Past | Lubei Rural Zhuanghu Drama "Haha Cavity"

Author: Su Yindong

After the twenty-third "little year" of the Waxing Moon, Li Jiazhuang began to set up a stage, and one after another "Zhuanghu Drama" had to be sung in the full moon until the "second of February".

Those days were the most festive and joyful days of the year for the villagers. When I was a child, I always looked forward to the waxing moon with my fingers crossed. Because the waxing moon is coming, it is not far from the day when the stage of the play begins. Children's families don't want to watch the drama, nor can they understand it, but it is really for the lively energy when watching the play.

The East Road Zizi West Road "Vomit" is a popular local drama in the hometown area, and Li Jiazhuang's play is called "Haha Cavity". In my memory, this kind of "haha cavity" has a more significant feature, that is, at the end of each singing lyric, they are trying to pick up, the singing cavity is high and sharp, lively and jumpy, and the careful touch is also quite a bit of a taste of depression. The villagers are familiar with it, and most of the jokes are also remembered. On the way to the end of work, or to drive a donkey cart, or to carry a hoe and a basket, and roar two voices in a happy place, that is also a round word, happy like a fairy.

Grandma's house is at the southwest gate of Lijiazhuang. From my house to my grandmother's house, but half a mile away, only a large section of land. In the winter field, there are no dense crops, only a few old jujube trees with bare branches and scattered branches. As soon as I walked out of my house's alley, I could see the big chimney of my grandmother's house, and most of the time, my mother was also very relieved that our sisters and brothers went to my grandmother's house alone.

At that time, Grandpa was an adult playing boat on a sea fort called "Fork Tip". Every time I went to my grandmother's house, my grandmother would always bring out the fat "pomegranate yellow" (three warty pike crabs), the spoon shrimp with a belly full of seeds, or the Yangtou fish (dried and cooked small miscellaneous fish), "snow snow" (small white shrimp), pot fish and other seafood for us to eat. Probably because my mother was my grandmother's youngest daughter and was the closest, I felt that my grandmother hurt us, far more than my aunts and my cousins and cousins.

We had dinner at my grandmother's house, and when it was almost dark, my mother also rushed from home, and she could not forget to give her a few old pumpkins, or a few large turnips that had been hidden for a long time, or a bag of carrots or something, which counted as a gift to her grandmother. For those things that are not worth much money, Grandma always nagged and had to count the mothers every time: keep the children to eat, they are still young, but they can't be wronged. What do people have to have - what do adults have to eat or not? In my memory, my grandmother's nagging is almost the same, and it is always nothing more than these few words.

Without waiting for the two ladies to say a few words, they heard the sound of gongs and drums at the east end of the village in the distance. We hurriedly moved onto the pester stool, tugged at the sleeve of the mother's coat and shouted to go quickly, don't delay and go late and occupy the seat. Grandma also hurried to pack up, locked the door, turned her feet upside down, and went with us one foot deep and one foot shallow to listen to the play. Grandpa's big black dog also came with us, and it ran upside down in front of us, and looked back at us from time to time.

The place where the opera was sung was at the east end of the village, which was an official residence for the elderly, and after liberation, a school was built on the official residence, and the stage was set up in the open space in front of the school. Four or five large gas lamps above the stage "hissed-" and lit up, illuminating the surrounding area of the stage. At this time, the underside of the stage was already full of people and very lively. The sound of gongs and drums on the stage was similar to a burst, and suddenly stopped abruptly at the most intense and highest time, followed by the crackling of firecrackers on the stage. After that, sonorous, babbling, the actors came on the scene one after another.

Drama is some old drama. All I can remember is a limited number of plays such as "Three Soldiers", "Tianhe Match", "Old and Young Change", "Wang Sanjie's Cutting Vegetables" and "Qin Xuemei Godson". Purely to see the hilarity, the plot can not be said. At that time, I was most impressed by the "old cow" grazed by the cowherd in "Tianhe Match". The "old cow" on the stage is played by one of my cousins, two tall horns, a pair of large bull eyes, but walking on two legs and able to "talk" to the owner. The "old cow" used this as a matchmaker, matching the industrious cowherd on the ground and the beautiful weaver girl in the sky for a good marriage. In the play, the most infuriating of course is the queen mother, no matter how loving the cowherd weaver girl is, she has to use the silver hairpin to draw a river of heaven, ruthlessly dismantling their happy life, and only on the seventh day of July every year can they meet once. As for "Old and Young", the storyline is probably like this: it is said that it is a young and handsome little daughter-in-law, confused to marry a bad old man; and a white-haired old lady, but the yin and yang mistakenly want to go to a young man's palanquin... After going through all the twists and turns, the play was finally completed, and the "old and young people were exchanged" and formed a happy marriage with each other, while the old man knew nothing and had been kept in the dark. In the play, the young and handsome little daughter-in-law, with a black smooth head, wearing a red dress, holding a flower handkerchief in her hand, the lotus step gently moved the style affectionately, soft a few words and a small section of confession, which suddenly fascinated me under the stage - I thought she was more enduring than Sister Duo'er. The most puzzling thing is that Xue Pinggui's "heavy treatment" of his father-in-law after he became emperor in "Wang Sanjie's Cutting Vegetables" is simply very gratifying - if you are poor and love the rich, there should be no good end!

Those who will watch will look at the doorway, and those who will not look at it will see the hilarity. We have watched a lot of dramas, and there are really not many words to remember. In a play that I don't know what to call, a lively and cute little girl, singing a lyric in the back garden, because of its humor and smooth mouth, has not been forgotten so far. Remember the play singing:

Little Lady (Ah) Sixteen Seven,

Come to the garden and take the lice,

The big lice took three hundred and six,

The little lice took a palm,

Lice are not big six legs (ah),

Put it in your mouth,

Bleeding down the corner of that mouth (wow)...

Later, I thought that the reason why I was able to remember this lyric verbatim probably caused us to sigh at that time: it turned out that not only were we dirt boys crawling with lice, but even the handsome and squeamish "little squirrels" also had lice - this made our hearts somewhat balanced. The lice in his hair and the lice in the seams of his clothes were shouting, and he often saw his mother in the sun with grates for him to get down and sweep down with brooms. To this end, we also made up a slip of the tongue for Eight Shi'er: Eight Shi'er Eight Shi'er's big crotch, there are articles in the crotch, a large gang of lice lice, black and day and day shouting, his mother sweeps down with a broom, grunting and raising a big basket... It was embarrassing to mess with Babashir.

The little hairy child loves to be sleepy, and before I could see a paragraph, my upper and lower eyelids began to fight, so I dragged the hem of my mother's clothes and begged her to go home. And the mother is interested in seeing it, she will give me a few dimes of change, coax me to go outside the stage to buy food by myself. The most bought were sugar cane sweet bars, sugar gourds (we call them "sugar not drops") and syrup, and later there were melon seeds and fallen peanuts. Chewing on the sugar gourd with ice ballast in the hard state, or bumping the fragrant melon seeds and peanuts, the thick sleepiness is really gone, and it can persist for a long time...

Ten minutes on stage, ten years offstage. Acting requires solid skills, and the actors who can show their faces on stage in the drama team are almost all old actors, especially lao sheng and Hua Dan, who are those few people every year. Rehearsing new plays requires new roles, often selected from young fans. Teaching the play is a foreigner named "Sour Apricot", he is famous for singing, handsome, clean singing, habitually a small voice, his singing voice is sharp and sour (this may be the origin of his stage name "Sour Apricot"). "Sour Apricot" rarely comes out to perform, and occasionally there is a lack of a role, or the actor has a temporary problem, he will go on stage to "save the scene". That move, one thought and one song, raise your hand and throw your hands, is really a lot higher than other actors. Later, the "sour apricot" was too old to teach, and he changed to a stage named "Pure Face Pear" to teach the play. A few young people with fetishes in the village studied in the drama team all day long, and in the evening in the jujube trees outside the village, there was often the sound of them practicing hanging their throats. In the end, the work was not in vain, and gradually, several of them could also run a dragon set on stage. Zhang Zhuan'er, Reborn, Hua Ru and several other big girls also followed suit, they had fat breasts and fat buttocks, they were originally plump, and they dressed up as more handsome and watery, which provoked the half-sized children under the stage to be confused, which was a bit crazy. As soon as they came on the field, before they could open their mouths, they attracted a sharp whistle, and some shouted their names. As long as they heard that there were their characters, the half-sized children insisted on seeing Satai on cold days.

Haha cavity, I don't know when it arose, has been singing my entire childhood, adolescence. It was not until the 1990s that it gradually declined and subsided. The actors are old and dead, and there is a lack of successors; a few who can play the strings and play the drum board are too old to go on stage; and the heads and props are almost lost. Mainly, at that time, every household began to put up "drama boxes", some also bought television sets, people did not have to go out to listen to the drama every day, who would be willing to go to the open air to listen to the drama.

When I was doing news reporting in the Liubao Township Government Office, around the New Year of 1995, I also went to my grandmother's village and took some photos about the "haha cavity". Some of the old actors in the village heard that they wanted to sing and take pictures, and they were very excited, flipped out their costumes, put on a little makeup, and the organist took out the accompaniment of the family and sang a few "classic" plays on the street. They repeatedly told me that I must give them a few photos to keep a thought for myself. Through their words and demeanor, I can see that they are still very nostalgic for the "haha cavity" that was once popular.

I heard that Lijiazhuang's "Haha Cavity" troupe has been revived, and the county's cultural department will repackage and dig deeper to apply for the "intangible cultural heritage" of the province. It is really good news, maybe in the near future, the New Year will be able to hear the long-lost "haha cavity" again.

Writer Profile: Su Yindong, Shandong Wudi people. Literary works have appeared in Selected Chinese Poetry, Selected Poems, Times Literature, Western Prose Anthology, Contemporary Prose, Qilu Evening News, etc. He is the author of the essay collection "See Cooking Smoke Again", "Cooking Smoke in Dreams", and the reportage collection "Looking Back" (co-authored).

Pictured by Humphrey Muleba

One point number Strange on the wind literary art