The hunger of famine years is something those who never lived through it cannot understand

Summary: If you have never lived through an era of famine, you do not know what true hunger is

Without having lived through that era, without having personally experienced hunger, you cannot understand the poverty and hunger of those times. Even I, born in the 1980s, cannot understand or comprehend it. I can only often listen to Grandpa tell the "story of grain ration coupons" over and over, describing how the older generation survived years of starvation, how they overcame illness and famine again and again. Back then, wild vegetables and wild fruits were all eaten, and coarse grains and pickles all tasted incredibly delicious.

But back then, people mainly worked for the production team to earn work points and get grain rations. Men were the main labor force in the family, earning ten points a day, while women and children could only earn six or seven points a day. At the end of the month, grain was distributed according to how many work points you had earned, and the grain distributed was only enough to last half a month. Even eating two meals a day, you could not make it to the end of the month. To avoid going hungry, women and children would carry baskets to the fields to dig wild vegetables, pick tender elm leaves, locust flowers, and wild fruits. Even now, my mom can still recognize all kinds of wild vegetables in the fields: shepherd's purse, noodle vegetable, pig tail vegetable, amaranth, ququ vegetable, and so on. She can talk endlessly and knowledgeably about which vegetable tastes good and which tastes bitter and astringent.

Once a person is hungry, they can do anything. Stealing food to eat when starving is understandable. In those days, every family had several children, and the grain that could be distributed from work points was little, so children also could not eat their fill and went hungry. Grandpa told of how, when my aunt was very little, their house was very close to the production team's sweet potato field. My aunt would go to the sweet potato field pretending to relieve herself, secretly pull sweet potatoes from the ground, tuck them into her clothes, and bring them home. They were cut into sweet potato slices. During the day, they did not dare dry them in the yard, so at night they secretly put them on the stove to dry, and finally ground them into sweet potato flour to supplement the family's rations. This shows how scarce materials were at the time.

Grandpa said that people in those days would also catch fish, wild pheasants, and wild rabbits to give themselves a treat. But the number of fish, wild rabbits, and wild pheasants was very small, while the number of people who could not eat their fill was huge. Solving the problem of food and clothing by catching fish and hunting wild game was clearly unrealistic. Moreover, catching fish and hunting wild game required professional tools. In an era when people could not eat their fill, could not dress warmly, and materials were scarce, any family with a fishing rod, fishing net, or hunting rifle clearly had luxurious equipment. If you relied only on bare hands and luck to catch fish and hunt wild game to solve the hunger problem, I estimate you would not have lived to see the arrival of reform and opening up.

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