My father started working with the adults when he was not in school at the age of 16. He would go to a place dozens of miles away from home to haul ammonia, and he would haul as much as the adults did.
Although the work is hard, after all, I am not that old, and I still have happy times, and I enjoy the hard work. There was a river in the village. At that time, almost everyone could swim without a teacher, and my father was no exception. He was a pretty good swimmer. One of his cousins almost drowned, but he tried his best to save him.
My grandfather passed away at the age of fifty-eight, suffering from stomach cancer . My father was twenty years old at that time. My father rarely mentioned grandpa to us. He only mentioned it when he had finished drinking. He said that his grandparents had been criticized. They had their hands tied and a sign stuck on their back, marched, and swept the streets. They were so cold when they came back from sweeping the streets in winter. I wanted to make them a bowl of soup, but they couldn't cook it because there was no firewood. Grandpa's stomach cancer hurts to death. He wanted to drink some wine to anesthetize him, but he didn't. I vaguely remember that my father never looked directly at us when he said this, maybe because he was afraid that we would see his eyes. Sometimes he cried while talking, and his mother stopped letting him talk and asked him to go to sleep.
My father learned to farm from an old man in the village, and he could also ride a horse and drive livestock.
