Take Dada to China丨 The meaning is long and short

Aunt Dada in Guilin. Courtesy of the author

The Italians are neither old nor young, and Dada is in her seventies, and I always hear her seven-year-old granddaughter calling her by her name downstairs, shouting, "Dada, come down and play." "We Chinese can't help but add an aunt, grandmother or something after the name. When I met Aunt Dada more than 20 years ago, she always sighed: old age is really a bad thing. I am now about the same age as her, and I feel the weight of the years, and I often say the mantra: I drag my old waist and struggle forward...... In Italian, it is Petrarch's tune. Dada's house is huge, and in the boundless living room hangs a cross-stitch with two red fish swimming stretchingly in the picture, with the words "There are fish every year", but she does not recognize the Chinese characters she embroidered. I explained to her again, and she pouted and said, "I don't eat fish." ”

Dada's life is a picky eater, he does not eat meat and seafood, but he is not vegan either, and occasionally eats raw beef and raw ham. I saw her embroidering cross-stitch with the theme of Chinese culture, so I bought her the theme of Meilan bamboo chrysanthemum, a total of four, and patiently translated the manual with her, and she happily embroidered. The last time I went to Italy and stopped by to visit her, it was just in time for an F1 race. We sat on her yacht in Monaco, and I watched with great excitement as the drivers buzzed by at speeds of more than 200 kilometres per hour, the narrators were hoarse, and the stands across from me were full of people. Dada embroidered bamboo there with his back to the track, and the Chinese characters on it were: Wind and Moon Shake Bamboo Shadow. What the artistic conception is, she must not know what it is.

In recent years, Dada has always said that he must visit Guilin before he dies. She was a native of Genoa, and it seems that the people there were particularly taboo about death, and she was fond of going to the grave, visiting her deceased parents in the cemetery every week. On one occasion, he solemnly said that he would leave a sum of money for his granddaughter to renew when the family's cemetery expired in a few decades. She lives towards death, always thinking that she should not leave any regrets before she dies, and that whatever she wants will be realized as soon as possible. Guilin is indeed charming, and she has seen a lot of scenery films, including osprey fishing, the smoke shrouded in the rolling mountains, and there is no place more oriental than the sunny days and blue seas of Italy. She had been to Vietnam, but she still worried about what she would miss out on in the world. She told me many times that I felt obligated to take her to China, so I asked her to come during my vacation, and it happened that the visa waiver policy for Italy was recently introduced, and she quickly decided to come.

When I picked her and her husband Julio at the airport in Chongqing, she looked relaxed. I asked, "Aren't you tired from a long journey?" She said, "You can sleep in first class, it's about the same as sleeping at home." "It's good that I'm not tired, and I hugged them happily. Italy's post-50s generation grew up during the period of economic take-off, worked hard, and the times did not fail them. The old man and the old lady can think about it, and try to spend all the money they have saved while they are alive, save it for their children, and pay inheritance tax. However, they can also think about other things, keep pace with the times, and are not too nostalgic. Once, Aunt Dada attended a same-sex wedding for a colleague's daughter and came back and lamented: "Now only gay people want to get married." ”

I asked Aunt Dada to stay in my study and got her her favorite Disney Mickey Mouse slippers, and she was naturally happy. But the problem came out, when we ate out, I found that they didn't know how to use chopsticks at all, and the last time they came to China was 20 years ago. I watched in amazement as they were holding their chopsticks in their hands, and they couldn't get anything out of their mouths. I said, you can embroider, your hands must be very skillful, hurry up and learn it. In the days that followed, there were no knives and forks everywhere, and they were finally able to eat freely with the help of spoons.

We finally arrived in Guilin and lived in Yangshuo, and I asked her if she had any strategies and knew about the marriage customs of the Zhuang people. I can't help but think: This is clearly Ye Gong's good dragon. patiently told her the story of "Liu Sanjie", and talked about the marriage customs and hydrangea of the Zhuang people. She said it was a bit similar to "The Betrothed Couple". We took the cable car up to Ruyi Peak, the sky was not beautiful, the sky was full of fog, there was nothing to see in front and back, left and right, and the cable car went up, like entering the set of a science fiction movie or a horror movie. Miraculously, there is still ginger soup sold in the small shop on the hill. I happened to be feeling cold, so I asked for a drink, explaining that it was called "resurrection soup". Aunt Dada stood on the suspension bridge with great interest and asked: Can you see the fog? When the photo was taken, there was no lonely peak in sight, only her and the fog.

I saw osmanthus wine sold in the tourist merchandise store, which is a local specialty, and I bought a bottle and said that it would accompany the meal at night. Dada didn't drink a sip of wine, I gave it to Giulio, and I didn't drink it because of the antibiotics. Dada said, "Is it good wine?" My old man still wants to keep it, don't poison it. I said, "Your old man gave me expired aspirin." "Julio is a doctor and always has all kinds of medicines on hand. Aunt Dada loves her husband very much and expresses it from time to time. When talking about the marriage customs of the Yi people, she said that she wanted to snatch Julio home, and when she talked about the marriage customs of the Zhuang people, she said that it was not good, what should I do if the hydrangea was lost wrong, it was not enough insurance. They started dating at the age of sixteen, watching each other grow up, wishing to be one heart, and the white head is not separated from each other, which is about the same way, and it can be regarded as the love of the old era, which is not disturbed by the new era.

Aunt Dada is a math teacher who is very good at settling accounts, and she has to come to me every night to settle accounts. They didn't have Alipay or WeChat, so I paid all kinds of fees first. At night, my cold worsened, and I wanted to lie down in the bed immediately, Dada always came to ask me to tell me the expenses on Alipay, and I read to her one by one in a hoarse voice: 15 yuan for sugar gourd, 10 yuan for resurrection soup...... The bourgeois view of consumption is something I have never understood. I was at her house before, and it was amazing to see her mending socks with reading glasses and hourly workers ironing and mending clothes. Later, my students and I were reading a novel by the Italian 20th-century writer Natalia Ginzburg, in which there is a bourgeois woman who lives in a villa, has a housekeeper and a cook, and is also keen to mend socks. We students are also puzzled. I said that the Italian textile industry is quite developed, it should not be that the socks are of bad quality, that is probably the bourgeois way of life: the flowers that should be spent, the provinces that should be saved, and they are proud to save money.

At the end of the tour, Aunt Dada said that the most memorable is the landscape of Guilin, which is very mysterious, and always feels that there are gods in the middle of those mountains, and the best thing to eat is the green onion cake you cook at home. Although Aunt Dada was curious about the world, her stomach belonged only to Genoa, and the most popular food in Genoa was the focaccia, which was a soft dough spread on a tray with shredded onions, large pieces of coarse salt and olive oil. I think of my mother, who is almost the same, and her life must be inseparable from hand-rolled noodles and pot helmets. A person who has experienced thousands of mountains and rivers may not be able to enter those differences, and most of them will still bring their hometown with them and stay in a comfort zone. Who I am will only come to the fore when I leave. I remembered Duan Yifu I read a few days ago, and the "space" and "place" he studied, space is open and brings risks, while place is familiar and safe, and it can be boring, but fortunately we have geography and spiritual space to explore.

Chen Ying

Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan