"Writer Li and His Country Friend" by Li Jorge. Published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
In 2021, my collection of novels "Writer Li and His Country Friends" was published. When designing the cover, I sent a set of photos I took to the editor-in-charge, and after selection, four sculptural faces appeared on the cover of the new book. The four faces are Xiujun, the leader of Luotun Second Team, Hannan, director of the township health center, Zhi'an, a member of the poverty alleviation task force, and Han Sheng, the village director, who are my working partners during the rural poverty alleviation period. In my book, there are no stories based on them, but this does not mean that they are people without stories, on the contrary, their stories have deeply inspired me. I think that when the time comes, I will reunite with them in the novel. It's only a matter of time. When I received the invitation for the "Heart to Heart" column of "Youth Literature", I immediately thought of them, and the days when I walked with them in the countryside, although it has been a few years, it seems to be yesterday. In a short article, I wrote the following sentence: "The morning dusk on the face is the most thrilling." The same is true of these faces, who for a long time were my cover characters.
Hannan, the director of the township health center, has a national character face, deep eye frames, a high nose, and thin lips, and he has a smile on his face every time he sees me. The first time I saw him, on the first day of registration, the township arranged for me to stay temporarily in the staff dormitory of the township health center, and he came to deliver me the keys. The room is on the fifth floor, and after the completion of the staff dormitory, no one has lived here, which is considered a "new room". Looking at the dusty room, he was a little embarrassed, and first went to twist the faucet, and the black and yellow water washed the dusty aluminum basin, rattling. He said that this room is open, and you have to turn on the faucet several times before the water becomes clear; Usually the bucket should be filled with water, the water pressure on the fifth floor is low, and there are many people who use water at night and in the morning, and the water cannot reach here. He helped me clean up my room and asked me, where? Will you not get used to village life? Poverty alleviation is very hard, mainly because there are many checks. Dean Hannan always smiled, as if receiving one of his mild patients. That's what he was talking to.
Later, I learned that this health center is probably one of the most deserted in the whole of Guangxi, and there are few patients visiting a day. It has to do with geography. It takes only half an hour to drive from the township to the county seat, and if the people in the village usually have a headache and brain fever, they will first find a village doctor in their respective villages to get injections and medicines, and if the injections and medicines do not work, they will directly cross the township health center and take a ride to the county seat. If there are fewer patients, there is not much income, and the township hospital is a differential appropriation unit, and part of the performance of hospital staff depends on the flow of patients to make up. It is not that the people in the township health center hope that the more sick people there are, the better, because usually the sick people are either in the village or in the county, and they do not expect to come here to see a doctor. If the patient does not come here, the money that should be spent is not less, which is a headache for the people in the health center. Later, I also learned that there are very few people in the inpatient department of the health center, and another function of the ward is to arrange for the cadres from the prefecture to sleep here at night in the event of a sudden disaster. There are no hotels in this township, which is rare in Guangxi. The life of the township health center is tight, and the director of the health center in Hannan is naturally not easy. One of the "two worries and three guarantees" in poverty alleviation work is that everyone has medical insurance, and because of work, I have intensive contacts with Hannan. Whether at work or eating and chatting, I have never heard Hannan complain to anyone that he shows what a man should look like - down-to-earth and forbearing. I have a very good impression of him, and he also has a good reputation among the county and rural cadres and fellow villagers.
It was such a stoic, capable man whose fate showed him a hideous face. Perhaps because I have been away from the scene of life for too long, I have not witnessed someone I know suffer such an intensive doom in a short period of time, and I have only known Hannan for less than half a year, and the changes in his family make me sigh until now. Haiko's poem reads, "All the winds blow only to them, and all the days are broken for them". Here I want to borrow: fate treats Hannan too viciously, so that it has no poetry at all; All bad luck fell on him, and all misfortune he was forced to accept everything. The Hannam family of five, an eighty-year-old father, two sons, one in high school and one in kindergarten, he and his wife both work in the health center. The eldest son dropped out of school due to illness, which is the first difficulty; The wife suddenly had a nosebleed one day, went for examination, and was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer, which was the second difficulty; The father is bedridden and needs to be taken care of, which is the third difficulty. In just a few months, unfortunate things followed. Hannan and we went to the village to visit the households, give physical examinations to the elderly, give medicine to the mentally ill, and go to the homes of his helpers day and night to understand the situation. He never said anything about his family affairs and always smiled. Later, with the fourth difficulty, he himself found out that he was terminally ill. At first, Hannan didn't tell us about his illness, he still walked with us to the village as usual, but he didn't hold up his glass during the meal, he said that he was taking Chinese medicine, and he could "open" drinking with us in half a year. No one in the working group knew that he was already ill by then.
In mid-November 2018, when I entered the house, I was bitten by a dog from a poor household, and Hannan accompanied me to the health center to get the rabies vaccine. At that time, the news of fake rabies vaccines had just broken in China, so I was very worried, and although I pretended not to care on the surface, I secretly took pictures of the vaccine and kept it. After the injection, I asked Hannan if he could run in ten days, and he said yes. Ten days later, I went to Fangchenggang to "run the whole horse" and ran away from the hardship, fatigue, and embarrassment of the poverty alleviation work, while the situation in Hannan became worse and worse. The last time he went with me to the village was on December 12, when we went to give medicine to the mentally ill in the village. In my village, there are more mental patients than in other places, and comrades in the township told me that there are more than 80 mental patients in the entire township. The first poor family I entered the village had a mental patient, a girl who failed the college entrance examination last year, and when she learned her college entrance examination results, the string in her head broke. I went to see her, and she sat next to her mother and looked at me, her expression frightened, she had only been ill for more than half a year, and the drug had not yet taken effect. After that, her eyes were dull, sitting alone in front of the TV, no matter what program was performed on the TV, she had the same expression. Poverty alleviation efforts have given great care to these vulnerable people, and if they are willing to be hospitalized, they can be admitted intensively; If you want to stay home with your loved ones, you can receive free medication on time. I went with Hannam to give medicine to the mentally ill people in the village, but I didn't see his tiredness or tiredness. After beating there, in the crowd of people walking into the village, at the dinner table where the working group gathered, he was no longer there...
The winter of 2018 was a cold winter. This winter, I attended a total of four funerals, the first of which was in my hometown of Lalie Town, where Chunyu's cousin died, and I hurried back from the poverty alleviation point to put incense on my cousin, and hurried back to the poverty alleviation point. My cousin gave birth to seven children in total, she was short, thin, and in my impression, she was never plump; Excessive fertility and the difficulty of livelihood robbed her of moisture and luster, and she sat on her back, spending one difficult spring, summer, autumn and winter after another. This is the most common image of the previous generation of rural women. Now, the good days have just arrived, but she has left to the west. The second funeral was an elderly man in the village next door to the poverty alleviation point who he had never met. The children went out to work, the old man stayed at home alone, suddenly had a cerebral infarction in the middle of the night, was discovered three days later, and died a few days after being sent to the hospital. When we went to see off the old man on the last ride, I thought that such an accident does not distinguish between urban and rural areas, and it seems that it has nothing to do with rich and poor, and can only be said to be impermanent. But I also thought, this impermanent fate, is it more often to single out the weak to bully? It is clear that the countryside has become a place where they often hang out. In the village, this is not the first accident of an old man, in the summer, an old man in Changtun walked to Rin Tun, a few kilometers away, to eat wine at his sister's house, and lost when he returned home. The village mobilized nearly 100 people to search for several times in the nearby villages and mountains and forests, and the search notices were also posted to various townships and even county towns, but in the end, they were not found. In the spring, because of the start of the Changtun tailings remediation project, large instruments entered the site, and when cleaning up the site, people found the remains of an old man in the grass nest, and it was no longer clear who it was. The children of the deceased came to identify it, and they were not sure that it was their father, when they found a string of keys around the waist of the remains, they took them down, took them to open the lock of their house, and the lock was opened, which confirmed that the body was the father. Sadly, the grass nest where the remains were located was only a few hundred meters from their home, and they were only looking for nearby villages and forests, but ignored the wasteland near their home. In poverty alleviation points, there are many sick elderly people living alone, and the use of fire, gas, electricity, and daily life is worrying. Later, the township came up with a way to spend money in each tun to invite relatively young and healthy people to take care of these elderly people living alone, visit them morning and evening for any abnormalities, deliver water and medicine, buy rice and vegetables. In the fight against poverty, many people see numbers, and I see temperature. The third funeral was the funeral of Hannan's father. Originally, as a son, Hannan should have knelt in front of the spiritual hall at this time and kowtowed, but he could not come. Because of his illness, he lay in another room of his home, listening to the sound of the official outside the door doing his father's work, smelling the burning of paper money and incense sticks all over the house, and he must have known that he would soon follow his father. This is the saddest moment on earth. Some time ago, the people of the working group knew that Hannan was seriously ill, and the team member Zhi'an suggested that everyone visit him, but I did not dare to go because the image in my mind had always been the enthusiastic and smiling Hannan, and I did not dare to see the withered and terminally ill Hannan. This is not ruthless, I think that because of customs, my father, who has been dead for many years, needs to be buried a second time, and I dare not go to the scene, and my father's kind and vivid image has become a bone in front of me, and I dare not face it. Later, Lao Liang told me that when they went to see Hannan, Hannan was already out of phase, and his mouth could only spit out three words: "Brother, coming?" The fourth funeral was Hannan's, just a month after his father's funeral. That day, the winter rain was dripping, three firecrackers were blasted in Bumatun in the early morning, many people came to the funeral, and the nearby elementary school playground and the basketball court in the village were full of cars. In the courtyard of Hannan's house, a group of people are busy cooking, a group of people are busy putting incense, the same scene was just staged a month ago, the same people are cooking and incense, but the portrait on the spiritual hall has changed from Hannan's father to Hannan... I don't know who said in my ear, fortunately, it's not a white-haired person sending a black-haired person. It means that the father died before the son, and the white-haired person sending the black-haired person did not happen in this unfortunate family. How heart-wrenching such a "okay" is.
My friend said that my writing was "heterogeneous", which is certainly a compliment. I didn't talk to my friends about what they meant by "heterogeneous." To become "heterogeneous", is it necessary to first have a special material, plus special processing to slowly take shape? And, what exactly is this special material? In 2019, I gave a novel sharing session entitled "In the 'Penal Colony'" at the One-Way Space Bookstore in Joy City, Chaoyang, Beijing. At the sharing session, I explained why it was named "In the Exile Land": one rule fails here completely, or becomes another, of course, mainly writing. "Heterogeneous" and "in exile" are words that excite the writer, it makes you feel like there is a special territory and you are banished here. When it comes to banishment, perhaps because of being a writer, the sensitivity of a writer often makes me feel exiled, even when I go to the countryside to help the poor. I am not a passive "exile", I am passionate about what I do, listening to the villagers express their demands, tell their own stories, and then run for their big and small things, and I will be happy to solve a little sesame big thing.
In the autumn of 2018, Lin Chunming, a deaf and mute man in Luotun, approached his help contact and expressed his desire to work in other places, which was a difficult problem. Lin Chunming's wife is blind, she intermittently works in the earphone processing factory in the township, and her income is very unstable, if Lin Chunming finds a suitable job outside, it must be a good thing. But how easy it is for a deaf and mute person to go out to work, firstly, to find a suitable job, and secondly, to consider how to live outside. After many contacts, Secretary General He, former first secretary of the village and Guangxi Writers Association, contacted Longmen Shuidu, a tourist resort on the outskirts of Nanning. There is a need for gardeners to be responsible for planting flowers, grass, sanitation, and food and housing, 2,200 yuan a month, on the condition that Lin Chunming must be accompanied by someone to work and be his "translator" at the same time. This is another difficult problem, who in the village is willing to be Lin Chunming's "translator"? I asked the helper contact house by house in the tunli, and finally, a kind person appeared, he was Lin Naihan from Bentun. I was worried that Longmen Water Capital would repent, and asked Lin Chunming and Lin Naihan to quickly pack their luggage. The next day, I drove them for more than three hours to Longmen Shuidu, 230 kilometers away, and when I got there, I helped them fill in their employment materials and took them to the dormitory with their luggage. What is this called a dormitory? Just a cabin in the scenic area with several steel frame beds, smelly garbage everywhere, no toilets and places to bathe. I called and wanted to talk to the staff that this place was not inhabitable at all. Lin Chunming kept nodding and signaling me not to fight, meaning that it is okay, it can be done here. Lin Naihan said don't fight, there must be a toilet in the scenic area, and there must be a faucet nearby. He walked around, and sure enough, he found a very low faucet, and he wanted to take a bath, and his body had to bow ninety degrees. Summer is OK, what about winter? Instead of calling the staff, I called Secretary General Ho, who had acquaintances here and who spoke to them better than I did. I told him that I would negotiate with the person in charge of the scenic area and arrange dormitories with toilets for them as soon as possible, as well as bathhouses where they could take hot baths in winter. Not long after putting down the phone, Secretary General He quickly called me back, saying that the person in charge of the scenic spot told him that this was a temporary arrangement, because we came in too much time, and the staff dormitory was not cleaned up. After settling them out, I left Longmen Shuidu. I was very happy and posted a circle of friends on the same day: send Lin Chunming and Lin Naihan to Longmen Water to work.
As mentioned earlier, I am not a passive "exile", I am passionate about things in the countryside. For two years, things in the countryside rushed towards me one after another, perhaps, this is how "heterogeneity" was trained? For a while, "the difficulty of writing" became the most frequently said sentence, and I think that many times, the difficulty of real life and the difficulty of solving real life problems determine the difficulty of our writing. There is also whether we see the difficulty in life, whether we see the difficulty of solving problems in real life, determines the success or failure of our writing.
Back to the collection cover.
Village chief Han Sheng and task force member Zhi'an have different personalities. The village chief Han Sheng is in his fifties, is recognized as a good old man in the village, and he is a little shy to talk to people. In the past two years, I have never seen him blushing with the villagers once, because because of the identification of poor households, low-income households, and five-guarantee households, and the issuance of various government subsidies, people in the village often come to the village committee to scold people, accusing the village committee of doing things unfairly, and many times it is vexatious. The village chief Han Sheng was kind, and in the face of accusations, he did not lose his temper once. It is said that the mildest people also have times when they can't hang up, such as releasing grievances after drinking, but Hansheng does not, he has never been drunk and gaffe, and his expression is always gentle and kind. With such a good temper, how can he be a good village chief? In the impression of many people, the image of the village chief is mostly simple and direct, and fierce, but Han Sheng is not like this, his "weapon" is fair and gentle. One night, we were having dinner at the secretary of the regiment branch, and the villager Lao Zhao was drunk and came to make a fuss because of the Dibao matter, and wanted to do something to us. It was Hansheng who stopped him, and he didn't want anyone else to participate, because it would appear that the village committee was bullying one person collectively. The old Zhao family did not meet the conditions for receiving the dibao, and he compared the situation of his family with the situation of families with the same conditions elsewhere, and felt that he had been wronged. Han Sheng stopped him one-on-one and told him, if you want to scold, scold me, if you want to hit me, hit me. That night, Hansheng listened to the drunken old Zhao tell about the grievances in his heart until late at night.
When it comes to things in the village, Han Sheng's secret is "big belly can tolerate", even the puppy thinks he is close. One thing I find very interesting. Not long after Han Sheng became the director, probably on a certain occasion, he played affectionately with a puppy in Tunli, and he remembered this gentle person ever since. Every morning it came to Han Sheng's house on time and went to the village with Han Sheng on duty, Han Sheng's motorcycle walking in front and the puppy running behind. The same is true at night when leaving work, the puppy will follow Han Sheng's house all the way to his house after dinner at his house. This continued for several months until the puppy was sold. Not only Hansheng, but also other members of the village committee such as Lao Luo, Yingming, Yongqiang, Yimin, etc., are all trusted people of the villagers, and working with them is smooth sailing.
Zhi'an is my "mentor" in terms of county, township and village conditions. He and I, as well as Junneng sent by the county education bureau, often worked together, ate, and chatted. Many of the details of the poisoning incident I wrote about in my novella "Octave Tun" were told to me by Zhi'an. Zhi'an, a driver of the county food supervision bureau, is a humorous person, a pistachio, a person who can mingle with others everywhere, and the working group entrusted Changtun, the most complicated situation, to him. Changtun was a mining area before, and "Octave Tun" wrote about this place, and the people here sued and besieged the gate of the county government, all of which were true. Zhi'an was in charge of Changtun and quickly mingled with the masses there, why is this? Because he did not have the domineering and condescending style of "someone sent by his superiors", coupled with humor and kindness, he was recognized by the villagers. He and Yongqiang, members of the village committee, have done a lot of work to keep the channels of communication between the working group and the villagers open and various situations dealt with in a timely manner. This most troublesome village did not drag the "hind legs" of the whole village and the whole township to work, and got rid of poverty on time. Zhi'an likes fishing, and the working group rarely takes a vacation, and when he is on vacation, he goes fishing, and when he catches a fish, he calls me and asks me to "get some Caesar white beer" in Nanning, and have dinner when I return to the village. In the past two years, Zhi'an told me about the affairs in the county, the township and his own family, and I wrote down both good and bad things.
I miss those two unforgettable years and miss my "cover man". I miss the other members of the working group, they are Senye, Junneng, Yongfang, Bingyu, Hua Bin, Su Li, and Rihong. Take care, everyone.