More than 30 years ago the countryside was very lively and very popular I'm after 70 My hometown is in the mountainous region of southern Hunan, villages are built on the hillside, some houses are built on the hillside, they are still a family. The winding mountain road stretches from the door of the house to the tractor road at the foot of the mountain. Follow the tractor road and you will reach the school. Each village has an elementary school, from first through fourth grade. The town has two complete elementary schools for 5th and 6th graders. There was no place to live in the villages, so students had to leave early and stay late each day, and some students who were far from the school needed to bring food to school at noon. I attended two village elementary schools.
The first elementary school was close to home, with smooth bluestone slabs stretching from the door of the house, which had been rebuilt from the landlord's private school. The house was a brick structure with green and gray bricks. The main entrance to the school is the green brick guardhouse. The threshold is very dilapidated. There were a couple of large trees next to the school. I don't know when it was burned in a fire, leaving only a few holes in the trees. The holes in the trees were very deep and intimidating. Every morning, I ran for ten minutes to reach the school. Then my family moved to another village and I moved to a school in another village. The second village school I went to was far from home and the road was very muddy on the way out. If you weren't careful when it rained you would slip and fall, one winter I ran to school and slipped and rolled on the road, even then I insisted on going to school.
In front of the school, I pulled a few dogwoods and wiped the mud from my body hard. To this day, I still think often of the small wooden floor in the village and step on it to make noise. Our teachers told us to walk softly so as not to disturb others. Probably because of the wooden floor, I always walked softly, which later turned out to be a great environment to grow up in. Since fifth grade, I lived a life of bringing rice and vegetables. On the first day of school, my mom sent me to school with a quilt and suitcase. When I arrived at school, my mother paid the tuition and delivered a bag of rice to the school cafeteria and then went home. Before my mother went home, she repeatedly told me that the three meals were the meals of the day, unlike now, when breakfast is rice flour. The school had a cafeteria that took care of the meals but didn't care about the utensils.
In the school cafeteria, a stack of rice tickets would be issued after students paid for their meals, with each ticket representing three taels of rice. At mealtime, the rice tickets are exchanged for a bowl of rice. Some people with large appetites would eat six taels of rice in one meal, which often resulted in a shortage of rice tickets, and they had to borrow other people's rice tickets. Carrying rice and vegetables to school can actually be an uncomfortable experience. On Fridays, there was usually an unpleasant odor when the glass water jars were found, especially in the summer. On Sundays, carrying a bag of rice and a pot of vegetables on your back for the ten miles or so of hilly walking made you sweat. If it was winter, the mountain road would be slippery, but you still had to walk quickly because if you walked too slowly, I was afraid the road would be dark. When I was in middle school there was a bulletin board with a hall of fame in front of the school.
On the honor roll were written the names of several students, and my mother used to inspire me that life in the countryside was very difficult, and that if I could work in the city, it would be so much easier to take the secondary school entrance exam as a shortcut to jumping onto the farm. In the junior high school I attended, only one person could enter secondary school each year. Every morning at five o'clock, some students got up and ran to their classrooms to read. Sometimes when the school had a blackout, we would light kerosene lamps for reading. In those years, I always had a kerosene lamp on my desk, which was made of an ink bottle, a bottle cap, a hole with an iron nail and a wick made of cotton thread, and it was very hot in the middle of the day in the summer, and there was no electric fan in the classroom.
So the shady part of the schoolyard was always filled with students who loved to read, and the year I graduated from junior high school, four of the school's students were admitted to junior colleges, a joyous event for the whole city. In the 70's and 80's, studying in rural schools was very difficult, but it left behind so many happy times. When we were bored, we played fishing, rubber band jumping and siege games in the auditorium. The auditorium was a dirt floor with many marks carved into it. Sometimes movies were shown in the school auditorium. Students and parents crowded into the auditorium to watch the movie, which was very lively. As time went on, there were fewer and fewer people on the mountain. There is no elementary school or middle school in the village, and there is only one elementary school in the town. Most of the children in the mountains have gone to study in the city, and the conditions of the school have been improved.