【A leaf in the world】Smashing the field| essay Zhu Tanqing

Smashing the field is also called kicking the field, which mostly happened in the martial arts world in the old times. It is nothing more than mutual disobedience or conflict of interests, and the party that thinks it is strong uses various means to force the other side to be unsustainable, bow down and give up territory. The kind of non-fight and killing scenes are often bloody.

The story I'm telling is neither from the old times nor in the martial arts world, nor is it a conflict of interest. There is no bloody scene.

It was the mid-1970s, and I had gone from being recruited to work at a power plant. As we all know, both from an environmental and a strategic point of view, power plants are built around the city, and every time I come home from work, I have to take a train to get back to the city.

It will take three or four miles to get home after getting off the train, and Liji Bridge is the only way for me to go home. Liji Bridge is an ancient bridge on Jianguo Road across the Yellow River, because there are five bridges and caves that the elderly call it "Wukong Bridge" and few human crepes call it "Liji Bridge". There was a place on the way that I enjoyed my stay. This place is located in the northwest corner of the Wukong Bridge.

The place is an open field along the river embankment, the size of five or six football fields. Because the "Cultural Revolution" was not completely over at that time, many enterprises were in a state of semi-suspension of production, and this became a good place for everyone to relax and entertain.

This place is very similar to the overpass in Beijing, there are people who talk about books, there are circles selling art, and the folk grass platform team passing by Xuzhou in other places uses blue cloth to circle, and the gong and drummer can perform acrobatics and play magic tricks inside. The most entertaining way is to play poker and chess.

And none of that appealed to me.

I don't look at the spitting storyteller or the seller who slaps his chest and stomps his feet, walking through the bustling crowd straight to where I like. It was a corner near Jianguo Road, and there was an old man selling words.

This old man was in his seventies, with a short beard, an old felt hat, and a black cloth dress, although his clothes were not very neat, and his demeanor was more or less revealing of a bookish atmosphere, and everyone estimated that he was a private school gentleman. Because Xuzhou is a place where five provinces pass through, plus the old man is relatively reticent, it is impossible to tell from the accent whether he is from western Henan, northern Anhui, or Lunan. Taking the calligraphy work and the seal as clues, I vaguely remember his surname "Xu".

Behind him hung calligraphy works for sale on the decadent fence wall, which were nothing more than "self-reliance", "hard struggle", "anger control" and the like, mostly Mao Zedong's poems, and he did not dare to write even the content of getting rich in those years.

Underneath the work is a bench with all kinds of paper.

In front of it is a simple writing desk made up of two folding square tables. On the writing desk is an old blanket stained with ink, on the left is a small black bowl filled with ink and several brushes of different specifications, and on the right is several reference books of three hundred Tang poems, Chairman Mao's poems, and aphorisms for customers to choose the content. There was also a book-sized thin tin biscuit box that was used to collect money.

When there was no business, the old man practiced writing in the old newspaper, or picked up his dry cigarette bag, subconsciously dug up and dug in the leather cigarette bag, listened to the audience comment on his words, and had a very humble attitude, never arguing with people. A few of our regular visitors became his friends. When the old man was writing, some of us rolled paper for him, and some of us took waste rice paper in our hands to suck out excess ink for him, and the atmosphere was very harmonious.

I like to see him get business the most. Once he received the business, he immediately came to the spirit, you look at him, with his back to the visitor, crouching three or four meters away from the stall, holding the content requested by the customer in his left hand, holding a small wooden stick in his right hand and constantly comparing on the ground, everyone knows that he is laying out the work, leaving blank, and no one will disturb him. As long as he considers maturity, he will stand up, walk to the stall with confidence, choose a brush, dip the ink, look at the rice paper in front of him, brew emotions, and then, frown, close his lips, dance the brush in his hand as if no one is there, and then, drop the money, stamp, the whole work is almost in one go.

Next, digging around in leather cigarette bags with dry cigarette bags to observe customer satisfaction.

When it was time to collect the money, the old man immediately changed to another expression, he half-hunkered down, and a smile squeezed out of his face: "Buy and sell children who want food, look good, just reward a few more!" "In this way, customers often give one or two more pieces."

I don't know when there were two more people in the crowd, to be exact, two sixteen or seventeen-year-old boys, two people one tall and one short, the skin is very fair, the hair is neatly combed, the upper body is a black tweed short coat, the neckline is lined with a full-hair plaid scarf, wearing black leather gloves, this dress was very different at the time, it is estimated that it is from the nearby compound of the prefectural commissioner's office of the "gongzi brother".

At first, they also watched the old man write with everyone.

On that day, the tall boy coldly said to the old man, "Grandpa, let's play a few for you!" Without waiting for the old man to say anything, they spread out the paper and wrote it themselves.

"As soon as the connoisseurs shoot, they know whether there is or not", these two boys are indeed extraordinary, and after a while, the insiders can see that they are well-trained "boy skills" and "practicing family members", and they don't know how many beatings they have been beaten, how much sweat they have shed, and how much suffering they have suffered.

The short man wrote a book of Li, a standard Han Li, and did not know who his pro post was, the font was steep and powerful, the structure was rigorous, and the antique was antique. The tall man wrote about the grass and "hair body", and his pen was old and spicy, and the layout was dense and appropriate. In terms of the flexibility of the work, it is definitely above the old man.

The cheers attracted more people to watch, and the tall man also imitated the old man's style on his own initiative and stamped the old man's seal. Perhaps it was the herd mentality that sold more than a dozen works in a short while, and the thin tin biscuit box that had always been a dismal operation was also filled with ten yuan bills.

In this atmosphere of "heroes from ancient times to teenagers", I found that something was wrong, through the human seam I saw the old man crouching under the low wall, bag after bag smoking dry cigarettes, his face getting darker and darker. I motioned to a few old friends, and one of them shouted at the crowd, "It's not early in the morning, let's disperse, come back tomorrow!" The crowd dispersed, the two bear children also left without hesitation, a few of us invariably helped the old man clean up the stall, looking at the old man's depressed expression, intuition told me that some things were irreparable.

Sure enough, the old man never reappeared under the decadent fence.

I dare to assert that these two bear children have absolutely no malice, but it is their ignorance of the world that hurt the old man's self-esteem, smashed the old man's field, and knocked on the old man's rice bowl.

After so many years, whenever I think of the old man's mournful and resentful expression, I still hate the two bear children.