The small business brought some extra income so that we were not always strapped for cash. My father traded excess crops for a motor with which he made tofu to sell to our neighbors. In 1984, a new land distribution plan was implemented, my little brother, who was three years old, was also given a small piece of land. During the slack season, he worked on a tree farm, carrying wood to make extra money.
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He worked for himself and thus was full of energy, and went all out, going to the fields before sunrise every day and taking good care of the crops, which brought us two harvests every year. My father did not have to toil for 10 work points every day as assigned to work for the commune. That year, we ushered in a new family member: my little brother, and became a family of five. That year, farming families no longer devoted most of their efforts to collective production, but instead signed contracts with the village or town to cultivate a given crop on a particular piece of land.
But it was not until late 1981 that my family began to reap benefits. This continued to the autumn of 1978 when China made the big decision on reform of the economic system. I have vivid memories of food shortages between two harvests in early summer when mom would only cook rice mixed with sweet potato shreds for the whole family.
Teens and adults got “work points” (indicating the quality and quantity of labor) through working in agricultural collective units, or a production team, to trade for food, meat, cloth, and other supplies. By 1978, my father, 26, and my mother 24, were already parents to two kids, which was common back then.Īt that time, we and a dozen other households were in a production team. A realization struck me while visiting museums in Xi’an, glancing at agricultural tools used for a couple of millennia the tools that were wielded by my parents and their elders to get us to this point in our lives were now relics that I was looking at in a museum. Our lives are vastly different from those of our predecessors. Following 40 years of development, the fear of hunger and cold is a distant memory for my parents my siblings and I have office jobs in cities owing to our higher education, and all our children are studying hard at school for their future. I was born to a family of farmers in Suntai Village, Liancheng County in Longyan City, southeast China’s Fujian Province.
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