Slightly older people know that in the past, when buying things, everything to eat not only cost money, but also to match a certain denomination of food stamps, the smallest denomination is one tael, and a slightly larger fire costs two taels of food stamps.

At that time, my mother and another middle-aged woman worked in a grocery store on the side of the railway station, and my mother had attended a literacy class in the village when she was a child, and worked in a flour mill owned by my grandfather's family. The middle-aged woman whose surname is Guan, I call her Aunt Guan, she can't read and write, and she just stands at the counter every day to sell goods.

The grocery store is divided into two rooms with a counter, with customers standing outside and selling goods inside. The box for collecting money is placed in the most secret place under the counter, and the box is divided into two compartments, one for money and one for food stamps. On the shelves in the counter, there are several varieties of liquor, cigarettes, sugar, soda and other miscellaneous things, facing the most conspicuous position at the door, neatly arranged with iron boxes containing pastries, usually put seven or eight, there are peach crisp, fried sugar, longevity cake, honey, twist, twist sweet and salty, sometimes there is a kind of sesame cake, the size is as big as the current one-yuan coin, very delicious. At that time, I was five or six years old, and I followed my mother to work every day, and in the face of these dim sum with a rich aroma, my little heart deeply felt the pain and suffering. In fact, I am relatively self-conscious, and I have always been shy and shy, and I have never dared to reach out and take snacks for myself. Originally, I was going to go to nursery school at my age, but I couldn't adapt to the group life, so I persisted for half a year, and I still died every day, and the teacher and my mother were enough. Thinking about the fact that there is still one year to go to school, it is not worth tossing with me, and the key is to save a year's childcare fees, and after obtaining the consent of the commune leaders, take me to work. Before I went to work, my mother set a rule for me: if you dare to steal food, whichever hand holds it, you will chop off your hand.

Aunt Guan didn't think so, thinking that my mother was acting like this, how much can a child eat? Sometimes while my mother is away, I break a piece of peach cake, she takes a bite of me, grabs a handful of sesame cakes, she takes a piece of me, and my mother comes back as if nothing happened. Once, my mother said that she was going to the commune to pay the account, and when she walked halfway to the road, she remembered that she forgot to take something, and turned back, Aunt Guan and I were hiding in the counter and eating sesame cakes with a smile. I opened my mouth wide and didn't close it for a long time. I saw my mother, who had done eight roads, rushed into the counter from the outside in three steps and two steps, raised her hand and slapped out half of the sesame cake that I didn't have time to swallow in my mouth, and then grabbed my collar, dragged it outside, and stood against the wall, pointing her finger at my nose: cry and kill you!

After my mother finished rectifying me, she turned around and questioned Aunt Guan with a righteous face.

"Lao Guan, what are you doing here?"

Aunt Guan drooped her eyelids and stood against the counter, silent.

"It's a public thing, don't you know?"

This is a standard rhetorical question, when I learned the rhetorical question in Chinese class, my mother's sentence flashed in my mind for the first time, it is indeed more powerful than the general declarative sentence, such as scolding my father, you are not a good person, in other words, what are you, you don't know? The effect is completely different, the latter has a much heavier tone. However, for the illiterate Aunt Guan, it doesn't matter what you are, she has her own wisdom and wisdom, in just a few minutes, Aunt Guan returned to her usual slowness and calmness, she picked up the rag on the counter, wiped off a few sesame seeds scattered on the counter, raised her eyelids, glanced at my mother, and said slowly: "It's wrong, it's wrong, I've eaten it, what should I do?" I can't pull it out, if I don't count how much it is, count what Xiao Nan eats, count it on my head, see how much it is, and send me to the commune. ”

Who said that it was terrible to say that there was no culture, and Aunt Guan said a few words to my literate and hyphenated mother. In fact, in the following decades, until my mother died, she didn't have any friends around her, she was a little disdainful of unenlightened people like Aunt Guan from the bottom of her heart, some pretentious, although she herself was an ordinary person, but my mother felt that she was fundamentally different from them, and my mother had a glorious past. Although my grandfather's family was wealthy and classified as a rich peasant when the composition was divided, no one brought down my mother during the special period, because my mother joined the revolution at the age of sixteen. At that time, my mother ignored my grandfather's objections, and on the night when the troops stationed in the village were deployed, my mother smashed the window in the middle of the night and ran away, just like in a movie, chasing after the troops. My mother has told me countless times that she is a famous little tiger in the army, and that there were many revolutionary young people like my mother in those days, who were not afraid of hardship or death, and were completely loyal to the party. Because of her excellent work, my mother joined the party in the army and was sent back to her hometown to preside over the local work as a district chief. His reputation became so great that he became the main target of the Kuomintang reactionaries, and he was blocked in the middle of the night by a white dog with loaded guns and ammunition several times, and he almost died.

"Aren't you afraid?" I asked my mom once.

"What are you afraid of? At that time, the more you fear, the more you die. ”

My mom would sometimes show me off: "I carried a gun everywhere I went, and it was so big that I couldn't even see it in my pocket." ”

My mom gestured with her palms open, proud.

"I have it myself, they all carry spears."

When my mom said they, she meant her subordinates, comrades.

When my mother returned to her hometown, she did not immediately visit her grandfather, but first arranged her work and took her to see her father and mother when she went to the village for a meeting.

When I left, I was still a little girl who didn't know the world, and now I came back with a sassy and heroic female cadre, and the ups and downs in my grandfather's heart could not be imagined.

"Why don't you give them a letter, you don't want them?"

"How can you think about it, follow the troops here and there all day long. Later, when I came to the local area, I was too busy with work to think about it. Besides, at that time, the liberation had just begun, and the situation of the struggle was very complicated. ”

When my mother said this, she had a bit of the charm of a female cadre back then