In February and March 1975, on an ordinary day, the drizzling rain filament with a little bit of snow was drifting down to the earth in succession. The time is fast approaching the alarm. Of course, the snow will never be left. It often disappears without a trace before it lands. The cold and long winter on the Loess Plateau seems to be over, but the really warm spring is far from here. In such a rainy and snowy day, if there is nothing urgent, people would rather stay at home all day.
Therefore, the streets and alleys of the county town are much less noisy than usual. Where the streets are shady. Winter snow and ice skates are eroding under the impact of rain, and dirty sewage is flooding the slate streets. The wind is still cold. Occasionally, in the empty streets, a countryman comes up with a broken felt hat over his head, a basket of potatoes or radishes on his arm, and calls for the buyer powerlessly. Alas, in such a day, the city lost its vitality completely and became less lovely.
Only in the courtyard dam of Banyao County High School, there is a lively scene at the moment. Just after the lunch bell rang, a group of men and women came out of the rows of high and low stone caves. They knocked the dishes and chopsticks at a high price, walked through the yard dam with mud and water, shouted, and rushed to the South under the walls of the cave row of the General Affairs Office. A large courtyard was suddenly trampled into a muddy beach by the chaotic crowd. At the same time, those who live in the city's day-to-day students are also pouring out of the eastern school gate in twos and threes. Holding umbrellas, they laughed and talked all the way, and soon disappeared into the streets and alleys of the city through a long downhill road cut with crossstones in their early years. Under the south wall of the campus, there are now more than a dozen columns lined up according to the class. The duty students on duty are busily dividing meals among the people. Everyone's meal was registered and paid yesterday, so the procedure is not complicated. Now the on-duty student only pays each person a reservation according to the meal form. The dishes are classified into A, B and C. A vegetable is mainly potatoes, cabbage and noodles.
There are some big meat slices with a mouthful, which cost 30 cents per serving. B vegetable is the same as A vegetable, but there is no meat, which costs 15 cents per serving. C vegetable is far from it. White radish is boiled in clear water. It seems that only to hide the excessive lightness, it symbolically drifts a few spicy oil flowers in it. However, the price of this dish is cheap, five cents each. Class A dishes are only served in small basins. It seems that few students can afford meat dishes. C dish is also served in a small basin, which shows that there are not many people who eat this kind of inferior food. Only Class B dishes are served in porcelain-fired pots, and the sea is vast. Obviously, most people eat dishes that are neither luxurious nor shabby. Staple food is also divided into three categories: white bread, corn bread, sorghum bread; white, yellow, black, color shows a difference; students jokingly call Europe, Asia, Africa. From the crowd of black opium queuing up, most of them come from the countryside, and there are more or less traces of manual labor on their faces and bodies. Apart from the fact that people's clothes are as rustic as their peasant parents, those who have been regarded as "Mr" by their fathers are decently dressed.
Although most of the farmers in poor mountainous areas are short of food and clothes at present, since their children go to the big places to study, their parents are biting their teeth to save money, but also want to make some clothes for them to see people. Of course, there seems to be a well-off farmer's son in the team, who is no different from the children of the cadres in the city, and often has a bright watch on his wrist. Some of these "foreigners" stand among the masses, just like a flock of chickens, without concealing their superiority. They ranked behind the extraordinary armour dish pots, and although they were few in number, they were particularly eye-catching. In the whole desolate and barren Loess Plateau, a county high school, even the highest University in the county, can't build a restaurant for students in any case. Everyone eats in the open air because of the bad weather. Fortunately, these young people all come from the village. Who hasn't eaten in the wild? So you don't care about that either. Usually when the weather is good, everyone crouches in a circle with good classmates, laughs and talks, and eats up the meal. Not today. All those who cook.
They used straw hats or elbows to protect bowls, staggered across the muddy pond-like yard dam and ran back to their dormitories. In a short time, few people were scattered in the dining room. Most of the students on duty in the class also left one after another. Nowadays, only one person on duty in Grade 1 of Senior High School stays in an empty restaurant. This is a short, plump girl, who probably suffered from polio and other illnesses as a child, leaving a limp, so she walks a little lame. There were no vegetables in the three pots in front of her, and only four burnt black sorghum buns were left in the basket. It seems that these black guys are not on duty, because she has a white bun and a corn bun in her hand, and the bowl is like B dish. This shows that lame women are middle class. She stood under the eaves with her own meal and her face full of displeasure, apparently waiting for the last one who came late. We can imagine that this must be a poor boy. He not only ate the worst staple food, but also could not afford a fifth cent of C food. The snowflakes in the rain suddenly increased and became more and more blurred far and near. The city is silent. A cock's crow was heard faintly from a long distance, adding a sleepy gloom to the grey world. Just then, at the north end of the open courtyard dam, came a tall, thin young man. He hobbled in the mud with a bowl in his arm.
The young man's face was yellow and thin, and his cheeks were collapsing a little, making his nose as tall and straight as the Greeks. His face seemed to have just faded from the childishness of a teenager - apparently due to malnutrition, he had not yet glowed with the youthful luster peculiar to his age. He pulled open his long and thin legs and flopped on the mud. Maybe that's the owners of those Black-faced buns? Looking at his poor clothes, he must be able to eat only this kind of food. Look, his clothes, though barely cut out, are still student clothes, but they are clearly the homemade kind of old coarse cloth, and the black pigments are unevenly dyed, giving a feeling of dirty. An old pair of yellow rubber shoes had no laces on their feet, so they fitted together to tie two white ropes; even a blue patch was patched on the upper of one shoe. The trousers were apparently sewn in the last two years. They were long and shrunken, and now they were so short and narrow that they were hanging on half-legged handlebars. Fortunately, the stockings were high at the waist, otherwise they would be bare. But who knows, except himself, that his two threaded socks have no heels long ago. It is only because of the cover of his shoes that people feel that the socks are intact. He walked straight to the restaurant.
Now it can be concluded that he is here to get these black buns. Before he reached the basket, the lame woman limped away with her bowl. He came to the bun basket alone, first hesitated, then stooped and picked up two buns of sorghum flour. There are two left in the basket. I wonder why he didn't take them. He straightened up and glanced involuntarily into three empty pots. He saw a little residual water on the bottom of the dish basin. The eaves of the house dripped down and the soup on the bottom of the pot splashed everywhere. He looked around and saw that there was no one in the snow-drizzled yard dam. He squatted down quickly, panicked like stealing, and scooped the rainwater-mixed leftover soup from the bottom of the basin into his bowl. The scratch of the iron spoon at the bottom of the basin was as alarming as the explosion of a bomb. Blood poured into his thin, yellowish face. A big drop of eaves water fell on the bottom of the basin, splashing his face with vegetable soup. He closed his eyes, and then he saw two tears slowly sliding down his cheeks - well, let's just think it was spicy soup in his eyes!
He stood up, wiped his face with his hand, carried half a bowl of leftovers soup and came to the boiling water house at the southwest corner. He mixed some boiling water with the soup from the pipe stretched out on the back wall of the water house. Then he broke the sorghum bun and soaked it in it. He squatted down under the eaves and swallowed it. Suddenly he stopped chewing and watched a girl come to the basket and take away the remaining two black buns. Yes, she's here too. He watched her leaving, dressed in rags for a long time. This has almost become a routine: since the beginning of school, every time he eats, the class always comes last, silently take their own two black sorghum buns. It's not an agreement. They're not really familiar with it.
They haven't even said a word. After graduating from commune high schools, they were recommended to go to county high schools. Not many days after the beginning of the school, most of the students in the class had no contact with each other except those who came from the same village. He crouched under the eaves, picking up rice from his mouth and guessing in his heart that the reason why she often came to eat last was probably the same as he did. Yes, it is because of poverty, inability to eat good food, and young and sensitive self-esteem that they avoid the public's eyes to stealthily take away their two disgraceful black guys, lest they suffer many wordless ridicules! But he knew nothing about her. Because the class roll call once a day, he now only know her name is Hao Hongmei. She probably only knows his name is Sun Shaoping, right?
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