Small Town Story | Small town dwellers

The county town's extensive highway leads to this or that township or village, and there is an absolutely natural transition between the county town and the countryside. The picture shows the railway station in Jianshui County, Yunnan, where passengers are getting on the train. (Southern Weekend reporter Feng Fei/photo)

I went to Singapore as a teenager and local classmates would ask me which city I came from and they would usually offer two options: Shanghai? Beijing? It was 1996, and foreign countries didn't know much about China, and even a city like Shenzhen was unfamiliar to them. The whole of China is divided into two parts: Beijing, Shanghai, and "other places." So, I have to explain to them that I come from a county, the county in the United States is called a county, and the country in China is called a county.

In China, when people in big cities look at the county seat, it should be the "urban-rural interface". As for treating themselves as half of the countrymen, most of the county people are unconvinced, they will say: No matter how small the county town is, it is also a "city", and we all take wages and eat "commodity grain". In the eyes of the county people, only the residents who cultivate the fields and live in the villages are the rural people.

Although the residents of the eighteen-line small city are not convinced, when they arrive in the provincial city or capital, they will feel "timid" and worry that they will exude a rustic atmosphere. In the small town residents, there is indeed the style habit of both urban and rural residents, because the small town and the countryside are so close, the urban residents and rural relatives are frequently exchanged, and the material and cultural are mixed. And it is this "both" that gives the lives of small city residents a different flavor.

The inhabitants of the small town feel that they are fashionable city dwellers. They go shopping in supermarkets, buy clothes in designer stores, buy high-end electronics, drink coffee and restaurants, and feel that there is no shortage of things in big cities. Of course, art exhibitions, museums, cultural diversity... These have not yet entered their judgment system of urban life. In front of their relatives in the countryside, the shelves of the county townspeople are even more fully arranged, beckoning people to drink a cup of coffee, making the relatives miserable, telling others about the state's peasant policies and international political trends, causing others to sit in danger, just like holding meetings and classes. However, these shelves are not malicious, but they just want people to see the style of the people in his city. In the big city, the people of the small city dare not slacken off, always dress too strictly or gorgeously, so that others can see his origin at a glance. However, although the people of the small city feel that they are not as fashionable as those in the big cities, they will pick some other problems, such as thinking that there are many poor people in the big cities, thinking that the broken houses of the big city people are smaller than the pigeon cage, and even the courtyard is not, saying that the people of the big city invite guests to eat beer is actually a bottle of land call (small county towns are twelve bottles and a dozen want), buy a chicken can be broken into three plates of dishes, stingy... To speak of temper, the big ladies of rich households in small cities have a lot more tempers than ordinary ladies in big cities.

Most of the ancestors of the county people come from neighboring villages, and there are constant warm ties. I remember when I was a child, when the wheat was ripe, the enterprises and institutions in the county town would take a week of "wheat vacation". During the wheat holiday, almost half of the people in the county town ran back to their hometown to help harvest. Of course, there were no large harvesters, so those who were accustomed to carrying teacups and reading newspapers in the mechanism still knew how to pick up their scythes and harvest wheat in the scorching fields of the Akatsuki. Even county people like my parents, who have run out of land and no home in the countryside, will show special concern for crops. In the conversation of their generation of county townspeople, there are often words such as "this year's wheat harvest is good", "it is frosted, the persimmons should be red", "there is too much rain, this year's watermelon must not be sweet". This kind of understanding and concern for land and agriculture is certainly not the style of legitimate urban people.

The county and the countryside are closely linked, and they don't have the barriers of the big cities—skyscrapers, labyrinthine high-speed overpasses, checkpoints of one kind or another, restrictions on traffic. The county town's extensive highway leads to this or that township or village, and there is an absolutely natural transition between the county town and the countryside. People who live in the county town come to the suburbs by bicycle. Along the way, the surrounding buildings gradually became scarce, and then between the residential areas appeared meadows and woods, and soon you saw vegetable gardens, fields and people working in the fields... Naturally, this has become a familiar and emotional landscape.

The countrymen entered the city in a motorized tricycle "Ding Ding Guangguang", and they did not treat themselves as outsiders, but at best they were a little shy (in large cities with strict barriers and language barriers, this shyness turned into fear). Most of them have relatives in the city, and since they were young, they have followed adults into the city to buy things, see relatives, sell vegetables and fruits, and are familiar with the streets of the county, rice stalls, and newly opened small commodity markets.

Because of the proximity to the land, one of the happiness of the inhabitants of the small town is to be able to eat the freshest fruits and vegetables. These vegetables and fruits are usually picked from the ground in the early morning, with dew and dirt, unselected, soaked, packaged, and not sprayed with brightener. At a glance, the people of the county can distinguish who is a vendor and who is a real vegetable farmer and fruit farmer. My father was only willing to buy peasant things, one was to sympathize with their hardships of traveling dozens of miles into the city, and the other was to like their honesty and kindness. My father was very frugal, but he never cared about the price when he bought the vegetables of his hometown, and he did not let him find it when he was small. When the price of vegetables in the market is too low, he is always angry: "The things in the field are so cheap, let the peasants not live!?" ”

I have many country relatives in my family, and they are the most simple, hard-working group of people I have ever seen as a child. Later, I wrote several vernacular novels, and I often borrowed the impressions they left on me when imagining some characters. I especially remember one of my mother's uncles (I should call my aunt in The Henan dialect), who was in my seventies when I was a teenager. The old man is in good health, and every year when peaches, watermelons, and peanuts come down, he will send them to our family. At first, he walked into town for more than five hours with a rack car, but then he bought a rickshaw and pedaled slowly for two or three hours. The old man often set off before dawn, and when he arrived in the city, it was breakfast time, but he was embarrassed to come to our house to eat, and he ate at a street stall before coming. He unloaded from the car peaches with dew on their leaves and peanuts wrapped in fresh dirt, and hurried to leave, saying that there was still work in the field. My mother sometimes gave him some laundry detergent, soap or candy, old clothes and shoes, and he always had to push him with a red face for half a day.

I am now very fortunate that I was born in such a place, and in the first ten years of my life, I was able to enjoy the convenience of a small town and get close to the fields and rivers. When I was young, the dialects and people there were mellow and sweet, and the life there was plain but warm and full. However, just as the old country virtues of the late aunt and grandfather have long withered and disappeared in the countryside, today's hometown town has long lost its former simplicity and calmness.

Zhang Huiwen