Text: Yingshui tired guest
From my memory to the time I was in elementary school, I spent almost every day in the square below the ancestral hall rolling hoops and playing glass pinball with a few people on the iron egg tether pillar. There is also a game called "hopscotch", which is to draw a simple floor plan on the ground similar to today's three bedrooms and one living room, we have to jump between rooms and rooms, and the rules of the game are not to step on the line. Thirty years later, when I came to Shenzhen, faced with a housing price of more than 20,000 yuan per square meter, I could only look at the floor plans of those houses on real estate advertisements and sigh, and I couldn't help but think of my childhood games.
We will also have unexpected rewards while playing games in the square. Because the ancestral hall of the commune or the ancestral hall commune has all kinds of people coming to do business every day, the most common are young men and women who come to the commune to register their marriages. At the end of the 70s, when China had just emerged from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, it was still a situation of poverty and whiteness, and the common people did not have much money in their hands, and the largest banknote at that time was 10 yuan with a sketch of "Workers, Peasants and Soldiers United Forward", which could buy 13 catties of pork, but even if you had money, you couldn't buy meat, because pork was supplied by ticket, and it was useless without a meat ticket. At that time, people were really helpless, buying meat for meat tickets (not the kidnapper's), buying rice for food stamps, buying oil for oil tickets, buying cloth for cloth tickets, tickets flying all over the sky, Chinese clothes only monotonous blue, gray and yellow hues, so the newlyweds at that time were also very plain in dress. Despite this, we can still tell from the words and deeds of the men and women who come to do the work whether they are here to get the certificate. At that time, how could young men and women have the hot demeanor of the hipsters in the 21st century, hooking shoulders and hugging can only be the madness of male and female spies in the movie, newlywed young men and women in real life are very shy, they keep their distance all the way, if they are leaving, whispering, passers-by look at them more, and the woman immediately blushes.
Our harvest lies in the fact that these newlyweds who come to go through the formalities have to distribute the joy candy no matter how to go through the procedures for the wedding wedding, so we can grab the joy candy to eat every time. Moreover, Tiedan's father is the secretary of the commune, and he specializes in this, so we naturally get the moon first near the water. When we were playing in the square, as long as we saw a pair of young men and women with twisted expressions walking towards the ancestral hall, we would follow them and run to the office of the iron egg. Tiedan's father is not big, but he dresses very carefully, and often wears a crisp black tweed uniform in winter. We saw that the hand stretched out from the sleeve of his black tweed was very white, very different from the rough fingers of the usual commonplace farmer. After the white hands stamped the bright red official seal on the marriage certificate, they said "congratulations" with a smile, and the newlyweds hurriedly offered the candy, of course, they would not forget those of us who had been waiting for a long time; the groom would take out a handful of candy from the canvas bag that was leaning on his back and throw it at us, and as the candy crackled and fell to the ground, we began to scramble, like a group of greedy monkeys.
In those years of suffering, a piece of cheap candy brought happiness to rural children is unimaginable to today's children! Therefore, I am very grateful to my ancestors for leaving us an ancestral hall, which can usher in a couple of new couples at the same time, but also make a child's childhood sweet and happy!
The atmosphere of the ancestral hall is not only festive, sometimes angry, sometimes sad. Its anger is due to the anger of the top and second leaders: A handful of lawless elements wantonly sabotage the excellent situation in the agricultural village, buy and sell, and do those speculative things! When those speculators were escorted to the high platform outside the gate of the ancestral hall and faced the thousands of poor middle peasants in the square, the whole square was boiling. The slogan of "Down with the speculators" resounded in the sky. The father of the pillar is also in the ranks of the opportunists who are being beaten because of the sale of wood. He was tied up with three or four of his kind, with a black wooden sign hanging on his chest, on which were written three eye-catching white chalk characters of "Zhang Wenyuan", and there was a huge and shocking cross on the word. Tie Dan and I watched the shackle father's face withered and tossed to death in the audience, and our hearts were extremely frightened!
Whoever wants to make a fortune by buying and selling can only be a dead end! If you want to blame them for being born in the wrong era, more than 30 years later, in Shenzhen, the streets are full of speculative and upside down elements who are full of ambition and full of ambition! Who would have thought that it was illegal to do business many years ago, and countless seniors were imprisoned because of this!
The atmosphere of the ancestral hall was also sad at one time. It was September 1976, on a golden autumn day, a shocking news reached our small mountain village with a high mountain emperor: Chairman Mao has passed away!
I didn't know what "death" meant, but adults explained that death is the death of a person. I have seen the scene of people dying, and there have been old people in our village who have died, and my understanding of death is that people can never wake up after closing their eyes, and then they are put into red lacquer coffins and buried in the loess, and their children and grandchildren are wearing linen and wearing filial piety and crying to the heavens and the earth. How could Chairman Mao die? In my memory, he was like a god! His portrait hung in the halls of every house, and his quotations were written on paper and on the wall. On the wall of my house, there are 10 big characters "Long live the great Mao Zedong Thought!", each of which is the same size as me at that time, and on the back of my small bamboo chair, there are also five crooked characters carved by a carpenter with a knife, "Long live Chairman Mao!", and the first characters I knew were also the three characters "Chairman Mao". All this tells me: Chairman Mao is our most amiable and respectable person! Now such a person will never wake up again after closing his eyes! He will also be buried in a coffin in the loess? Somehow, I also felt very sad at that time! Although I have never met this person, he is both familiar and strange!
The sky above the ancestral hall was covered with gloomy clouds, the grass and trees were sad, and the wind and clouds changed color, and the cadres of the commune began to organize everyone to hold one memorial service after another. In the evening, the only nine-inch black-and-white television set in the whole commune was invited out and placed on a table in the square outside the ancestral hall, and the central government's memorial meeting for Comrade Mao Zedong was being broadcast on television. Chairman Mao was lying in a transparent crystal coffin, covered with the party flag, and his face was as peaceful as sleeping. The picture flashed, Comrade Hua Guofeng and Chairman Mao's relatives shook hands one by one, and when Jiang Qing wearing a black veil was played, the voiceover explained: "Comrade Mao Zedong's lover, Comrade Jiang Qing, is very sad!"
"A lover is a pot maker!" The young officer at the scene didn't know how to explain it, so he had to answer with the local common name for his daughter-in-law, "the pot burner".
Chairman Mao passed away, leaving behind 800 million people and a poor and white country, and US imperialism and the Soviet Union and Lao Revision were eyeing each other.
In any case, life still has to go on, but fortunately, there is Chairman Hua, who adheres to Chairman Mao's supreme instruction of "I can rest assured that you can do things" to lead the people to continue to move forward.
The standard portrait of Chairman Hua began to enter the folk thatched cottage, and the cable radio in the village house began to broadcast songs such as "Dear Chairman Hua, we love you", and the source of these songs came from the commune radio room in the ancestral hall. That cable radio was just a loudspeaker, and the commune assembled it from house to house, and the common people could not afford it. It is said that when China and Japan established diplomatic relations in 1975, Prime Minister Nakasone talked about Japan's war reparations during World War II, and proposed to let several Japanese electronics industry giants compensate each of China's 200 million families with a semiconductor radio, but Premier Zhou Enlai refused, on the grounds that our radio factory would go bankrupt.
Life seems to be getting better.
Then came Deng Xiaoping's comeback, putting things in order, class struggle was no longer the key link, and the central government put forward the "four modernizations." The adults said: The days are a little hopeful!
The days are good, and the New Year is also enjoyable. During the first month, the villagers began to organize and carry out festivities such as lion dance, dragon lantern play, dry boat rowing, and stilt walking. From the thirtieth day of the lunar month to the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the ancestral hall has been lit up with lights, and I am particularly impressed by the two yarn lanterns, the pink veil and the bright red tassels, the light shines out from the lantern through the veil, and the whole ancestral hall is shrouded in an auspicious and peaceful colorful clouds. On the square, the lion dance and dragon lantern dance performances are in full swing, the villagers help the old and the young to surround the three layers of the outside three layers, at that time, the fireworks are gradually appearing, from time to time there are "magic bullets" and "flowers" and so on screaming and flying to the night sky, looking for the explosion immediately, reflecting half of the sky brilliant and brilliant. The rower is a young man named Zhang Zhipeng, who is versatile and proficient in blowing, playing and singing. I can only hear him sing: "The commune is an evergreen vine, the members are all sunny flowers, every family loves the commune, everyone loves it, and the seeds of happiness have sprouted......"
In the latter part of my childhood, because of the close proximity to the commune, I would enjoy such a visual feast once a year on New Year's Day. However, the society was progressing, the times were developing, the commune's institutions were expanding day by day, and the old ancestral hall gradually could not meet the needs of the modern township, and finally one day, the commune, which had built a new office building in the town, moved out of the ancestral hall.
On the day the commune moved, I also helped a lot behind those blue cadres in uniforms, people are emotional animals, staying in one place for a long time, often will miss the old, these commune cadres with a very superior sense of superiority to me, the children they watched grow up, suddenly became kind, some even gave me a pile of carbon paper, Zhu squad leader gave me a wooden pistol, looking at their distant figures and the empty house in my ancestral hall, I had a feeling of loss for the first time in my heart.
The commune moved away, and the ancestral hall without the two signs of "Tangchi People's Commune" and "Tangchi Town Party Committee" looked depressed. It is no longer a "commune" where people come and go, can it be turned back into an ancestral hall?
Of course it can't be! The ancestral hall was given to the township-run middle school as a teacher's house, so more than a dozen stinky old nine people who had just taken off their rightist hats dragged their daughters to live in the place where our ancestors used to enjoy fireworks. After another three or five years, the stinky old nine people who turned over the salted fish began to dislike the old ancestral hall, at this time the reform and opening up has begun, the "four modernizations" have achieved initial results, the local financial departments with bulging pockets have come up with money to build dormitories for the people's teachers, and the ancestral hall was demolished overnight, replaced by modern brick houses.
Sadly, joyful, and the world's poor people have more than 10 mansions, but they are pitiful for the ancestral hall with a history of hundreds of years, the ancestral hall with three courtyards, the ancestral hall with the cornices and corners, the ancestral hall with carved beams and painted buildings, the ancestral hall of the Hui school building, and the ancestral hall with a magnificent momentum like a small palace, which have disappeared from people's field of vision forever! At that time, I had already moved to another city with my parents to live, and after hearing about this, the ancestral hall of my childhood once frequently fell into dreams! In the days when I gradually grew up, the back of the ancestral hall was extremely desolate and repeatedly appeared in my memory!
With the passage of an era, an ancestral hall that has gone through hundreds of years of wind and rain has become its burial! In a few decades, will anyone still know that there was once an ancestral hall with such an identity and ups and downs of fate?
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