Cover news reporter Zhang Jie
Farming life with the land shows the most simple and intimate relationship between man and nature. Farming is naturally hard, killing leaves and accumulating fertilizer, ploughing the field, planting seedlings, managing water and controlling insects, and even cutting grass and drying grain, every agricultural work requires countless sweat. In particular, in the "double grabbing" season of rushing to harvest early rice and rushing to plant late rice in the middle of summer, the scorching sun is scorching, the labor intensity is huge, and it is very hard work. At the same time, the other side of the story is that people take the earth as their foundation, follow the laws of nature, arrange their lives, and so on, and so on, and so on.
This rhythmic and rhythmic life also brings people many moments of peace of mind. Being close to the land, following the order of the four hours and eight festivals, and being full of vitality is a spiritual wealth that people's hearts do not want to discard easily. Especially for fast-paced, easy to feel stress and anxiety, it is undoubtedly a powerful attraction. Perhaps, this is an important reason why the Spring Festival holiday every year attracts people to travel thousands of miles back to their hometowns, to find that sense of closeness to the land and nature, and to obtain peace of mind. The kind of skin-to-skin kinship that has been built up by grass and trees, flowers and trees, mountains and rivers, land and all things and human beings may be the reason why people in reinforced concrete cities are obsessed with the countryside.
A writer who came out of the countryside used words to write a three-dimensional biography of his hometown
Fortunately, there are always people who record our countryside: the farm work that people have done, the fields they have run, the meals they have eaten, the stages they have looked at in their childhood, and the days they have spent happily. Through the salvage of words and literature, we can look back at the slow and quiet, four-hour and orderly rural years. Through reading, get close to those who work at sunrise and rest at sunset.
Born in 1969, Hunan writer Huang Xiaoji is from a small mountain village called Eight Centimeters in Hunan. This small mountain village is located at the junction of Yongxing, Guiyang and Chenxian counties. It was a remote corner surrounded by mountains, lush mountains, turquoise rivers, and fertile fields. In this area, Huang Xiaoji spent his unforgettable childhood and adolescence until he left his hometown because of his examination. In 2005, the construction of the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway began. Because the railway line runs through the north and south, the eight-centimeter new village is built in a different place, all of which are newly renovated buildings, mostly three or four floors, no different from the urban community. Those old rural artifacts that were once familiar to generations are gradually forgotten, gradually drifting away, disappearing into the depths of time.
In recent years, Huang Xiaoji has begun to take the eight-centimeter village as the object of writing, telling about the old utensils, diet, agricultural affairs, festivals, etc. in the countryside, and writing "Old Utensils Under the Eaves", "A Village's Food List", "Farming in the Old Garden" and so on. At the beginning of 2022, a new work "Hometown in the Festival" was launched, which was published by guangxi people's publishing house in the series of "China Rural Preservation Series".
"After the winter solstice, the late rice in the field, the sweet potatoes in the soil, and the oil tea in the mountains have all been harvested, and the hometown of farming has truly reached the winter leisure period." For many years, the young people in their hometown loved to learn the art of worshiping teachers in the long winter leisure, learning carpentry, learning paint, learning to blow trumpets and pull erhu, learning martial arts and learning to play lions, all kinds of things, in a village, many people are master-apprentice relationships. The long winter is also the season when young men and women in the countryside are happily married. In the hometown, whether it is to say that the matchmaker is betrothed to a relative, or to marry a wife and a daughter, people often choose to hold this traditional ceremony in winter. Therefore, in my childhood and adolescence, in winter, I could often see the greeting team of my own village or from other villages, carrying a red dowry, walking joyfully on the field path in front of the village. Those brides who entered the court gate and married into our village became our people from now on, wives, mothers, children, thrifty families, connected with the blood of this land, and kept together all their lives. "Between the lines, warm words, as if they can penetrate time and take us back to that quiet rural years."
In "Hometown in the Festival", Huang Xiaoji tells about the forty important rural festival customs in the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter in the author's hometown, allowing readers to see how a traditional farming village expresses the joys and sorrows of life through the festivals.
With the gradual drifting of the traditional farming era and the acceleration of the urbanization process, a whole set of labor and lifestyles that grew around the land are also quietly changing or even disappearing. However, production and lifestyle can be changed, and material conditions will be improved, but the emotions between people formed by the simple agricultural way of life will not change easily.
In the book "Farming in the Old Garden", Huang Xiaoji recorded nearly 60 kinds of agricultural affairs such as ploughing the field, double robbery, handing over public grain, collecting herbs, picking oil and tea, herding cattle, beekeeping, iron, pot repair, and quilts. Some of these agricultural affairs are no longer common, and some have been replaced by modern equipment. Farming is not just about farming. Agricultural leisure is a great opportunity for the countryside to build water conservancy and various large-scale constructions. The stone dam on the front river of Huang Xiaoji's village, the slender water zhen in the rice paddies, and the small reservoir commonly known as shantang next to the village are all built by generations of villagers with countless labor and sweat. His childhood witnessed the tail end of the era when the whole people built the reservoir, and he followed his mother who delivered food to the construction site of the reservoir in a neighboring village, and was deeply impressed by the warm labor scenes.
Remind us to be more in awe and grateful for the land that raised us
The people take food as heaven. The food in my hometown is something that many people have been thinking about for many years. In the "Menu of a Village", you can see the description of more than seventy kinds of home-cooked food in the southern countryside, which can be called a southern countryside on the tip of the tongue, reproducing the cooking smoke years of a southern village. "At that time, in addition to growing rice and sweet potatoes in the village, there were also many miscellaneous grains such as wheat, sorghum, peanuts, beans, etc., and the cabbage, radish, pepper, eggplant, pumpkin, winter melon and other four-hour vegetables and vegetables in the garden soil were more abundant. As for the meat, pigs are raised by every household, feeding pig grass and grain, piglets to the pen slaughter takes more than a year, there is a natural growth process; chicken, duck, goose breeding is also very common, they are completely in a free range state, full of vitality; the pond in front of the village is numerous, plain vegetarians have raised grass carp, silver carp, bighead carp, carp and other domestic fish, the pond water comes from streams or mountain springs, blue waves; and in the vast rice fields, deep-water rivers and streams, wild yellow eels, loach, crucian carp, snails, shrimp, Crabs and the like are also very common. The ingredients obtained in such an environment are undoubtedly green and pollution-free from today's point of view. At that time, the villagers did not have the concept of food pollution in their minds, and all these ingredients were obtained in accordance with the nature of the Heavenly Dao. At that time, the cooking utensils of the hometown people were also simple. Rice is cooked in ding pots, and steamed rice is made in wooden koshiki or clay bowls. Cooking is made in a small iron pot with a wooden lid and a long-handled vegetable spoon. This small iron pot is also commonly used to fry peas, soybeans, peanuts, melon seeds and other seasonal local products, and on good days in summer and autumn, it will also be used to make hot skin. There is also a large iron pot used to boil water to make tea, steamed wood rice, stewed sweet potatoes, stewed taro, steamed steamed steamed buns, steamed dumplings, and rice and tofu are also inseparable from it. Condiments are also simple: salt, chili ash, earthy soy sauce, and shallots, garlic, parsley, and ginger. The oil is made with home-boiled pork plate oil and squeezed tea oil. Most days of the year, firewood is burned in the stove, and only in the cold winter, coal is burned. My childhood and adolescence were spent eating rough but fragrant meals, dishes, snacks, and teas cooked by my mother with these natural ingredients and simple cooking utensils. ”
If a worker desires to do a good thing, he must first use it. In "Old Artifacts Under the Eaves", nearly a hundred kinds of old rural artifacts can be seen. The book is divided into six series according to the spatial order: bedroom, stove house, hall house, alley, grass field, field, from near and far, and this is also the farmer's day's labor route. The order of the utensils in each series has also been carefully designed, such as the first series is arranged in the approximate order of the utensils that the villagers will use in their lifetime; the second series is arranged in the approximate order of the utensils that the villagers will use for a meal; the third series puts the carpentry box in the first part, and the rest are all carpentry-made utensils; the fourth series is roughly in the order of the day of the village; the fifth series is roughly in the order of the utensils used in the rice harvest; the sixth series is roughly in the order of the utensils used in the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and finally ends with a wooden bridge and walks across the wooden bridge. The author also went out of his hometown.
In the process of urbanization, the rise and acceleration of industrialization, the villagers are no longer limited to farming, people's lives are more abundant, there are more possibilities. However, there have been generations of folk customs, where our cooking years have risen, precipitated generations of hardships, sufferings, efforts and joys, but it is worth recalling in memory, reminding us that we know how to respect and appreciate the land that raised us.