Qing Wei | Jiao Nianjun: Father's love is like a mountain

Spring is here, and it's time for trees to sprout and blossom again. At this time in previous years, my father would have been busy in the orchard, but this year he could no longer be found in the orchard. The moment I carried him to the hospital bed and his body slowly fell, he forgot the season. Time will always stop at 6:20 p.m. on October 27, 2009. Now, whenever I go to the orchard, I think of him, I will dimly see his busy figure, and that kind lingering face, and faintly hear his familiar voice ringing in my ears, and make me cry... What happened to his father was somewhat similar to Lei Feng's. When my grandparents died early, my father grew up like a wandering child and suffered a lot. He joined the army in 1957 and was also a car driver in the army. When the whole country carried out the vigorous activity of "learning from Comrade Lei Feng", my father was a pacesetter in the study of the army, doing good deeds everywhere at all times, often secretly sending his meager allowances to the homes of some comrades-in-arms with poor families, and was often commended by the troops. In 1964, his father refused the special arrangements given to him by the army and the local government, and he was demobilized and returned to his hometown. Seven years of military career has created his father's bold and optimistic, upright, and strong and weak character. Soon after returning to his hometown, the Cultural Revolution occurred, and my father's original desire to change the old appearance of his hometown with the villagers became a failure. When I was a child, my father was very strict with me and my younger siblings, rewarding and punishing everything, but he was very concerned about us in life. At that time, my father drove a tractor in the village, and the living allowance for going out of the car every day was only two cents, but he was mostly hungry and reluctant to eat lunch outside to save the money. Once when I was sick, my father came back from the car and brought back an oil-paper bag and said, "Little Army, you see what I bought you back." "I opened it and looked inside, and inside were a couple of fried yellow croakers." Give it to your younger siblings, and you'll eat it." "At that time, in the countryside, adults could not see fish, let alone fried fish. Our three brothers and sisters happily grabbed up. My father took the nest and pickles handed over by my mother, looked at us happily and smiled and ate them. When the little sister was about to throw away the fish head, her father said, "Don't throw it away, let me taste something" ... Now, whenever I smell fried fish, I think of that time eating fish. In 1979, I was in the first year of junior high school in Zibo No. 2 Middle School. One night in the winter, snow flakes fluttered in the sky, and heavy snow fell all night. When I woke up the next morning, my father was already sitting at the head of my bed. "Dad, why are you here?" Father said, "It's too cold, and you don't have a stove in your dormitory, so I'm afraid you'll freeze." There is no cotton at home, and last night I didn't sleep and your mother made you a straw mattress to keep you warm underneath. "I opened the door and saw that the snow on the ground was a foot thick. Did my father just walk seven or eight miles through the thick snow... Now, every time I see snow, I think about it. After the division of the land in 1980, my father began to do the business of black and white iron maintenance without any teacher, pounding with a hammer day and night, and both hands were scarred. When I was admitted to high school and was pushed down by people who went through the back door, my father was very depressed. After some consideration, my father said to me, "You have a disability and can't do heavy work, so I'll lend you money to go out and learn some technology." "So I was sent to Zhangdian to learn the technique of repairing clocks and watches." Since then, our father and son have rushed to the countryside together, and I have repaired clocks and watches, and he has been inseparable for more than twenty years, more like a pair of friends who have forgotten their friendships. My father often warned me: "We craftsmen should not take money too seriously, one is to be technically good, the other is to talk about credibility, people's reputation is more important than anything." "Father's skills are good, generous and righteous, he charges little or no fees for widows and widows, and he has a good reputation among the surrounding people, and there are many jobs, and a hammer is wielded tens of thousands of times a day in his hands." After twenty or thirty years, my father's right arm could not be straightened, the calluses on his hands were as hard as cowhide, and the bloody mouths were like a child's mouth.

In our contracted plot, my father built an orchard filled with peach and plum trees, as well as watermelons, melons, vegetables and strawberries. Whenever he came back from the market, his father would work tirelessly in the orchard. When I have free time, I almost always go to the orchard, help my father when I am busy, and sit with my father on the stone pedestal in front of the garden house when I rest. Ancient and modern Chinese and foreign affairs, red and white affairs in the neighborhood, and business affairs in the rush to gather, everything is discussed. In the meantime, my father would tell me which tree had the peaches on it that were red, and which one of the melons on the stalks was ripe... Go pick it up... Due to overwork, my father's heart disease became more and more serious. The day before the Spring Festival in 2009, my father, who had fainted, was admitted to the hospital for the first time. The Spring Festival was spent in the hospital. There were a few nights when I stood guard at my father's bedside, and he told me his history like a story: a naughty childhood, seven years of military life, and a marriage to my mother... Until now, what I know and what I don't know has been spoken from beginning to end. At that time, his smiling eyes looked out the window, as if immersed in the past time. I asked, "Dad, where are you going to go the most?" He said: "The most important thing I want to go to is Beijing." I stood guard there for seven years, leaving the best of my life there, eager to go to the place where I used to fight and see what it was like now. It's been almost fifty years, and it must have changed a lot. The battle against the Kuomintang planes in Tongzhou seemed to be still yesterday..." But this wish of the father was never realized. After a few days of treatment, the condition stabilized, and my father was afraid of spending more money and was forced to get out of the hospital. The doctor told him to go home and rest, but he didn't listen. He said, "When a person lives, he will work, but if he does not work, he is still called a man?" My father was an idle man who began working the day after he was discharged from the hospital. I advised him, "Dad, don't do it, the three of us brothers and sisters will give you some money on time, and you can just take good care of your illness." He smiled and said, "It's okay, I can do as much as I can to exercise, and also reduce the burden on you." You are all providing for students, and life is very tired. "Since this time, my father has been hospitalized once every two months on average, and after each discharge, he continues to work. October 27 of the 1909 lunar calendar is my father's fifth hospitalization in a year, seven days before his seventy-third birthday. At about six o'clock in the afternoon, my father wanted to defecate, saying that it was unhygienic in the ward and that he had to go to the toilet. After going to the toilet and returning to the ward, I carried my father to the hospital bed, and the doctor next to me saw that his face was sallow and sweaty, and said, "Don't lie down, sit first and don't move..." Before the words could be heard, I saw my father with a smile on his face, there was no light in his eyes, and his body slowly fell down... Father was gone, walking so hastily, without leaving a single word. Walking silently, like a meteor speeding away. For a moment, I felt like a landslide and my heart was broken. Many people who knew him after his father's departure felt sadness and regret for his death. After hearing the news of his father's death, a villager who was working in Guangzhou wrote a poem and sent it to a villager in my village. Several villagers deliberated and wrote the poem in a nave to honor the spirit of heaven dedicated to their father. It reads: "I was shocked to hear that the heroic soul returned for nine days, but everything was calm." Industrious and incorruptible, iron-hearted and resentful, iron-heartedness awaits posterity. "In 1970, when the new grand railway was being built in the winter, my father saw several migrant workers living in the wind-ventilated courtyard shed of the production team and shivering in the frozen ground, so he resolutely led them home and lived in a house with us for more than half a year. Grief-stricken when they learned of their father's death, they visited my mother several times remotely and comforted me... On the Fountain of Origins, when a disabled person heard the news of my father's death, he cried at the place where my father had been out of the stall... What my father did in his life was admirable and nostalgic, fulfilling a phrase he often said before his death: "People have left their names." Geese pass by. One night shortly after my father's death, I dreamed that he was talking to a man: "Xiaojun loves to write, he writes a lot of stories, if only he could publish them..." The sound was so real, it was like being there, and I woke up with my pillow soaked wet. My father worked for us before he died, and he was still worried about me after he died.

About the author: Jiao Nianjun, net name Yan Tu. Farmer, Chinese, fourth-degree disability. He is a member of the Boshan District Writers Association and the Zibo Writers Association. Some of his works have been published on media platforms such as Zibo Folk Tales, Qi Feng, Xiaonu Riverside, Oriental Wenyun, and Boshan Daily. He has participated in several prize essay contests and won a little prize.

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