After my grandmother took the yellow paper from the little ghost monkey with the courage to do so, the little ghost monkey turned around, jumped a few times, burrowed into the cornfield not far away, and disappeared.

My grandmother stood at the head of the grave with yellow paper, stunned for a long time, and finally looked at the cornfield where the little ghost monkey disappeared, and whispered: "Little ghost monkey, you are late!" "Looking back at the embryonic loess where my grandfather was buried, tears couldn't help but fall again......

A lonely widow with two children, this day can be imagined......

This world is actually like this, who can have a smooth life in the weather?

A year later, in 1958, my grandmother was forty years old, my father was nine years old, my mother was seven years old, and my aunt was seven years old.

1958 was a year in which many stories were hidden.

In May, after the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress of the People's Republic of China was held, the "Great Leap Forward" movement was vigorously launched throughout the country.

The Great Leap Forward is roughly divided into two parts, one is the "Great Leap Forward in Agriculture" and the other is the "Great Iron and Steel Refining of the Whole Party and the Whole People".

The Great Leap Forward in agriculture has seen an unprecedented, absurd and comical "style of exaggeration." The exaggerated wind, that is, the boasting all over the sky, is also called "satellite".

The most pompous style was in Tianjin, and the "Tianjin Daily" at that time claimed that Xinli Village, an eastern suburb of Tianjin, had a yield of 120,000 catties per mu of rice experimental fields. Immediately afterwards, it is Xushui County, Baoding City, Hebei Province, with a yield of 1.2 million catties of yam, 120,000 catties of wheat, 5,000 catties of lint, and more than 2,000 catties of grain per mu in the county.

We don't grow rice here, mainly wheat, I don't know about rice, but as far as our family's current wheat yield per mu is concerned, the best harvest is only about 800 to 900 catties per mu, and in the past production conditions, the yield of wheat per mu is 120,000 catties? 120,000 catties, what kind of concept is this? This is no longer an astronomical figure, this is a big joke, but on this joke, some people really believe it, and the Party Central Committee has clearly instructed: how bold people are, how productive the land is. Now it seems that it is really "how bold people are, how productive the land is", let go of the courage to blow!

Writing here, some people may ask, don't the superior leaders come down to inspect? If you look in the field, you will know it. You know what, after the superior leaders came, the local leaders transplanted the crops in dozens of acres of land into one acre of land, and the crops in that field were full of grains, crowded and impermeable, and it was okay to sit on it, it seemed that it was a bumper harvest against the sky!

The whole people made steel, at that time the conditions were simple, just build a soil platform on the smelting, the steelmaking technology is not good, the good iron smelting is finished refining the scraps, the scraps are finished refining to the people's homes to collect, the iron pot and iron spoon, as long as it is a little bit of iron gas, are collected, blindly, and unrealistically thrown into the steelmaking furnace, smelted into piles of scrap iron lumps, and finally thrown everywhere on the side of the road, eager for quick success, so ambitious, labor and money!

At that time, the central leaders actually wanted not to steam steamed buns to fight for breath, and to tell the world that although we are poor in China, we have ambitions, we have people, we have food, we grow ourselves, we don't have steel, we refine ourselves. However, there is something, it is not ambition and crowd tactics that can be successful, and those who are dead to the horns of the bull are not called ambition, that is called stupidity. At that time, Khrushchev criticized China's rashness, because these roads, they Russia has already traveled, they have already suffered losses, it can be regarded as a good medicine, but * did not taste this is a good medicine, only know that it is bitter, and this is the cause of the later break with Russia.

At the same time, people's communes were established in the rural areas of the country, especially in Qiliying Town, Xinxiang City, Henan Province, and the leader at that time was called Shi Laihe, who became a well-known "servant of the people" in the 80s. Soon after, in less than a month, communes were established throughout Henan, and in some places the masses were even forced to join. The word "following the trend" seems to have originated in this era!

The People's Commune opened a large canteen, which is commonly known as "big pot rice", and it is not necessary to eat in the commune canteen for money, but you have to hand over your family's land, and all private property becomes public property, and you cannot make a fire at home, or even raise poultry, and everything, including you, is all "public".

At the beginning of the establishment of the canteen, most people expressed doubts that there was no money for eating, and many people had a wait-and-see mentality. According to my father, the food in the canteen was very good at first, with white flour, steamed rice, and even fried dough sticks.

Later, those who watched couldn't resist the temptation, and handed over the land they had obtained in the past to the "public family", joined the commune, and ate a big pot of rice in the big canteen.

My grandmother's family, because there is no labor force in the family, can't eat white flour steamed buns a few times a year, and I am the first batch to join the big canteen, and my father was also fortunate to eat white flour steamed buns for a few days.

However, due to the influence of the "exaggerated style" later, the Party Central Committee thought that there was an inexhaustible grain in all parts of the country, so it put out the slogan: "Let go of the belly to eat, throw off your arms and dry."

This slogan, in fact, is an empty word, after the establishment of the canteen led to the result: food waste not to say, many people who eat big pot rice are passive and slack off, anyway, do more and do less of the same, when it comes to eating, they don't eat less, one is lazy, a group of people follow the learning, which then leads to the abandonment of countless farmlands, wheat seedlings are not as tall as weeds, and some fields even have no harvest. However, the upper echelons of the state did not know this, and even if they did, they did not dare to say it, and they seemed to be blind to the fact that the country had entered a great "*" society, with common production and distribution. Moreover, in the statistics of the State Food Administration, the national grain output is a geometric doubling of the amount, when the Ministry of Agriculture announced that the summer grain output increased by 69% year-on-year, and the total output was 4 billion catties more than that of the United States.

In the winter of 1958, there was a shortage of food in the large canteens in many localities, and there was a famine in some places. At the same time, because of the "exaggerated style," the state has raised taxes on agricultural grain, and in order to be able to pay all the "public grain" in all parts of the country, it can only make those members hungry; even so, the exaggerated amount of public grain cannot be paid, and in some places it is suspected that someone has secretly hidden grain, and there have been cases where cadres of production teams have come to chase after public grain, and even beat and force people to death.

In the spring of 1959, the so-called "three-year natural disaster" broke out in an all-round way!

At this time, the big canteen, where is there any rice fritters, three meals a day, a small spoonful of thin soup per person that can be used as a mirror, and it is gone after drinking a soak of urine, and people have to dig grass roots and peel bark like they did in 42 years, and the best food is sweet potato stalks, that is, the stems and vines of sweet potatoes.

The year 1960 was the most difficult year, when countless people died of starvation, and almost everyone who was alive suffered from "edema." The arms and legs are skinny, but the belly is extremely large, which is the symptom of "edema".

My father and my aunt were so hungry that they couldn't stand up at all, so they were lying on the ground and crawling on their arms. Every day after my father and my aunt drank a bowl of clear soup in the morning, they would stay at the root of the south wall, and on the earthen wall of the south wall, they drew a horizontal path for my father, and the two brothers and sisters just lay on the ground and looked at the horizontal channel, in my father's words, when the sun shines on the center of the horizontal road, when the team canteen will ring the bell for lunch.

When my father told me this, he had a smile on his face, but I knew that behind that smile was endless bitterness and pain......

Relatively speaking, our area is better, my father, my mother, and my father-in-law have made it clear that there is no starvation of people here, but many people are hungry and go to the production team to steal food to eat. It is said that on the edge of the Yellow River, the people who stole socialist grain were caught, and after they were packed in sacks, they were thrown directly into the river. At the same time, I also heard that there are incidents of cannibalism in some places, but they are still not in our area, and they still have a smooth mouth, called "people eat people, dogs gnaw dogs, and rats gnaw bricks when they are hungry." ”

In the autumn of the same year, one day, my grandfather's death day. At that time, the living could not be saved, where could I take care of the dead, but my grandmother had to go to the cemetery every year to worship, at this time, the yellow paper was long gone, and there was only half a bundle of incense sticks left in my grandmother's private collection, my grandmother smoked nine, and when there was no one in the middle of the night, she shook and came to the grave, and gave my grandfather, my grandmother, and my grandfather, each of whom ordered three sticks, and I didn't dare to cry, for fear of being found out by others, because my grandmother was a "landlord's wife" at this time, and the composition was not good. Engaging in feudal superstition will be troublesome.

My grandmother knelt on the grave of my grandfather and the three of them, and muttered softly: "Daddy, mother, brother...... How are you guys? Now, there is another famine, but you don't have to suffer this sin anymore......" said him, tears falling from his eyes.

In the autumn of 1961, the Party Central Committee saw that more and more people were dying of starvation, so it had no choice but to dissolve the canteen. * The suggestion that each household be given a small piece of "self-reserved land" to save their lives was approved.

After the common people were allocated the "self-reserved land," they had the motivation again, because this "self-reserved land" did not have to pay "public grain," and they planted and ate their own food, and gradually, fewer and fewer people died of starvation, and by the autumn of 1962, the great famine was basically over. The hardest part of our neighborhood was the year of '60.

According to incomplete statistics, the number of people who died of starvation in this famine and died from some improper causes was about 20 million.

During these three years, some overseas scholars called it the "three-year famine", while Western scholars called it the "Great Leap Forward famine".

Afterwards, when the state summed up the causes of the famine, it said: "Three points of natural disasters, seven points* ......"