Nostalgia is a bright light that will never be extinguished
---- Liu Weijie
When his father left his hometown in the southern country, he was less than seventeen years old, but at that time, he did not think that the change in the trajectory of fate, falling behind him and gradually drifting away from his hometown, has since become a distant place, a hometown that is difficult to return.
His father's hometown is in Xingning, Guangdong, which is located in the largest basin in eastern Guangdong - Xingning Basin, the upper reaches of the East river and the Han River. In June 1994, Xingning County was established as a city managed by Meizhou City, but according to historical evidence, Xingning was the earliest county in Meizhou, but in history, it was "no 'Meizhou', first there was Xingning". Xingning began in the Xianhe period of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (331 AD) and covered the entire area of present-day Wuhua County and parts of several adjacent counties. Xingning got its name from the ancient Xingning River, which is today's Wuhua River. Among them, the name of Xingning Jingyu County was known as Qichang for 79 years. Prosperity and tranquility, the name of Qile Yongchang's hometown, pinned people's wishes for a better life. In the autumn of October 1999, my sister, wife and children accompanied my father back to Guanghua Village in Shuikou Town. The landform of the hometown is gentle, full of vegetation and beautiful natural scenery. Xingning is a famous hometown of overseas Chinese and football, and the national football team has a number of international footballers from Xingning No. 1 Middle School.
Talking about the past, Xiao Yan's father made a rare joke to his mother: There is no my rice bowl in my hometown!
When my father was young, my grandparents died of illness. At that time, it was not yet liberated, and medical conditions, backward productive forces and the poverty of the people could be imagined. When the older generation withered away with the wind like dandelion seeds one by one, the family was separated, and this big family, which was maintained by the family concept and strong emotions of the elders, was finally inevitably placed in front of the fathers.
The family was eventually divided into three, with the father's uncles and brothers forming their own family, and the eldest brother and sister-in-law as a family. His father was at the end of the six siblings, and when he was young, he formed an independent family with his second brother and second sister-in-law. In the humble home, the second uncle witnessed his little brother's frustration in the face of the very few daily necessities he had received, and saw him pounding an empty bowl on the table with a pair of chopsticks to laugh at himself: I am miserable this time, there is only one bowl left! It is no wonder that the premature departure of Abba and Aunt has already made my father taste sadness and inferiority, and he also has worries about the future.
When he was a student at the town middle school, the young father had a small notepad in his pocket, which could be fixed to a shop in the town to fill his stomach with some food on credit or a tooth sacrifice, and the brothers would check out the bill on a regular basis. The father told his mother that he did not want to go home during the busy holidays at that time, and it was difficult to have a place to live in the small family. He sometimes spends the night with his classmates, and more often than not, he prefers to lie in the school dormitory. The long summer vacation came, the stomach had to eat, the father had no choice but to go to the big brother and the second brother to run the freight ship to mix rice, the little student boy can do is to help the boat boss and the brothers cook some porridge and so on. In his spare time, his father, who was dressed in quail clothes, would sometimes carry a fish basket with his friends and catch small fish barefoot in the rice fields to subsidize his life. His father said that when he was young, one of the things he was most blind to was that he hoped that a daughter-in-law from the same village would call him when she returned to her mother's house, because he could go to the second sister's house in his village and eat charcoal grilled tofu made by his second brother-in-law who made a living by selling tofu. There is a big river on the road that must be traveled in the hometown, that year we went back to our hometown with our father, standing on the shore, my father pointed to the wide river in front of us to show us, the past moment like a wave surging in his heart, he told us, this is the Han River, when I was a child, I was on this river with your uncle and uncle together to run a boat...
In 1951, northeast China, as an important heavy industrial base in New China, was in urgent need of construction talents. My father and some high school classmates went to Fuxin, Liaoning Province, to study and work. The diet in the northeast, frozen in winter and cold, is nothing less than a huge test for them. Some of their fellow villagers fled due to severe discomfort. Father had no way out, only gritted his teeth and insisted. In March 1955, according to the organizational arrangement, he and a group of colleagues in the northeast responded to the call of the state to support the great northwest and came to our city today - Tongchuan, Shaanxi, which will always become his father's second hometown.
Initially, my father and other technical personnel were responsible for the preparation of the Coal Technical School of the Mining Bureau, and it was not until the end of 1957 that he was transferred to the Middle Machinery Factory of the Mining Bureau. In the decades of working in the enterprise, my father worked diligently and devoted himself to his work, making his own contribution to the construction and development of Tongchuan coal. All kinds of technological innovation experts, honorary certificates and prizes of advanced producers are the best affirmation and interpretation of his professionalism. His father went from technician to engineer to workshop leader in charge of technology until he retired at the age of sixty.
(Liaoning Fuxin souvenir, father in the front row)
The turn of fate in life is sometimes really difficult to grasp, there are natural factors, there are also man-made reasons, and more importantly, instantaneous choices and decisions.
Before going to the northeast, my father had a choice. At that time, although there were brothers and sisters-in-law who loved and pitied, it was difficult to maintain daily food and clothing in a barren life. As he grew up, he understood that the future and survival were a mountain in front of him. In the winter of 1950, my father, like many young people in his hometown, signed up to join the army, and he almost became a member of the health corps of the Volunteer Army to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. He later recalled that in the crowd of gongs and drums, the truck carrying the recruits was about to start, and the second sister-in-law rushed to the scene and dragged him off the car. The old sister-in-law is more than the mother, the second sister-in-law who entered the husband's family as a child bride since she was a child (such things are commonplace in the old society, and my three aunts are also in the same situation as the second mother), and the father is like a brother and sister, and the deep feelings can be imagined. Unfortunately, we did not see the second mother, and when we went, she had been ill and died for many years.
His father had a gentle personality and was much loved by his children and grandchildren. He is introverted and unsociable, kind and humble, likes to be tidy, and works diligently and conscientiously. There is a great love in the silence, and the most appropriate description of the father is. When colleagues in my parents' factory praised my mother for my father's excellent qualities and hard work, my mother always smiled and groaned with happiness: Southerners may be such a gentle character!
Like many men in the past who were not good at expressing feelings, although the father loved his family like a fire, he never traced it on the surface, and he would not say words like love or like. For as long as we can remember, he seems to have few intimate words and deeds for his children, and the only thing that sprinkles on us is the warm gaze and the love of day after day.
The Buddha said: Gentle, naturally good. My father had a clear heart and treated people sincerely, and he was deeply respected and loved by several of my uncles, and in their eyes, the eldest brother-in-law was better than his dearest brother. When the mother's sisters and brothers or the mother's girlfriends and friends came to the house, the father smiled and plunged into the kitchen, busy alone, and let the mother have a good chat with them. With the knife in hand, the pots and pans sounded, and soon the hot meal was on the table. Once my grandmother came to our city hospital because of her serious illness and was hospitalized. Parents have to go to work, take care of their three young children, and keep running to the hospital to take care of grandma. When he was discharged from the hospital, he could not make up for the hospitalization expenses, and there was really no money in the family, so his father did not say a word, took off the watch on his wrist and sent it to the "consignment house" to realize... For the brother-in-law who is far away from home, the parents also have worries from time to time, and try their best to squeeze out a little help from the living expenses of the whole family.
Perhaps after experiencing the vicissitudes of cold and warm, under the amiable appearance, the father acts with a strong and open-minded person who is unique to men, and in the face of many life tribulations, he can always infect his mother and us with an optimistic attitude. As his descendant, as a continuation of his bloodline, I am trying to travel through time and space to figure out the inner world of my young father at that time. The loneliness of wandering in a foreign land, the hardships of starting from scratch, the obscure days and nights of the wife,000 young children waiting to be fed... I believe that although life is bitter, my father is content in his heart, grateful, and cherishes the gifts brought by life - in the hot land of the north, with a firm belief, his life can finally blossom and fall, with his own harvest and pursuit of happiness. Therefore, he always had an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the hard work of raising his children and the tiredness of handling tedious housework. Father and mother have a deep affection, he often said to his mother, if a person does not love the family, what is the meaning of living? My mother had proposed raising flowers and plants, and my father shook his head humorously: Why raise them? They can't be called Daddy. When we grew up and had our own small family, we gradually understood that in the difficult era of the weak and poor people, life brought to the fathers and grandfathers can imagine the pressure, fatigue, hardship, coupled with the father's dedication to everything, in many ordinary and ordinary things, will pay affection, there is no more energy to do other.
It would be a mistake to judge on this basis that my father was a man of little interest. In the 1950s, Sino-Soviet relations coincided with the honeymoon period, and due to its influence, the degree of urban openness and the activity of young people in the country may not be imagined by modern people. My father was young and exquisite at the time, as can be seen from some of the past photographs. His mother said that he liked to participate in the dances that were often held in the factory, and he also wanted to teach his mother to learn ballroom dancing at home, but because his mother did not love it, he gave up, and the young father was lively carrying a stool at home and walking in circles. My father learned to do carpentry in his spare time, and personally built a two-door cabinet with a pair of drawers that was more than half a person tall for the family. Seeing the prosperity of the country's fortunes and material wealth over the past forty years of reform and opening up, I remembered my father and my mother sighed that he was not blessed and had not even used his mobile phone. His father loved life, home was the source and motivation of his happiness, he loved food and cooking all his life, and he also loved everything that was new. If he is still alive, he should also like to fiddle with mobile phones.
(Father on the right, traveling with colleagues to Beijing, Summer Palace)
If the premature death of our father has brought great sorrow to our family, it is the biggest regret of our family in this life. But in retrospect, having his children and grandchildren wrapped around him to accompany him back to his hometown gave people a little comfort. For decades, for my father, who traveled far away, the old garden was a deep and deep sorrow in his heart. Wandering in the landscape of the hometown, feeling the warmth of family affection, the satisfaction of the father at that moment fell to our eyes. After my father left, my wife and children, sisters and brothers-in-law and other family members also visited my hometown and tried to find my father's footprints. I remember that year, when my wife and children were in my hometown during the Spring Festival, my cousin told me that the neighbors who heard the news learned that I had returned to my hometown from the far northwest, gave me a thumbs up, and praised me for not forgetting my ancestors and not forgetting the roots that belonged to the Liu family. That moment made me feel relieved. We, the descendants of factory and mine immigrants who have no hometown and no dialect, have found their hometown like our fathers, and have satisfied the geographical and psychological distance and huge deficit between our hometown and ourselves for decades.
It had been exactly twenty years since my father had been gone. "The living are passers-by, and the dead are returnees." Heaven and earth are a journey against the tide, and the same sorrow is eternal dust. "The years have changed, and the pain caused by his departure has slowly subsided with time. But when I think of him, my heart will still be sad, and sometimes I will dream of his old man's home. Leaning on the head of the bed alone in the long night, thinking of my father, nostalgia is like a bright lamp, which has not been extinguished, and always reflects my father's kind smile. Suddenly, a strange thought flashed in my mind, if my father knew in the spirit of heaven, with his low-key and unassuming personality, he would definitely show shame on his face to prevent me from telling the world about his suffering and his virtues, and he would also say: What is there to talk about? Who's not? I actually laughed at the thought of this. I miss my ordinary and charismatic father, and thank him for bringing us to this colorful world.
The 25th Anniversary of the Father's Birthday in the Year of the Ugly Year
About the Author:
Liu Weijie, whose ancestral home is Guangdong, was born in Tongchuan City, Shaanxi Province. Graduated from Baoji Normal University majoring in political science and education. I write my heart, record my feelings, and enrich my life.
----------------- Editor of this issue Song Xiaoqi