2024 Chinese New Year outlook
Mulan Lake originates from the Xiajiasi Reservoir built by the Huangpi people, and has poured the hard work and sweat and even the lives of my parents and grandparents. Therefore, the topic of Huangpi people's New Year's greetings, especially when chatting with the elderly, inadvertently went around Mulan Lake.
The custom of Huangpi is to pay New Year's greetings to the family (grandmother) and uncle's house on the second day of the Lunar New Year. My uncle died before the Spring Festival, and the second day of the new year is when our nephew gives the deceased uncle a New Year's greeting. My aunt's family prepared three sumptuous tables for us, and after the feast I proposed to visit his old parents, whose mother was my mother's eldest sister, whom I call aunt and uncle.
My aunt is 81 years old this year, and my uncle is 84 years old. The two old men were in good spirits and were very happy to see my aunt and nephew. In particular, my aunt is the kind of old man who is commonly known in the countryside (not confused, clear thinking), who has not studied in the school for a day, but has a super strong memory, and the past is vivid; He is also very talkative, and he talks about the past vividly and clearly. I accompanied the two elders to bask in the sun, and I talked about the past of my uncle's family.
Talking about my father's (grandfather's) large amount of food, especially the famine in 59 years, he couldn't stand the hunger, so he responded to the call to build the Xiajiasi Reservoir. The grain of the whole Huangpi is concentrated on the project of building a reservoir, and the heavy laborers do the heaviest work, with a ration of 7 taels of rice, half a catty of rice for general laborers, and 3 taels of rice for small workers.
My father is actually not the kind of person who can make a lot of effort, but in order to have enough food and sign up for labor, he used a board truck to pull soil on the embankment, but he was exhausted, and even people and cars fell into the ditch, and he was unconscious. It was only at the roll call in the evening that I realized that there was no one missing. Then everyone made torches and led the ox to find it, and it was only when the oxen came back that they saved his father's life.
My mother had already married, and only my aunt and aunt were starved to death, and my family (grandmother) fled to Hankou to find my uncle. The aunt was so hungry that she could only buckle her feet, she couldn't walk, and begged her to dig the roots, but the aunt came back crying empty-handed, and the aunt knew that she was hopeless, so she could only sleep on the bed and wait for death.
In a drowsy state, my grandmother brought some food from my uncle and boiled the gnocchi, and rescued my aunt and aunt in two days. In order to be able to eat, the aunt also signed up for the Xiajiasi Reservoir, when the aunt was only 13 years old, with a bed of broken cotton wool did not have to sleep, the two mothers-in-law and daughter-in-law on the village's own house took pity on her and let her squeeze in a quilt, the aunt said that she felt that she had not slept all night, and had not eaten a full meal, but just lived a life.
My aunt said that my mother had married into my family, and my mother and grandmother also went to work together in the Xiajiasi Reservoir. Only my great-grandmother (my grandmother's mother-in-law) was left in the house, and she was too old to watch the door at home and spin some thread to supplement the family. When my mother went to the Xiajiasi Reservoir in 59, she had just been married for more than a year, and as a result, the family's dowry property was stolen by robbers.
The robber took a hoe and dug slowly from my stove, and it didn't take much effort to dig in, and when he saw that there was still rice in my tank, he was impatient to make a full meal in my house. From there, he dug into his mother's room and stole his mother's dowry; I dug into my grandmother's room again, and found that my grandmother still had a load of food hidden, and I stole it.
In the Great Famine of '59 and starved many people to death, I listened to it and asked my aunt in amazement, why was my family so rich at that time! My aunt said that my family ran a mill (cotton gin), so the robbers were worried about my family's wealth. This incident became a big news story on the construction site of the reservoir, and it quickly spread that the robbers had dug three big holes in my house and stole everything.
My grandmother was anxious at that time, and she was clamoring to go home to investigate, and only grandma was allowed to go home alone on the construction site. It took a day and a night to walk from the reservoir to the house, and when my grandmother rushed home, my great-grandmother was half dead with fear, saying that she had spun and spun most of the night before going to sleep, only to hear the sound of rats tossing, who had thought that the robbers were digging holes in the wall, and only found out at dawn.
Grandma really deserves to be the head of the family, supported the spirit to visit around, really found the robber, reported it to **, and really raided the house and copied out the stolen property of my family. It's just that half of the stolen load of grain was recovered and confiscated. The robbers were tied up and marched around for criticism, and they were also sent to the construction site of Xiajiasi for criticism.
When my aunt talked about these past events, many of them really couldn't get around Mulan Lake. This project, which brings together the struggles of several generations of Huangpi, accompanies the New Year's customs of Huangpi into the topic of New Year's greetings, and becomes the remembrance of Huangpi's descendants to their predecessors. I feel that we and our juniors still need to be patient, very religiously to our elders to pay New Year's greetings, accompany them to chatter, maybe there are some discoveries worth inheriting, isn't it? Shouldn't it?
The author of this article, Zhou Jianxin, authorized the release of the new collection of old things, Zhou Jianxin, male, engaged in rice planting in Bailongsi Village, Wangjiahe Street, Huangpi.