Jiang Lesheng of the 60th class of "Jiangzhong" is the youngest, and he has a small voice when he speaks, and he is still an undeveloped child. The graduation physical examination is 1.48 meters tall and weighs 32 kilograms. Because of his thinness, a pair of eyes appear extraordinarily big, and he is always timid when he sees people, and he does not lose his aura in his childishness.

He was born in Pailou Village, east of the county seat, with three older sisters, Leyun Lehua, two younger brothers and a younger sister, Letian Lemei Legu, and an elder brother who died less than a year old. When he was born, his father Jiang Qingyu was thirty-six years old.

Jiang Qingyu was afraid that this son would not live long, so he named him "Lesheng". During the confinement, he ate vegetarian food, burned incense and worshiped the Buddha, and begged the Bodhisattva to bless "Happy Life" from death. Perhaps this piety touched the heavens, and the weak Le Sheng finally survived.

This child has been smart since he was a child, and he can read more than 100 words at the age of three. My father cut the white paper into the size of a square cake, wrote with a brush a knife, cattle and sheep, read and read words, rice, soybeans and other words into word blocks, and taught him to recognize a few words at the end of the day. In the summer evening, the family peeled corn around the basket, and his father used corn kernels as teaching aids to teach him addition and subtraction, and when he went to school, he could even do simple multiplication and division. He likes to listen to stories the most, "Mother-in-law's Tattoo", "Kong Rong Makes Pears", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Yang Jiajiang" and so on. These enlightenment education stimulated his strong desire for knowledge, and he entered the private Pailou Primary School at the age of five.

The primary school is three miles away from home, and it was originally the private residence of the family's eldest uncle, Jiang Si's father. There are four classrooms in the front row of the two rows of houses, with four classrooms in the front row of tiled houses, with more than 50 students at the earliest, and four grandmothers and her cousin Jiang Lepu's family live in the back row of thatched houses. In the year of Lesheng's birth, the Japanese soldiers went to the countryside from Jiang'an City to sweep, and people scattered and fled for their lives, and the next year Jiang Lepu graduated from Xiaozhuang Normal School, vacated his own house, and set up this primary school as his own principal. Principal Jiang likes Lesheng to be smart, and when he saw that others were too small to walk, he asked the older students to take turns carrying him.

Since ancient times, Chinese peasants have been associated with poverty and heavy manual labor. Jiang Lesheng grew up with poverty and hunger. Regardless of whether they planted their own crops and harvested themselves before the cooperativeization, or joined the high-level people's commune and distributed according to the work points, there was always not enough food to eat, and they relied on "substitute food" for three meals a day to satisfy their hunger. The nursery rhyme sang: "Today Ba (Pan) Tomorrow Ba, Ba to the Thirty Nights (Chinese New Year's Eve), tofu scoop fish meat fork". Three cents an egg is reluctant to eat, sewing clothes, buying cloth and cotton thread, three meals a day are inseparable from salt, providing two taels of cottonseed oil every month, matches and kerosene, children's books and miscellaneous fees, all expenses depend on the hard work of the chicken butt. Few people brush their teeth, and on ceremonial occasions such as children's engagement and marriage, they can wipe their front teeth with a towel dipped in salt; Even if there is a toothbrush shared by the whole family, the hair is reluctant to change it, and toothpaste is a rare luxury. Laundry clothes with honey locusts knotted on the tree, sick do not see a doctor stiff, really powerful to ask for a home remedy, or the temple begged to flush the ashes to drink...... People Wishing you prosperity each other during New Year's greetings, and congratulating each year on not getting rich every year.

For as long as Lesheng can remember, he can get a new pair of cloth shoes during the Chinese New Year. As soon as they entered the wax moon, my mother and sister used rags to paste the rice, wrapped the beautiful "divination page" edge, and nailed the soles of the salad salad with fine hemp rope, and then bought a piece of black drikung tweed to make the upper, and put a wooden last on the upper after the upper, which was no worse than the shoes sold. Each family has a pair of cloth shoes, and they are considered to be "new" for the New Year. On Chinese New Year's Eve, I put my new shoes next to my pillow and couldn't sleep with joy, just hoping that I would wear the "cannon battle" at dawn, and the feeling of shining under my feet made people excited. Because there is only one pair a year, these shoes are precious. Lesheng studied in primary and junior high school, regardless of cold and summer, winter and summer, and never played barefoot in rain and snow, even if his feet were red from the cold. The shoes are tucked under the armpits, and they are reluctant to get wet.

The children of Pailou Village have their own joy.

Qingming season is a good time for kite flying. The turquoise wheat seedlings are strung high, the golden rape flowers are fragrant, and the lilac broad bean flowers on the ridges attract butterflies and bees to fly. The blue sky is like a huge curtain, adorned with colorful kite silhouettes. The square, five-star, octagonal, butterfly-shaped, centipede-shaped is very beautiful. Lesheng only has a very small kite, tied with twine to bend into a butterfly-shaped piece, pasted with red, black and yellow three-color paper, tied to the yarn removed from the old socks, lifted it into the air in the breeze, dragged the yarn rope against the wind and ran, the flower butterfly flew into the blue sky, the back lined with white clouds. The largest kite in the village is the second year of the king of Dongzhuang Liugen Xizhuang Lu, tied with hemp rope instead of old sock yarn, the falling rope swinging with the wind is three or four feet long, and the eight horns are equipped with open gourds, and the pleasant whistle can be heard several miles away.

In summer, the large pond surrounded by reeds is rippling with blue waves, half of the water surface is planted with lotus water chestnut, the other half is used as a natural swimming ground, and a rope connects more than a dozen sections of tree trunks as a dividing line. Children are tanned, and they don't wear shorts until they are ashamed. The swimmer swims faster than whoever swims the waves; Diving to see who holds the water for a long time; The belly of the backstroke floats on the surface of the water like a leather ball; There are even more artists and darers, who dare to jump down from the beam of the waterwheel. On the other side of the dividing line, the lotus flowers are grateful, and many lotus pods are produced, and pink water chestnuts grow under the water chestnut seedlings. The children supervise each other, and no one is allowed to cross the line - the adults say that there are water ghosts under the lotus canopy, and they will drown the greedy children and sink into the mud at the bottom of the pond to die!

In autumn, the rice is yellow and ripe, and the golden ears of rice give birth to laughter all over the fields. People "Hi Shout" and "Hi Shout" took the cut rice bales home day after day, dismantled them evenly and spread them on the drying field, and then drove the cattle to pull the mill. During the day, the rice is harvested in the field, and the milling field needs to be completed overnight. A bright moon hung in the gray-blue sky, the stars blinked happily, and the shouts of cattle and the squeak of the rotation came from the drying fields. The children are even more excited than the sports meeting: helping the adults open the rice bales and pave the field, it has become a good place for mat sports with a fragrance: wrestling and flipping his heels, stacking Arhats, picking up the milled rice and pouring it into his neck, flowing down his trouser legs, cool and itchy......

The most spectacular is the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. In the rural areas of Jiang'an, there is a custom of frying "hemp skewers" during the Lantern Festival: the wheat straw is tied on wooden sticks or bamboo sticks, made into a torch with a thick bowl mouth that is two feet long, and poured with oil residue called "hemp skewers". After dark, he waved around his own ridges, dragging and shouting in a long voice while dancing: Half fried hemp skewers in the first half of the New Year. Hemp is knotless and insect-free. The rice is full and the ears of wheat are sinking. If the first three sentences imply praying for a good harvest, the latter words vividly express their selfishness and narrowness: other people's vegetables have a big copper coin, but my family's vegetables are big; Other people's families pick a line, not enough for the old man and wife to taste, my family picks one, and the family eats warmly. The last sentence is the most "lacking in morality" expectation: people's mother-in-law gave birth to "forks" (girls), and my mother-in-law gave birth to "hanging (son)!"

When frying "hemp skewers", adults hold torches in front, and a group of little children follow behind. The adults shouted the first half of the sentence, and the children answered the second half, singing and laughing. When the neighbors met together, the last three sentences were changed: "my family" was changed to "my two families", which showed that the neighbors were happy and harmonious.

As the night darkens, a full moon hangs in the sky, and the mercury-like moonlight illuminates the villages and fields semi-hazy and translucent. The village is filled with the sound of festive firecrackers, the occasional fireworks go off into the air, and children call out the name of the fireworks: "Starry Sky"! "Nine Dragons"! "Double Butterfly"! In the wilderness, hundreds of "hemp strings" are dancing, high and low, rising and falling, torches burning the withered thatch on the roadside, lighting pieces of fire, and strings of sparks......

In the second year of liberation, the government took over Pailou Primary School. The new principal Chen is the only junior high school graduate among the teachers, and the rest of the teachers include a gentleman who has taught a private school, a business account office that has closed down, and a village finance and economics brother-in-law who is only in the fifth grade. Every year, thirty or forty high school graduates have not been admitted to junior high school for three consecutive years. Pailou Primary School is known as a "bald" school.

In 1954, eleven-year-old Jiang Lesheng was admitted to Ziyu Junior High School and "prepared" for the third place. Principal Chen came to the door and said to his father Jiang Qingyu: Congratulations, your son has taken it! Jiang Lesheng couldn't wait to see the notice, and the principal said that you are "reserved", and you can only make up for it when the admitted students give up their enrollment. Jiang Lesheng cried when he heard it.

His father advised him not to cry, saying that you are too young to retake the exam next year. Principal Chen said don't worry, there will definitely be students who will not be admitted to such a big flood this year. It's time to take off the bald hat of my Pailou Primary School. Jiang Lesheng asked the principal: Why did people admit me for preparation? Principal Chen said: In the five townships around the county, there are more than 2,000 primary school graduates, and only Ziyu Junior High School recruits 200 of them.

Jiang Lesheng clenched his small fists, slapped his head and scolded: What a damn! The four most difficult questions are calculated correctly, and the number is wrong; I changed the wrong words in the language, I changed the difficult ones, but I forgot to change the word "to" in the "knowing"! The principal said carelessly, at least two points will be deducted from these two places!

This lesson made Jiang Lesheng remember it for a lifetime!

Just when the three of them were persuading and crying, a person ran in out of breath outside the door, who was the nephew of the township mayor who graduated from primary school last year and became a teacher. He panted and reported to Principal Chen, and the township chief's uncle received a call from Ziyu Junior High School, informing Jiang Lesheng of Pailou Village to report for duty tomorrow. The flood washed away the bridge, and the postman could not pass, and the notice could not be delivered.

In the autumn of May Fourth, Jiang Lesheng bid farewell to his childhood friend and entered Ziyu Junior High School in the county seat.

It takes an hour to walk from home to school, and I have been going out early and returning late for three years of junior high school. The first semester was fine, bringing some leftovers from home mixed with food for lunch, or cooked potato pumpkin and carrots to satisfy hunger; In the second year, the unified purchase and marketing sent the task of selling surplus grain, "low-standard melon and vegetable generation", porridge is so scarce that you can see people's shadows, and there are more and more "substitute foods" such as vegetable leaves and carrots, how can there be leftovers?

Drink two large bowls of gruel on the road every morning, and your stomach will "growl" every step you take. After more than seven miles of two bubbles of urine, the stomach was empty before the person arrived at school. At noon, the boarders had their meals, and in order to avoid the reflex seeping saliva, he often took a book to the Xixiao River to read, where a few weeping willow trees were in the shade. When people sink into books, their hunger is much lighter.

The experience of picking up a meal ticket was something he will never forget.

It was the time of lunch on the second day of the second semester of junior high school. Jiang Lesheng sat on a stone under the shade of the willows, concentrating on reading the Soviet novel "The Road of Gulya". The east wind blew, and a strong aroma of rice wafted with the wind and hit the nose. The stomach is gurgling, and the intestines are twisted into twists, which are hot and painful. He couldn't resist the temptation of the smell of rice, closed his eyes slightly, closed the book, and opened his mouth to swallow the fragrance wafting in the wind. Saliva unconsciously flowed down the corners of his mouth, and a "Bu Da" dripped on the handsome face of the book cover. He opened his eyes and hurriedly dried the book jacket with his sleeve. I only felt that Venus was bursting in front of me, and the river around me was shaking.

Suddenly found that on a cloud of leaves on the surface of the river, there was a matchbox-sized brown paper, a meal ticket? He jumped up, pouted a branch and hooked it to take a look, and sure enough, it was a meal ticket with a face value of one dime, it had the dual value of half a catty of food stamps and a dime, and it could be used to buy half a catty of rice! He didn't have time to think about it, so he rushed all the way to the cafeteria, held up the meal ticket to the master who cleaned up the pot and said to buy food. Seeing that he was not a boarder, the master asked where he got the meal ticket? Jiang Lesheng was in a hurry, and for the first time in his life, he lied with a red face and said: "I'm hungry, I borrowed my classmates." "--The things I picked up were dishonorable after all. The master served a bowl of rice and scooped a spoonful of vegetable soup. In a few minutes, the wind swept away the clouds.

This is the only time you have an adventure. No matter how much attention and anticipation are met, there is no floating meal ticket on the surface of the river.

Every afternoon in the free activity class, the students go to the playground to play ball and exercise, he really has no strength to run and jump, the cat in the classroom to hurry up to do homework, do it well and go home quickly, the two pigs at home have a basket of pigweed every day. His parents and sisters were too tired to work in the fields, and digging pigweed was a task he took the initiative to undertake, and it was an assignment other than homework.

Suffering from hunger, Jiang Lesheng was short, thin, thin, and yellow-faced, and he was not growing in age. Despite this, at the end of each semester, he was excellent in all his subjects except physical education. The head teacher always praised him for his excellent character and learning, but he hoped that "the parents would properly solve the student's lunch problem" year after year.

The class held a learning experience exchange meeting, and the class teacher introduced the learning method by name. His face was flushed, and he lowered his head and said that he had no experience. The teacher repeatedly inspired him to talk about his experience. He shyly snorted: I don't have lunch to eat, and I'm sorry for my stomach if I don't study well.

In the summer of '57, Jiang Lesheng graduated from junior high school, ranked third in the county in the high school entrance examination, and mathematics was the only perfect score, washing away the shame of "preparedness" three years ago.

That day, he finished the test, checked the standard answers, and rushed home. There is no moon at the end of the lunar month, and the dark clouds are overwhelming and you can't see your fingers. The black waves of the roadside rice fields are rolling and lush like ink, and the frogs are loud like ten thousand drums singing in unison. He stumbled and stumbled with one foot deep and one shallow, and suddenly saw the fireflies in front of him flickering and flashing, and the outline of the road appeared dimly. He was happy in his heart, and he made up his own limerick and recited: The clouds and the sky are wild, and the rice sea listens to the frogs. The fireflies danced and moved, according to my night.

The family sat around the table and waited for him to come back for dinner. When I entered the house, my father asked how he did in the exam? He pursed his lips and smiled, and replied with only one word: yes.

He immersed himself in the poems he had compiled, reciting words in his mouth while eating dinner, and pondered the first word of the last verse: "Zhao"? "Citation"? "Help"? "Companion"? That's right, "walk with me through the night" is good.

He feels that his poems are dynamic and static, and the artistic conception is realistic, like a magnificent ink painting, which is quite complacent.

Father is so strange, what's wrong with this child?

My father studied in private school for three years when he was a child, read a lot of books in his spare time, and memorized hundreds of ancient poems. couldn't stand the repeated questioning, Le Sheng read the poem he had thought of to him. My father didn't squeak. Light a pot of cigarettes and say with a depressed look on his face that this poem is not good.

How is it bad? Lesheng was surprised.

The father did not answer. Shaoqing shook his head and said to himself: Fireflies break the night? …… The road is not easy to walk, wow!

In the following 20 years, Jiang Lesheng experienced ups and downs and sufferings, and often recalled this ominous proverb back then.