, the devil had already rushed up, and he pretended to be dead and lay down in the corpse, and escaped the catastrophe. However, when he fled, he was discovered by the devil again, so he ran to a village, and a lady hid him in the wheat stack, so that he was not discovered by the devil. Later, the troops saw that his arm was crippled and let him go home. He was the first person in the Agency to participate in the revolution, because the entire Agency had come down from the battlefield to resist US aggression and aid Korea. Otherwise, when he later saw that many people who had joined the revolution much later than him were treated as veterans, he asked me to write to Beijing, but this kind of thing could not be done by writing letters alone, so I wrote several letters to no avail. He was going to Beijing to find Lu Zhengcao. So I persuaded him to forget it, don't go, what should they do if all the people who fought with you are dead? Who are they going to? When I say this, he never mentions it again.

My stepfather and my father used to be in the same shift, my father was the foreman, and my stepfather was the deputy foreman. But he and his father belong to two different personalities, the father is easy-going, and the stepfather has a very stubborn temper, and he is extremely honest, he doesn't like to talk, and he can't talk to women, so they are all thirty-five or sixteen years old, and they haven't talked to anyone yet. He was seven or eight years older than his mother. At that time, my mother was not yet thirty years old, and she was still beautiful. Because her father was handsome, tall, well-dressed, and educated, her mother loved her father very much, but in contrast, her stepfather did not have anything she liked. However, if she doesn't want to follow her stepfather, she will have to take us back to her hometown. And she ran out of her hometown because she was angry, and she didn't want to go back to the place that made her angry, so she still chose to marry her stepfather and start a family.