Today's rain
One waits for the otter to sacrifice the fish; the second waits for the wild geese to come; and the third waits for the grass and trees to sprout
Rain in Kunming
Wen | Wang Zengqi
Ning Kun asked me to draw a picture for him, to have the characteristics of Kunming. I thought about it for a while and drew a picture: in the upper right corner, a thick green cactus hanging upside down with a golden yellow flower at the end; and a few blue-headed mushrooms and porcini mushrooms in the lower left. The question is a few lines:
Kunming people often hang a piece of cactus at the door to ward off evil spirits, and the cactus hanging upside down in the air can still survive and blossom. Here we can see the tenacity of cactus life, and we can also see the humidity of the air in the rainy season in Kunming. In the rainy season, there are blue-headed mushrooms and porcini mushrooms, which are extremely fresh and fatty.
I miss the rain in Kunming.
I didn't know there was a rainy season. The "rainy season" is only after arriving in Kunming that I have a specific feeling.
I don't remember how long the rainy season in Kunming was, from a few months to a few months, it seemed to be quite long. But it doesn't get boring. Because it is down and down, stop and stop, not continuous, down and up. And it doesn't make people feel bored. I think the pressure in Kunming is not low in the rainy season, and people are very comfortable.
The rainy season in Kunming is bright, plump and emotional. The city spring grass is deep, and the Mengxia grass is long. The rainy season in Kunming is thick green. The moisture in the branches and leaves of the grass and trees is saturated, showing excessive, almost exaggerated exuberance.
My painting is realistic. I did see cacti hanging upside down that could still bloom. In the old days, the doors of Kunming people used to ward off evil spirits: a small mirror, surrounded by gossip, and below it was a cactus,—— a hole in the cactus, pierced with twine, and hung on a nail. Kunming cacti are numerous and extremely fat. Some families planted a circle of cacti around the vegetable garden in place of a fence. ------------------------------------------------------ Cacti have thorns, and pigs and sheep are afraid to prick.
Kunming has a lot of fungi. Visit the wet market during the rainy season, and you can see all kinds of mushrooms at any time. The most, and also the cheapest, is the porcini mushroom. When the porcini mushrooms came down, the restaurant sold fried porcini mushrooms, and even the table in the canteen of the Southwest United University could have a bowl. Porcini mushrooms are as colored as beef liver, smooth, tender, fresh, fragrant, and delicious. Stir-fried porcini mushrooms must be more garlic, otherwise it is easy to make people faint. Blueheads are slightly more expensive than Porcini mushrooms. This fungus is still light green when fried, and the style is higher than that of porcini mushrooms. The king of the fungi is chicken, which is fresh and strong, incomparable. Chickens are precious mountain treasures, but they are not really amazingly expensive. A plate of braised chicken costs the same as a bowl of yellow braised chicken, because it's not rare in Yunnan. There is a joke: someone took a train from Kunming to Chenggong, saw a chicken on the ground on the car, he jumped down and picked up the chicken, hurried two steps, and could climb on the train. The joke is intended to illustrate the slowness of the train from Kunming to Chenggong, but it also shows that chickens are everywhere. There is a kind of fungus, which is not eaten in the middle, called dried bacillus. At first glance, it really makes people doubt: this kind of thing can also be eaten?! The color was dark brown with green, a bit like a pile of half-dried cow dung or a trampled honeycomb. There are also many grass stems and pine hairs in it, and it is a mess! But with some effort, the grass stem is loose and hairy, torn into the thick silk of the crab leg meat, and fried with green peppers, and the entrance will make you stunned: This thing is so delicious?! There is also a kind of fungus, which is not eaten in the middle, called chanterelles. They were all average in size, the size of a silver dollar, dripping round, light yellow in color, just like chicken fat. This fungus is only used for coloring when cooking, and it has no taste.
The fruit of the rainy season is the bayberry. The sellers of baywood are all Miao girls, wearing a small flower hat, wearing a wrench-pointed embroidered shoes full of flowers, sitting in the corner of the steps of the people, from time to time shouting: "Sell bayberry -", the voice is delicate. Their voices made the air in Kunming's rainy season softer. The bayberry in Kunming is very large, as big as a ping-pong ball, and the color is black, red, black and red, called "fire charcoal plum". The name is so good, it's like a ball of blazing red charcoal! Not sour at all! I have eaten the bayberry of Dongting Mountain in Suzhou and the bayberry of Jinggang Mountain, and it seems that it is not as good as the charcoal plum of Kunming.
The flowers of the rainy season are Burmese osmanthus flowers. The Burmese osmanthus flower is the white orchid, and the Beijing name is "Put Erlan" (this name is really not good). Yunnan calls this flower Burmese osmanthus flower, perhaps originally this flower was imported from Myanmar, and the fragrance of the flower is a bit like osmanthus flowers, in fact, this has nothing to do with osmanthus flowers. - But then again, elsewhere it is called white orchid, and it is not close to the orchid, but it is only because it is very fragrant, fragrant like an orchid. The Brando I saw in my hometown was one-man tall, and the Burmese Gui in Kunming was a big tree! I lived at No. 2 Ruoyuan Lane, and there was a large Burmese gui in the courtyard, dense leaves, which reflected the green of the surrounding rooms. When Burmese Gui was in full bloom, the landlord (a widow in her fifties) and one of her adopted daughters took a ladder to pick it, and every day they had to pick it better and take it to the flower market to sell. She was probably afraid that the tenants would pick her flowers indiscriminately, and often sent some to each family. Sometimes a seven-inch plate was sent with Burmese osmanthus flowers! The Burmese osmanthus flowers with raindrops made my heart soft, not nostalgic, not homesick.
Rain, sometimes, causes a little nostalgia. Li Shangyin's "Night Rain Sending North" was written for many long-time travelers. One day on a rainy morning, I went with Dexi from the new campus of the United Nations University to the Lotus Pond. After looking at the pond full of clear water, looking at the stone statue of Chen Yuanyuan in the bhikshuni costume (legend has it that Chen Yuanyuan became a monk after he went to Yunnan with Wu Sangui and died in the lotus pond in his twilight years), the rain began to fall again. There was a small street by the lotus pond, there was a small hotel, we walked in, asked for a plate of pork head meat, half a pound of wine (in a green glazed earthen porcelain cup), and sat down. It was raining heavily. There were several chickens in the hotel, all with their heads under their wings, one foot on the ground, and standing motionless under the eaves. There is a big wooden fragrant flower in the courtyard of the hotel. There are many flowers in Kunming. Some of the small rivers are lined with woody incense. But such a large wood fragrance is rare. A wood incense tree, climbing on the shelf, covered the yard tightly. The fine green leaves, countless half-opened white flowers and full bones were soaked by the rain. We couldn't walk, so we sat until the afternoon. Forty years later, I still can't forget the love of that day, and wrote a poem:
There are few pedestrians outside the lotus pond,
A little deeper in the field shop moss mark.
A glass of turbid wine is over noon,
The woody flowers are wet and rainy.
May 19, 1984
Excerpted from the Complete Works of Wang Zengqi, People's Literature Publishing House
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WeChat Editor of this issue: Yu Wenwei