Zhao Xinyu
On the last day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, the autumn rain outside the window was lingering for two days, and the cool autumn mood crawled into the lung cavity along the breath, but it caused emotions in the heart. When I pressed "Under the Trees of the Hometown" (by Liu Guxia, Qingdao Publishing House), which was blown around by the autumn wind, I couldn't help but feel a thousand emotions.
"Under the Trees of Hometown" is a book of memories and prospects about the high density of the hometown. Isn't the traditional character "鄉" on the cover the emotional carrier of the sons who have left their hometown and looked back forever in their hearts? The hometown is the eternal concern of every wanderer throughout the ages, and it is the warm place for countless literati and inkers to sing and sing songs - there are fathers and fellow villagers, and there are familiar grasses and trees... The author uses the most down-to-earth language and writing to record the people and events of Gaomi Fengdu in the form of prose, and records a family history and rural history with flesh and blood, laughter and sorrow, despair and hope.
I especially love the first series "Courtyard Deep" and the second series "Folks in the Village".
When I was in college, I took a three-and-a-half-hour train ride to Yantai (in 2013, yantai had not yet opened an EMU) train to Yantai. It was the first time I left Gaomi and for the first time I deeply understood what "hometown" was. Before that, I had always grown up in the arms of Fengdu Gaomi, and I didn't know what it was to miss because I had never been far away. When I got home, the scenery outside the train window flashed by, and My grandmother called to ask me where I was, and I said that I had entered the high-density land. At that time, I didn't know where I was, but the pull of my hometown made me answer my grandmother so earnestly. After returning home many times since then, I finally found that the earnest answer I had mistakenly hit by mistake may have been attracted by a deep-rooted fate in my veins- as long as the scenery outside the window became a horse and a river, it was the hometown where I was raised.
When I graduated, I struggled to return to Gaomi or go to a bigger city, and my tutor said that only by listening to my inner voice would I not regret it. In August 2017, I took a train home and took a bus back to the village where I was born and raised. On a cool night, dragging my suitcase, I walked on the country road, looking up to see the stars in the sky, and between my nose was the familiar sweetness of corn stalks and the fragrance of grass. The cooking smoke is thick and the aroma is steaming - it is the corn cake aroma of the grandmother in the front house, the sauce of the big lady pork belly stir-fried next door, and the sweet potato aroma cooked by the newly married daughter-in-law behind the house... I suddenly opened up and stopped struggling. As the author heard from his father: "When you go out and think about it, your hometown will give you the answer." ”
The hometown of Gaomi is not as prosperous as the north of Shanghai and Guangzhou, but the few crooked neck old locust trees in the west of the village and the hundreds of years old ginkgo tree in the neighboring village carry the infinite happiness of our youth. The grass and trees of the hometown grow freely, children either climb or swing, or ride as a horse or fold elm money locust flowers, even the beautiful flowers on the street are also picked twice by ignorance. Because of this, the rough skin of the twisted grass and trees, the carved traces are always warm.
It also seems that every village has such an ugly-looking old man who can be warm and kind in his heart ("The Old Man and the Bell"), an honest man with a bad fate like a leap of earth ("The Great Divide"), a teenager who has disappeared since the exam ("The Boy Who Fell off the List") ... The sincerity of "Under the Trees of the Hometown" immerses me in it: the struggle and moaning before the departure of friends, the desperate grief when relatives die, the warm tenderness of the villagers helping each other, the sincere teaching of the grandparents and fathers similar to "learning is not successful, the farmer cannot". The author uses simple language to tell the development and progress of the people in his hometown from generation to generation, the historical evolution of the village, the vicissitudes of the terrain and landform, and the humanistic history and the nostalgia of the countryside are presented in the form of words. When the preface is opened, the men come out of the book and greet the reader with familiarity.
There are a thousand Hamlets for a thousand readers, and I personally think that it is a good book to get some insight and some empathy for the reader. When I was in college, I took an aesthetics class, and I had an in-depth discussion with the teacher about the Yangchun White Snow and the People of Xia Riba, is the regular, spectacular, and gorgeous thing recognized beauty? Is the music in the concert hall more elegant than in the country minor key? Harmony and difference, the world is so wonderful because of difference. Although the flowers and grasses planted in front of the door of the villagers are not as elegant and luxurious as the peonies, and the national color is fragrant, the grass and trees are the colors of the hometown and the roots of the hometown. What can be seen is the grass and trees, and what cannot be touched is nostalgia.