My deep feelings about the past four decades, the year 1978

More than a third of a century has passed since 1978 and the old “modern” village has changed a lot, the middle-aged man thinks to himself as he wanders about the place. He has deep feelings about the past four decades and some things in his mind that are both bitter and sweet.

1.Housing

In 1978, the houses were mainly made of earth and some bricks, each of them no more than about 50 square meters in size, with a wooden door and windows that still had no glass. (paper was used as a substitute)

2.Furnishings

Some of the better homes had a sewing-machine and a bicycle, and a clock hanging on the wall, but very few of the farmers could afford a wristwatch. Families considered a new bike to be a prized thing since it cost about 200 yuan, and the heavy steel frame of the bike was wrapped in red cloth and the master of the house usually kept it in the living room and wiped it down with a piece of oily cloth every now and then.

3.Food

The farmland was owned by the commune and the peasants were like soldiers work the fields in groups, but harvests were often not enough to meet their needs. They lived on corn, sweet-potatoes, and what little wheat they could save.

4.Clothing

Most of their clothing was made at home. I well remember how comfortable the thick cotton-jacket my mother made was. If you could get clothes of man-made (polyester) cloth they were fashionable to be dressed and seen in!

5.Transportation

The village had three wooden carts, with three horses to pull the biggest cart. The driver held a long whip that he could use to make a sound like firecracker, and the copper-bells around the horses’necks made a sweet sound that was always pleasure hear over a long ride.

6.Tractors and transportation

A tractor in those days was a tracked vehicle that looked like a military tank, and could plough 13,333㎡ of land per day, which was so great for the farmers that they called it the iron ox.

As for cars, our school sat alongside a road and, onetime, a strange white car came by and the children run out of the gate to get a closer look at this wonderful thing that they’d only seen in movies and were so excited that some of us shouted, “Frog-car, frog-car!”

7.Electricity

There were 800 people in our village and three diesel engines that were used to irrigate about 800,000㎡.

At night, people used kerosene lamps for lighting and once I burned a small hole in my cap from the flame when I was doing my homework by lamplight.

After supper, it was a pleasure whenever we listened to the radio or had a chat with our neighbors out in the street.

8.Pork

In spring, every family would buy a piglet and feed it wild plants. As it grew, we would fed it sweet potatoes because, in autumn, we would harvest a lot of potatoes and even some grain had to be used this way since it could not be stored for a long time. And pork cost only one and half yuan per kilo, while it’s now about 20 times that, while the price of wheat’s only gone up about three times

9.The environment

There was a well next to the pond and sometime the water level in them was the same. You put some animal bones in a basket with a rope tied to it and toss it into the pond and, after a while，you could get some wonderful animals feeding off the bones. You could also gather plants from the river to feed the goat and pig. A neighboring village used river water for cooking and drinking.

10.Cheap housing

If you wanted to build a new house, the villagers would always come to lend a hand and you could use soft earth for the walls as it hardened. You didn’t need to pay the neighbors for their work, all you had to do was feed them at dinner time. Building a three-room-house only cost you about 2,000 yuan and that included the building materials!

The original blog: http://blog.chinadaily.com.cn/blog-1341001-20296.html