Phoenix Reading Plan
Classic literature, you can't just pass by
Ji Xianlin is an internationally renowned master of Orientalism, a sinologist and historian, and a tenured professor at Peking University.
Going out is "traveling", hometown is "home", hometown is an idyllic refuge from external threats, and it is a place of return after several years of wandering in a different place. Chinese's feelings for his hometown and family in his heart are eternal and indelible. In his old age, when he thinks back to his hometown and childhood, there are always many feelings that are difficult to let go.
I have reached the age of nine. In the past seventy or eighty years, from the countryside to the city; from domestic to foreign countries; from primary schools, middle schools, universities to foreign research institutes; from "willing to learn" to more than "from the heart to do not exceed the rules", twists and turns, bumps and bumps, both walking through Yangguan Avenue and walking through the single wooden bridge; both through "mountains and rivers and doubts have no way", but also see "willow dark flowers and bright villages", joy and sorrow go hand in hand, disappointment and hope fly together, my experience can be described as many. To talk about regrets, that is to look down. To choose the deepest, truest, most memorable regret, that is, eternal regret, is also within reach, because it has not left my heart for a moment.
My eternal regret is that I should not leave my hometown and leave my mother.
I was born in a village of extreme poverty in northwestern Lu. My grandparents died early, leaving my father and three other brothers, lonely and helpless. The youngest uncle sent someone. My father and Uncle Nine were so hungry that they had no choice but to go to someone else's jujube forest to pick up dried dates that had fallen to the ground to fill their hunger. This is certainly not a long-term solution. In the end, the brothers were forced to leave their hometown and blindly went to Jinan to make a living. At this time, they were only in their teens and twenties. In the big city with no relatives, it must be after countless hardships, the ninth uncle settled in Jinan.
So my father returned to his hometown and said he was a farmer, but he had no land to cultivate. It must have been after countless hardships, uncle Jiu sometimes sent some money home from Jinan, and his father relied on it. Somehow, I found my daughter-in-law, and she was my mother. My mother's maiden name is Zhao, the door is right, her family is almost as poor as our family, otherwise she would never have married. She can't eat at home, where there is money and leisure to go to school. So my mother didn't know a word, lived all her life, and didn't even have a name. Her house is on another village, five miles away from our village. This five-mile road was the longest distance my mother had ever walked in her life.
I was born in such a family, and I had such a mother.
Later, I heard that our family was indeed "wide" for a while. Probably at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, Uncle Jiu used the last five cents left in his pocket to buy one-tenth of the Hubei flood lottery tickets in the three eastern provinces and won the prize. The two brothers discussed that they wanted to "return to their hometown after being rich and noble", go home and raise their eyebrows and breathe. So he transported the money home, but Uncle Jiu remained in the city, and the affairs of the township were handled by his father. He bought bricks and tiles and built a house at an absurd and bizarre price. At an absurd price, he bought a field with a well. On a whim, it will be dripping, and it will really raise its eyebrows. Unfortunately, the good times did not last long, and my father used a ridiculous and bizarre way, like Song Jiang, open-minded and generous, and entertained friends from all over the world. In an instant, the tile house built was demolished and sold bricks and tiles. Fields with wells also changed their owners. The whole family returned to the original situation. It was at this time that I descended into the human world under such circumstances.
Mother, of course, experienced this huge change first-hand. Unfortunately, when I lived with my mother, I was only a few years old, and told me, I didn't understand. Therefore, our family rose sharply and fell sharply this time, just like a flash in the pan, and I still don't fully understand it. This mystery is probably going to become an eternal mystery.
In any case, our family has returned to the poor situation it once was. Later, I heard that our family only had more than half an acre of land at that time. How this half acre of land came from, I don't know. A family of three lives on this half-acre land. Of course, uncle nine in the city will also give some help, but things like the Zhonghubei Flood Award are not less than once in a lifetime, and Uncle Nine does not have much money to help his brother.
How life at home is like, I am too young to say. Anyway, I eat very badly, I understand this. According to the standards of the time, eating "white" (referring to wheat noodles) was the highest, followed by eating millet noodles or stick noodle cakes, and the second was eating red sorghum cakes, which were red in color, like pork liver. "White" has nothing to do with our family. "Yellow" (millet noodles or stick noodles are yellow in color) and we don't have much to do with it. The only people who work all day long are "red". This "red" is bitter and astringent, and it is really difficult to swallow. But I don't eat and I'm hungry, I really talk a bit about the "red" color change.
However, children also have children's ways. My grandfather's cousin was a lifter, and his wife I called her grandma. They have money and land. Although the person died, the family was still well off. My grandmother is still alive. Her own grandson died early, so she poured all her love into me. She was one of only a few people in the whole guanzhuang who could eat "white". She not only ate it herself, but also set aside half or a quarter of a white-faced bun for me every day. Every morning, as soon as I woke up, I immediately jumped off the kang and ran to the village, where our family lived. I ran to Grandma and crisply and sweetly shouted, "Grandma! She immediately smiled and closed her mouth, shrunk her hand back into her fat sleeve, pulled a small piece of steamed bun from her pocket, and handed it to me, which was the happiest moment of my day.
In addition, I was occasionally able to eat a little "white", which I bought with my own labor. During the summer wheat harvest season, there was no wheat to harvest in our house. To the eldest sister-in-law and aunt of the Ning family who lived at the door—their family was also poor enough—they took me to the fields of the rich people in my village or outside the village to "collect wheat." The so-called "picking wheat" means that the long-term workers of other families have cut the wheat, and there will always be a little bit of wheat left, which is not worth picking up, and we poor people will come to "pick up".
Because there will never be much left, we will pick up half a day, and we will only pick up half a basket; but for us, this is already a treasure. It must have been my aunt and aunt who took special care of me, and a child of four or five, five or six years old, who could pick up ten pounds and eight pounds of wheat grains in a summer. These are all rubbed by the mother's own hands. In order to reward me, after the wheat season, my mother would grind the wheat into noodles, steam it into steamed buns, or paste it into a white dough cake to relieve me of my hunger. So I feasted.
I remember one year, my wheat picking was probably a bit "extraordinary". When it came to the Mid-Autumn Festival, the farmer called it "August 15th" in his mouth, my mother got some mooncakes from nowhere, broke a piece for me, and I squatted next to a stone and ate it. At that time, for me, the mooncake was really a magical good thing, and the dragon's liver and phoenix marrow were difficult to compare, and I rarely ate it once. I didn't pay attention to whether my mother was eating too. Looking back now, she didn't eat a bite at all. Not only the mooncakes, but also other "white ones", which my mother had never tasted, left them for me to eat. She probably spent her life with red sorghum cakes. In the thrifty year, even this can not be eaten, then only eat wild vegetables.
As for meat, the memory of eating seems to be a blank slate. Next door to my grandmother's house was a workshop selling boiled beef. Old cattle that had been toiling and cultivating for the peasants all their lives, when they reached old age and could not cultivate, a few peasants bought them at a very low price, killed them in a very barbaric way, boiled the meat, and then sold it. Old beef is difficult to cook, there is really no way, the farmer just urinate in the meat pot, so that the meat is rotten. The peasants had a good heart, and when they had this situation, they told their neighbors: "Don't buy today's meat!" "My grandmother's family is poor, although she loves my grandson very much, she can only use earthen jars, spend a few money, and pack a jar of beef soup, which is better than nothing." I remember one time, there was an extra piece of beef belly in the jar, and this became my patent. I was reluctant to eat it in one go, so I used a small rusty iron knife, cut it piece by piece, and ate it slowly. This piece of tripe is really comparable to the mooncake.
"White", mooncakes and tripe are rare, but what about "yellow"? "Yellow" is equally rare. But even though I was only a few years old, I figured out how to do it. In the three seasons of spring, summer and autumn, the grass and crops outside the village have grown. I would go outside the village to cut the grass, or go to the sorghum fields of people to chop the sorghum leaves. The owner of the field not only does not forbid but also welcomes the splitting of sorghum leaves; because as soon as the leaves are split, the ventilation can be improved, the sorghum can grow better, and the grain can be beaten more. Both grass and sorghum leaves are fed to cattle. Our family was poor and had never raised cattle. My second uncle's family has land and often has two big cows. I have prepared this grass and sorghum leaves for them. Whenever I, a child who is less than three pieces of dried tofu, carries a large bundle of grass or sorghum leaves into the door of the second master, I have some fear in my heart, put the grass in the cow pen, and if I don't go, I can always rub a "yellow" meal and not be "picked" by the second lady (our vernacular, meaning "scolding") out. When it came to the New Year, I felt in my heart that in the past year, I had made meritorious contributions to feeding cattle, and I had the courage to go to the second uncle's house to eat yellow noodle cakes. Yellow noodle cake is steamed with yellow rice noodles and dates, although the color is yellow, but it ranks above the "white", because it is only eaten once a year during the New Year, "things are rare and expensive", so the yellow noodle cake is expensive.
All I've said above is food. Why do we talk about what we eat when we talk about our mothers? The reasons are not complicated. First, as a child, I tend to care about what I eat. Second, almost all the delicious things I mentioned above have nothing to do with my mother. Except for "red", she is not touched. I stayed with her until I was six years old, and I came home from two funerals, and I stayed for a short time. Now I recall that even my mother's face was vague and blurry, without a clear outline. One thing in particular, which puzzled me and made it easy to understand: I could not recall my mother's smile anyway, as if she had never smiled in her life. Her family is poor, her son is far away, she has suffered a lot, where does the smile come from? Once I went home to hear Aunt Ning across from me tell me, "Your mother often said, 'I knew I couldn't send him back, and I wouldn't let him go anyway!'" How much bitterness and sadness is contained in a short sentence! The mother did not know how many days and nights, looking into the distance, hoping that her son would return! But the son never returned until his mother left this world.
I didn't understand this situation at first, and I didn't understand it very deeply. By the time I was in high school, I was a few years older and gradually understood. But under the fence, the economy can not be independent, empty ambitions, how can not be realized, I secretly made up my mind, made a vow: once I graduate from college, I find a job, immediately to meet my mother. However, before I graduated from college, my mother left me and left, forever and ever. The ancients said, "The tree wants to be quiet and the wind is not stopping, and the son wants to raise and not to be kissed," and this word is exactly for me. I can't bear to imagine my mother missing her beloved son on her deathbed; the thought of it makes my heart tear up and tears in my eyes.
When I rushed back to Jinan from Beiping and rushed back to Qingping from Jinan to run for funerals, I saw my mother's coffin, and when I saw the simple house, I really wanted to crash into the coffin and die with my mother. I regret it, I really regret it, I should never have left my mother. No matter what reputation, what status, what happiness, what honor in the world, it is not as good as staying by the mother's side, even if she does not know a word, even if she eats "red" all day.
This is my "eternal remorse."
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