On March 31, 2024, in Shanggaoling Village, Ekou Town, Dai County, Shanxi Province, photographer Cai Shanhai came across Zhang Fuqing's courtyard. (Cai Shanhai/Photo)
The most special old man in Shanggaoling Village is gone.
Zhang Fuqing, who is seventy-eight years old, is an authentic Shanxi farmer, with a broad head and a stocky nose. Diabetes has made him shy away from sweets. The heart covered by the navy blue tunic had already crossed the bridge twice. In order to protect the blood vessels, pork is also eaten sparingly.
Aging constantly challenges him, but Mr. Zhang Fuqing has a lovely heart that does not match his age. For more than 20 years, in the courtyard at the entrance of the village, he was like a child who had just learned to use a pen, writing more than 10,000 words on the door beam, red bricks and the white wall of the ear room.
Zhang Fuqing's favorite word is "la". "I'm 71!", "I'm 74!", or "The toilet is out of water in late spring!", he also likes "yes" and "yes". He appealed at Menliang and said that he longed for Kashgar in Xinjiang, "At the age of 77, will Zhang Fuqing be able to go and see it?" He turned his head and wrote on the wall, "How big is the universe? The surface temperature of the sun is 6,000 degrees, the center is 15 million degrees, the volume is 1.3 million times that of the earth, and the weight of the earth is 330,000 times. It takes 20 years for the plane to fly to the sun. The Moon is one-forty-eighth the size of the Earth and has 200 billion stars. ”
However, in Gaoling Village, Ekou Town, Dai County, Shanxi, most people can't touch that cute, squeaky heart.
The villagers only know that the old Fuqing man, who likes to wear Mao suits, will go to the "Serving the People" photo wall at the entrance of the village, and sit with the old men on a few blackened sponge cushions to bask in the sun and pass the time. At five o'clock in the afternoon, the old man had to go home, lock the door, and take care of his wife, who was mentally ill.
As for what the old man Fuqing did to the wall at home, not many people cared. Aging has occupied this village in northern Jinbei, and the silent old people don't even care about themselves: the food is extremely simple, buy a big bag of fritters, and constantly soak in white water, you can deal with it all day. There are 306 young people living in the village or in the county seat, and only a handful are under the age of 50. The only thing that matters to the old people is to welcome death peacefully.
On March 31, 2024, Mr. Zhang Fuqing passed away his life. A passing photographer took a picture of the words he wrote on the wall and posted it on the Internet, this yard that no one cared about, the old man who no one cared about, suddenly became so special.
On April 13, 2024, the door beam of the house appealed to express his yearning for Kashgar. (Su Youpeng/Photo)
Father's prose poems
"At the age of 77, Fuqing is perfect. ”
The name "Shangaoling" makes it easy for people to wonder if there is an ancient tomb nearby. When the weather is good, you can see the remnants of Wutai Mountain in the south of the village, and the low vegetation looks like a layer of light green flannel in the sun. At the foot of the mountain is a flat, vast field where people sow seeds and grow corn, millet or flax, giving the whole land a sense of order. Except for the trucks selling vegetables entering the village, at other times, Shanggaoling Village is surprisingly quiet.
On the last day of March, photographer Cai Shanhai passed by here on his way to Yanmen Pass. A family at the entrance of the village is holding a funeral, and on the lintel, there are two conspicuous blue cranes. Entering the door, the word "Fu" is inlaid on the wall, and there are four lines of calligraphy characters in its own style, asking "how big is the universe". The courtyard is surrounded by houses on three sides, and under the south wall, the branches of two apricot trees stretch wantonly in the air, and the shape of the trees is quite zen.
This is Zhang Fuqing's triple courtyard, which is Zhang Fuqing's funeral.
From the point of view of the system, it is not a triple courtyard in the strict sense, and the west house is just a small bungalow stacked with farm tools. The main house was not imposing enough, and the roof seemed to have been cut in half. In the middle of the courtyard, the owner deliberately vacated a large piece of cultivated land with gray floor tiles, and in autumn, the soil will be full of red girl fruit like lanterns, and the door beams and red brick walls around it are also covered with calligraphy.
Cai Shanhai excerpted part of the text on social media:
"After the apricot blossoms fall fruit, the fruit is cut at a distance of four to five inches, and the fruit is far away. ”
"At the age of 77, Fuqing is perfect. ”
On the twelfth day of the first month of 2017, 71-year-old Fuqing and Maochuan went to Fanzhi Xinglong Hotel to take a bath and found a gold necklace worth 5,800 yuan, which was found by the owner the next day. ”
"The two sons went their separate ways, and they were more than 400 kilometers away from us. The two of us were recuperating at home, and our two sons were supporting our living expenses to celebrate our old age. When his father died, the two sons wrote an essay to remember their father and put it in the glass frame of the main wall of the main landlord's hall. ”
A netizen borrowed a lyric and commented: "This is the text in my father's diary, this is the prose poem left by his life."
In a village in northwestern Shanxi, surrounded by iron ore, the Ehe River and corn, Zhang Fuqing uses timeless calligraphy to construct a spectacle, a world as unique as he is, on red bricks, white walls and dark brown wood.
Believing that "basalt mines are a national treasure more expensive than gold", and the way he figured out how to get rich was to "feed 8 to 10 adult pigs in two circles", he copied at least three earthworks to treat diabetes, high blood pressure and colds, one of which recommended taking dried banana peels directly.
However, the old man's best knowledge is still related to crops, he is familiar with the treatment of apricot tree leaf curling disease, see "apricot blossom falling", to fight caterpillar medicine, enoki needs to be watered five times before picking, and the secret of making crops thrive is "a flat car chicken manure".
His curiosity about plants surpassed that of most rural elders, and he once transplanted wild jujube trees into his yard and told his nephew Zhang Jiping that he wanted to observe the growth of the trees.
"Ji Ping", in Zhang Fuqing's writing, in addition to his wife and children, the person who appears most frequently. He lived next door and helped the old man with a lot of chores, including blocking the pigsty door and framing articles, and the old man once gave him a piece of land, which was written on the wall. However, when someone asked Zhang Jiping if he remembered when his name first appeared, he could only scratch his head and smile.
In the last few years of his life, Zhang Fuqing's persistence in two things made him a spectacle in the eyes of the villagers.
This old man in a tunic appeared at the construction site of the highway construction, appeared at the construction site of digging the river, and once, when a tunnel was to be dug near Wutai Mountain, he stuffed a pack of cigarettes into the village driver, Han Baocang, and asked him to take him to the construction site. He also tried to figure out how the EPB worked. The villagers commented that he was very good at talking, but in his words, he was "asking for advice".
In Zhang Fuqing's world of wonders, there is a lot of foreign knowledge, which is likely the result of frequent visits to the construction site to talk.
In 2026, Hohhot and Xiong'an will have high-speed railways through Xinzhou, write it down, widen the section from Shahe to Xinkou of National Highway 108, write it down, and write it down "three verticals, twelve horizontal and twelve rings" - this word is used to describe Shanxi's highway planning, he may not know that in 2021, the latest expression has become "four vertical, fifteen horizontal and thirty-three".
The road can lead to the city he yearns for the most, which is Kashgar, Xinjiang. The old man was deeply influenced by his eldest son, Zhang Honggang, who believed that by 2030, the opening of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway would make Kashgar a major city in Asia. He instructed his son to go to Kashgar to "attract more villagers to develop together".
It may also stem from the variety of books on his shelves, apparently from before the 2000s: "What is a Socialist Market Economy", "Commodity Knowledge", "Modern Etiquette", "Reading Life", "Roland's Whispers", "Getting Ahead", and so on.
As for the other thing he insisted on, starting at the age of 55, it took 23 years to repair the old house. Before he died, the old man had just asked people to spray paint the color steel tiles in the east room.
On April 13, 2024, Zhang Fuqing spent 23 years repairing the house, the main house. (Su Youpeng/Photo)
"He's so lonely"
The old man wrote down the arrangements for the future on a wooden board and stuffed it into the longevity. Six years later, his father died, and Zhang Hong just found out.
Zhang Fuqing spent most of his life planting corn on 6 acres of land.
When the juniors in the village talk about him, they use the words "straightforward" and "respectable". Older people know that Zhang Fuqing was still an adventurer, and in the 1980s, he tried to break into the fledgling commodity economy, the high-spirited young man, riding a bicycle and carrying chili peppers, to Taiyuan, 200 kilometers away, to do business.
He planted the seed of the first red girl in the village, and in the autumn, Zhang Honggang pulled the fruit to Inner Mongolia to sell.
However, like most farmers who depend on the weather for food, the adventure is only an episode of a lifetime. Birth, marriage, child-rearing, and death, the important life nodes of the old man are all spent in the house.
The old mansion not only witnessed his life, but also witnessed the rise and fall and migration of the family. The Zhang family made a fortune in business in Shanyin County, and after moving here, they purchased a large amount of land. According to the words on his father's wall, later generations estimated that the time when the house was built was far before 1905, which was the year Zhang Fuqing's father was born. In 1947, Zhang Fuqing was born, received private school education, and practiced a small brush with a hand.
In the special years that followed, the Zhang family was forced to give up the large amount of land they had purchased. As an adult, Zhang Fuqing inherited the courtyard from his father, inherited the bricks and tiles, but had to destroy it.
In Shanxi, the walls, tiles, and beams of the house all flow with an ancient temperament about clan, bloodline, and rank. "The upper kiln is respected, and the inverted seat is the guest", the functional setting of each room also has a complex cultural system behind it.
In the old days, the northern part of Jin was a border pass, and although the dwellings were simple, they also had many characteristics. According to the research of Wang Jinping, a professor at Taiyuan University of Technology, most of the roofs of the houses in northern Shanxi Province are quail eaves with long front slopes and short back slopes. There is no trace of the house in front of me, and the herringbone roof has been remodeled a long time ago, and now only half of the slope remains.
One of the reasons for the remodeling is money. Zhang Fuqing's first relationship ended in divorce. By the 1970s, the eldest son Zhang Honggang was less than a year old, and his second wife died. At the end of the 1980s, in order to take care of the family, 43-year-old Zhang Fuqing made three trips to Jintang County, Sichuan, married his third wife Du Zhongxiu, and gave birth to his second son Zhang Hongying.
Zhang Hongying heard from her uncle and grandfather in her hometown in Sichuan that Du Zhongxiu had a serious illness after she was born, and her parents preferred sons over daughters and decided to give up treatment. Uncle and grandfather saw her pitiful, gave up the prepared marriage, and took care of Du Zhongxiu for 8 years. When Du Zhongxiu was in her teens, her parents asked her daughter back to find her in-law's house.
Zhang Hongying attributed her birth to a very simple beginning: "Men want to find a woman, and women want to find a man." ”
But for Zhang Fuqing at that time, all this was not easy, he chose to demolish the west house of the ancestral house and sell wood, Zhang Honggang remembered that "it was sold for 900 yuan". According to tradition, the west room was originally to be left to the second son.
As for the east room left for the eldest son, it was demolished before Zhang Hong was born.
Zhang Honggang, who wears glasses and has the same broad forehead as his father, lives in Ordos and talks to his father every day. The conversation between the two was irregular, and sometimes, when I got up at 7 o'clock, I had to talk to my father for 5 minutes, and most of the time I had to talk for 30 minutes. Zhang Honggang cares about the distance as much as his father, he has done a business in Chinese herbal medicines, and since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, he has paid special attention to the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, "The licorice produced in Central Asia is very cheap".
Zhang Honggang reminded visitors many times to understand his father's state of mind when he wrote. He pointed to the back of the wall: "My father started to renovate the yard at the age of 55, 'It took 16 years to build, with 100,000 red bricks and an expenditure of more than 70,000 yuan, and he is 71 years old!'" He pointed to the symbols on the wall with his hand, "Look at this exclamation mark, he was full of affection at the time." Because he has been taking medicine all his life and is not in a good financial situation, he is very careful about the house and spends a long time repairing it."
But Zhang Fuqing's state of mind when he wrote, I'm afraid that no one really understands.
The villagers had barely seen how he wrote on the wall, and he seemed to be living a different kind of isolated life in the courtyard. Zhang Jiping, who was closest to him, could hear one of the few movements in winter, when Zhang Fuqing got up early to make charcoal and burn the stove. At noon, he would go out in the sun. But the old guy who sat with him under "Serving the People" had a hard time telling him anything interesting.
Zhang Hongying believes that more than 50 years ago, he helped the village write a lot of slogans, and now the words on the wall of the house are the memories of writing the old slogans, which emerge in his father's head.
But the old people in the village don't explain it that way. Mr. Zhang's neighbor, a 75-year-old lady, had seen him write in someone else's yard. "Why do you want to write? My wife is mentally ill, and my two sons are not around, and he is so lonely. ”
Both sons went further than their father, who went to Taiyuan when he was young. Zhang Honggang went to Inner Mongolia in 1997. Around 2013, Zhang Hongying went to Beijing. The only wife who was by his side suffered from schizophrenia and was extremely emotionally unstable at the time of the onset.
Zhang Honggang feels that there are more and more words on the wall, after 2017. That year, Zhang Honggang's mother-in-law died suddenly, which made Zhang Fuqing "very shocked", and the next year, the old man spent 4,600 yuan to buy two longevity materials and put them in the main house.
In October of that year, the old man wrote down the arrangements for the future on a wooden board and stuffed it into the longevity.
Six years later, his father died, and Zhang Hong just found out.
In October 2018, Zhang Fuqing wrote down his arrangements for his future on a wooden board. (Su Youpeng/Photo)
Aging villages
In order to save electricity, the old people had to turn off the lights and go to bed at 8 o'clock, and the old houses fell into thick darkness in an instant.
The most magnificent building in Shanggaoling Village is a temple on the edge of a wheat field, surrounded by two roads, connecting Fanzhi County, eight miles away, and Ekou Town, five miles away. One afternoon in mid-April 2024, the sand and gravel were flying in the wind and the light green mountains in the distance became dark. Farmers plough the land against the wind and sand, and the black flock of birds is suspended in the air in a circle. Look more closely, the flickering figure in the sand curtain has an aging figure.
Luo Xiaolong, a professor at Nanjing University's School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has long been concerned about urbanization, and his last visit to rural Shanxi was in 2018, when he found that the proportion of elderly people in rural areas was higher than a decade ago.
This also put pressure on Xu Aijun, who is the secretary of the village branch of Gaoling Village and was elected in 2020. Xu Aijun once wanted to develop organic farming in the village, but he couldn't push it. At the age of 53, he is a junior for many villagers.
Most of the disputes handled by Xu Aijun need to understand the position of the elderly: the courtyard wall of a family is about to fall, and based on the different terrain, it is necessary to pile up the maintenance materials in the yard next door, and the elderly neighbors will not easily agree; when sowing seeds, the best solution may be to give some of their own land to the other party, but this is not the style of the elderly, they will dig up all the seeds they have sown.
Xu Aijun understands all this very well. His mother lived in the house of her childhood, the eaves collapsed into an arc, and she was reluctant to go to the county seat to live with her son.
Xu Aijun has seen many nights in Gaoling Village, in a village eroded by aging, there is no nightlife, in order to save electricity, the old people have to turn off the lights at 8 o'clock to sleep, and the old houses instantly fell into thick darkness, and the traces of decay on the house were also hidden by the way.
The old people live a silent and boring life, and in the sunset stage of life, the most important thing they think about is not to burden their children. They all said that they were unwilling to go to Daixian, Fanzhi, Taiyuan and live with their children, and they would not explain the reasons endlessly, but would only use the simplest description: "Not free, inconvenient." ”
The old people may have something to talk about, after all, they have to help each other. Han Baocang, who often carries Zhang Fuqing, is actually over 70 years old, and the old people often take his Jetta car to the hospital in the town and county to get medicine.
However, there are also business opportunities with aging. Zhang Huping, a native of Shanggaoling Village, owns a battery car shop in Ekou Township, and is the only store in the entire town that sells cameras.
Earlier, he had only installed cameras in the store to prevent burglars. In the last three years, the business has suddenly extended to the village, and the client is usually a young man who is out of town. The shopkeeper who came to install the bag found that in the past few years, the number of cameras installed in Shanggaoling Village is the most, with a full number of eight. His most recommended is a 3-megapixel camera with night vision.
"Look, 400 yuan for this, how good pixels!" Zhang Huping opened the App, the camera rotated 360 degrees to the left and right, and the old man was moving silently on the screen. He turned on another cheap camera, and when the village lights out, all that was left was a static black fog.
In order to make the old man who is full of thoughts about saving electricity not turn off the camera easily, he has to pull up the wire of the camera every time until the old people can't reach it.
In such a village, Zhang Fuqing may be regarded as an orphan of the old culture, and more and more houses are growing old, either with crooked roofs or sloping windows. Zhang Jiping had already decided not to overhaul the house, and his children followed Zhang Honggang in Ordos, "the children will not inherit this house."
On this night in mid-April 2024, he leaned back in a battered computer chair with a rose-red refrigerator, a brown wood-grain wardrobe, and a desktop computer without internet access, all from the 2000s or earlier. Someone asked him, don't you think it's a pity that the house is deserted? He smiled and asked, "50,000 yuan, if I sell the house to you, will you come to live there?"
Some of the figures recorded by Zhang Fuqing are directly or indirectly related to aging.
On the title page of an atlas, he wrote that "96110 was cheated, 12337 were abused, 12368 were owed, 12333 were owed wages, and 12336 peasants' farmland was encroached upon." At this time, he was at least 75 years old, and these numbers were the special number for anti-telecom network fraud, the anti-gang and anti-evil reporting hotline, the public service hotline of the national court system, the special number for the national labor and social security telephone consultation service, and the illegal reporting number of the Ministry of Land and Resources.
The number is followed by a "subsidy" for different age groups. For example, "70-79 years old receive 150 yuan per month". The old man did not explain what kind of subsidy it was, and the data with the highest similarity was the standard of comprehensive allowance for the elderly in Shanghai. In Shanxi, according to the old age allowance regulations implemented on January 1, 2024, the standard for receiving 150 yuan per month is to be at least 100 years old.
On April 12, 2024, in front of the "Serving the People" photo wall in Shanggaoling Village, the old people in the village like to gather here to bask in the sun. (Su Youpeng/Photo)
Overnight
The rise of the mining industry brought about the emergence of people in the village whose faces were "very dark and ugly, and when they breathed they sounded like they had asthma".
How exactly does a village get old?
On this morning in mid-April 2024, just after half past eight o'clock, a middle-aged woman resting by the ridge silently stared at the land in front of her. Some villagers have 4 acres of land, while others have 9 acres. In 2021, the annual rent of one mu of land in Shanggaoling Village is 200 yuan, and if it is better, it will rise to 600 yuan, and if you work by yourself, the harvest per mu will be about 1,000 yuan.
Don't blame the people who left the village lightly. Although the land is vast, the harvest is largely related to the climate, and the average annual precipitation of about 400 mm is distressing, and in northern China, this value is the bottom line of the amount of water needed for most trees to grow. Before the irrigation project, the irrigation water of each village had to come in turn, and if it happened to be the turn of Shanggaoling Village to irrigate in the middle of the night, then it would have to run to the ground every night.
But there were young people left behind in Shanggaoling Village.
From the road at the entrance of the village, ride a 10-minute battery car to Ekou Town. Ekou resembles a small western town, lined with banks, shopping plazas, neat neighborhoods with locust trees, and even a workers' club with granite facades.
There are 500 million tonnes of iron ore reserves in the vicinity, which can be mined dating back to 1958. A news item in 2022 said that the Ekou Iron Mine gathered 10,000 employees and their families.
Xu Aijun used to work in a private mine. He remembers that the peak of the village's permanent population was in the 1980s, with nearly 1,000 people. After 2005, the price of ore skyrocketed, and young adults lived a prosperous life. "In the mining area, there are eight hours of work and 16 hours off, and the young people go back to the village to farm after work, and there is no spare time at all. ”
Zhang Hongying had the opportunity to stay in the village, growing up in a time when the mining industry was growing by leaps and bounds. But with the rise of mining, people in the village began to appear with faces that were "very dark and ugly, and when they breathed they sounded like they had asthma." He gradually learned that these people were suffering from pneumoconiosis, and they had difficulty speaking, and finally had to become silent, leaving only heavy breathing. His perceptive father thought it was too dangerous to go to the mines, so he discouraged the idea of working in the mines.
Some of the traditions flowing in his hometown have also made Zhang Hongying feel sad. When he was about to talk about marriage with his ex-girlfriend, the girl's family proposed a bride price, which was almost enough to buy a house in Beijing's Fourth Ring Road at that time.
Why are young people leaving?"Job opportunities, children's education, and the urban lifestyle that has been formed. The reason in Luo Xiaolong's mouth was not unexpected.
Not long ago, the former way of life in Shangoling Village also came to an end.
In June 2023, China News Weekly reported that in the 15 years from 2007 to 2022, a number of miners in Daixian Jingcheng Mining were reported to have died due to work safety accidents.
Xu Aijun said that after that, the surrounding mine resources were reorganized, integrated and reorganized, and work was suspended. At this time, the young people are waiting at their homes in the county seat to start work.
On this morning in the spring, this woman who is nearly 60 years old on the ridge also wants to save hundreds of thousands of bride price money for her son, and the reason why she did not go to the county seat to find a job is because "there is no boss who wants it."
No boss was willing to hire 65-year-old Zhang Jiping, who used to be a lathe worker and could earn a lot of money by working, and he was rejected on the grounds that "the current lathe is operated by a computer."
There may be another reason. When Xu Aijun was working in the mine, there were old people who wanted to work and let him be accommodating, but he was very helpless, "If you are over 60 years old, you can't get labor insurance." There are not so many people in the company, it is a hard and fast rule."
The aging of the village intensified overnight, eventually affecting the young people who left. On the 12th day after Zhang Fuqing's death, Zhang Honggang fell into a kind of self-blame in front of the steps that read "It only took 24 days to renovate this house".
"On March 24, he said he had a cold, and I said, you go and take a look. He went to his neighbor and put some blood, and look, it was black, and he judged that it was a bad cold. I used WeChat to transfer 2,000 yuan to him and asked him to go for an infusion. The village doctor knew that he had an underlying disease, and he didn't dare to lose casually. He went to the clinic in town, and the other party gave him an infusion, but he didn't ask for a medical history and didn't take his blood pressure. ”
After two days of infusion, Zhang Fuqing said that it didn't feel like it had any effect. Zhang Honggang asked him to "go to the county hospital", but at that time, he still relied on someone to set up Han Baocang's car, and the county hospital checked that it was liver ascites. "I received a call at 7 o'clock, saying that I should send Taiyuan quickly, and I will also rush back from Inner Mongolia. After another examination, alanine aminotransferase reached more than 4110, the normal value is 0-40, and every indicator is declaring death. The man was pulled home, and in less than an hour, he died. ”
Zhang Honggang, who rarely smokes, picked up a cigarette, he felt that this was the medical dilemma of the elderly in rural areas, there were no good medical resources, what the patient needed, the clinic directly gave him something, did not ask for medical history, did not measure blood pressure. He considered asking for a doctor, but in the end he chose "one word, forbearance".
"Everything seems to be fine, they are pushing each other, it feels perfect, but it doesn't feel right. ”
Maybe he just regretted not being by his father's side in the first place.
"Maybe. Zhang Honggang sighed and said an ancient saying: "The mother is weak and the merchant is strong, the father is strong as a waiter, the clan wants to stay in his hometown, and the family is poor and goes to another country." ”
On April 13, 2024, brothers Zhang Honggang and Zhang Hongying were turning over the soil in the yard, recalling their father's death the night before. (Su Youpeng/Photo)
Perfect patio
Even when there is no wind, the pale pink petals fall on their own.
Let's take another look at Zhang Fuqing's yard.
The most beautiful moment in the courtyard is the early morning of spring. The branches of the classical apricot tree are above the air, and even if there is no wind, the light pink petals fall on their own, falling under the wall that reads "It took 16 years to build, 100,000 red bricks were used, and more than 70,000 yuan was spent". There was a soft, dark layer of moss on the ground.
This dwelling that can be seen everywhere in the land of northern Jinbei, its delicacy and uniqueness, not entirely from Zhang Fuqing's creation alone, but the support of the whole family.
When the East House was first to be rebuilt, Zhang Honggang had already started a business in Inner Mongolia. He didn't quite understand Zhang Fuqing's thoughts, but when he thought of the rain in his childhood, the washbasin was used to catch water in the house, so he gritted his teeth and took out 10,000 yuan to his father. It's the money he makes selling adult products, and people around him say his business is "shameful." The money was originally intended to be used to buy a house in Inner Mongolia, but now that Zhang Honggang is a father of three children, he has not been able to buy a house in Ordos.
He will remember that when he was a child, he was going to go to school in the county seat, and his father was worried that he would be lonely, so he quietly persuaded the neighbor's children to go to the county seat to study. When he went to Ordos alone, Zhang Fuqing took Zhang Hongying to help look after the store.
Zhang Hongying, who is in Beijing, first worked in a good logistics company, and in 2018, when his father was sick and hospitalized, he was ready to take leave to go home in order to take care of his mother, but the company's leave process was cumbersome, and he resigned directly. His dream is that in the future, his small family must be able to accept his mother's small family.
It's like a cycle. Zhang Fuqing once lamented on the wall that his mother was unable to live in the renovated house in the end, and his two children still do not have their own houses, and they still rent bungalows. When his girlfriend wanted to squeeze into Zhang Hongying's rented room, he just widened the single bed by 60 centimeters.
Now, the brothers also need to think about how to care for their sick mother. According to the plan written by Zhang Fuqing, to "find a person who matches the age, has patience and a sense of responsibility to give your mother as a companion", in his view, life is like continuing in relay care. He did not forget to remind the brothers that when they went to the hospital to find Du Zhongxiu's attending doctor, they should not forget to bring gifts.
Zhang Fuqing also planned how the yard should be used in the future:
"The ash of the winter furnace is sieved in the south of the two apricot trees, and the sieve is put into the toilet. ”
"Bricks are sealed at the bottom of the gate, which can prevent flooding from entering the hospital. ”
"Anti-theft press (secure) a few cameras. ”
……
An old man in the village said that she could understand Zhang Fuqing, the children were not around, and many of the thoughts of the people and the things of the older generation, if they were not written down, the children would not know.
But this understanding is limited to the sympathy, the spectacle of the spiritual world, locked alone in the old house at the entrance of Shanggaoling Village.
If he hadn't died, then on the day of the funeral, he had planned to pull eight bags of cement to "prevent flooding in the western courtyard"; by 2025, he would have to put anti-rust paint on the color steel tiles, and then every five years after the rain; he was also going to rebuild the western house, saying that when laying the foundation, he had to dig the riverbed stone "to have the ability to prevent floods and earthquakes."
Words are always limited. On the east and west walls, there was a finger-wide section of brick extending from each wall, and the two sons could not tell whether this was left over from the previous demolition of the house, or if it was the mark made by the father for the later construction of the house.
This is actually a tradition in Dai County, which is a design that makes a yard look more square in the sense of feng shui.
Words are infinite because of an accident. For more than 20 years, Zhang Fuqing would not have thought that the chatter left to future generations would make him seen by the outside world. The old man who has passed away, in the reports and messages, is constantly resurrected, and his life is more lively than before his death.
There were many visitors, and Zhang Honggang once thought about protecting the wall, but he also knew that all this was like the wind, the old house, the attention, and the words on the wall, one day like his father, dust to dust, and soil to earth.
On the afternoon of the 13th day after Zhang Fuqing's death, Zhang Honggang found that on the pillar of the middle hall, his father even arranged which people to send after the apricot tree bore fruit.
The old man could not see the results of these plans with his own eyes. This is not his only regret, he once wrote about the arrangements after his past life, hoping that his two sons can put the photos of him, his parents and two wives together and hang them in the middle hall. He added: "When will you take a picture of the whole family?"
The father, who has respect for his two wives and has spent 23 years taking care of bricks, roofs, almond trees and his wife, has not been able to have a neat family photo at the end of his life.
At least, the two sons fulfilled one of their father's wishes, found Zhang Huping, and installed a camera in a position that Du Zhongxiu couldn't reach.
Zhang Fuqing followed Zhang Honggang to take photos on a trip. (Interviewee/Photo)
(Southern Weekly interns Zhang Yiwen and Xu Yue, and Southern Weekly reporter Chen Yifan also contributed to this article.)
Southern Weekly reporter Su Youpeng
Editor-in-charge: Wu Xiaoyu