【Original】Neem Tree (Prose)
Text/Wang Yishang (Shandong)
My family lives on the east side of the village, and there is a neem tree in front of the door.
When the "communist wind" was blowing, the old branch secretary planted this tree at the intersection at the head of the village, more than thirty years ago. For more than thirty years of ups and downs, the ground with a radius of more than ten meters is covered by its branches, and the body of more than three meters high can make people wrap their arms together, and the knife and pen of the years have carved large and small cracks on its body.
It condensed one word in its lifetime is "suffering." When it comes to bitterness, people naturally think of Huang Lian and the bitter bitter vegetables that were eaten in the past... Its roots can race past the yellow lian, and every spring, although its flowers can emit an aggressive fragrance, the fruit is still bitter. Because it bears bitter fruit, and in the heart of the street, some people say that it is an ominous thing, and some people say that it has the meaning of "love son"... I ignored this, but I didn't have much of a good feeling about its existence for what had happened in the past.
When I first remembered when I was four years old, poverty and hunger took the young lives of my grandfather and father, and the hardships of life made me brand the first word of the five tastes of life in my young mind: "bitterness."
Later, I joined the army, and seven years later I retired and returned to the neem tree.
After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, people's lives have improved, and I often think about "good dreams come true", but in recent years I have been an "atheist", and despite doing everything in my power, I have never been able to achieve "positive results".
Once, a group of people holding shovels, saws and other tools were clamoring to destroy this tree, and the old branch secretary came forward and hugged the tree tightly and shouted: "It is a book in our village, who wants to destroy it, unless I die!" "Despite all the objections, the old branch has been dead for more than ten years, and no one has proposed to move this neem tree anymore.
Later, in my daily life, I gradually discovered that people use neem wood every time they make furniture. Because of its good quality and not easy to deform, the furniture made is both firm and beautiful, and even building a house can come in handy. I couldn't help but have a reverence for it in my heart: as long as I approached this neem tree, I had to stand still, look at it a few times, and seem to think that its thick green leaves were as beautiful as paper-cutting, so elegant, and although the fragrance of the flowers was not as strong as that of peach and plum, it could still bring people the message of spring. In particular, the fruit that is purring and purring, from emerald to golden, is like a "golden bean" hanging from a branch, like a clump, a cluster of pearls hanging in the air, which is cute...
Oh, the original suffering, but it is all for the sake of nurturing the quality of lifelong indomitability! It is precisely because of suffering that it does not succumb to the wind, frost, rain and snow of nature, and constantly advances upwards until it matures into a material. Although it is not so tall, it still has its own value of survival, and I regret that I should not have had that kind of disgust for it in the first place, so that there was so much incomprehension...
It was published in more than 10 newspapers, periodicals and radio stations such as Heze Daily on January 13, 1996, Caozhou Evening News on October 18, 1996, and Militia Life Daily on March 5, 1997, and was collected by the Exhibition Hall of Representative Works of Contemporary Chinese Writers on January 31, 2000, "Writers and Readers" in July 2004, and published in the prose volume of "Selected Literary Works of Great Love in the New Century" in April 2021.
【About the author】:Wang Yishang (pen name Cordyceps sinensis), born in 1957, is a government employee and a member of the Communist Party of China. He was once employed as the deputy editor-in-chief of the editorial department of the "Reporter's Cradle" newspaper of Shandong Heze Journalism Institute. Since 1979, he has published works in the army, and has published more than 3,000 works. His works have been published in Heze Daily, Dazhong Daily, Peony Literature, Writers and Readers, Modern Writers Literature, Times Literature, Essence of Writing, World Poetry and Literature, Great Northwest Poets, Northern Lights, Literature, Selected Contemporary Chinese Masters, Selected Contemporary Literature, Ginseng Flowers, and Oriental Collections. Gold List Famous Articles- Selected Works of Cultural and Creative Achievements in the Past Forty Years", "Literature of Great Love in the New Century. There are nearly 100 literary websites such as newspapers and magazines such as "Selected Works of Chinese Rural Poetry" and "Selected Chinese Rural Poems", and have won more than 80 commendations and awards at the provincial and municipal levels. His works have been selected for many times in the "Qilu Literary Works Annual Exhibition", the essay "Spring to crescent bay", and in September 2021, he was selected as a fourth-grade Chinese reading textbook. He is a member of the Shandong Provincial Writers Association, the Shandong Prose Literature Association, the Heze Writers Association, the China Writers Network, the Blue V Poets of the China Poetry Network, the contracted writers of the Jiangshan Literature Network, and the director of the Dingtao District Writers Association.
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One point cordyceps