After some tossing, my father Wang Haimali unloaded half of the carload of sweet potatoes. These sweet potatoes are all packed in large baskets made of willow branches.

After each large wicker basket is full of white potatoes, the weight is at least 100 catties. But for Wang Hai, who is only more than one meter six or five points tall, it seems that he has no weight, and with a clasp of both hands, he easily lifted a basket and moved it off the ox cart.

Carrying the big basket and continuing to walk a few steps, I came to the pool dedicated to washing white potatoes, and the basket was tilted, and half a basket of white potatoes jumped into the pool like a duck in a hurry.

Wang Hai clasped the bottom of the basket with both hands and made a great effort. The whole wicker basket was turned over, the bottom was up, the mouth was down, and all the large and small white potatoes in the basket obediently went into the pool.

Because when the sweet potato is dug out of the ground, it is with soil. All, before the sweet potato is crushed, the first step is to clean, clean the soil on the body, and save the trouble of filtering later.

The pool at the door is not big, about a square of about one meter and two, but the height is only more than 20 centimeters. Generally speaking, you can put four or five baskets at once and it will be full.

After it was full, Wang Hai picked up a wooden rake and began to push it against the white potatoes in the pool. As the rake pushes continuously, the white potatoes in the pond continue to rub and shake in the water.

Soon, some of the white potatoes near Wang Hai were washed clean. Wang Hai put down the rake, picked up a large fence welded with a thin iron rod, stretched it into the pool, pinched it down vigorously, and then pushed it up, and the cleaned white potatoes of a large fence were fished out.

Wang Hai twisted around with this big fence of white potatoes, shouted with both hands, and sent it to the gate beside him.

"Bang-"

A large fence of sweet potatoes was thrown into the gate.

The gate of Wang Yong's house was newly built last year, the ground is plastered flat with cement, and the wall is also made of stone at the bottom, and the top is full of red bricks. The top is not bare like ordinary people's homes, but a roof is made of cement prefabricated panels.

Close the gate, which is half welded with thin iron plates, and it becomes a storage place for the cleaned sweet potatoes. The grinder is placed more than a meter in front of the door, and it is easy to throw the cleaned white potatoes into the grinder from here.

In other words, the peasants are really bitter these days!

What a mess of charges makes you have a few dollars left throughout the year, and you definitely feel funny to hear that there are so many heads. Not to mention the formal ones such as retention and agricultural taxes, the apportionment of various clever names is unimaginable to future generations. It's no wonder that the old peasants later complained to the prime minister!

For example, what is the house renovation fee, which means that your house has lived in for too long and is not safe, and you want to renovate it, then you have to go to the government and pay this money.

What the? Don't pay? Then you just wait for the police station to come and pick you up, bring a silver bracelet and live in a single room! The peasants of this year are not as bullish as they were twenty years later, and they are absolutely afraid of these law enforcement agencies.

Of course, the secretary, the village chief definitely doesn't need to pay this. No matter what, it's an official, isn't it? You have to have some privileges to reap some benefits, right?

This is only a small part, and there are children going to school, so there are even more indiscriminate fees. All kinds of workbooks, all kinds of exam papers, newspapers and periodicals, heating, fire (hehe, don't confuse it with heating, it's not the same thing at all), water, electricity, make-up classes, evening self-study fees.

What the? Is there still a charge for self-study at night? Hehe, I didn't know anything when I heard you, what is the charge for evening self-study, it's all a small head. The real big deal is still work-study tuition.

Work-study, as the name suggests, should be students who earn tuition through their own labor.

But all the post-80s and 90s generations may have this kind of memory - every year when the season comes, the school will have a special holiday to let students go home to work-study.

The so-called work-study program is the picking of sweet potato tendons that begins every summer in Wang Yong's hometown. It is the petiole part with leaves on the white potato seedling.

After picking, remove the leaves and feed them to the pigs and rabbits at home, and the remaining long petioles are scalded with hot water, then dried and bundled into bundles, and then handed over to the school to pay for work-study tuition.

You get the idea, right? This work-study tuition is to be handed over to the school, and it is for the school work-study! If the money you pay for the seedlings is not enough for the work-study tuition stipulated by the school, then there is no way, go home and ask your parents to get the money.

What the? Your family has no money? If you don't have money, why do you go to school? Go home and stay! At this time, the nine-year compulsory education has not yet been implemented, let alone let you go home and stay, or you will be expelled directly, which is also a matter of other teachers' words!

Don't be unconvinced, although the teacher at this time may not have much salary, but the social status is definitely high! At least in the eyes of ordinary people.

By the way, at that time, the sun-dried seedling tendons were about five cents a catty, and as for how much it was sold on, it would not be something that we ordinary fart people could know. It's just that I heard that all these things are exported to Japan and South Korea, so the price is definitely more than five cents, right?

A pound of fresh seedling tendons can probably be dried for one or two more, which means that ten pounds of fresh seedling tendons are worth almost five cents. At this time, people are real people, if you put it now, if you don't mix it with a few catties of water, a few catties of stone and dust, etc., don't even think about it.

The work-study tuition fee for a first-grade primary school student is about more than ten yuan, which is equivalent to more than a year's tuition plus books. It is equivalent to 20 catties of dry seedling tendons and 200 catties of fresh seedling tendons.

A group of seven or eight-year-old children, carrying a broken bag against the big sun overhead, sweat beads and bending over the ground to pick seedlings and tendons, if this scene appeared after 2010, I am afraid it will be enough for CCTV news to make a special topic, and talk about it.

But in the decade, this was the norm. Rural children born in the 80s and early 90s, except for those with particularly good family conditions and special pampering parents, who hasn't done this?

Isn't it for the work-study tuition, which will grow higher and higher later?

In contrast to the price of agricultural products, two or three yuan a pound of meat, a few cents a pound of flour, and white potatoes are even more cents a pound, when the market is bad, no one wants a penny or a pound.

Of course, most farmers are reluctant to sell sweet potatoes directly, which is too cheap. Every household is a family of all ages, turning them out of the ground with a pickaxe, picking them up one by one near the big basket, pulling them home to crush them, and then going through a series of troublesome steps, which are time-consuming and laborious to turn into starch.

Because starch is worth more than sweet potatoes, you can earn a few more bucks!

But for this, the peasants paid for more than a month of hard work in the cold late autumn season. Get up early and be greedy, get up from more than five o'clock in the morning before dawn, and have to be busy until ** o'clock in the evening, which is still early, and some families even have to work until eleven or twelve o'clock in the evening.

During this period, the rural infrastructure was very poor, and there were no cement roads, and the electricity consumption during the busy agricultural period was even tighter, so that the village had to group the farmers into groups and use electricity in groups.

It's okay to be assigned to the evening, so you don't have to delay your work during the day. But what about the daytime? Isn't it possible to go down to the field with a flashlight and a candle at night to cut sweet potatoes? It's so unrealistic!

Of course, the village electrician will not be too excessive, and the time generally arranged is specially selected. During the day, I usually get up early and at noon, so that I don't have to delay the work in the field.

In October, and possibly November, it's already winter. However, in order to make the whole family's life better, these farmers can put their hands into the ice water in sub-zero temperatures, and stretch out for about ten minutes of busy work.

Even with such hard work, there was not much income at the end of the year. After removing the money for fertilizers and pesticides, there may only be a few hundred yuan left, and most people may not have so much.

And during this period, the various messy expenses paid to the school for a year alone cost at least more than 100 or 200 yuan! If you remove all kinds of strange taxes and fees collected by the state and the villages, it will be too common in the countryside during this period to pay money in a year.

It is precisely because of this that a large number of peasants have begun to leave their hometowns and go to other places to work in the cities to make money. Because it's much better than being busy at home for a year and losing money.

In the city, no matter how hard and tired you are, the money you make is also real money. During the Chinese New Year, you can take it back to subsidize the family, pay the children's tuition and miscellaneous fees, let the family eat a meal of meat, buy a few feet of fabric, and make a few new clothes.