The long-distance bus from Yan'an to Xi'an parted the iron gate of the station at dawn. The fourth sister pressed a layer of loess dust on her forehead, and finally glanced at Da He's mother who sent her out on the long road - her mother ran with the car crying and shouting very good words, and Da Ye ran a few steps awkwardly, wiping her tears with her sleeve - but the scene of her mother digging for her came to mind.

My mother grinds the millet bran with a stone mill to become a yellow chaff, which is exactly the same color as the loess where the millet grows. Mom mixed the bran noodles with water, patted and pinched, made into round cakes, and when they were cooked in the pot, the four sisters climbed on the pot table and smelled an attractive fragrance. When she took a bite of the bran bread in her mouth, the fragrance disappeared completely, like chewing a mouthful of fine sand, the more she chewed, the more she chewed, the more she chewed, the more she chewed, and she couldn't swallow it. Mom patiently taught her the essentials of eating bran cakes: bite smaller, chew slowly, and wait for the saliva in her mouth to soak the chaff noodles softly, and then swallow them violently. She tried, and sure enough, she swallowed properly, although she inevitably had to stretch her neck. The bran cake is unpalatable and hard to swallow, but the worst thing is that it can't be pulled out after eating, and it makes people's eyes straight, and their faces are red and bruised, and they still can't pull it down. Pooping has become an insurmountable difficulty, an insurmountable burden, and an inextricable pain. Helpless, she had no choice but to pout her buttocks and let her mother take out a wire ring with a handle one by one, like a small dung grain pulled out by a lamb.

While digging it for her, her mother told her that she should not eat too much bran cake at a time, and if she had too much, it would be stuffed, and she must eat it with sauerkraut, and the sauerkraut would be cool. She didn't believe it. Once, in the thatched hut next to the cave, she saw her pouting her white buttocks, holding her hands on the ground, holding a cigarette pouch in her big mouth, pinching the wire ring with a handle, and saying something strange while digging it, which made her laugh and cry and curse fiercely. When the freshman saw her, he suddenly sank his face and scolded her to get away immediately. Another time, she saw the scene of her mother digging up the shit again, the big posture was very stupid, her hands were on the ground, her bare head was against the stone on the low wall of the thatched house, pouting her black and slimy ass, and moaning loudly. She already knew that she shouldn't watch this kind of action of adults, and before her mother found out, she quietly avoided it.

When I was a child, I just let my mother dig out shit for her, and I even felt that my mother's palms caressed her ass with an unusually warm feeling, and when she began to know how to be ashamed and ugly, she couldn't take off her pants in front of her mother. She found the neighbor's sister E'e, and the two of them hid in the mountains and asked Sister E'e to help her, and Sister E'e also needed her help.

Buses are speeding through the valley. The four sisters can see at a glance that the passengers on the bus can be roughly divided into two categories, one is the well-dressed public family, and the other is the local farmer. It's not exactly the difference in clothing, but there are also a few rural boys wearing four trunk uniforms, and you can tell the characters who are also chaff eaters at a glance. Those cadres or workers, in short, the kind of passengers who are members of the public family, seem to have a stronger digestive ability than the kind of passengers like the crop people, and from the very beginning of the drive, such people begin to chew, some chew snacks, cakes, bread, some gnaw apples and pears, chew and gnaw and mutter, Yan'an's dim sum has no oil, it is dry noodles and baked cakes! Yan'an's cakes are too hairy, and they are harder than stones! Those farmer passengers like the four sisters seemed to have eaten too much, were too satisfied, did not chew or complain, just carried dry tobacco bags and spit out choking smoke.

The four sisters naturally belong to the category of not chewing and not complaining. It was unseemly to watch others eat, it was painful to hear others chew cakes (though hard as stones) and apples, and to hear the grumbling words that were so infuriating that she looked to the windowpanes. The barren beams of the bald mountains flashed past, the canopy flashed past, and the black sheep and white sheep attached to the ground also flashed past.

The first thing she can remember is holding the doll for her mother. The doll was always endless, and as soon as the younger brother ran away, the mother shoved a younger sister into her hand, and as soon as she taught her sister to move, another monkey doll on the kang cried out, waiting for her to hold it again. When the younger sister was able to carry the younger brother, she put a small basket on her shoulder, loaded it with ash dung and went down the mountain with ears of grain, and lay on the kang at night, her shoulders hurt so much that she could not sleep. Mom said, it's good if it's a long time. After two years of carrying it, her shoulder still hurts. Saying, it doesn't hurt to carry it for ten or twenty years, and it shows off your shoulders. When the four sisters looked at it, on the shoulders of the big ones, there were two big black bumps on the big two big fists, and when they touched it with their hands, they were harder than stones. Da said that only by letting the ring of the back basket pull out these two pieces of dead flesh lumps, can he carry more than 200 pounds of ash dung up the mountain. The fourth sister was very scared, if there were two black and ugly lumps of dead flesh on their shoulders, it would be ugly to die.

Her personal colleague was a middle-aged woman, who belonged to the type of chewing and was particularly talkative, and kept asking the fourth sister which county, which commune, and which village she was from, and then asked her what she was going to do in Xi'an.

When she was in the fifth grade in elementary school with her sister on her back, a strange cripple came to the house, speaking a ridiculous foreign dialect, and led her second aunt away the next day, and her mother told her to call the cripple her brother-in-law. She looked down on the cripple, and led the amiable and lovely second aunt away with that bear-like appearance. Before the Spring Festival this year, the lame brother-in-law came and brought three bags full of white noodles, and for the first time in her life, the fourth sister filled her stomach with thin and tough noodles, and led the crippled brother-in-law to visit the scenery all over the mountains and ditches. Her brother-in-law told her that they had a flat horse there, and they couldn't run it on a bicycle for two or three days, and that Pingchuan had a net yield of wheat, and that the wheat stalks were neck-high and the ears of wheat were long, and they ate all the wheat all year round, and the half-thick pot helmet and the two-foot-long wide noodles were considered ordinary meals. The mothers-in-law and aunts in the neighborhood, who once ridiculed the second aunt for marrying a cripple, came to the kiln one after another, begging the mother to give the second aunt a message, so that the second aunt could find a mother-in-law for their women in the Guanzhong Plain, which ate wheat for a year. What can a poor peasant with two long legs do? It's not like stretching out her neck to swallow chaff and pouting her ass to make people dig up shit! The fourth sister is eighteen or nineteen years old, and now she takes a bus to Xi'an, and the second aunt and the lame brother-in-law pick her up at the bus station in Xi'an, and then transfer to the car and go to the village named Yang Jiaxie, where the second aunt lives, and the second aunt will find her in-laws in some village there...... For such a humble purpose, how could the fourth sister be embarrassed to say it to the irrelevant middle-aged female cadre sitting at the same seat?

The female cadres sitting at the same table not only love to chew food, but also love to chew their tongues, and they are Yan'an natives when they listen to their accents. She said that she had been away from Yan'an for more than 20 years, and she wanted to Yan'an, dreamed of Yan'an, and always had no chance to come back to have a look. This time, I really revisited the revolutionary tradition, and I will never forget it for the rest of my life. The fourth sister was confused when she heard it, and she didn't know why this female cadre had such a strange mood. The four sisters knew that among the 100 households in Liujiayuan alone, there were more than 30 people who were now officials at or above the county magistrate level outside, and when they returned to Liujiayuan, they also said things similar to this female cadre. The fourth sister thought that if they were to eat chaff cakes now, pouting their butts and letting others dig out shit, they would ......

After the car passed through Tongchuan, the four sisters suddenly exclaimed--oh! In front of her eyes, a vast and endless field suddenly unfolded, the wheat seedlings returned to green, the peach blossoms were red, and the willows were green. Is this the Guanzhong Plain that the lame brother-in-law boasted of eating wheat all year round? Ahhh