Chapter Ninety-One: Borrowing Grain

“Autumn harvest means hard labor, and hard labor means bigger appetites. The strong ones eat most. In a household with mouths from the elders to the children, even one meal takes a lot of grain. No one is wrong to set aside a little extra. Old sent-down youths can draw rations in advance, but your new batch of sent-down youths seems to get none. Still, if I say, ‘Han Li is a good boy,’ and if grain is short, just tell me. Even we can squeeze out a little from the house.”

“Then let me thank Auntie Zhang first,” Han Li said. “If my grain does run out, I’ll be sure to speak up.”

“That’s right. I’ll go to the granary now.”

“Nothing urgent at home. I’ll come with you and see what happens.”

By the time they reached the granary, many villagers had already arrived carrying cloth sacks.
Soon all three elders of Shanghe Village appeared, and even the tally clerk followed with his ledger.
Seeing Han Li there, they all frowned. Inside their minds they were weighing whether to give him an advance: if they gave, it would set a bad precedent; if they refused, they would lose face.

Village Chief Zhao looked at Han Li and asked, “Han Li, are you here for an advance too?”

“No,” Han Li replied. “Mine is enough for now. I’m just coming back with no special business, only to look on.”

They nodded. As they were about to speak, more sent-down youths came in with sacks, clearly informed that villagers were borrowing grain that day.
It was easier to queue with the villagers; going alone was needlessly troublesome.
Without the village chief, brigade captain, accountant, tally clerk, and storekeeper together, no one could get grain from the granary.

Chief Liang stood chewing his pipe in silence; the brigade captain wore an irritated expression, speaking quietly with Accountant Zhang and the storekeeper. The noise around them was too great for anyone to hear what was said.

“The villagers will queue in order and come up one by one. Qualified sent-down youths stand behind the villagers,” Liang announced.

One of the newly arrived sent-down youths, still dazed, stepped forward. He clearly had not yet accepted that he had no quota this year.

“Comrade Liang, is this how you look down on people? Why should we sent-down youths stand behind the villagers? There are several families who came after us, yet they are ahead of us!”

“In what way? In what way do you think the villagers have done less to earn this grain than you? Do you have no sense of the work they’ve put in? If you have complaints, better work hard next year. By the way, I think you’re in the last group that arrived. Why did you bring a bag here?”

“For an advance. My grain is already exhausted.”

“Did you sleep when I explained this earlier? Sun Yong, you’re the youth team leader of this lot. Explain the rules to him properly.”

The villagers were grinning with a certain smugness, while on the sent-down side the expressions were less cheerful, especially among the newly arrived.
Sun Yong stepped forward, grabbed the dazed youth, and said with a smile to Liang, “What Liang said is reasonable. I’ll explain the brigade rules to him.”

He led him aside and spoke for a while, then strode off in anger. Even though it was only for a turn of the body, many noticed the hatred in his face.

Watching for a while, Han Li understood one thing: the villagers’ advance grain could be chosen at will.
The old sent-down youths were indeed allowed to borrow, but only sorghum or buckwheat.
Although the granary still held maize bran, Accountant Zhang would not let them exchange for it.

Han Li had heard villagers complain about this sorghum more than once: the notorious “Jin No. 5.”

Jin No. 5 was the sorghum variety mandated to be sown there in 1971. At the time, two and a half jin were required to buy one jin of seed.
It was so precious that it was tended with extra care from field preparation to weeding and fertilizing—always first for Jin No. 5.
Yet as it grew, something felt wrong. It began tasseling before it could even reach a meter.

When people were still uncertain, they saw the ears of Jin No. 5 were enormous—round and upright like an upside-down oil flask. They assumed its yield would be no small thing.

But after tasseling, a sharp smell of ferment still hung at the edges of the Jin No. 5 plots, enough to make the village drunkards swallow their saliva.

In ordinary times, everyone vied to work those fields, expecting a splendid harvest.
By autumn, the bundles of Jin No. 5 were cut and brought back. The brigade did a basic crushing and threshing before distributing it, and only then did the trouble begin.

Ordinary sorghum needed only a dozen or so turns through the mill to become edible grain.
Jin No 5 never lost its hull; with a larger mill or longer grinding time, it just shattered.

In the end they had no choice but to haul the grain to the commune and shell it in the electric grinder.
Money was spent, labor was wasted, and still the husks of Jin No. 5 would not come off cleanly.
Washing at home changed nothing. Boiling it in a pot did not solve it either. So they ate it with the black hull still mixed in.

Cooking Jin No. 5 itself consumed too much firewood and more time.
Worst of all, the food it made was terrible: porridge was thin and lifeless, no starchy richness, no sticky body to it.
Plain rice mixed with dregs and grit had no taste of grain at all. It was like shelling sunflower seeds—everyone ate while spitting out husks.
After one meal, the table was a black film of sorghum skins.

Some careful reckoners later tallied the yield: ordinary sorghum had yielded nine liang per jin; Jin No. 5 yielded only seven.

That year, old and young in the village shouted till their throats were dry—every kind of insult was used—and eventually it hardened into a rhyme:

“Jin No. 5, Jin No. 5,
Not enough to the jin,
Hard to eat and hard to cook.”

From that year on, no villager asked the granary for Jin No. 5 again.
Perhaps it was also how Accountant Zhang quietly cleared old stock; otherwise how could it have sat in storage forever?

In any case, if the old sent-down youths wanted a proper coarse-grit porridge, they could only wait until after harvest—or pay out of pocket and buy or exchange it themselves.

The grain-distribution business was mostly a novelty for Han Li; by the time he had watched half of it, he returned home.

He lit the lamp, built the fire, ate, read for a while, and then, after climbing onto the kang, kept turning over the matter of how to handle the statue.

For Han Li, that brief calm was brief. Trouble had already broken out again at the sent-down youth compound.
This time it was stirred by the last two batches of newly arrived sent-down youths, whose grain was simply insufficient to eat.

The brigade was still refusing to let them draw grain in advance. Those with money could perhaps manage it, but most of them had none.
They avoided the older sent-down youths, and, together with Zhang San—the one fond of writing reports—and Qizhaodi, who always kept company with Hemi’s circle, they had long been hanging around together.

The rest gathered in the back yard for a small meeting. Nearly all of the men and women of those two batches of youths had arrived.