My father's memory is that he came to Changchun to study, and soon after, Changchun began to be besieged. But at first, people on the street were full of confidence in the national army. At the beginning of the recovery, the people on the streets of Changchun saw the Eighth Route Army led by Lin Biao for the first time, dressed in rags and with tattered guns. Although the number is quite large, it makes the adherents and elders who are used to the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Puppet Manchurian soldiers in the streets doubt this China Julian Waghann. Then I saw the new seventh army of the national army and drove away the eighth route army. The new seventh army was supplemented by a division of the famous new army. Because I was in a hurry to transfer from the southwest, one was a southern soldier with a short stature, and the other was a military uniform for jungle operations. Northeasters laugh at it as a monkey soldier, but admire its American-made weapons.
But later, I heard that the Eighth Route Army had fought back. After several fights, he didn't come in. I was at ease at first, but then I found the problem. Because the Eighth Route Army didn't come in, it was found that the national army couldn't get out, and after the spring "Dunkirk retreat" was vigorously promoted, the 60 th Army of Jilin City also withdrew to Changchun, but it was trapped in the isolated city. People think the biggest problem is that food prices have gone up, and then they have gone up again. Each family has only three to five days of food storage, so food becomes a problem.
So hunger began. The situation of my grandfather's family at that time was that my father was the eldest of the boys, aged13; There is also a sister on it. I should call her aunt, 17 years old. My father is followed by my third aunt and my second uncle, 1 1 and 9 years old, then my aunt, 6 years old, and my third uncle, 3 years old. The problem is that my grandmother was pregnant with her uncle.
So the little money grandpa earned was not enough to buy food at home, but grandpa was not willing, so he implemented the post-liberation method in advance-to find the mayor if he was not full. Grandpa is a very persistent person and never acts according to his own theory. So, I ran to the Changchun municipal government as a citizen and found Shang, then the mayor of Changchun. There were no armed police and security guards at that time, but Mayor Shang really saw his small home. I don't think there's anything else. My grandfather is just talking. My family has a large population and we don't have enough to eat. What should I do? Your city (mayor) must take responsibility. At that time, it was estimated that Mayor Shang could not speak Mandarin very well. He just said that I have nothing to eat, but I can give you an idea for the time being: one is that he can write a note and send children under 10 to an orphanage run by a charity organization, at least there can be porridge there, and the other is that the old mayor has no choice but to solve it himself. So grandpa came back. He obeyed the mayor's order, took the mayor's note, sent his uncle, aunt and other children to the orphanage and ate porridge.
The older one has no choice but to fend for himself. His father is thirteen years old (fourteen years old in name only) and can't be sent to an orphanage. Fortunately, a member of the church came to visit grandpa. His surname is Huang, and he is a company commander of the artillery in the New Seventh Army, but his rank seems to have reached the field level (as can be seen here, the quality of the New Seventh Army is not boastful, and the establishment of the artillery company is not large, but the personnel level and rank are not low). He took his father to Jianshe Street, where he is now stationed in the military region, and used power for personal gain to pay his father an empty salary. In fact, empty wages are nothing more than eating with one mouth open. So my father transferred to Xi 'an Dalu Primary School near Jianshe Street. My deskmate was the sister-in-law of Li Hong, the commander of the New Seventh Army who was guarding Changchun at that time. He goes to Jianshe Street to go to school during the day and goes back to the army for dinner at night. Old Changchun knows that Xi 'an Dalu Primary School is only five minutes away from the Military Region. Grandpa rented a house near Guangfu Road. Because of the distance, my father seldom goes home.
But there is only one person who can't solve it, and that is the elder sister-in-law, older than her father. At that time, she was seventeen years old and had the deepest feelings with her father. She has no place to eat and no books to read, so she has to live at home. Originally, she was very talented in painting. At first, she earned some money by painting people on the street to supplement her family. But later, people couldn't solve the problem of eating, and no one asked for a portrait. Later, my elder sister-in-law fell ill and went to see a doctor, saying it was enteritis. It is estimated that this is the same standard case as the three-year difficult period, and there is only one cause, which is hunger. It was probably autumn at that time, and my elder sister-in-law was dying. It is said that the elder sister-in-law waited until her father knew the news, rushed to the hospital bed from the barracks and took one last look at her before she died.
At this point, the summer has passed. Grandma always wanted to leave. Women's intuition is more accurate and their risk awareness is much higher than that of men. They didn't gamble. She has always hoped that the family can "climb the trap" and go back to their hometown to at least ensure that the family can eat enough. But grandpa is a man. He never admitted that he couldn't support his family. For decades, as long as he is in a family, he has never been hungry. He had always believed in his ability, so he refused to escape. But the elder sister-in-law starved to death, which forced the stubborn man to change his decision and decided to climb the trap and go back to his hometown.
Here we need to talk about what Changchun people call a "clip". When I say "climbing", I actually mean two roads. Because there was no direct confrontation between the two armies at that time, there was a buffer zone, and this side of the buffer zone was the "clip" of the Kuomintang, and they could not let go. In the past, people in Changchun used to say that they would buy five bridges inside, because the old Changchun City had Yitong River on one side and railway on the other, so the three bridges on the railway and the two bridges on Yitong River became the boundaries of the old city. At that time, the Kuomintang's "clips" were these five bridges-Xi 'an Bridge in the northwest, East Bridge in the northeast, Nanguan Bridge in the east and West Chaoyang Bridge in the west. In fact, the one in the southwest didn't have a bridge at that time, but it was just close. The other is to enter the liberated areas, regardless of whether it is collected or not. Probably located in Songjiawazi in the northwest, Anlongquan in the northeast, Mengjiatun in the southwest, Longan or Mishima in the east, and Jingyue and Sheling in the east. The main thing here is to check grain, because the policy at that time was not to let a grain flow into Changchun, and the west didn't know much about it. No one cares about the middle part, but * * * producers often send guerrillas and some intelligence personnel inside. Its main function is to crack down on snipers and harass the national army, and it is also a place frequented by people. So, this is the most thrilling place.
According to my father, before August, when my father came home from school, a friend sent a liter of soybeans, and a neighbor also sent a liter of soybeans. Half of it is ground into bean powder overnight to eat; The other half was fried and put into a bag for the road. The next morning, I embarked on an unknown journey.
We must talk about soybeans here. Because it is not only a crop, it has great symbolic value in the eyes of Changchun people at that time. In the 1940s, the northeast of China once owned 90% of the world soybean production, and soybean was the most important material in the northeast of China. The reason why the Japanese regard northeast China as the lifeline of Japan is that many researchers ignore such a small thing as soybean. Because before the large-scale application of chemical fertilizers, Japan's GDP was mainly supported by agriculture, and Japan's rice-based agriculture must rely on soybean meal as fertilizer. Therefore, before the 1940s, when there was no soybean in Northeast China, Japan's finance would go bankrupt. Therefore, Japan's hoarding of soybeans has reached an obsessive level. Among the most important materials left after the recovery, soybeans accounted for a large part, so that after the recovery, soybeans accounted for an unimaginable degree in the granaries received by receiving officials. Therefore, in the year of 1946, cities in Northeast China actually stopped buying coal and all used soybeans as fuel. This kind of waste is also easy to understand, because the price of soybeans is lower than that of coal. However, in 1948, the threat of besieged city in Changchun became more and more serious. There is one person to thank, that is, the mayor of Changchun mentioned earlier. When the Nanjing government asked him to transport 2 million Jin of soybeans to the south, he had a premonition that the situation in Changchun was not good at that time, so he privately found reasons to detain them, so the main grain of Changchun later depended on these 2 million Jin of soybeans. At that time, there were two ways to treat soybeans, one was to grind them into soybean powder and eat them in other grains, and the other was to fry them. Father recalled that half of the things he brought on the road were fried soybeans, which he put in bags and took out a few from time to time to eat. But it is impossible to eat all the time, because I always feel hungry, and I don't feel full after eating too much. In fact, a family of eight people, a liter of soybeans can be divided into several grains?