Childhood in the Compound (Part 1)

When it comes to Beida Camp, everyone thinks it is the Beida Camp in the Shenyang Incident, but what I want to talk about is Jinzhou Beida Camp. It is located in the northeastern suburbs of Jinzhou. It was Zhang Zuoxiang’s military camp during the Republic of China. It was separated after liberation. It is the location of Jinzhou Infantry School (the predecessor of today’s Dalian Army Academy) and the 11th Artillery Division. I lived there for 11 years in the 1970s and 1980s, and I have a deep attachment to Beida Camp. In the compound in the late 1970s, slogans such as "The line is a guideline, and the guideline is carried out" and "Governing the country by grasping the guideline" could be seen everywhere. The popularity of the posters "I can rest assured that you ban things" was also very popular. We have one in our house. But after a while, these all disappeared inexplicably. Later I found out that Mr. Hua had lost power.

The scenery inside the compound is good, the environment is clean, tree-lined, quiet and orderly. The barracks and family residences are all brick buildings, and the roads are suet roads and cement brick pavements. Compared with the dusty courtyard next to it, The rural and quasi-rural railway system of 768 (which has the feel of a shanty town) is a paradise among rural and quasi-rural areas with soil and sewage flowing across it. Every morning, noon and evening, melodious bugles will be heard from the big speakers on time, floating in every corner of the compound. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but many years after I left the compound, I realized that the seemingly monotonous sound of the bugle was actually the most pleasant and friendly sound in the world.

Play

The security in the compound is very good. Except for the occasional petty theft and fights between children, there is basically no crime. But I still didn’t dare to walk far away alone at night. Firstly, there were few street lights and everything was eerie. Secondly, there were few people in the compound and there were many trees. The wind blew the trees to create an atmosphere. I always felt like there were bad people hiding inside. So I can only stay at home. Movies are always shown in the auditorium, and I love watching war movies. The People's Liberation Army is invincible, and the enemy troops are running around. It's a great experience! But what left a deep impression on me were horror movies. At that time, I was young and timid. Watching the mysterious Buddha and the chase scared me to death. Look at the homeless people in India. The bad guy yells with a ferocious face: Steal, rob, kill, and set fire! It still rings in my ears. Watching "The Black Triangle", the scene where the old lady played by Ling Yuan was peeping in the dark made me shudder, not to mention the scene where the man's corpse standing by the window fell over at the touch of a touch. I could only close my eyes. The most outstanding thing is the painted skin. Whenever night falls in the shot, something will definitely happen. When watching this movie, I closed my eyes almost half the time, eagerly looking forward to the appearance of the daytime scene, which is a bit of a waste of resources. Hong Kong people are really perverted when it comes to making movies. Only they can make the movies so scary. Fortunately, there were no movies like The Ring at the time, otherwise I would have been stunned on the spot. In fact, it’s no wonder they were there. Until now, there is no film rating system in our country, so my young mind was repeatedly tortured in the movie theaters in the 1980s.

In 1982, Shaolin Temple was screened for the first time in the auditorium. It was a huge crowd and the event was unprecedented. I had never had such a great visual impact. I had never seen such a good-looking movie. Suddenly, the term martial arts was deeply rooted in the audience. Movies that touch people's hearts can only be ranked second.

Once when we were watching a movie in the auditorium, the loudspeaker suddenly and urgently notified all the cadres to gather urgently. We thought something big had happened, but later we found out that two groups of soldiers were fighting in the cornfield outside the west gate. (That is, pickaxes, shovels, etc., which are made from local materials, and controlled knives are still difficult to obtain). A large number of officers are needed to stop it. It seems that there are no serious consequences.

Every Spring Festival, there are Spring Festival entertainment activities, quizzes, games, etc. in the auditorium (or the house next to it). What impressed me deeply was a turntable with different prizes written on each grid. , the easiest thing to transfer is the last prize "a piece of candy", this is enough to make me happy. The father of our neighbor Guohua was a cadre in the auditorium. Sometimes we would sneak in under the light and watch some internal war movies, such as Napoleon, Navy, Yamamoto Isoroku and so on. Except for the battle scenes, the rest is incomprehensible. This scene is very similar to that in Sunny Day. It seems that peeking into the internal movies is not our exclusive privilege.

Besides home and school, we spend most of our time in the garden.

Although it is called a garden, it does not seem to have many flowers, and there is no regular lawn. It is divided into many areas with bushes. There are tall and short trees in it, and the area is quite large. We often play hide-and-seek in there, catch spies, or climb up the trees to play, or hang out inside. Sometimes when no one is around, I go to the water room of the special agent company next to me and play the water game. Every time I play, my basket vest is almost soaked through. It’s very enjoyable. Now it seems that we don't care about water resources too much. Let's reflect on it.

The Military Service Club sells a lot of delicious food that makes us salivate, and we are all yearning for it. But the pocket money on hand was limited, and our parents were very strict and didn't allow us to go there often, so we often felt helpless and dismayed. My mother is a staff member of the service club. All the aunts there seem to know me, but I only know a few of them. I was very timid and shy at that time, and I was always afraid of being recognized by the aunts (this was basically not a problem for them). (difficulty), and I didn’t want to call Aunt Zhang and Aunt Li, so even though I was eager to go inside and feast my eyes on it, most of the time I stopped and went to play in the garden next to it. What makes me unforgettable is that one time I was waiting for my mother to get off work in the backyard of the service company. My little hands were not honest. I touched this and that. I saw a small iron door on an old boiler. I went up and pulled it, and the iron door opened. The door was broken and there was no connection between the shaft leaves. The little toe of my right foot suddenly became the victim of the free fall of the small iron door. It was immediately bloody and bloody, and the pain made me cry loudly. To this day, the nail cap of that toe is still irregular.

There is also a young man who sells meat in the service club named Yuzi. He has thick eyebrows and big eyes, is strong, has long hair and a long beard, likes to wear white nylon socks and leather shoes, and likes to ride a big motorcycle. This was definitely for fashionistas around the 1980s. He likes to bully children, grab handfuls of them from their crotchless pants, etc. We are all a little afraid of him. The day before yesterday, I read someone else’s reminiscence article, saying that he was beaten up by a more powerful boy from the infantry school in the 1970s. It was really satisfying! It is a pity that this news was learned 30 years later, and it is even more regrettable that this exciting scene was not witnessed live.

The shooting range is a great place. There we did two things: 1. Pick up bullet casings, which were basically AK47 bullet casings. A very few were from Type 54 pistols, and the latter became treasures. I also picked up bullets from an unfired 54mm pistol, which shows that the management was relatively negligent at that time. 2. There are two rows of mulberry forests next to the shooting range. We like to pick dark and sweet mulberry seeds (mulberries) to eat. These are all wild, no one cares about them and they are not illegal. I picked them from preschool to the 3rd and 4th grade of elementary school, and nothing happened. But one day, a classmate reported that as a student cadre, I climbed trees to pick mulberries. Not caring for trees is not in line with my status as a cadre, so I was ordered by the teacher to write a self-criticism. I felt very wronged and did not think it was a wrong behavior. However, due to pressure, I had to write a self-criticism against my will. Fortunately, my writing skills Yes, the teacher only got a very sincere review and passed.

The fourth branch is a neighbor of our compound, but you have to climb over the wall to get there. There is a small lake outside the south wall of the elementary school. When it freezes in winter, it becomes our skating rink. We make various kinds of ice cars and ice skates. One of them is a "monorail" with an iron wire on the ground and two feet squatting on a small wooden board. "I am very envious of the ice car because the older children can skate so fast. Unfortunately, I have never learned how to do it. Sometimes there would be soldiers from the Fourth Division patrolling and chasing us away, forcing us to lie on the wall and spy on the movements of the sentries. Only when we were safe did we dare to jump down, as if we were fighting guerrillas.

The processing factory is very close to my home, so I go there when I have nothing to do. There is a large barn inside, and we go there to catch sparrows. In this relatively closed space, sparrows are no longer something that is out of reach. , we touched sparrows several times, which was very exciting. Although we didn't catch them, we were quite satisfied. There is a color TV in the conference room of the processing plant. In the era when TV was not popular, it was a treasure. We often went there together to watch TV at night. Every time, there was a sea of ??people. The TV was not big in the first place, and we could hardly see the people in the back. Even so, we still kept watching with great interest.

This is a plastic processing factory. Li Jianwei’s father is the director of the house to the north of us.

The mother of my classmate Kuang Xiaojun worked there and often took some plastic products home for processing, which seemed to be done on a piece-by-piece basis. I also followed suit with a knife to cut off the burrs on them.

I went to the tofu shop in the processing factory to buy tofu. I passed by a house where freshly slaughtered pork was often piled up. The meat was still trembling, which puzzled me.

There is a deep well near the processing plant, and frogs are croaking at the bottom of the well. We once grilled a frog and the thigh meat tasted pretty good. Materials were poor at that time, and we were full of yearning for food. In addition to toad meat, I also ate tree oil from the peach tree in front of the logistics department (it looked good, like jelly, but had no taste), and the locust tree next to the school. Flowers (a little sweet), roadside heitiantian (delicious) and lei melon gourd (very delicious). The mulberries mentioned earlier are naturally also delicious. On the way to the military hospital outside Ximen, my mother picked a few edamame beans on the roadside and cooked them for us to eat. They tasted good, but the picking process was a bit scary. After all, they came "smoothly".

Jintun to the north of the compound and No. 768 (six hundred households) to the west are places we often visit. What attracted us mainly was the department store there. The one in 768 is bigger, with several floors, but the one in Jintun is smaller, just a rural store. But as long as there are food and firecrackers for sale, it is a great temptation for us. I clearly remember that I was at the stall selling syrup outside the 768 department store. On a cold day, I bought a few cents worth of syrup and stirred it a few times with two small sticks (which must have been unsterilized and used repeatedly). , I put it in my mouth to eat. Suddenly a strong wind blew and blew the sugary saliva onto my clothes. I didn’t eat much in my mouth but my clothes were “full”. I felt so distressed. There is also a general store there, which is a good place for us to buy fireworks before the Spring Festival. The ones I often buy include the two kickers wrapped in thin kraft paper at 2 cents and 50 cents each, the Liuyang My Son with a painting of Sun Wukong, and the flash thunder that was just launched at the time and cost 6 cents each. On the way to the Jintun Store from the north gate of the compound, there is a small shop selling piaji, which often attracts me to stop. I still have the results of that shopping spree at home: a thick stack of brand-new piaji. From The Legend of Yue Fei (this one is the most exquisitely produced) to The Romance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, they are quite new and comprehensive, and they are all full-page, and I was reluctant to cut them into small discs. This thing has been extinct for many years. I wonder if it can fetch a good price on the collection market now.

There is a railway outside the west gate. Walking along the railway for a while to the north, there is a small metal processing factory. We once went there to steal iron sheets, which were similar in shape and size to old-fashioned flat ice cream sticks. A piece of iron, I still don’t know what it is used for. I once owned a lot of these iron pieces, and I couldn't do any tricks with them. I just had a lot of things that others didn't have, which was a kind of bragging rights. I remember that the factory wall was not short. I was outside for a walk, and my neighbor Guohua, who was 2 years older than me, jumped in to get a piece of iron. As soon as he managed to jump out, a guard came after him from a distance, and we were so scared that we ran away. Some of them also put the pointed end of the long iron nail on the rails. When the train wheels ran over it, the pointed end turned into a flat diamond shape, just like the Fangtian Painted Halberd used by Yang Erlang, and there was another one in his hand. A treasure that no one else has, let alone how beautiful it is. But I was timid at the time and was a good student in the traditional sense. My intuition told me that doing this was wrong (I wasn’t sure whether it would cause a rollover), so I never practiced it myself.

Old Hero

The most famous figure in the compound is Zhi Shunyi. Dong’s fellow countryman and comrade-in-arms is also a national fighting hero, and he does not rely entirely on Dong’s halo. His grandson Zhi Jun and I are classmates and good friends. I often go to his house to play. His home is a townhouse for division-level cadres, with two floors, upstairs and downstairs. It is very grand. The most important thing is that he has a water closet in his home, which makes us extremely envious.

The old hero has several comic books about directors’ deeds at home, which gave me an intuitive understanding of how heroes blow up bunkers. There is another interesting thing in his house - the telephone. I yearn for it endlessly. I couldn't help but pick it up several times. The voice of the female soldier on the line immediately came out, asking where the leader wants to pick up the phone. I didn't dare to say a word. I was in a panic. He stuffed the phone back and immediately left his house with some excuse, fearing that others would follow the picture to track him down.

At that time, only high-ranking officials in the compound had telephones. In our eyes, telephones were a luxury item and very mysterious. There are always new things at his house. His uncle is in the Air Force and brought back some airplane models and machine gun bullet casings for him to play with. I liked them very much and took the opportunity to play with them and touch them. I saw many new things at his store for the first time, such as magic wands and instant noodles. The packaging of instant noodles at that time had a bright and attractive prawn printed on it, which made me salivate, but there was no trace of shrimp inside. , which confuses me. The oil package at that time was different from the current one. It was salad oil packed in a plastic model of a small shrimp. We broke it and tasted it. There was no shrimp flavor at all, which was quite disappointing.

The treatment of the old heroes is that they can enjoy the treatment of a single room in the bathhouse, but we adults and children are crowded into a large pool, and the changing rooms are quite far away. After stripping naked, we put on bulky wooden clothes. I put on my slippers and walked towards the big pool shivering from the cold. My dad is quite lively sometimes. I don’t know what the relationship is. He took my two brothers into the single room area and took a shower several times. Once when he met a manager who was changing shifts or a superior leader, he shouted loudly in the corridor to expel someone who was not in compliance with his status. Or, my father was experienced in the battlefield and didn’t take it seriously. He scared my brothers so much that they hid behind the tightly bolted door and dared not come out.

The old hero is known as a good husband. He is very kind to his first wife who came out of the countryside and was paralyzed. The two of them stayed together until they died, which is admirable. Many media have reported on their deeds, because there are too few high-ranking officials who do not dislike their wives.

In the compositions I wrote when I was a child, I wrote more than once that I saw old heroes cleaning fallen leaves on the road early in the morning, which aroused my enthusiasm for loving labor and doing good deeds. Frankly speaking, I never saw it even once. It's a natural result, but it can't cover up the greatness of the old hero.

Going to school

The primary school in the compound is called Xiangdong Primary School. It seems to have been called Wuqi Primary School and Beidaying Primary School before and after. I stayed there until the end of the first semester of fourth grade.

The primary school and kindergarten are connected together, forming a rectangle from the air. It seems that it was originally a landlord's compound (the residence of Zhang Zuoxiang's concubine?), and some say it was built by the Japanese. The kindergarten part is very beautiful with its carved beams and painted buildings and wooden floor. After I went to school, I went to watch a puppet show by the Jinzhou Puppet Troupe with my children. I liked it very much. Sometimes I went to play on the slide in their courtyard, which was also very fun. It can be seen that my hobbies in the first few years of school were still inseparable from the "low-level interests" of kindergarten. It may also be because I have never been to kindergarten for a day, and I have always been full of curiosity and yearning for it.

There was a small test before admission. They showed me some pictures for me to recognize. When I looked at one of the pictures, they said they were selling shoes and clothes, but they didn’t accurately describe the standard of the store. The answer is a shortcoming, the rest is correct. In fact, getting all the answers wrong will not have any impact on admission. After all, there are only a few students in the compound.

The class teacher for grades 1-2 is the older and amiable teacher Liu Yalan. We sat obediently on the long bench with our hands behind our backs, and her loud voice lingered in our ears. I still clearly remember the scene where she led us to clap our hands and jump up and down to do freehand exercises. Her tall figure was flexible in her movements.

Teacher Liu cultivated two habits in me: one is to excerpt beautiful words and sentences for future writing, and the other is to record the polyphonic words in each lesson and form words. I persisted in both of these two habits until I graduated from elementary school. It’s just that I was too young at the time and my brain wasn’t flexible enough. I took the trouble to write down the numerous “knowledges” in each lesson one by one, which made me very tired every time.

My favorite thing about Chinese language class is reading aloud by role. Every time I raise my hands high, praying in my heart that the role I am assigned will not have too little dialogue. Once, I read aloud the text of Little Yanzi with a girl in front of the whole school. I was the little Yanzi and she was the mother. I felt that she had taken advantage of me, and I felt a little unhappy.

My Chinese scores have always been good, and my compositions have been well received. The one that left the deepest impression on me was describing a military parade I saw in the city on a National Day. At the end of the article I wrote, "On the way back, I was still immersed in the wonderful scene of the military parade...", which was rated as a genius by the teacher. In fact, I also quoted it. of.

This composition is also posted on the blackboard for everyone to read.

We were still learning abacus at that time. On the way to and from school, the big abacus clattered in our schoolbag. At that time, I was very familiar with the formula of "three times five times two" and so on, and my fingers were playing very fast. It's a pity that I have forgotten all about it now.

The school also held a dictionary search competition. Everyone in the competition quickly flipped through the blue plastic Xinhua Dictionary. I almost got full marks because of a polyphonic word. In my hurry, I only wrote down the first word. The page number where the first pronunciation is located ignores the second pronunciation, so it ranks second.

During a Spring Festival performance, I was talking about cross talk with others. The joke was from New Youth, using cats and mice to promote eating more vegetables to avoid night blindness. One of the lines included "How good it is to hold a flashlight." I Still impressed. For this reason, I worked hard to memorize the lines for many days, which was even harder than memorizing the text.

During class, we often play the game of occupying the city. We draw two large frames and divide them into two groups to occupy the middle. They have to pass through the middle aisle. If the opponent pushes them into the city, they will be eliminated. Which side has the last survivor? Capture the opponent's corner to win. There are also jumping grids, kicking pockets, skipping rope, hitting crutches, and stepping, which are all our favorites.

I was the squad leader in elementary school, and became the captain in the third grade. All aspects were very positive, and the number of castor seeds and pupa shells turned in was among the best. Our class teacher also called on everyone to save pocket money, and I saved the most money (please take care of your parents). Because my home is close to the school, I will also be responsible for opening the door tomorrow morning. What was more painful was the cold winter morning. I arrived at school at around 6 o'clock in the dark, and I was the only one on the entire campus. I sat quietly in the classroom, listening to the sound of water rushing in the heating pipe, and thinking about the haunted stories in this school and kindergarten, I couldn't help but feel a little scared.

Of course, there are also happy moments. When it is dawn, I am walking in the quiet woods to the north of the school. I suddenly hear the sound of Kuang Kuang. I look up and see a woodpecker on a high branch working hard. Pecking at the tree trunk, I couldn't help but stop and watch. The animals that I had only read about in books were now alive and catching insects on the trees above my head. I was really happy.

Our class held a little red flower competition (study, labor, and comprehensive). I always had the most little red flowers, and the second place was often a girl named Wang Xiaohua. I once went to the city with my teacher to participate in a Young Pioneers activity in Taihe District. There, I heard the performance of the drum band for the first time in my life. It was the most common piece played by all primary school students at major events. I felt like two words at the time. : Shocking, to be specific, it’s exciting and exciting. This shows how isolated our primary school is. There is not even a drum band, and there are very few opportunities for contact with other schools. As a student cadre, I only occasionally have such an "eye-opening" opportunity. On the way back, the teacher gave us dry bread to eat. It was already past noon. The bread was really delicious when we were hungry, but there was one shortcoming. There was no water or drink. After eating it, we felt dry and choked. If there was water or drink, It's just perfect.

We also called on Lei Feng to do good deeds, so naturally I couldn’t fall behind. On a cold and windy day, I led several classmates to clean the army's pig pen, but there was no soldier there, only a few dirty pigs staring nervously at the brooms in our hands. We were afraid of the pig biting us, and it was really impossible to get out of its nest, so we had to do a few hasty sweeps around the perimeter and then go back. There were no witnesses, so there was no letter of praise. It just added a real source of material for my composition.

The compound school also has a feature that other schools do not have, which is the "Xiangyang School", that is, the army sends several soldiers with both good morals and academics to be our vacation counselors and take us on various activities. Among activities, the most fun thing is to go hiking at Bauhinia Mountain in the east. We carried military water bottles and some dry food such as biscuits and bread, and queued up to hike a long distance to Bauhinia Mountain. There were deep forests and luxuriant grass, and there were many small animals that could not be seen in the courtyard. We often caught a few grasshoppers and took them home. Play. We are always excited to go on this hike, even though the whole hike is tiring.

Every Qingming Festival, we put on white shirts and blue trousers, walk in formation to the Jinzhou Martyrs Cemetery under the impressive statue of Liang Shiying, and pay homage to the martyrs’ tombs. We regard this as a hike, because we can Seeing the sky outside, you can eat biscuits that you can’t usually eat. This shows how easily we were satisfied at that time.

There was another major incident that happened in our elementary school that I remember deeply. Two children in the compound went to swim or play in a small lake next to the shooting range. One of them accidentally slipped into the depths of the lake. They never came up again. Later, everyone vividly described it as a wok-shaped lake bottom, so it was easy to slide in. When the children panicked and called for soldiers to rescue people, all they fished out was a cold corpse. This incident had a great impact on the school. The whole school held a meeting to criticize and educate. I clearly remember the surviving child by the lake, standing in front of everyone, burying his head deeply in his chest, listening to the criticism from the school leaders through the loudspeaker. scene. The central idea of ??the criticism meeting is that wild bathing is no longer allowed, and I abide by this principle to this day.

I am also responsible for collecting some students’ holiday homework and sending it to the teacher’s home for review. The advantage of this is that it can not only urge everyone to write homework on time, but also reduce the teacher’s burden of reviewing all the homework before the school starts. There were no make-up classes at that time and there was not much homework, so we had a lot of happy time after school, which is not something that today's children can imagine.

There are only 2 classes in each grade, with less than 30 people in each class, because there are only so many children of cadres, so it is a real small class teaching, haha. The teachers are all family members of cadres, and those with a normal education background will be given priority. Otherwise, a higher level of education will be enough. In short, we put together such a stall to solve the problem of difficulty in enrolling the children of cadres. But the disadvantages are also obvious. First, due to limitations in scale and nature, there is a lack of teaching equipment, not even a basketball stand or a football goal. There are insufficient teachers and insufficient communication with the outside world. The overall teaching level is low, but it is just as golden as the surrounding rural areas. The school in the village is better and cannot be compared with the primary school in the city. Secondly, because there is no middle school in the compound, most children in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school find their own way to go to the primary and secondary schools in the railway system in the west or further away in the city. Study in other schools so that you can keep up with other people's progress and adapt to the study and life there as soon as possible. As a result, there were only a few students left in the five or six years of Xiangdong. People were really panicked and the future was desolate. Fortunately for me, I successfully "escaped" in the fourth grade and did not have the opportunity to experience the life of traveling long distances to study abroad.