Look at the flowers
Wen 丨 Zhu Ziqing
Growing up in a city on the north bank of the river, where the gardens were famous, but these days have been few; it seems that we have never heard the words of us looking at flowers today since childhood, so it can be seen that flowers are not prosperous. Some people who love flowers mostly just plant flowers in pots, and one pot is placed on the shelf; the shelf is placed horizontally in the yard. As usual, the yard was small, only enough to put down a shelf; on the shelf was at most more than twenty pots of flowers. Sometimes a flower platform is built against the wall in the yard, and a flowering tree is planted on the platform; there are also planted on the ground in the yard. But this is just an ordinary embellishment, not a love flower.
The family doesn't seem to love flowers; My father only happened to go to the flower room with us once or twice when he led us to the street. But we stayed in a house with a small garden that belonged to the landlord. There were trees, there were flower trellises (about wisteria trellises or the like), but I was too young to know the names of those flowers; I just remember the roses crawling on the wall. There is also a cave gate made of Taihu lake stones in the garden; Now that I think about it, it seems to be fine. At that time, I was led by a mischievous young servant, but I only knew how to run around and catch butterflies; Sometimes a few flowers are pinched, but they are just casually teased and discarded at will. As for the fun of appreciating the flowers, that's for later: on summer mornings, we have country girls in our place calling along the streets and alleys, selling gardenias. Gardenias are not a high-quality product, but I like the white and yellowish color and the fat one, which has a similar charm to the girls who sell flowers. The fragrance of gardenia, thick but not intense, light but not light, is also what I am happy about. That's how I fell in love with flowers. Some people may ask, don't you love flowers? I actually didn't know much about this myself, so I had to leave it alone.
In the spring of high school, someone proposed to eat peaches in the F Temple outside the city, and prepared to eat them for free; if you don't let them eat, you will make a fight, and you don't even care about a fight. At that time, although it was long before the May Fourth Movement, our middle school students there often entered the theater to watch white opera. Middle school students can watch dramas in vain, why can't primary school students eat peaches in vain? We all thought so, so the proposer gathered more than a dozen classmates and headed out of the city in a mighty way. When we arrived at The F Temple, the Daoists (we call the workers in the temple Taoists) in an imposing manner immediately led us to the peach orchard. The Daoist people hesitated and said: Now the peach tree has just blossomed. But who believes in people's words? We finally got to the peach orchard. Everyone was frustrated, and it turned out that the flowers were really blooming! At this time, the proposer P Jun went to fold the flowers. The Daoist people followed step by step, immediately stepped forward to dissuade them, and used their hands. But P Jun is the worst of us; It was too late, it was fast, and in the blink of an eye, the flower was in his hand, and the Daoist was already stumbling aside. The peach blossoms in that garden should always have something to see; None of us wanted to see it. Just shouting, no peaches, have to make tea and drink! The Taoists led us to the abbot with their stomachs full of grievances, and everyone drank a large cup of tea each. Only then did he calm down, talk and smile and go into the city. Probably I only knew how to love gardenias at that time, and I didn't know the peach blossoms that bloomed on the trees; so the opportunity in front of me was missed from the front of my eyes.
Later, I gradually read some poems about looking at flowers, and I felt that looking at flowers was quite interesting. However, after studying in Beiping for several years, I only went to Chongxiao Temple once; I went too early, and the famous green peony had not yet bloomed. In Beiping, the matter of seeing flowers was very prosperous, and there were many places to see flowers; but at that time, there seemed to be only a group of poets and celebrities, and the rest was still irrelevant. That was the beginning of the new literary movement, and we teenagers were really disrespectful to the old poems and the poets and celebrities of that class; And the places where I look at the flowers are far from being able to speak, and I am a lazy person, so I simply broke that heart. Later, when he went to Hangzhou to do things, he met Y Jun, who was a new poet and an old poet, and he was very interested in seeing flowers. He and I often went to lonely mountains to see plum blossoms. The plum blossoms in Lonely Mountain are famous in ancient and modern times, but there are too few; there are too many people who are not near the water. Once sitting on the crane pavilion drinking tea, there came a bearded person wearing a satin coat, greeting people with a Hunan accent, plum blossoms blooming! Sheng Zi said it very heavily, which surprised me; but what surprised me was only to say that it was only the sound of this sound in his mouth, and the flower was not flourishing, and there was nothing in me.
Once, Y said, there were three hundred plum blossoms in Lingfeng Temple; the temple was in the mountains, and few people went there. Y and I, and N Jun, hired boats from the West Lake to Yue Tomb, and from Yue Tomb into the mountain. After walking for a while, I went up many stone steps before I reached the temple on the mountain. The temple is very small, and the plum blossoms are in the garden on the west side of the main hall. The garden is not large, there are three clean rooms under the east wall, the most suitable for drinking tea and watching flowers; There is a hill in the north, there is a pavilion on the mountain, about to be called Wanghai Pavilion, Wanghai is not necessarily, but the Qiantang River and west lake are visible. There are indeed many plum trees, densely lined up low. It was already dusk, and there were only three of us in the temple; the plum blossoms did not bloom, but the pearl-like stars of the bones were already cute enough; we all felt more delicious than when they bloomed on the lonely mountain. The main hall was doing evening classes, and the sound of Brahman was sent, and the dark incense in Merlin really made us reluctant to go back. After wandering in the garden for a while, and sitting in the house for a while, the sky was dark and there was no moonlight, and we asked for an old lantern from the temple and went down the mountain. The road was almost lost, and the dog bite was repeated twice and three times; Our poet Y was a little embarrassed, but finally arrived at Yue's grave. The boatman greeted me from afar: You are coming, I don't think you will wrong me! On the boat, we still talked about the plum blossoms of Lingfeng until the electric lights on the lake reached our eyes.
Y went back to Beiping, and I also went to White Horse Lake. It was the countryside, and there was only a row of small peach trees planted along the lake and the willows, and when the flowers bloomed in the spring, they smiled charmingly in the wind. There are also many rhododendrons in the mountains. These days before our eyes, no one has ever proposed in a hurry, we look at the flowers. But there is an S Jun, who is particularly fond of raising flowers; his family does not leave flowers almost all year round. When we went to his house, we always saw that he was either there with scissors to repair the branches and leaves, or carrying a pot to water. We are often happy to watch. A purple weed in his yard was very nice, and we drank by the flowers, I don't know how many times. I lived in White Horse Lake for only a year, but I infected him with his love of flowers. However, when I returned to Beiping, I lived in the Qinghua Garden, where flowers were very prosperous, and after three consecutive springs, I never thought of going to see it again. Only in the autumn of the following year, I saw chrysanthemums in the garden with Mr. Sun San a few times. The chrysanthemum of Tsinghua Garden is famous, and Mr. Sun San also specially wrote an article and painted a number of paintings. But the kind of pot and dry flower cultivation method, the flowers are good, always feel that there is no natural humor.
Until last spring, when I had some spare time, I asked people for the names of some flowers before they bloomed. A good friend starts knowing his name, and I want to see flowers. It just so happens that Y Jun often comes to the garden, and we go to those flowers three or four times a day to wander. This year, Y Jun is busy, so I will go alone. I love the old dried apricots, the little red peaches of Linfeng Wanna, and the bauhinia with a lot of stems; but the most infatuated is the Begonia of Xifu. The flowers of the begonias are good and well lightened; they are very colorful, but there is no hint of swaying. Sparsely drained high-ranking cadres, heroism is hidden. Unfortunately, I didn't take advantage of the moonlight to see it; Wang Pengyun has two words: only the hazy shadow of the moon is sad, and it is difficult to detect the ups and downs of the microwave. I think the begonia flowers under the moon are probably like this. For the sake of begonias, two days ago in the city specially braved the strong wind to go to Zhongshan Park, there were many people to see the flowers; but somehow, they forgot about the Kisuke Ancestral Shrine. Y told me that one of the plants there covered most of the yard; the others grew upwards, but this one stretched out horizontally.
The multiplicity of flowers can not be said, begonias have no fragrance, people used to think that hate, here the flowers are too rich, but brewed a faint fragrance, so that people can not smell tired for a long time. Y told me that it was the night when the wind had been blowing for a day; he had gone the day before. He said that when he went, there were already flowers on the ground, and the wind of the day and night was over. He said that when Peiping looked at the flowers, he had to hurry to see them: the spring light was too short, and there were many sunny days; this year was a cloudy day, but the strong wind still could not escape. I said that looking at flowers in Beiping is more interesting than other places, and it is also here. At this time, I didn't seem to be very thin in the class of poets and celebrities.
April 1930.
(Originally published in Tsinghua Weekly, May 4, 1930, Vol. 33, No. 9)
Sponsored by the Propaganda Department of the Cpc Dongchuan District Committee
Source | Literature and art of the Republic of China
Typography edits | Li Zhujin
Editor-in-charge | Liao Yanqing
Editor| Wu Li Mao Wenhui
Final Review | Wang Jieyun Li Ze
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