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墨書 Inktalez
The first semester of high school quickly came to an end, and the joyful winter vacation began. As my siblings grew older, I found myself taking on fewer chores like gathering straw and feeding the pigs at the boarding house. However, there wasn't much to do during the winter break, and I couldn't just sit around. One evening, I volunteered to carry a heavy trough of pig feed and headed towards the pigpen.
To my surprise, the pigpen was completely empty, showing no signs of housing a pig. Instead, in the adjacent cattle pen lay an enormous pig that was almost exaggerated in size!
What was going on? In my memory, our family had never raised such a large pig. During the era of collective farming, we would raise one pig a year as part of the government's procurement task. After selling it at the food station, we could earn a little money. My siblings and I spent all our free time gathering firewood or collecting straw to feed this pig, which represented our family's hopes. Every day when Mom returned from work, she would chop straw and mix pig feed before doing anything else. After a year of hard work, the pigs would only weigh around 120 to 130 pounds at most.
After land was allocated to households, our grain supply increased, and so did the pigs' diet. Leftover meals went straight into their bellies, and when autumn sweet potatoes were harvested, they could indulge in them to gain weight. Even so, the pigs sent to the food station still weighed only 120 to 130 pounds; it was just that they were raised for a shorter period.
Mom was quite calculating. In the spring of the second year after land allocation, she caught two piglets. One was sold at the food station around August or September, while the other was kept for slaughter during the New Year. Most of the good meat was sold to neighbors, while some less desirable pork and offal filled our bellies throughout the winter break.
The first time we slaughtered a "New Year Pig," Dad borrowed a large scale and said it weighed over 200 pounds. But this time, just looking at its size, it must have weighed at least 400 pounds; it certainly wasn't just a simple "New Year Pig."
Filled with curiosity and questions, I placed the trough in the cattle pen and immediately ran to Mom to ask, "Why is this pig so big this year?"
"Now we have plenty of grain; of course we can raise such a large pig," Mom replied succinctly. Seeing my lingering disbelief, she added, "The pig we're raising this year is indeed much larger than others'. I heard that pigs fed with special feed grow faster and bigger, so when it was being weaned, I specifically bought a bag of feed from the market and mixed it into its food for a month. I didn't expect it to grow this big."
Encountering such a large pig for the first time, although I believed Mom's explanation, I still maintained my inquisitive nature and tried to piece together how it had grown so much:
When Mom caught the piglets in spring, she designated this one as a "key training subject." Instead of choosing from nearby purebred piglets in our neighborhood, she went to Li Family Ferry Crossing and found the only pig farm in the commune that introduced high-quality boar mating to purchase a hybrid piglet. At just one month old, it already weighed five or six pounds more than ordinary piglets. The price was also higher than usual; Mom paid an extra ten yuan for it.
In summer, when the pig was being weaned, Mom boldly used specialized feed that few people in our area knew about along with traditional sweet potato vine mixed with grain flour. This not only made this pig significantly larger than ordinary pigs but also caused its body mass to increase daily.
In autumn, Mom made sweet potatoes its main food source. She chopped them up and cooked them with broken rice and fine bran in a large pot to feed it two big bowls every day. Additionally, she tossed whole bundles of sweet potato vines into the pen so that it could eat whenever it wanted throughout the day.
As I watched this pig grow fatter day by day—lying lazily in its pen without even bothering to turn over—our neighbors' cow happened to be under another family's care for those days. Seeing that the pigpen seemed small compared to this massive pig, Mom decided to move it into the cattle pen.
Previously raised pigs often liked to wander off and frequently staged "runaway" acts; thus Mom would always close the door of the storage room each day to prevent it from getting lost. Later on, seeing that it treated the cattle pen as its cozy nest—only strolling around its corners occasionally—Mom stopped closing the door during the day so that it could enjoy fresh air and warm sunlight until it reached its current size.
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