Text/Zhang Changchun
There are many new styles and styles of straw hats now, but I still have a special love for the straw hats made by my father, which has a historical imprint and records the heartache and ups and downs of my father's generation.
There is a small river in the south of the village, like a Tingting maiden in a white dress, floating from southwest to northeast, twisting her waist in the south of the village, forming a watery water. The villagers call it the South River. The water of the South River is crystal clear, the fish grass is lush, and the reeds are rippling, which is a paradise for water birds.
As long as I can remember, the villagers have been weaving straw hats. Every autumn, they scramble to harvest the reeds, hoard and dry them, and there are bundles of reeds in the yard. We call it reeds, which is the main material for weaving straw hats. When the harvest is complete or the farmers are busy, the villagers begin to weave straw hats. The finished straw hat is sold on the set in exchange for change or necessities. Now it seems that straw hat weaving is a technology, a hobby, or a side business, but for the generation of fathers in the village, it is the source of the fundamental guarantee for the survival of life.
My father was born in the 1930s, nearly a century from now, when China was in dire straits, and like most other Chinese, my father lived at the bottom of society, living without clothes and food. Grandpa was an honest and honest farmer who lived a life of cutting food in the soil. The few acres of thin land that they had originally opened up or exchanged for the grain they had accumulated were also robbed by the bully landlords, and the life of the five people only relied on more than one acre of thin land to maintain, and the days were difficult. In addition to helping his grandfather take care of the more than one acre of land, his father, who was fourteen or fifteen years old, also had to go out to escape the famine and ask for food. At that time, my father and fellow villagers all lived the same life, often going out hungry, returning hungry, and only drinking cold water and eating pickles to fill their hunger.
If you are poor, you will think about change, change will be general, and general will be long. Forced to make a living, my father always thought of ways to change the status quo. The result is either because of thin physique or lack of capital, all of which end in failure. Although "thinking about change", there is no "pass", let alone "long"! Just when my father was forced to make a living and had no way out, an opportunity came. Some people miss it for a lifetime. This person, the father did not miss, and remembered for a lifetime.
In the autumn, on both sides of the small road leading from the South River to Zhuangshang, is the land of a large family in Zhuangshang, and the soybean field after the autumn harvest is a piece of essence. A thin teenager, struggling to carry a bundle of freshly harvested reeds, staggered and moved due to hunger, but his eyes looked around seriously in the ground, hoping that a few beans or other edible things would appear in front of him. But until the end of the land, no miracle happened.
The young man walked to the ground, saw that he was about to reach the edge of the village, and put down the reeds he was carrying to rest his feet. Three people came from behind, a middle-aged woman, with two teenagers.
"Brother, do you carry a reed back and weave a straw hat?" The middle-aged woman looked at a bundle of reeds beside the teenager and asked with interest.
"Go home and cook the pot, there is nothing to eat, and what straw hats are made!" With his own experience, the teenager saw these three people dressed in rags and carrying a broken bag, and he knew that they were fleeing the wilderness and asking for food.
"I just saw such a big piece of reed by the river, and I was about to weave a lot of straw hats. Why don't you weave straw hats? "Middle-aged women avoid eating and only talk about knitting straw hats.
"It's useless for you to please me, I don't have any food at home, I haven't eaten in a day." The teenager muttered. I wanted to get up and carry the reeds, but hunger accompanied by fatigue, and I didn't get up at once. The middle-aged woman helped him put the bundle of reeds on his shoulders and held them up again.
The teenager came home to see his father. The boy's father was a kind man, hurriedly rummaged through the boxes and cabinets, took out a cloth bag in the corner of the cabinet, pinched out a few grains of millet, and put them in the pot, even if it was too late! The middle-aged woman thanked her two sons for their kindness and prostrated their heads as well.
The middle-aged woman pointed to a bundle of reeds lying on the ground and said to the young father, "Big brother, how can this reed be burned?" Such a good thing can be exchanged for money. ”
"Can this still be exchanged for money?" The South River is full of pots, and the pots are cooked. The boy's father was dismissive.
"Well, big brother, you find a place for our mother-in-law to live, and I taught this child to weave straw hats, weave straw hats to change money, and then change grain." The middle-aged woman said straight to the point, "You see you have so many reeds in the South River, you have to weave a lot of straw hats." ”
The boy's father was half-convinced. The good people did it to the end, so they cleaned up the idle West House and simply built a bed for the mother and son three.
The middle-aged woman did what she said she wanted, and the next day began to prepare to teach teenagers to weave straw hats.
She peeled the reed herself and broke it with a kitchen knife, dividing the thick into three halves and the thin ones in half. Place the broken reeds in the yard and soak them in water. When the reed petals have sucked enough water and have toughness, find a stone roll, push back and forth, until the reed petals are flattened, scrape the reeds with a knife, and the remaining part is elastic, like a leather whip, called a fan.
Because it was a raw person, and it was a woman who displayed her talents on the village, it was very strange, and soon it was spread all over the small village, and they all came to watch with curiosity. Only to see this woman find a mound, Ma Li took a few fans, roughly compared, visually measured about a meter, and cut it in unison. Skillfully combine the three puzzles together. And then the fourth fan, the fifth... It didn't take long for the top of a straw hat woven from reeds to take shape.
Guan Hat does not speak true gentleman. The crowd held their breath and watched carefully, stunned that they did not understand.
The middle-aged woman sat up and said, "This is a flower, and I will weave it like this until I reach the head of this fan."
Curious, the teenager stepped forward, squatted down like a middle-aged woman, picked up the fan and began to make it up. Because of the hands, under the watch of the crowd, they became more and more nervous, no matter how hard they tried, they still did not make up a look. The middle-aged woman carefully instructed by hand, and when the teenager made up the first flower, the middle-aged woman laughed, the teenager laughed, and the teenager's father also laughed.
With the help of middle-aged women, an afternoon of kung fu finally completed a straw hat with a raw edge, known as a hat stubble. Excited, the teenager picked up the stubble of his hat and put it on his head, forgot his hunger, forgot his fatigue, and walked around the yard a few times, causing everyone to laugh together.
Middle-aged women split a thicker reed in half, called a clamp rod. The excess fans were cut together, clamped with a clamping rod, and finished in a straw hat tied with a thick line, a complete six-sided hexagonal, uniform pattern, sunshade and windproof.
This teenager is my father, and the father of the teenager is my grandfather. Later, I gradually learned that this middle-aged woman from Yutai County, Jining, was called the third child, because the two teenagers were her two sons, whose names were the second child and the third child.
The third child relies on the craft of weaving straw hats to maintain the family's livelihood. But the husband was poor and bad, smoking a lot of cigarettes, until he ran out of money to buy reeds, and he cried out for his life. In order to survive, the third child took the second and third children out of the wilderness to ask for food. But her craftsmanship always has a place to play, this is not just passing by the South River, seeing the dense reeds in the river, remembering her craftsmanship, just happened to meet my father, is in urgent need of food and clothing, suffering from no way out. In all fairness. My mother often said: People should not die and be saved!
Father learned to weave a straw hat, and with his thin body and flexible shoulders, he took on the heavy responsibility of supporting the family. Father got up early every day and worked in the dark, and it was not too much to describe it as "later than the dog sleeps, earlier than the chicken". Get up before dawn, go to the South River to cut reeds, break them, soak in water, put on the straw hat that was woven last night, walk to the market of dozens of miles to sell, exchange the money is not to fill their stomachs, but to change into millet for noodles, and then walk the same distance back home with these things, because there are sisters and brothers in the family who also need to eat. It is said that in order to save rations, my father fainted several times on the way back and forth, and when he woke up, he continued to rush.
In short, with this straw hat weaving craft, Lai will not be so hungry, and he can eat a "porridge" containing several grains of rice every day.
The third child also has a place to stay, and does not have to sleep on the street every day, and there is no fixed place to live.
Later, the villagers saw that their father had learned to weave straw hats and could exchange straw hats for food rations, and they also joined the team. According to my father, at that time, the Nanhe reeds were just a piece, and they could only grow up until next year, so they didn't want more people to follow suit. Only five people who play well with their father have this treatment. Perhaps it was the persecution of life that my father had this selfish psychology!
Farmers are busy doing farm work, not busy weaving straw hats, with the help of grandpa, although the standard of living has improved, but it is not enough to solve the problem of food and clothing. In order to learn from each other, the father and several of them weave straw hats together, and whenever they come to dinner, the others go home to eat, and the father also goes into the house and lies in bed, until he is too hungry to deal with it, or drink water to fill his hunger.
His father relied on this inadvertently learned craft to help Grandpa maintain the life of the family. Although he was toiling, he was content and did not lose his family's life because of hunger. It wasn't until my father was eighteen that something happened to the family.
With the increase of straw hats on the village, although the Nanhe reeds are taking root and sprouting every year, the growth rate cannot catch up with the demand, in order to continue this life, they can only buy it by a river ten kilometers away. This requires investment. But the roof leaked during the overnight rain. Just as my father was saving money to buy reeds, Grandma was sick and very sick. My father had to give up buying reeds and take out the money to see my grandmother. Grandma's illness was taken care of, but my father's money for buying reeds was gone. At that time, they were very poor, and they had to buy rations to earn a penny, so they didn't have extra spare money to borrow.
The father, who has grown up, tasted the hardships of life and the hardships of his parents, and had to give up the livelihood of weaving straw hats to make a living, and went to a rich and large relative's family to do long-term work. At that time, it was called following people. In ancient times, it was called the lower people, that is, people living at the bottom went to the big households to do miscellaneous work, and they called them around, and they could not escape the fate of being scolded. This is fate, the same people live at different levels, they have different living conditions.
His father was industrious and honest, and was deeply loved by his relatives. In addition to the salary for a month, he will add some more miscellaneous noodles or millet, and his father will send these wages and miscellaneous noodles and millet to the family when he saves money and use the money to make up for it. Because there are still parents and siblings waiting to make ends meet.
In his spare time, my father will always not be idle. He was afraid of forgetting the craft of weaving straw hats he had learned, so he would find some sorghum sorghum or wheat straw and weave straw hats according to the craft he had learned. The owner found that he liked to tinker with these, so he found someone to leave the sorghum sorghum in the field and put them away, so that his father could weave straw hats in his free time for others to work in the fields. In addition, to give processing money, the father knows that this is the owner in disguise to increase his salary, grateful! I've been living here for four years. Not only do you feed yourself, but you can also give your family some subsidies.
When my father was twenty-two years old, he proposed to the owner that he wanted to go home and continue to weave straw hats. The owner not only did not embarrass his father, but also gave a piece of land to his father as compensation for his youth in these years. Later, my father sold the land, bought reeds, and resumed his old profession of weaving straw hats. Father weaves a straw hat meticulously and carefully, is strong and durable, carries it to the set, and can always sell for a good price. Because the cost of weaving straw hats is not large, but the profit is also small, it belongs to a small business, relying on technology to eat, can not make a fortune, and will not starve to death.
It is commendable that the national famine is what my father called the lowly year, and in those years, the ground basically did not harvest grains, bark and roots, and all that could be eaten and stomachd was snatched up. My father relied on straw hats in exchange for some rations, which ensured the continuation of the family's life. Whenever I talked about this, my father always said: "I don't think about the current life, it is better than living a lowly life!" Alas, it is still the good leadership of the Communist Party! ”
Later, production teams and cooperatives were introduced. His father was recommended by the captain as a straw hat technician, who was specifically responsible for the special study arranged in the formation team, and his father was always serious and responsible, teaching by hand. Father knew that this craft was also a lifesaver. He also didn't want to watch the familiar people around him leave one by one. As a result, the whole village and even the whole brigade set off a climax of weaving straw hats. For now, it is also an individual enterprise or a collective enterprise. In short, straw hats have become a familiar topic. By the river, by the ditch, wherever you can plant reeds, you must plant reeds, and if you can't plant reeds, you must also find a way to plant reeds. There is a trend of "Luoyang paper is expensive".
As straw hats became the source of income for their neighbors, their lives improved, causing jealousy among other villages or individuals. Some people report and complain. In order to avoid such embarrassment, they all retreated and left the relationship with the straw hat. For the safety of the family, my father also had to endure the pain of cutting love, and when the last straw hat was knitted, he also washed his hands in the golden basin. Only occasionally the hand itched, secretly broke a few reeds, soaked well, pressed flexible, removed the reeds, and woven straw hats according to the program of memory.
Later, the spring of reform and opening up came, and the economy was invigorated. Father and the villagers had the intention of returning to their old business, cleaning up stalls and weaving straw hats, although as in the past, they slept in the middle of the night, but they could not keep up with the speed of mechanization. And with the needs of people's life and work, the pattern of straw hats has increased, which is very inconsistent with the father's single hand-knitting and cannot catch up with the trend of the times.
As our siblings grew older, my father intended for us to learn how to weave straw hats with him. My mother said that the skills are not pressed, and the father said that although weaving straw hats is simple, they can also save their lives at key moments, and we are also interested in learning for a few days, but we are curious and fresh, and they are halfway abandoned. When my father saw these things, he sighed with disappointment, and while he was disappointed, he warned us that he also warned himself: "Everyone has his own way of life, and his children and grandchildren have their own children and grandchildren, and it is not a bad thing to be able to do the same." ”
In this way, for a few years, some young people went out to work, some made a big fuss on the land, and lost interest in weaving straw hats. The stone rolls specially used in the village to roll fans are also missing, and the knife that broke the reeds is nowhere to be found. Only the fathers and a few of them occasionally got together to talk about the past related to straw hats, talk about their mentor and the third child's death in Huangquan because they had no money to heal, and talk about the second and third children who were poor because they could not inherit their mother's craft, and once again ran away from home! They all feel nostalgia, heartache, regret, and sorrow!
Today, the water of the South River is crystal clear, the reeds are abundant, and it has become a paradise for insects, fish and birds, and the breeze rustles, restoring the lively scene of decades ago.
On the outer wall of my old house, there is still a straw hat woven by my father, which has been gradually blackened and decayed by years of wind and sun, but it is still hanging there. My father often looked at it in a daze, or listened to the straw hat tell the story of the struggle of a generation in the long river of history. Along with the corrosion and weathering of the mud walls of the old house, just like the father's gradually aging face, suffering from wind, frost, rain and snow, tasting the cracks left by the sour, sweet and bitter in the world!
Straw Hat, although he is about to withdraw from the stage of history, he is still the mark of the times that his father's generation has experienced vicissitudes, and is a historical monument to witness the development of the Chinese nation!
About author:Zhang Changchun, member of Linyi Writers Association, Linyi Photographers Association, Luozhuang District Writers Association. Since childhood love literature, in the middle school period in the "middle school era" and other articles, in February 2021 the essay "Yo-Yo Hometown Year" was published in the "Learning the Spring Festival Imprint of a Strong Country" column, the essay "My Father" won the second prize of the 2016 "China Resources Shuxiangfu" Cup Essay Contest, and in recent years, his works have been published in "Yellow River Literature and Art", "Double Moon Lake", "Luozhuang Literature", "Jiangquan Monthly", "Sun Rain Literature" and other publications.
Submission email: [email protected]
One Point No. Scroll Wenyuan