(1) Half a life of ups and downs | my childhood

Forty years old, half a life has passed, looking back at the road, imagining.

Like all young people who pursue their dreams, they have come from a distant hometown to the strange south, floating and sinking for half a lifetime. My own journey is not only a kind of memory, not only a kind of feeling, but also a true story of individuals under the drastic changes of our times, and at the same time, it can reflect a small microcosm of the historical development of our times.

The time experienced, looking back in pain, harvesting in laughter, shadows, changing scenery, half-white hair climbing up the forehead. Through the tunnel light of middle age, and then open the way of youth, from young and carefree, to cold window hard reading, to turbulent displacement, to rooted dreams. Contemplation and contemplation, experiencing so many things, seeing so many people, the starlight is no more, people are not teenagers, but many or beautiful, or sad fragments, so they fill their own life course, and at the same time in this process, they are intertwined with other people and things, giving rise to stories. Although this true story is not deliberately woven, but exists with time and space in the natural years, just like migratory birds rushing from the south to the north in the spring and flying back to the south in the autumn, they are forced choices in natural survival, so their own stories have become the stories of others.

We — all of us — are actors in this era or family background, and before we have time to prepare anything, the curtain of social drama has already opened for all of us. Maybe before we walked in, for hundreds of thousands of years, he was his own protagonist, and everyone else was a supporting role, supporting his life and feeling his pain and sorrow. When we walk into this curtain and become the protagonists ourselves, they have no choice, and they cooperate with us as supporting roles to interpret our years and years, feeling our success or failure. We are both our own protagonists and their supporting roles, and in our respective lives, the protagonists and supporting characters have never had a clear dividing line. So we're both the protagonist and the supporting character, and anyway, we're in. As the protagonist, unstoppable – we walked in.

From toddler, from falling and then getting up, from the wind and dust all the way, from passion, from all kinds of confusion, from indifferent face, from ..., we are unconscious, just like when the summer cicada climbed out of the nest in late spring, the countless trees next to it have long grown for it, and have opened green leaves, climbed to which tree to whistle, encountered any danger or flowers, experienced what rain and wind blow, that is its fate. According to our own personality, knowledge, financial resources, family background, ideological experience into this complicated society, from the confusion into the factory to work hard, learn from their experience, imitate their road to success, create their own career, from success to failure, from falling to the pain of the fall to the comeback, know different people, walk different roads, do different work, chase the aspirations of each young person, pursue it, practice it, realize it, stumble all the way, walk all the way.

I think it makes sense to try to collect the remaining memories in my mind and write them down.

- Caption

The village of nearly 1,000 families is embedded in a vast Jianghan Plain, which appears insignificant, and occasionally there are some small hills, and whenever the air is clear after the rain, the hazy undulating mountains can be seen in the distant half sky. The ditches that irrigate the rice fields are covered with horse water chills and other aquatic weeds, and the water grasses flow through the front of the village with the turbulent waves of the flowing water, and the clear rolling water gathers like a galloping white horse into the pond near the farmland to calm the surging momentum. The Beijing-Guangzhou railway line passed through the town like a beautiful ribbon not far away, and the train roared.

This is a town below Xiaogan City in Hubei Province.

I was born in a place called Little Bay in front of a village in this town, and it is said that when I was two years old, I moved from Small Bay to the front of Big Bay. At that time, it was still the period of the production team, and the peasants worked at sunrise and did not rest every day. Whenever the hammers of the team, which were made of half-meter-long rails hanging from the treetops in front of the captain's house, were struck by hammers, people would throw down their children, put on straw hats and begin to lead the cattle, carry shovels, hoes, forks, and other agricultural tools one after another, and go out one after another in the fields for the output value and honor of the large collective, and busy with a few mouths of the small family.

My grandparents died very early when my mother didn't pass through the door, and in my very small memory, I always envied my grandparents' playmates, who could eat fritters, noodle nests, steamed buns and other clay candy bought by the elderly. Even when we were having fun together, the scene of their grandmother calling them home for dinner made me extremely envious, so stunned that I looked at the glass ball lying quietly at my feet, I was stunned, my eyes were wet.

What is particularly impressive is that later when I was in elementary school, a teacher assigned an essay entitled "My Grandma", which was difficult for me, where was my grandma? What does she look like? She wasn't there before I came out of the womb, how do I write grandma's story? So I made up that I had a "grandmother" who cooked for me, went to the alleys of the village and called me home for dinner, and led me to buy something to eat. Turn it in, the teacher does not have any comments, because he is from our village, knows the details, makes up the story, has no feelings at all, fake! Others have red pen words to write comments and annotations, encouragement, students invented a grandmother, my composition without comments is normal. During that time, I also secretly hated my heavenly grandmother, why didn't I leave so early and not let me finish a real essay?

However, in my childhood, there was still an old man who I could never forget, that is, the fan father I called "Daddy", and my father called him a fan uncle, an uncle of my distant house.

He was lonely and miserable all his life, five insured households. There is a ringworm of the foot, it is said that when I was a child swimming in the water in the Pond, I was accidentally stabbed by the mussel shell, and I did not have time to treat the stubborn disease that fell, and every summer my feet were swollen high, mosquitoes and flies bitten, and I couldn't wear shoes in winter, and I was exposed to the outside and froze.

Dad is kind and loyal, when his parents went to work in the team, they handed over our sisters and brothers to his care, if it were not for him, maybe we would not grow up today. He took good care of us, and once, when a big kid in the village bullied me and heard my cries, he limped angrily with his crutch and threw him away. Although it is inconvenient for dad to walk, this action of his makes me never forget. When his sister helped him to twist the straw handle, he saw the little footed mother-in-law carrying a bamboo basket selling oil cake twist flowers passing by, he would silently enter the grass house, carefully take out a few cents in a cloth bag under the pillow, and buy some twist flowers or candy from the old woman for us to eat, that was our happiest time.

One day in 1978, my father took my little hand to my father's broken grass house, which was dark and damp, and he lay down on the bed, and I stood at the gate and heard my father's crying, and my father sobbed. It turned out that his father had something to go to Shanghai, and he was reluctant to cry because of his father, and his father could not bear to be sad. Not long after my father went to Shanghai, my father died one night, and since then, I have lost my care. In 2018, under my convocation, cousins and sisters together erected a monument of gratitude to Dad as an eternal memorial.

In childhood, there were more children in the village than now, and there were especially many children of the same age, and they played particularly vigorously. There is a pond in the middle of the village, where the women shabu-shabu clothes every morning. This pond separates our second team from the third team on the opposite side. The children of the two teams are very naughty, I don't know why, I don't know from what day, everyone according to the detachment of people into two hostile "forces", just like the guerrillas and sharpshooters in the movie, every day with stones to attack each other, in the monotonous and boring fun to find our happiness. In those days, this was our most fun game, winning the battle, we seemed to be Red Army soldiers, extremely happy. After the fight, we played glass balls, rolling iron rings, fighting arches, and had a lot of fun with each other, and the next day, we continued to fight and continue to play games, completely unaware that it was the "enemy" who had fought.

One day, my father said, "You're going to school in a few days, will you count?" "I said I wouldn't!" At that time, no matter how old you were, you couldn't go to school if you couldn't count. So, a few days before the start of school, my sister managed to teach me to count, from zero to a hundred, which is really laborious for a playful person. My sister danced rope with the girls and taught me until I could finally count, and she took me to the Hanwen teacher's house, counted to him, and passed the pass smoothly, and he told my sister that she would be able to go to school in a few days to pay the tuition.

When I was seven years old, I ended my childhood and walked into the village-run primary school classroom and began a long study career of more than ten years.

2022.1.6 First Draft