Grandpa's surname is Yue, and his name is a monk. It was the adoptive father of my parents.
I don't know what kind of mentality Grandpa's parents had in order to come up with this weird name for Grandpa. For as long as I can remember, this name has been a scar on my heart, and I attribute the ridicule and ridicule of others to my grandfather's strange name and the home he built with his own hands.
"Monk monk, chanting and knocking on the wooden fish, knocking again and again, the old monk has a granddaughter. "When my friends saw my grandfather, they would always follow him and giggle and sing as they heard it.
Not only children laugh, but adults laugh too. On February 28 in the countryside, an old monk crossed the river and said, I remember one year, we had a physical education class, lined up on the playground, the sun was scorching, and the physical education teacher looked around for a week and said: I can't remember, today is the old monk crossing the river.
Ah, no, isn't the old monk here? With a finger of the hand, everyone's eyes turned to the opposite side of the riverbank, but they found that my grandfather was carrying things to the river port to clean, and everyone was in an uproar, and I, my face was swollen and red, and I seemed to be ugly in front of everyone, and in the loud laughter of my classmates, I wanted to dig a hole in the ground. I was angry with my grandfather: Why did you come out, if you were someone else's grandfather, no one would laugh.
But Grandpa was not annoyed, and he was very unimpressed by people's laughter. The people in the village asked his grandfather for help, so they shouted at him "Wu Shang Wu Shang", the pronunciation of the monk in the dialect sounded Wu Shang, and he also responded loudly, he never seemed to think of changing his name, and decided that he was subject to his parents, no matter how ugly it sounded, it could not be changed.
Grandpa often wears some loose clothes, likes to tie a rope around his waist, sometimes it is a cloth belt, sometimes it is hemp rope, and the clothes on his body are always gray with mud stars or smoke smell, in grandma's words, even if the clothes are good, they can't wear anything, sloppy. Now that I think about it, my grandfather, who deals with the land all day long, can't be clean.
Our home, three low adobe houses, although dilapidated, but bricks, mud, pillars and purlins, was dug out of the ground by my grandfather and built, and it is the house where our family lives. A family of six, with the same surname Yue. This is a little special in that small village called Nantang, when there is nothing more to do, I don't think it's a big deal, and then I vaguely heard in the mocking tone of the villagers that there is no blood relationship between grandparents and parents.
I didn't dare to ask my grandfather about it, but after a little while, I occasionally learned from my mother that it was an indisputable fact that the neighbors ridiculed my grandfather for having no children and grandchildren.
Grandpa originally had a wife and children, and then grandpa's original partner died of illness, leaving behind a son and three daughters, life was tight, and then I heard that the matchmaker married my grandmother, and formed a family, but in the end with the children had a dirty relationship, uncoordinated, grandpa cleanly cut off contact with his own children, and grandma and two out of the house, from another village settled here, from scratch, built this adobe house.
Grandma did not have children, and after marrying her grandfather, she took her grandfather's surname, and then adopted a boy and a girl one after another, forming a family without blood relationship. Fifteen years later, the siblings got married and became my parents. In such a unique family, my sister and I were born with a mark, the granddaughter of Monk Yue, also surnamed Yue.
The monk became our grandfather, and he regarded our two sisters as treasures in his hands, and seemed to favor me more, and some of the good dishes left by my grandmother for him would be secretly pressed into my rice bowl. The three things he loves, drinking morning tea, smoking hookah, and listening to Peking Opera, must have made me follow him.
Drinking morning tea is a rare pastime for grandpa in winter, at this time, there is not much work, he gets up at three or four o'clock every morning, wears winter clothes and stars on the street, usually alone. If I had sold vegetables or something, and my grandfather had some spare money around him, he would wake me up from my sleepiness and let me ride on his shoulders and walk all the way up the street.
In my impression, the teahouse shop is on the street, standing on the street, drinking tea upstairs, downstairs with an extraordinary "tiger stove", the tiger stove is rectangular, eight-hole specifications. The one who burned the tiger stove was a woman, and she also had the job of a teahouse shop, and when she saw someone coming, she would run upstairs, serve the tea bowl, and put the long-spouted copper kettle into the tea bowl, and quickly pulled it out, lifted it high, and suddenly raised her head, and suddenly the tea leaves in the tea bowl tumbled, but most of the time, the water would spill onto the table.
The teahouse was smoky and full of people, and children were an outlier in such a place, and I was bored, listening to the people at their tables, noisy, and I could still doze off on the table.
Only once, the teahouse gave each person a green olive, and my grandfather left it and stuffed it into my palm. Only then did I have a little hope for drinking tea in my heart, although I drank tea with my grandfather in the future, I never got green olives again.
Grandpa had a copper hookah. This kind of chimney, the cylinder column is oblate and round, the upper end of the cylinder column is connected with a cigarette pot seat, the cigarette pot and the cigarette holder seem to be connected together, the cigarette pot is slightly shorter, straight up, and the cigarette holder will be long and curved obliquely stretched out.
This cigarette is smoked through a bucket of water in the barrel before it is inhaled into the mouth, and when smoking, the water in the barrel is sucked so that it gurgles. Grandpa smoked, holding a cigarette holder in his left hand and a five- or six-inch-long paper coal rolled in straw paper in his right hand, protruding his mouth, blowing the paper coal out of an open flame, and then smoking at the copper cigarette holder that had been filled with tobacco.
When he had taken a full breath, he slowly knocked the ash off his cigarette holder, yawned, and seemed satisfied, put his cigarette holder down, and sat down on the threshold with his eyes squinted and basked in the sun.
Most of the cigarettes my grandfather smoked were low-quality tobacco, and I always felt that this kind of smoke smelled as I sat on the sidelines. Sometimes, when I came home from school, I would walk on the village road, bow my head, and pick up the cigarette butts thrown by others, I knew that "Pegasus" and "Daqianmen" were good cigarettes, and my grandfather had always envied them in his heart.
If I found this kind of cigarette butt, I wrapped it in paper, held it in my hand, and hurried home, asking my grandfather to take out the tobacco, and when it accumulated a certain amount, I could smoke it again. At this time, I played with a hookah, picked up the cigarette and took a puff, but instead of inhaling the cigarette, I took a big mouthful of water, and I was nauseous for a long time.
Peking Opera is my grandfather's favorite, but unfortunately my grandfather didn't have much leisure, and he didn't have a sound machine at home, so if he wanted to listen to Peking Opera, he had to go to a small shop in the east of the village. After eating for a period of time every day, he went to the small shop to chat without moving, and he couldn't find his grandfather at home.
In fact, the chat is fake, but listening to the radio is real, because the radio in the small shop is so lively that Peking Opera is playing at this time. Once, at my grandmother's behest, I went to the shop to find my grandfather, but I found him squinting and listening attentively on a small bench, his head shaking slightly, and his hands beating on his legs from time to time.
I stood lightly behind him and reached out to pat him on the shoulder, intent on scaring him. When I slapped it, my grandfather shook it, and it really made my grandfather jump, and I didn't see anyone clearly, so I turned around and slapped me. In my memory, this was the first and only time my grandfather hit me.
I went home crying, and swore in my heart that I would never pay attention to this monk grandfather again. Sure enough, the next day, when I went to school in the town, I saw my grandfather holding his hand at the intersection I had to pass every day, and as I walked by, I walked over as if I didn't see him.
When my grandfather saw me, he greeted me with a smile: Come, see what delicious food grandpa bought you. As he spoke, he took out a fritter from his bosom and handed it to me. I took a look, and my heart was desperately greedy, but I didn't take the previous oath, and my grandfather chased after a few steps, shouting: I saved you something to eat. I stopped, as if angry, turned around and slapped the churros off his hand, and ran as I spoke: I won't eat your things, you are not my grandfather.
Grandpa didn't catch up again, but when I came home that day, I was called into the room by my grandmother, and I lectured and said that what I said made my grandfather angry, and he loved you so much, why did you still say that you wouldn't eat your things, not your granddaughter or something?
That is, in the year when I had a temper with my grandfather, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and in the end, he relied on Dureng Ding to relieve the pain. During that time, my grandmother and I made bunks on the floor and stayed by my grandfather's bedside. Every now and then, I would hear my grandfather call his ex-wife's name, and the names of some people who had long since passed away. Grandma said that grandpa's soul had gone to the underworld, and grandpa couldn't stand it for long.
The family seems to be lively, waves of people, it is said that they are people in the grandfather's family, who do not interact with each other on weekdays, including some neighbors who mock our family on weekdays, and they all come to visit grandpa when they get the news, but among these people who come and go, there is no figure of grandpa's own children.
The night my grandfather left, I forgot what made my father angry, right next to my grandfather's bedside, I was beaten hard by my father, my father's strength was very strong, grandma couldn't stop my father, my fist slapped me down, I was in pain, crying loudly and screaming desperately.
Grandpa was lying on the bed, seeing this, and wanted to stand up and persuade him, but he couldn't get up, so he comforted his father: Don't fight, don't fight. The staccato voice trembled later, as if it had exhausted its strength.
My father was almost angry, and he went upstairs to rest, and I snuggled in my grandmother's arms, and I was sobbing by myself, and in a daze, I heard my grandmother crying, and asked me to get up and go upstairs to call my parents down, and I knew that my grandfather was gone.
Our family sent my grandfather on a long trip. Grandpa has never taken a photo, the posthumous photo is a request to be drawn, sketch: high cheekbones, small eyes, sparse hair, a few light strokes, just draw the outline of a grandfather. Grandpa sat in the frame and looked at me quietly. I respectfully kowtowed to my grandfather and didn't shed a single tear.
Now when I go home, I always stay in my grandfather's old room for a while, his picture is hung in the corner behind the door by his parents, I sit in the room, my grandfather sits in the frame, I look at him, he looks at me, quietly......
About the Author
Yue Honglei, a member of the Wuxi Association, now lives in Jiangyin. His works have been scattered in major newspapers and periodicals such as "Yangtze Evening News", "Beijing Evening News", and "Fraternity", and he has published a collection of essays, "Walking All the Way to the Skirt and Flying".