Buckwheat: the Sound of a Machine

When I opened my eyes, there were dusty roof beams above my head, and the tip of my nose was filled with the smell of firewood. It took me three days to accept the reality - I was dressed as an ancient peasant girl, my father was a hunter, my mother was a farmer, and I had a little brother with a snotty nose. My original name is Shen Qiao. I am fifteen years old and as thin as a bean sprout. In my memory, this family was so poor that they almost starved to death last winter. I touched the frostbite scars on my arms that hadn't gone away yet, and I had to think of something quickly. The first thing is to go up the mountain. Dad had to hand over half of the prey he killed to Li Zheng, and the rest was not even enough to exchange for salt. I followed him to identify herbal medicines and read out all the Chinese medicine knowledge from my previous life. The first time I dug wild yams, I squatted on the slope and almost cried. When my mother saw me coming back with a pile of grass roots, she thought I was hungry. I cut the yam into cubes and mixed it with brown rice and cooked it in a pot. My brother drank three bowls of it. That night, for the first time in my life, my mother didn't sigh. In autumn, I found a wild persimmon tree in the back mountain. The fruit was so astringent that I couldn't open my mouth, so I picked it, peeled it, dried it, and covered it in straw to remove the astringency. Half a month later, it was so sweet that my brother jumped up and down, so my mother went to the market and sold it for twenty cents, and bought back half a catty of salt and a silver hairpin - bought for me. "The girl should have something decent at home." She inserted the hairpin into my head, her fingers as rough as tree bark.