Huang Lantern: The energetic post-70s generation is the last generation of traditional Chinese families

Written | Chen Zhenfang

It has been four years since the publication of "My Second Student", and Huang Lantern set off again. This time, she went further, to the vast countryside of China, to a more authentic Chinese family. At the same time, she is getting closer, to her peers who have been far away.

In many colleges and universities, the relationship between the elective teacher and the classmates is a nodding acquaintance. But Huang Lan is an exception, she is familiar with the past of many of her students and has been tracking their future development. At any university, it is basically impossible to ask teachers to do home visits. After all, most of their hometowns are separated from their schools by thousands of mountains and rivers. From 2017 to 2022, she took advantage of the holidays to step on trains, long-distance buses, motorcycles, and tractors many times, from Tengchong, Yunnan to rural areas in western Guangdong, and made long-distance home visits again and again, allowing her to immerse herself in the real environment in which Erben students grew up and experienced their hardships along the way.

During the home visits, the villages that are not accessible are hidden in the mountains, making it difficult for outsiders to enter. In some places, only walk-behind tractors could be driven, and cars could not enter. On one occasion, the younger brother of student Mo Yuansheng carried Huang Lantern and her husband into the village on a motorcycle. The photo taken at that time became the cover of Huang Deng's new book "Home Visits".

Huang Deng's original title of the book was "China in Home Visits". "Home visits are just a perspective, and we can take this opportunity to go into rural China and do home visits on the land." Because most of the students come from rural areas, this five-year home visit allowed Huang Deng to understand the true appearance and change process of China's rural areas, as well as the hard work and struggle of many rural post-70s generations. In an interview with Noon, Huang Deng recounted the parents she met during her home visit and the poignant stories behind them, as well as reminiscing about her childhood and upbringing.

Moms who are "not afraid of how hard it is".

Huang Deng's mothers of the students he met during the home visit all had backgrounds from all over the world, such as Yuansheng's mother from Guangxi, Xiaojing's mother from Jiangxi, Zaoliang's mother and Wei Hua's mother from Sichuan, and Zhengmin's mother from Vietnam. They share a similar life trajectory: they left their hometowns, went to Guangdong to work, and became one of the "foreign daughters-in-law" in Guangdong. As an outpost of China's reform and opening up, Guangdong has attracted a large number of immigrants. Many girls from rural areas in Sichuan, Jiangxi, Yunnan and Hunan came to the Pearl River Delta and embarked on the road of marrying abroad. Their marriage bears a strong mark of the times.

Jungmin's mother's experience is the most tortuous. Zhang Zhengmin was born in 1996, and her mother was a "Vietnamese bride" who was trafficked to the mountains of western Guangdong. "Stay up" is her belief in life. In order to lead her children out of the mountains and receive education, she insisted on buying a house in the town despite Zhengmin's father's obstruction. "I hope that my family will have a place to live, a place to be protected from wind and rain, and then plan for the rest."

In 2018, at Guangdong F College, when Huang Deng and Zhengmin's mother met, they talked about the details of building a house. Zhengmin's mother still remembers any expenses she spent on buying bricks, cement, and steel bars, and remembers that she followed the wall masonry next door to learn the process of digging the foundation, cement, and building the wall inch by inch. "I made the whole house myself." The house was halfway done, there was no money to build a roof, she disregarded the limit of physical strength, chose to go out to pack waste paper, worked day and night for two months, in exchange for 5,000 yuan, after the roof was installed, the house was finally completed.

Jeongmin said, "Mom is too hard", but Mom said, "I'm not afraid of how hard it is". After leaving Jeongmin's father, because she had no "identity", she had to engage in casual work and other high-intensity, uncertain occupations, and never had a consistent and stable job. "I gave birth to a child, no matter how hard it is, I will bring the child up, and wherever I go, I will not leave the two children behind. Speaking of the situation of being sold to Yangchun, Guangdong, she said repeatedly, "There is no way, two children have to be raised." ”

Thanks to his mother's wise decision to build a house on his own, Jeong-min was able to escape the long journey to school every day and receive an education in the town, and his life changed. With the encouragement of Huang Deng, Zhengmin wrote "My Mother is a Vietnamese bride bought for 2,800 yuan". It was because of this widely circulated article that Mom finally gained legal status.

Huang Lan also impressed Xiaojing's mother. Xiaojing's mother, who has a strong personality, is always not understood, from her peers in the village, daughters-in-law from other places, elderly mothers-in-law and grandmothers to her husband, they don't understand her, and even her daughter Xiaojing has a misunderstanding, thinking that "my mother is too strong and easy to have conflicts with the neighbors around her." When she encountered the yellow light, she seemed to have met a bosom friend. Huang Deng clearly felt that Xiaojing's mother "For so many years, it seems that she has finally waited for someone to talk to her, and poured out all her most secret mental journey from going out to work to marrying." ”

Xiaojing's mother is from the countryside of Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, because of the poverty of her family, as the eldest daughter, she went to Shenzhen to pan for gold, and even lived in a cemetery. Diligent and intelligent, she had several opportunities to improve, but due to lack of knowledge and courage, she finally went to rural Guangdong to get married and have children. She was very unwilling, and started from the smallest things in the village: picking tea, taking care of the children, and looking for every opportunity to make money. She wants her children to have a better education and more opportunities. In the eyes of Huang Deng, Xiaojing's mother "is middle-aged, but still full of vitality, I can feel at a glance the loneliness and unwillingness that only my peers can understand. ”

The energetic post-70s

Huang Deng found that many parents' mothers had similar experiences: they went south to work and met their husbands, and returned to the countryside with them. For example, Xiaojing's mother and Zaoliang's mother no longer go out after marriage and no longer run around. After marrying in Guangdong for 20 years, Zaoliang's mother only returned to her parents' home three times, and her father never set foot in her mother's hometown. I went back to Sichuan three times, once to celebrate my mother's birthday, once to marry my eldest daughter, and once to marry my second daughter.

Huang Lan lamented that between Sichuan and other inland provinces and Guangdong, there are many ordinary families with the migration and fate of two generations. Whether it's marriage, family planning policies, or education and career choices, as long as they are in an era of rapid change, any one factor is enough to affect their lives.

The first time I saw Luo Zaoliang's mother, Huang Deng remembered that she was wearing a pink-purple padded vest, with an extremely sweet smile, without the sorrow and vicissitudes of hard work. However, when Zao Liang's mother talked about the details of eating sweet potatoes in her childhood, Huang Deng suddenly remembered her eldest sister. The scarcity of that era was not a special case of one family, but a common mark of the times.

Huang Deng said that after her eldest sister got married, she returned to her hometown town with her brother-in-law, and experienced many livelihoods such as laid-off, feeding pigs, running small businesses, running transportation, and making sweet wine. Except that raising children is a little less than that of Zaoliang's mother, all other aspects are extremely similar. "No matter what reality throws us on, we can always overcome the odds and stand up in different places. He Jian's mother, Lin Xiaojing's mother, and Zao Liang's mother are the same...... Experiencing the transition from the 80s to the 90s of the last century, no matter how barren it was, no matter what challenges it encountered, the vigorous years of our adolescence were injected into our young lives as a common spiritual force. ”

Huang Lan lamented that many of the parents he met during the home visit were often more powerful than their children. For example, Luo Changliang's mother always said "I'm not afraid", Lin Xiaojing's mother said "it's actually nothing", Li Zongtao's father applied for an intangible cultural heritage inheritor, and the relevant departments stopped him, so he said "Lao Tzu made it". "Sure enough, it's a group of fierce people. Huang Lan sighed. This generation is full of vitality and a great sense of strength. Perhaps it is because the growth of this generation coincides with China's continuous integration into the world, and the era of vigorous economic development is full of opportunities.

Huang Deng's college classmates were in a similar situation. "There were very few college students in that class who had a bad time, and it was quite different from now." Most of them stayed in Yueyang's institutional units, except for Huang Deng and another classmate who were assigned to the factory and were later forced to leave their jobs due to the vigorous wave of layoffs. That classmate went south to Huizhou, Guangdong, engaged in software development, and with the spirit of daring to fight, he now manages many students who graduated from famous universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University. Huang Deng adjusted his state, participated in the graduate school entrance examination, and became a university teacher until now.

"If you are alive, you will have a head, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Speaking of being laid off that year, Huang Deng said that he was not depressed at the time, "I can't say that there is no impact at all, but you don't feel hopeless about your future, let alone feel insulted by your personality." ”

"They are the last generation of traditional Chinese families"

In the past few years, the home visits have brought Huang Lantern back to the bustling past tense of China, where there is no estrangement between family members. I went to the student's house several times, just in time for the Chinese New Year, and the whole family got together. "In the students' home, I was like my own home, they didn't treat me as an outsider, and I felt like I had traveled back in time to my own home. At that time, there were so many people in our family who sat down to eat together. Referring to the lively scene during the home visit, Huang Lan recalled many details of the life of the extended family.

The first change in her life was junior high school, before which Huang Deng had grown up with her grandmother and lived a relatively quiet life. In 1987, when she was in junior high school, she returned to her parents. At that time, my mother was not yet 40 years old, and there were 4 children and 4 elderly people at home. There are also brothers in my father's family, all supported by my parents and parents, and the pressure on family survival is huge.

Suddenly entering a large family of dozens of people eating together, the yellow light is very unaccustomed. During the Chinese New Year, children scurry around like horses. She has no privacy, and no one will take care of her emotions at all times. For a long time, she could not get used to the atmosphere of the house. She also felt that her parents were partial to her younger brother and only fried eggs for her younger brother. Angry, she went to fry eggs herself, and complained to her mother that "you are not fair". When she grew up, she realized that it was not her parents who were partial, but in fact, her younger brother's health was not very good at that time and he needed more care.

Huang Deng said with a smile that growing up in the countryside is not easy, and there will be many dangers. In the summer, she always wants to swim in the river and catch fish, but the depth of the river is difficult to control, and it is easy to slip, and she is almost washed away by the water several times. The canal in front of the house leads directly to the reservoir, but the time for the upstream gate to open and release water is not fixed. Once she was playing in a canal, and the water suddenly enlarged on it, which washed her away. When she was about to rush to the reservoir, fortunately she was blocked by the bushes, and her mother came to scoop her up. Once she went up to the mountain with her grandmother to pick tea and found a snake. Fortunately, she remembered what her grandmother said, and when she encountered a snake, she had to take an S shape, so she escaped the catastrophe.

"These dangerous experiences made the children of that era more realistic. Huang Deng believes that growing up in a family with many children is actually a good thing. Such a family structure will make the child's character stronger and more resilient. Observing the lives of many young people, she said that the disproportionate attention endured by an only child is actually a form of oppression and violence. "No one cares, but it's free and happy. Today's children are losing because of "lack of vitality", and today's exam-oriented education has become a chronic inflammation.

Thankfully, parents attach great importance to their education. She said that when Dad was 26 years old, he already had four children, and as long as the children were together, there was not a day when they did not fight. And Dad himself is still young, he has to play, he likes to play cards, and his personality is impatient, so he can only teach them a simple and rough method. But parents never insult them personally. "My father's principle is that you can't hit a child, you can hit it once. Every year before the start of school, we will be beaten once, the four brothers and sisters knelt on the ground, one by one to count the things that they usually do not do well, and beat us with a bullwhip, now I think about it is a tutoring scene. ”

Huang Lantern also brought up some interesting facts. Because my mother had to sew and make clothes with others, and my father had to teach, the second sister, who had no one to take her, went to school at the age of 4. Once when she came back from school, she hung her schoolbag on the pigpen, and the pig gnawed it all.

Huang Deng said that her mother is a person who is anxious and not meticulous, but her advantage is that she can't see others suffering, and she is very kind and generous. She often said, "I think about myself in the first half of the night, and I must think about others in the second half of the night." Fathers, on the other hand, never make realistic demands on their children, such as how much money they make, what kind of house they live in, and what kind of university they go to.

About his father, Huang Lan remembers a small thing. In the 90s, she worked in Yueyang, and her unit was very close to the Dongting Lake Bridge under construction. Every few months, when her father came to visit her, he had to check on the progress of the bridge. It takes two or three hours to take a car from my hometown to Yueyang, and the fare is more than a dozen yuan back and forth. He stayed in Yueyang for one night, just to see the Dongting Lake Bridge, from site selection, foundation laying, construction to the final completion, he followed all over again. He may be more concerned about the progress of the bridge than the leaders, but he is only a village teacher, and he thinks this matter is important. ”

Huang Deng said that the emotional structure, sense of family responsibility and sense of big family consciousness of the post-70s generation are no different from those of their parents. She once wrote in the book: "They are the last generation of traditional Chinese families. ”

Why is the new generation so different?

In the summer of 2018, Huang Deng finished writing "My Second Student". She didn't expect that the world would suffer huge changes due to the epidemic after that. The three-year epidemic has almost frozen the channel for young people to find jobs. Because of the sharp depreciation of diplomas, it is becoming more and more difficult to find a job, even children from key universities are difficult to find jobs, and diplomas from secondary and vocational colleges are not "valuable".

Huang Deng, born in the 70s, has been in contact with many post-80s, post-90s and even post-00s college students in classroom teaching and after-class interviews. In her opinion, on the whole, post-80s students are relatively more determined, and they will have a certain expectation when they go to university - "the job is there". The 2006 students described in "My Second Student" did not have a single student in the class who was admitted to graduate school. Eight years after graduation, 27 of the more than 40 students in the class stayed in the Pearl River Delta, and most of them bought houses. At that time, it was easy to stay in a first-tier city and settle down for employment.

Four years later, when she became a homeroom teacher for the second time, she found that the more students used electronic devices, the more separation she had from her students. In contrast, these post-90s generations are more willing to communicate with friends of the same frequency. Some students made it clear that "the post-90s generation does not pay attention to what the post-70s generation is thinking". Huang Deng noticed that before the "double reduction" rectification, a large number of education and training institutions used to be an important employment method for students. Today, when employment is becoming more and more difficult, post-90s students are beginning to consider whether returning to the countryside means new possibilities.

After meeting his peers in the 70s during home visits, Huang Lan "became more confident in China's future." You see the real world, which is completely different from what you see in WeChat or the information world. For example, the infrastructure in Mo Yuansheng's village is still very poor, very closed, unable to go out, and low income. If you live in the "WeChat world", many people feel that the world is going to be finished. "In fact, most people's lives are interesting, and I feel that very much. ”

Walking on the land of China, Huang Lan finally realized that "in the consideration of education, it has always been my urgent and direct desire to let children achieve worldly success and happiness." But at the same time, I know that this is precisely my limitation as a teacher, and it is also the deepest emptiness in my heart. ”

Home Visit, Yellow Light, People's Literature Publishing House, 2024-2, ISBN: 9787020184262

-- END --

The author is Chen Zhenfang, a reporter from Jiemian News.

Image courtesy of the interviewee.