According to the custom in my hometown, I call my grandfather’s mother grandma. My grandma had passed away when I was born. When I was a child, I often heard my mother talk about my grandmother.
The old grandmother had two husbands. Her ex-husband’s surname was Cui, and his name was Cui Jinsuo. His hometown was in Qixian County, Shanxi Province, and he was from the same hometown as Qiao Zhiyong of Qiao Family Courtyard. The Cui family is in a village in the countryside of Qixian County, and their family background is pretty good.
There are two Cui Jinsuo brothers. The eldest died young, leaving a pair of twin daughters to be raised by him. Cui Jinsuo is smart and well-educated, but he has a very bad habit - he likes gambling. He started gambling as a teenager and was never shy about his money. His father thought that by marrying him a wife, he would be able to live peacefully and stop gambling. Unexpectedly, the groom disappeared on the wedding night. After searching everywhere, he found that Cui Jinsuo was gambling heavily in a dark room with several wedding guests. My father became seriously ill in anger and died not long after.
After his father passed away, Cui Jinsuo lost control and gambled more unscrupulously. He lost all his family property in a few years. The most annoying thing is that he actually lost the two twin daughters left by his eldest brother to others. The two girls were twelve years old at that time.
was already impoverished, and his character was despised by the villagers. Seeing that he couldn't stay in his hometown anymore, Cui Jinsuo decided to take his family to the west entrance to find a way to survive. By this time they already had three children. The eldest was a daughter, eleven years old; the second, a boy, eight, and the third, also a boy, four. Along the way, they worked as part-time workers and sometimes begged from other people's homes. They walked like this for more than half a year and settled in a village to the west of Guihua City. They rented a shabby house in the village to live in. His wife was about to give birth to a child, so Cui Jinsuo took his daughter and eldest son to work for the wealthy households in the village in exchange for a morsel of food. Not long after, the fourth child was born, also a boy.
In the second year of the Republic of China, which was the 18th year of the Republic of China, there was a severe drought in the north. Many places were affected and many people starved to death. The Cui family's rations were not enough to eat. They first married their daughter to someone else and accepted a small gift, but it was still not enough to eat. In desperation, the couple decided to sell one of their children, in order to provide some food for the family and to find a way for the child to survive.
The eldest son is already able to work and is reluctant to sell. The younger son is still nursing but is reluctant to sell. After much deliberation, I had no choice but to sell my second son. The second child was already five years old and very sensible. When he heard his parents discussing selling a child, he begged, "Don't sell me, I will eat less every day." The couple were still cruel and decided to sell the second child.
That morning, Cui Jinsuo changed his second son into clean clothes and coaxed him to take him to Guihua City to eat sesame cakes. When they entered Guihua City, there was a place specializing in human trafficking. The traffickers put a bucket on the ground and counted a soybean in the bucket for each person they bought. When they went there, the bucket was already filled with a bucketful of soybeans. Cui Jinsuo's second son sold three measures of millet. When the trafficker took the child away, Cui Jinsuo regretted it and wanted to go back on his word, but the business was done and he could no longer control it.
After selling the child, Cui Jinsuo was very depressed and prepared to end up committing suicide after eating this small amount of food. But the wife had an idea at this time and was determined to go to the back mountain. So the whole family took dry food and spent the night all the way north to the back mountain. I had no money and couldn't afford a hotel, so I spent the night in a dilapidated house abandoned by others.
Outsiders are kind-hearted, and they see the two children as pitiful, and people often give them some food. Some people also let them spend the night in their houses. After passing Daqingshan, it’s the back mountain. Although Houshan is not considered rich, it has fewer people and more land. Although it is also a famine year, the famine is not serious. When we arrived at our current village in Inner Mongolia, Cui Jinsuo fell ill and his family settled in a broken kiln. Live by begging and doing day labor. Not long after, Cui Jinsuo passed away.
Some kind-hearted people saw that they were orphans and widowed mothers, so they acted as a matchmaker and let my grandfather's father marry Widow Cui, and she became my old grandmother.The old grandma got married with two children, and later gave birth to two more sons. When the old lady was alive, she would often talk about the child she sold to others, and she would talk about it until her death.
