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"Buying a house is a belief for most Chinese families and a foundation for accumulating life." In the county seat of southern Zhejiang, a couple reached middle age and bought a house in debt, but they suffered natural disasters and serious illnesses, and the family settled in garages, noodle shops and rough houses.
Enter the address of the neighborhood I said, and the taxi driver stared at the map for half a day. The system shows that there is no road leading to this neighborhood. He asked me, and I didn't know. He was surprised: "Isn't this your home, you don't know?" I chuckled, "Moved, just moved." ”
In fact, for the past three years, every year I came home, I didn't know where my home would be.
I called my mother, and her voice was unmistakable. "No, you told him, everyone knows about this neighborhood with elevators!" I really can't find it, you call him, I tell him! ”
The driver drove to the avenue on the edge of the county seat. On the left is the construction site, in the middle is the vegetable field, and on the right is the road leading to the community, but it has not yet been repaired. I quickly handed him my phone again, and according to my mother's full command, he drove into the vegetable field with a hard scalp, and in front of him was a path with mud mixed with large stones. I faintly heard a strange noise in the chassis of the car, and in the afterglow, his face became more and more serious.
Finally seeing the cement floor, arriving home, we breathed a sigh of relief almost at the same time.
After getting out of the car, I carried my suitcase into the elevator, but the elevator was intermittent: at first it didn't close the door, and when it closed, it creaked. When I got home, I heard my mother say that she had been locked up more than once. At first, she panicked and her heart rate soared, but now she can calmly call the elevator company with an emergency phone to open the door.
As I said this, my mother dragged me around the house, showing me the white tiled floor, the carefully selected wrought iron vintage lamps, the sight over the warm brown door frame, and the sunset in the kitchen. Televisions, marble dining tables and wooden chairs, which were purchased when the first house was renovated, had eaten ash in their parents' and friends' warehouses for two years, and now the new and the old meet here.
The mother smiled, "Isn't that happier than staying at that time?" Don't owe any money, this house is your own. ”
I know that the satisfaction of the mother is sincere. This community built next to the high-speed rail track, no wall, no property, no greening and entertainment area, as a relocation house, thanks to the "seven-storey and above buildings must be equipped with elevators" regulations, the elevator was installed. But after all, this was the place where she had spent most of her life to live again.
Her mother bought her first house in the county in 2007, when she was over 40 years old.
To this end, she and her father traveled to mines across the country for more than 20 years. Both parents were born in a village 20 kilometers away from the county seat, and the family had fewer people in the family, and the two left home to earn a living before they were young. There are as many as 100,000 people in our county who are engaged in mine well lanes, relatives and friends help each other, and later my mother also went to the mine to cook in the mine canteen. When my mother was 22 years old, she met her father, a miner, in the Guanzhong area, and the two fell in love, and in the late 80s, they married.
When they got married, the two were unable to get a house from both parents. They have been away for many years, and the old house in the family has long been divided among the children who cultivate the land. Later, my mother mentioned it almost every New Year's Day, "When I came back from the New Year, I didn't know where to carry my duffel bag, and I slept in Grandma's barn at night."
Author Figure | A home that has been abandoned
Throughout the year, my parents followed the mine engineering teams everywhere, and the tin house where the miners lived was their mobile home. During the summer vacation of elementary school, I followed them to live in a tin house, where there was a creaky wooden bed, a set of lacquered wooden tables and chairs, an electric fan, and a satellite TV when the conditions were good. During the day, my father walked into the mine a kilometer deep with dry food, and in the evening, he returned home in the dark, picked up a bucket of water that his mother had prepared in advance, and stood in the bath tub to pour it from top to bottom, and the bottom of the basin was covered with black mud.
After a few years of suffering, they saved some savings, and my father began to contract mining projects with others. He continued to go to the mine with his workers, while his mother was responsible for logistics and the payment of miners' wages. It sounds like making money, but the investment in contracted projects is high, the return is slow, the risk is high, and they always make less and lose more.
Because I didn't have a house, I went to a high-priced boarding school when I went to school, and slept in my aunt or teacher's house on weekends and holidays. When my parents returned home during the Spring Festival, they had to trouble their aunts again, and the single room in the house with cardboard boxes, bedding and other miscellaneous items was vacated to make a one-meter-five-bed position, where our family of three squeezed here for the night.
Buying a house has always been a heart disease for parents. Around 2007, they had more than 400,000 savings in their hands. Unfortunately, my father took out more than 200,000 yuan to invest in his friend's mine, which was counted as "taking shares", and eventually this money was also lost. At that time, the county town was developing and expanding southward, house prices rose year by year, and the average price of second-hand houses in the old residential areas in the central part of the county town had exceeded 5,000 yuan per square. The mother was uneasy, and if she did not buy it again, I was afraid that she would not have the opportunity to buy a house in this life.
But the mother waited for another opportunity. After the demolition of the village in the southernmost part of the county, a relocation housing community was built, and the villagers who originally lived here could get 2 or 3 houses per household, so they took it out to register for sale, a new house of 135 square meters, the asking price was 450,000, which was the cheapest house in the county.
She was determined to borrow money to buy a house here. To this end, she and her father began a long quarrel. The father's idea was that the remaining money in the family needed to be invested in the mine project. The money is taken to buy a house, what kind of contract mine is it? Buying a house still owes hundreds of thousands of debts, and what to pay back?
More than half a year later, my father compromised. The mother paid for the house as she wished, but the money for the renovation had not yet been settled. The new house with three bedrooms and two halls, the walls are plastered with cement, the floor is tiled, and it is connected to water and electricity, so empty, they continue to go out to "dry engineering".
But soon, the new house came in handy, like a simple lair, catching a heavy fall from my mother.
In May 2008, their parents were in the western Sichuan region when they left all their belongings and ran downstairs in an earthquake to live in a makeshift tent. After two or three days, the villagers saw that the situation was safe and returned to the building one after another to facilitate cooking. However, a strong aftershock struck, and the mother hurried downstairs in a whirlwind, and when she fell, her knees slammed heavily on the steps, and her patella was shattered.
Her mother underwent wire internal fixation surgery at the local hospital, and her father took care of her. After being discharged from the hospital, they decided to return to the county seat to recuperate.
They hid all this from me. When I came home from school for the summer, I was greeted by a chaotic picture: the floor was covered with shiny new tiles, the walls were exposed with cement particles, the living room ceiling was hung with a crystal lamp with tassels, the bedroom was hung with simple light bulbs, the closet was not completed, and a few exposed wires protruded out of the wall.
I looked around dazedly, and the unfinished dream was covered with a gray shell, forming the prototype of a home.
The mother was half lying on the master bedroom bed, with a plaster cast on her knees and a pair of crutches resting on the side of the bed. She was pale and smiling at me, "It's okay, it's not serious, just raise it." She raised her finger to show me the side, "You see, the bathroom and bathroom are all decorated, the kitchen is also better, there is no problem in living." ”
She looked at the wall again, her face full of longing: "When the painting is finished, the cabinet is also painted, and it looks white, and it looks good." ”
Author Figure | Stayed in a half renovated home
After spending three or four months in bed, the mother was able to get down to the ground and walk. For rehabilitation, she has to go downstairs for a walk after dinner, the community is surrounded by a construction site, the sidewalk trees are scattered, she greets the flying building dust every night, walking until she has fun, "I have to walk more, otherwise my knees are getting tighter." ”
The following year, after surgery to remove the wire fixed in her knee, she recuperated for several months and recovered her mobility well. She compared her two legs together, and the muscles of her left calf had atrophied a lot, and it was obviously thinner.
It seemed that the mother's body seemed to be fully recovered. Her father's contracting project did not go well, and she did not follow her to the mine again, and she was at ease to recuperate at home. After another two years in peace, the cement walls of the home are painted clean white, and our lives seem to be renewed.
In 2012, I started boarding junior high school. During the holidays, they told me on the phone that I worked in the mines and that I lived alone at home. One afternoon, there was a knock at the door at the house. They returned, and their mother was supported upstairs by her neighbors, and the southern heat had not faded, but she wore a beanie hat with a short dark brown hair underneath. In her memory, she had always had long hair and was thinking of scalding. I blurted out, "Mom, how do you cut your hair short, it's pretty good." ”
The neighbor outside the door laughed, and the mother also laughed and bent over, "Look good, just cut!" When the neighbor left, she took off her hat and "short hair" as well, the newborn hair on her scalp as short and soft as a baby. She told me she had cervical cancer and had completed chemotherapy.
I once saw a test sheet on their bedside table that said uterine fibroids, benign. I just folded it back gently, and the information I looked up said it wasn't a dangerous condition. I didn't expect that the sudden deterioration of my illness would pull our family's life out of a bigger rift.
I also learned later that my relatives had worried about the lack of money and money, and told my father that if there was no cure, it was my father who resolutely supported the treatment and stayed in the hospital for 2 or 3 months. The chemotherapy worked well, but the family borrowed more than 100,000 debts, and they had to mortgage their houses to the bank to cope with the money. To add to their income, they rented the second bedroom closest to the door to nearby day school students.
New diseases and old diseases make the mother's body fragile. In 2013, when she returned to her hometown, she fell down a mountain road, fractured her knee again, and was taken to the hospital. I accompanied her to the hospital waiting for the operation, and during the three hours of waiting, she lay flat on the medical cart, turned her head to face the wall, blushed, and spoke in an impatient and aggrieved tone.
In 14 years, this happened again. She went to visit her relatives, walked to the last staircase, and somehow fell to her knees with her legs soft and straight, and operated on again. This time, doctors removed a piece from her iliac bone to fill the over-depleted patella.
In 7 years, 5 knee surgeries, 1 cancer chemotherapy, the always optimistic mother became sensitive and melancholy. In the past, the corners of her mouth were always up, "Laugh more, the corners of your mouth will be bad luck when you go down." Now, lying on the hospital bed, she looked frustrated, saying that the fortune teller had already told her not to go out to visit the sick, and not to go out to drink wine, "Why didn't I listen?"
She began to wonder again if there was something wrong with the house that had brought her so much misfortune. One day, she suddenly asked me, "Is it okay to sell the house?" Rarely, she shed tears in front of me.
The mother went to the fortune teller again to make a calculation. The fortune teller said bluntly, "As long as you move three more times, you will definitely be able to usher in fortune." She smiled respectfully and took out a roll of big red money from her purse and handed it to her. The fortune teller opened the drawer and stuffed it in, and the crowd at the table was crowded, and the large-denomination paper money had been fluffily and thickly laid.
"What the Buddha said must be accurate." She said that she would not consider selling the house for the time being, but she kept talking about it.
She began to fall into severe insomnia, often waking her eyes for a night, complaining to me that she couldn't sleep and refused to go to the hospital. Father went back and forth between the provinces, always did not have the opportunity to be satisfied, was defrauded by the partner to more than 50,000 yuan, and after calling the police in a different place, the case was not heard.
Although I have asked many times, how much debt is there in the family? They were always tight-lipped about me, saying only that little children don't have to know that much. A few years later, I learned that during the period when there was no income, they mortgaged the house, borrowed money from relatives and friends to pay off the loan, mortgaged again the following year, and took the ID card to borrow money, so that they paid the bank five or six thousand interest every month.
They stayed in that house and lived two years of shortfall.
In the summer of 2016, I went home and my mother gave me an unfamiliar address again. I learned that they had finally sold the house. After the liquidation of the money from the sale of the house, there were more than 300,000 yuan left, and she briefly breathed a sigh of relief, saying that in the past few years, she could not breathe, could not stand up straight, and lived in the house and felt that it was already someone else's.
The cheapest garage new home can find in the county seat is hidden in a construction site. There was a large patch of grass connected to the cement floor in front of the door, and the main door of the roller shutter walked in, and there was a stove and a table and chairs on the other. Further inside, on the left is the narrow bathroom, on the right the creaking wooden staircase leads to the bedroom on the second floor, the wall stickers are bulging and curled up, the room is extremely low, the windows are at the leg position, the narrow side, and looking out is the brown-painted facing facing the facing facing the facing facing the facing facing the brown-yellow facing facing the facing facing the pavement trees.
The grand appliances bought at a high price in the old house were temporarily shelved by their parents in a friend's warehouse. The refrigerator slammed too hard during the move and it didn't take long to scrap. It took them a lot of effort to transport back the old refrigerator that their friends didn't want, but as soon as they opened the door, the refrigerator was covered with a thick dirty frost, and to clean it, the mother flashed her waist.
She excitedly pulled me aside and said that the current place was only temporary. She bought a very low-priced "bidding house" from an acquaintance and built it in two years. Next year she is going to change another rental office, so that she has moved home exactly three times, and there will definitely be a time to make a fortune.
The next year, we did move out of the garage. Coming home from school, I was still facing the new address and came to a two-story storefront on the street side of the county town. They resold the house they had, bought it in a better location— a new neighborhood about a kilometer away— and moved into the new house again as a longer wait.
On the first floor, my mother set up a noodle shop, and the small attic on the second floor was our residence. I went upstairs, and on the wooden platform extending from the attic, there was an old mahjong machine collected for 200 yuan, surrounded by several guests.
Mother calculated carefully, mahjong changed the dealer, it is counted as "a circle", can smoke 10 yuan fee, the daily income is uncertain, sometimes she can receive sixty to one hundred yuan in one night alone. When there were guests on the first floor, she went downstairs to wash her hands, quickly made a bowl of noodles, and then returned to the small attic.
It was already one o'clock in the morning, my mother closed the storefront on the first floor, we cleaned up, and people playing mahjong were on their heads. The mahjong table was just across a sliding door from the bed, and we lay down in the deafening sound of the mahjong table shuffling. I was momentarily stunned, not thinking that we were going to fall asleep in such a sound.
She said, "Just put up with it, or you'll put your headphones on." I lay on the bed with my back to her, and couldn't help but start sobbing quietly in the smell of choking smoke. Afraid that outsiders would hear her, she sat up half-and got angry: "What are you crying?" ”
I just think she's hard. I tried to calm myself down and tried to speak, but she turned and lay down, leaving me with a back of refusal.
The thick fog of cigarettes came in from under the wooden door, one after another the muffled sound of cards being smashed on the table, a few brief conversations or complaints, and then the machine rumbled in its belly, spitting out a whole new deck of cards, and the cycle began, where people spent long nights until dawn. At dawn she got up and opened the door of the shop to begin a new day's work.
That year, my father continued to go to the mines out of town, and she took care of the storefront alone, never resting unless there was something to go out. She proudly told me that she could net more than 5,000 yuan a month, and she could fully cope with the etiquette of the family, the tuition fee for my college, and even the monthly salary sent by my father.
A year later, the mother, who has always been strong, found that she was working harder and harder. Her heart rate was fast and slow, and after a short walk, her chest was tight and breathless, and her body was sweating coldly.
Every three months, I scrambled to grab the expert number of a hospital in Shanghai from the online platform and arrange for tickets and accommodation. She was from home, I was from school, and we met on the same train.
300 yuan registration fee, only met with the doctor for three minutes. The doctor diagnosed that the heart rhythm was irregular and frequent premature beats, but her condition was not yet serious enough to undergo surgery, so she first took the drug to see the effect, if it worsened, the operation fee plus the hospitalization cost needed 180,000 yuan. Then we took a big bag of medicines at the hospital that was enough to take for three months.
After dinner, my mother wanted to go for a walk nearby, and we walked in the park, and she said, "Leave such a big park in such a lot." "The nearby houses are 120,000 per square meter, and it is not an exaggeration to say that we have no land under our feet." The tall camphor lays the shadows, people walk and talk quietly, not far away is a wide road, at the end of the front is the light of the complex mall, this park is a luxury green island, we happened to pass by another kind of life.
Without going far, my mother was breathing unsteadily and had to sit down and rest. The elderly in the square danced square dancing on both sides, and the frolicking children ran past us. "If I live nearby and I'm in better health, I'll come every day to dance." She stood up to join the dancing old people, not shy, and her movements were somewhat clumsy. After a few minutes of dancing and then turning back to rest, I reached out to help her, holding the cold sweat of one of her palms in the hot weather, like a snake's letter crossing me, which was the embodiment of her illness and pain.
After returning to her hometown this time, she closed the storefront and returned the house. The new house was closed, and she and her father began to renovate the new house. To save money, they moved into a house in the same neighborhood that my cousin bought. We were on the seventh floor and her house was on the third floor.
However, my cousin's house is also a rough house, except for cement walls and water and electricity, nothing, they moved into the necessary stove and bed, because of the heat, call me to help buy an air conditioning fan online. Going around, they moved into the "semi-finished" house they had been in.
The renovation stopped, and after some time, my mother moved into the new house as she wished. Her complexion was visibly better. She boasted of her good luck, bought a house and picked the seventh floor, and even the rooftop area on the top floor belonged to us. She raised the idea of building an attic, modeled on the style of other neighbors, and built a new roof and wall on the roof, which attracted the attention of the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau, and after several inspections of the community, the staff delineated the area that could be built.
She talked about the progress of the eighth floor, with a smile on her face, and it was another profit to rent when it was completed. However, unfortunately, the location of the wall was one meter more than the demarcated range, and even the top was forcibly demolished, and the loss of thirty thousand yuan was lost, and the fortune that the fortune teller said did not come. The construction of the top floor fell silent, and she put her enthusiasm into the vegetable growing business downstairs.
Author Figure | High-speed rail track near the new home
After dinner, I accompanied her for a walk in the open space downstairs, where vegetables grown by residents flourished in open parking spaces, not far from the high-speed rail line, and the rumbling sound of trains passing by. My mother greeted the oncoming neighbors one by one, and her laughter was still clear and loud.
Later, I asked her, "Didn't the fortune teller say that you can get rich by changing three places?" You didn't get rich, did he have to lose you money? ”
She laughed, "Isn't it good now, buy this apartment, even if I get rich." ”
- END -
Written by | Yu Chuan
Edit | Cui Yumin