Sister Liang told us that the conditions in her family have never been very good. Apart from this house in the old city, her father had nothing else. So when she was a child, she would often envy other children for their possessions.
, and although those things are right in front of you, it will always be very difficult for you to get them. However, he is quite sensible and knows the situation at home, so he doesn’t mention it. However, since his mother passed away, his father has shown less concern for him.
More and more, and the relationship between herself and her father is actually good. There is always a faint affection between father and daughter. Her father is not good at expressing, but Sister Liang said that she actually understands everything her father does.
Everything was done to make myself live a better life. When I was 9 years old, things like piggy banks became popular, and the way of comparison among many children began to become how many coins I had saved. Originally, this
It was not expensive, so my father bought one for himself at that time.
Sister Liang said that it was her first piggy bank. It looked like a pig. Coins were inserted from the pig's back. But if she wanted to take out the money, she had to give the piggy
Broken. She said that she had always cherished it, but one day she accidentally knocked over the piggy and smashed it to the ground. She was very sad at the time and looked at the scattered coins on the ground, but she didn't dare
I asked my father for another one, so I wrapped the broken piggy in a handkerchief and secretly hid it under my father's bed.
Sister Liang told us that she was young at the time, and the house could not be made bigger. There was only one room, so her father used the small square stools in the kitchen as legs, and then bought a cold plate as a bed surface and spread it on top.
With the mattress and cushions, it became a very simple bed. Sister Liang said that under the closed window in my father's room was where I used to sleep.
But he hid the broken piggy bank under the bed and was discovered by his father not long after. Of course, his father would not blame himself, but pretended not to see it. He knew that his daughter was reluctant to throw it away and she really liked this thing.
So on her birthday that year, her father bought herself a small birthday cake and a brand new piggy bank as a gift for the first time. Sister Liang said that it was actually not expensive, but her father knew that I
I liked it, so I gave it to me as a gift. When Sister Liang said this, her face showed the feeling of reminiscence and warmth. She went on to say that this new piggy bank is similar to the one that was broken before.
It's different, because if you want to take out the money, you don't have to break the whole thing. Instead, there is a plastic plug under the base. Pull out the plug and you can take out the money inside. So, she went to school every day.
All the steel coins left over from school were put into the piggy bank.
Listening to Sister Liang say this, it actually evoked some childhood memories for me. Although Sister Liang is a few years older than Hu Zongren and I, she is still the same age after all. I remember that when I was very young, I was beaten in the factory.
Food stamps were still used for meals, but I still haven’t figured out where food stamps came from. In short, in those days, many things could be exchanged for food stamps. Although there were still banknotes circulating in the market, people like us
Most of the children grew up in factories and had very little time to go out on the street. Naturally, they lost the opportunity to squander money. When I started attending preschool, my pocket money was 100 per day.
Twenty cents. Because I went to the school for children in the factory, it was relatively close and it only took about ten to twenty minutes to walk there. Therefore, the unique geographical advantage saved me a lot of money on taking the bus. At that time
, every morning when I go to school, I squat down at the glutinous rice dumpling stall at the entrance of the factory and eat two large sandwich dumplings, which cost only five cents each. Even if I occasionally want to change my taste, I can also eat at the pancake stall at the entrance of the school.
It’s only five cents to buy a meatloaf. On the way home from school, if you’re hungry, you can eat spicy skewers, which are still five cents. In this way, if I’m not the kind of person with a big appetite or
As a very greedy child, I can save a dime every day. I also have a piggy bank, which looks like a big rooster. I think my parents bought this for me because I am a chicken. So I
I would often exchange the dimes I saved every day for some coins, and then stuff them into the slit on the chicken's head that looked like a craniotomy, listening to the tinkling of the steel in the narrow passage between the chicken's neck and the chicken's belly.
The clanging sound is the happiest thing for me every day. However, although my family is not rich, both parents are workers, but compared to Uncle Liang's family in front of me, I think it is still much better off. At least I
I have my own room and a real bed. If there is no cake on my birthday, I will turn into a dead chicken and collapse in front of my parents to express how pitiful I am.
So when Sister Liang talked about this, I actually resonated with it in my heart. When I was a child, I didn’t know whether the coins were made of nickel or tin materials. 1 cent, 2 cents and 5 cents were the largest. These coins have long been found.
There was no trace of it, and the fun of the children gathering in the yard to compete with each other to see whose coin had the earliest production date disappeared with time.
Sister Liang then said that she had been saving money like this for about a year. At that time, she was already 10 years old and was already considered a little girl. Girls mature slightly earlier than boys, so when they need more and more money,
The more things happened, and when my father couldn't satisfy her every time, there would occasionally be little quarrels between me and my father because of such things. Sister Liang told us that later on, she needed to buy something.
When I was young, I gradually stopped asking my father for money, and secretly took some out of my piggy bank. But after all, I was still a child and had no ability to make money, so the money in the jar became less and less, until later it became
It was empty. It wasn't until one day when my father was cleaning the house that he wanted to pick up Sister Liang's piggy bank and sweep the dust underneath, that he realized that the piggy bank was empty.
Sister Liang said that originally this was not a big deal, after all, the jar was filled with her own money. However, she did not expect that her father would criticize her because of this incident, and taught her that she should learn to be diligent and frugal from an early age, and not just spend what she has.
, Don’t look at our family being so poor, but dad still lives frugally just to raise you up. Sister Liang said that when she was young at the time, she didn’t listen to her father’s earnest education, she just felt that I
You still criticize me for spending my own money, so she was very dissatisfied. She had an argument with her father that day, ran out and stayed at a classmate's house until she came back very late. When she came back, her father had already gone to bed, and she started from that day
, and never saw his piggy bank again.
Sister Liang looked at the piggy bank of her childhood in front of her, stretched out her hand to touch it, with a look of emotion. I took the jar from her hand, and weighed it in my hand again. According to the volume of this thing,
Calculating, adding its own weight, and the length of the sound it makes when shaking, I can easily judge that the coins in this jar are actually almost full, only a few hundred handfuls.
The jar will be filled up. Logically speaking, after 20 years of this, no matter how much you save, you will never be able to fill up a piggy bank. And in the end, the coins will become 5 cents and 1 yuan. Go there.
The supermarket can bring back ten or eight of them, how come there is still room for them now?
I told Hu Zongren and Sister Liang my idea. After getting Sister Liang's consent, we decided to open the piggy bank to see if there was anything else inside besides coins.
Dare not go back to the house, so Sister Liang went to a neighbor's house and borrowed a folding table. After opening it, the three of us gathered around the table. Hu Zongren carefully pulled out the stopper on the base, and then blocked it with one hand.
Coins were running around everywhere, while slowly pouring out all the coins, covering most of the table. I looked carefully, and I couldn't find the old coins at all. They had all been replaced by Uncle Liang.
It became 1 yuan, not even 50 cents. Roughly calculated, the coins on this table should be almost 1,000 yuan. Who makes the piggy bank quite big? From the appearance point of view, they are actually the same.
, or it’s really hard for me to find anything different among them so densely packed. So I asked everyone not to touch the coins. I first spread the coins out so that they didn’t overlap, and then I started using a compass to draw clockwise.
In a circle, I started looking around the table.
The coins are metal, and although they have no magnetism, the compass pointer is very sensitive, and there are a lot of coins, so when I was looking for them, I actually received some interference to a greater or lesser extent. But this interference was completely
I can be defeated by my experience. After a few minutes, I quickly found a slightly stronger smart response on the compass that changed very slightly, so I began to narrow the scope and search one by one with a slower movement. Soon
, I locked one of them in the pile of coins. And that one was not a 1-yuan coin at all. The color was exactly the same as a 1-yuan coin, and it was mixed in among them, unless you are a master who looks for trouble, or you
I put in Zhenshiming eye drops, otherwise I would never notice it.
I first tentatively touched the coin with my hand and found that the compass had no reaction, so I boldly picked up the coin and examined it in my palm. There was a cross pattern on one of the two sides of the coin.
, very similar to the way the sickle and hammer cross on the Soviet flag that we saw in movies before, except that the sickle and hammer were replaced by one that looks like a stick but has a small round shape on one end, and the other becomes
A pen, just like the two things that Hu Zongren and I saw in the hand of Lei Zhenzi in the portrait behind the door.
I turned the coin over, and the pattern on the back was a blooming lotus, just like the lotus on the ghost's hand.