The Great Plains (226) | Bitter Cauliflower – in memory of Mr. Feng Deying

Bitter cauliflower

——In memory of Mr. Feng Deying

Li Guangrong

Writing the title, I do want to write about the bitter cauliflower, as a kind of plant bitter cauliflower.

However, I first think of a man. This man left yesterday. In the early morning of January 17, 2022, Feng Deying, the author of the novel "Bitter Cauliflower", died of illness.

Feng Deying is a native of Jiaodong, and his hometown historically belonged to Muping County, which now belongs to Rushan. Feng De English Academy is located at No. 71 Shengli Street, Rushan, and the former residence is the Feng family on the Rushan Temple. Guanshang Fengjia is a mountain village, backed by the mountain in the eastern part of jiaodong peninsula, across the Muping, Wenden, Rushan junction of the Kuncheng Mountain. The story of "Bitter Cauliflower" takes place in the Kunming Mountains. When the bitter vegetables bloom, the bitter cauliflower flowers are everywhere in the Kuncheng Mountain, bright and dangling, golden and brilliant, and a large piece of it opens. Inside and outside the courtyard of Feng Deying's former residence, the corners and corners are scattered with clusters of bitter cauliflower flowers.

From a flower to a person, this person must also be a family of flowers. It may be a bitter cauliflower, it may be a spring flower, or it may be a mountain chrysanthemum. In my opinion, it is most likely to be a bitter cauliflower, and he is closest to this flower.

Let's go back to the topic and write bitter cauliflower.

Bitter cauliflower is the flower of bitter cabbage. Bitters are the most common of Asteraceae plants, as common as the willow in trees. Bitter cabbage can not be called "bitter cauliflower" at any time. In the north, bitter vegetables return to green in early and mid-April, but not in flowering. The blossoming of bitter vegetables needs to be "hoped". When is the "hope" to come? Not necessarily. There are several kinds of bitter vegetables, the flowering time is not consistent, most of them have to stay up until the autumn wind rises. During the flowering period, the flowers bloom from early morning to noon every day, and the single flowering period is only a few hours, and some varieties have a longer flowering period. Bright little yellow flowers sway in the early autumn wind, swaying layers of ripples, emitting a soft fragrance. The more bitter the branches, the more fragrant the flowers. Bitter cauliflower is a beautiful flower, but it is conceived with bitter juice.

I have seen and eaten some bitter vegetables, but I can't tell which one. Most of the leaves I have seen in the Kunming Mountains are of the kind of long leaves, the leaves have a coarse serrated arrangement on the edges, dark green on the front and pale green on the reverse, and the white juice is collected, and the bitterness is slightly sweet. When I went to Rizhao Ju County, the bitter vegetables in the fields were slightly different from those in the Kuncheng Mountains, with wide and thin leaves, fine spines on the edges, and a bitter taste. The poet Lan Ye, who lives in the countryside of Juxian County, when he sees the courtyard cellar, the autumn breeze is in the wind, and a flowering bitter vegetable is struggling with frost, and a poem comes out——

In late autumn, the flowers in the valley have bloomed

Prosperity has passed, and it has decayed

I saw a bitter cauliflower flower with buds

In the gradually cold wind, waiting for the whole valley, are preparing for the winter

And this bitter cauliflower is still waiting

That destined bee...

Of course, no matter how the novelist writes or how the poet lays it out, in the end, bitter vegetables are just a plant, and it does not exist for symbols or metaphors. No matter which variety, whether its leaf feathers are oblong-oval, inverted lanceolate, or triangular, triangular halberd-shaped, no matter whether the flowering is late or not, or whether it is thick or weak, as a life, it grows in the true color of bitter vegetables. It is this tenacious nature of life that has grown all the way to the characters of the writer, all the way to the sentiments of the poets, all the way to the lives of many people...

Bitter cauliflower blossoms, bitter cauliflower falls, bitter cauliflower blossoms bloom again. The man who wrote the thick "Bitter Cauliflower" is gone, on the thick earth, spring will bloom in spring, lotus flowers bloom in summer, chrysanthemums bloom in autumn, lamei dress up in winter, in the world of flowers, there is only the beginning, there is no chapter.