Author: Lee Ka Fook
Source: Reading Leting Cultural Research Association Journal
The title image comes from the network, is only a picture, and has nothing to do with this article
#唐山头条 #
During the War of Resistance Against Japan, my uncle was an armed commissar of a village-level democratic regime. He has a "Seven Stars" pistol, which is very eye-catching; the few toon trees in his house have a special temptation for my young mind...
One
The uncle's family is located in a small village between the Guluan River and the Erluan River, Linjiaying, which was a liberated area opened up in the early days of Jidong Road South. My family lives on the left bank of the Erluan River, which is closer to the county seat of the Japanese and Puppets. The democratic regime of the Eighth Route Army carried out various propaganda activities in the villages, and the work of my uncle's armed committee members was also carried out with great sound. He had a "Seven Stars" pistol, and whenever he came home and wiped it on the kang, I watched it carefully, embedded in the seven holes in the wheel of the gun, like a bullet like a lotus child shrinking her head and shrinking her head, which was very cute. Whenever I saw this pistol, I couldn't help but think of my uncle's united front achievements.
Most of the Eighth Route Army, which has just come to open up the area, likes to have a fountain pen, especially the kind of fountain pen that is worn in the small pocket on the right side of the jacket. They put it into a fountain pen sleeve made of crochet and colored thread, tied one end to the second button eye of the jacket, and inserted it into the edge of the jacket pocket, revealing a colored ball woven with colored thread floating on the chest, and then wearing a "Jude" military hat and gray cloth military uniform embellished with two black buttons. However, this kind of fountain pen is expensive and has no money to buy, and there is no place to buy it in the base area, so it can only be obtained from the hands of intellectuals or the rich families.
Ge Hua's guard, Ge Hua' assistant to the eighth district governor, Zhang Zhihua, who straddled the double-box cannon diagonally, did not know from which channel he learned that my family had a parker gold pen, which my grandfather bought and collected for silver dollars during his business in Dalian, and prepared to make a prize for his grandson who was first admitted to middle school. Zhang Zhihua was inconvenient to go directly to the "enemy-occupied areas" to beg for it, and he begged his uncle to be a "lobbyist" for him. At that time, it was the turn of summer and autumn, the flood of the Erluan River had not yet completely receded, the uncle had to tie a dining table on the iron tile cart, and people sat at the dining table as if crossing the river by boat, and specially crossed the river to my house to ask for a tap water and gold pen for the Eighth Route Army. Originally, I had great hopes of inheriting this golden pen, but I had to "look at the pen and sigh".
The second grandfather's house, The East Juyuan Hall, is located on the easternmost side of the street road. Because the empty area outside the village is not far from the Erluan River, there are sometimes "strongmen" infested. Therefore, the east gable of the East Juyuan Hall is built higher, and there is a "daughter wall" with a battlement above the roof, there is a special walking path for people to walk under the "daughter wall" on the house, and on the roof of the southeast corner of the gable, an observation observatory that flashes out of the wall is also specially built, and someone is holding a gun at night.
The second grandfather also went abroad to do business when he was young, and later had some savings, and under the influence of bourgeois democratic ideas and the trend of opening new schools, he returned to his hometown to participate in public welfare undertakings such as "abolishing temples and revitalizing schools.", and once served as the school director of the "Yumin Junior Primary School" in Dongxiazhuang, and absorbed more than a dozen school-age children in Dongxiazhuang to enroll, and if they could not pay the tuition fees for a while, they could postpone or not pay them. Fighting righteousness and neglecting wealth, helping the poor and helping the poor, he became an enlightened squire who united against Japan. I remember that at that time, someone often hummed the school song: "Yumin Junior Primary School, school director Li Suweng ..."
In order to solve the shortage of funds for the primary school, the school director is also responsible for convening the squires to jointly raise funds, and purchase part of the land to hire people to operate, and the income is used as a supplement to the funds of the primary school. The house maintenance and cleaning of the primary school is also often sent to the family or long-term workers to take care of it, and I remember that whenever it snowed in winter, my great-grandfather personally instructed the family to remove the snow in time. Of course I'm in it every time.
After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, our Party put forward the slogan of the united front: "Those who have money to pay, those who have guns to shoot, and people to contribute to the battlefield." The rural grassroots anti-Japanese organizations extensively mobilized gun owners to hand over weapons, and the second grandfather, under the persuasion and mobilization of my uncle, took the lead in responding to the call and handed over a "Hanyang-made" fast gun, which was also praised by the democratic government of Changle United County at that time.
Two
My family is very populous, my mother is the daughter-in-law of Nagato's long house, and she has no time to take care of our brothers and sisters, while my grandmother's family is sparse, and my aunt has not given birth for a long time, so she regards me as a baby. So when I was young, I often lived in my grandmother's house. My grandmother's house is a single courtyard, and the spacious outhouse is full of trees and flowers, which is a paradise for my childhood to play. You see, after a spring rain, the grass is green, the flowers are blooming, and the trees are busy budding and sprouting, spreading their leaves and spitting green. Among them, the three tall toon trees and the tree children under their knees also spread their small fists one after another, standing at the top of the branches, probing their heads and looking at the world of bees and butterflies.
With the swaying of the spring wind, brown-red, fat and thick toon buds grew on the thick branches of the big finger. Within two days, the buds unfolded to be young leaves, and they broke with a fingernail. The color is pale green, with a little red, although it is not as bright as the flowers, but the strong smell can fill the whole village. Therefore, the crisp sound of "click, click" breaking the toon buds, "Zila, Zila" branding the fresh aroma of toon scrambled eggs, tempting!
The toon buds on the top of the head of the "tree child" in the lower place are quickly bald, and the toon buds must be climbed or used with the help of tools to pick the higher toon buds. And the best job of picking toon buds in the upper tree is none other than me. Holding the bamboo pole net pocket and wire long hook made by his uncle, he easily climbed to the branch to stabilize his body, used both hands together, and soon filled the net basket, and returned to the ground like a spirit monkey, waiting to eat "burning toon fire". Only to see the aunt wash and chop the toon leaf buds, add broken eggs and an appropriate amount of flour, stir into a paste, the hearth burns to heat the large iron pot, the mixed paste spreads on the bottom of the pot, the whole bottom of the pot is only burned with a curtain as big as the "toon noodle fish" or "toon fire". The whole family sat around the dinner table and shared the food, and it was a happy and harmonious meal.
After entering the summer, the branches of the toon tree begin to grow, and the leaves of the toon are different from the willow elm locust. More than 20 leaflets grow on both sides of a large leaf, like a centipede kite released in spring, and like the oars on both sides of the Dragon Boat Race wooden boat. Later, it was learned that its botanical name was pinnate compound leaves, and the leaflets were oblong and oval, with sharp tips at the ends, and symmetrically arranged like feathers on the main veins of the compound leaves. The compound leaves are like large pu fans, and like natural green umbrellas, providing shade for people.
If you stand under the tree and look, you will also find that in the shade of greenery, flower spikes have grown like small bunches of grapes before they were ripe, inverted conical polyumbelous inflorescences, small flowers the size of rice grains, white and fragrant, and flower spikes drooping. Soon, the turquoise bunches of fruit will appear. Under the thick shade of the toon tree, there are flowers, leaves and fruits, which is indeed a good place for the elderly and children to chat and catch grasshoppers in the cool.
In late autumn, the compound leaves on the toon trees became flags fluttering in the wind, yellow, red, a light wind blew, and the leaves of the trees fluttered to the ground with a faint fragrance. At this time, the spike-like "fruit" on the tree has matured. The peanut-sized fruit, oblong-oval, has five sides, each growing five leathery peels, reddish-brown, with the tip of each peel cracked and warped. From a distance, it looks like a nest of chicken chicks following its mother, and then it looks like an upside-down golden bell hanging from a bare branch. My aunt and cousin Caiyun, who also lived in my grandmother's house, especially liked the ripe fruit of the toon tree. Begging me to help harvest its whole ears, she carefully processed and decorated them, and hung them in front of the window, comparable to the "wind chimes" in spring and summer.
In winter, the toon trees are only left with straight trunks and forked dead branches, but they are like sentinels with a strong sense of responsibility, holding their posts in the cold wind, guarding the dormant grass and trees in the garden and their own children, smiling and welcoming the falling snowflakes, wearing silver armor and ice armor, silently conceiving: next year will grow fresher branches, flowers and fruits, and share the ecological balance with all things in heaven and earth.
Time flies, seventy or eighty years of vicissitudes, the uncle has long been ancient, the "Seven Stars" pistol may have been eliminated after several changes of ownership, and the house outside the house has disappeared. But the story of the gun and the toon tree related to the uncle is still vaguely lingering in the mind...
(Author Li Jiafu, former editor-in-chief of New Agricultural Magazine, Shenyang Agricultural University)