Road. Visual China|Figure
The title comes from the Scottish folk song "Lomond Loch", which is full of passion, rendering that kind of unswerving emotion, every time I listen to it, my heart is shocked, although I know that it is far away, but I still feel that it was written for people like me, and for people like my mother.
You choose the plains, walk so steadily, there are no ups and downs; I chose the mountain trail and walked on the mountain trail, which was full of twists and turns. I knew so, but I didn't regret it. God makes life unequal, opportunities are different, hard work and hard work are different, someone can learn lessons from failures again and again, and develop their strengths and avoid weaknesses, then this person may gain something that others do not have. Some people can't.
Since I was a child, I have been extremely sensitive and vulnerable, and my mother knew that people like me were vulnerable, so she wanted me to be tougher and didn't want me to be easily influenced by the outside world. Growing up, I'm a little better off than before. But when I come across a good book, I will read it day and night, even in class, in the drawer to read that other interesting world, eager to join it, will copy my favorite sentences in it, and even hope that the author is myself. It's ridiculous, and after laughing, then understand the fate of the characters in the book, the carefully constructed structure, and ask yourself a few more whys. The reading club reads out the experience, wants to rewrite the fate of the characters I like, wants them to be different, saves their lives, has lovers become dependents, separated people are reunited, I have comfort in my heart, and I can sleep at night.
Mother has been nagging for a while, talking over and over again, to sum up, it means that a person should have a kind and soft heart, unyielding bravery, delicate and sensitive, calm thinking in case of trouble, with these four qualities, she/he will not be defeated by life.
When I was young, I didn't understand it, but after my mother left this world, I gradually understood it.
My mother grew up in the countryside of Zhongxian County in the lower reaches of Chongqing, and there was a pond in front of the house and a hillside behind the house. She is smart, she can name many trees in the mountains, and she can also call out the names of many fish in the river, she loves to sing, she works in the fields, does needlework is a good hand, people are outstanding, famous far and near, and the rich people in the township pick children and daughters-in-law, so they naturally aim at her and let the matchmaker come to the door to propose.
But she wouldn't. The mother's mother looked at her and was angry: why didn't the little girl who had no knowledge listen to her mother, not only would she have food and clothing in the future, but she would also subsidize the poor family, and other girls were not qualified to marry this family. The mother's mother couldn't figure it out and locked her in her room.
The mother actually hugged the mosquito net of the dowry and opened the window, there was a high slope under the window, she was not afraid that she would break her leg if she jumped, so she did that, in the darkness of the night, she left that home, that village, thinking of how sad her mother would be when she knew, she still gritted her teeth and continued to hurry. When they arrived at the county seat, they sold the mosquito nets, and the money was used to board the boat to Chongqing.
In 1996, I wrote my autobiography "The Hungry Daughter", saying that my mother escaped the fate of a child daughter-in-law and arrived in the city of Chongqing, and soon had a husband who was the head of the robe. Then I met my adoptive father and biological father. My mother's life was magnificent, but in fact, a book could not be written.
Compared with her life, I grew up living in a small attic with several older sisters, and it was difficult to turn over in a narrow bed. Before the age of 18, he was humiliated in the yard, on the street, and at school, and he didn't know why, and he didn't know the life of his illegitimate daughter until his birthday, and for the first time he understood that the man who had been behind him for many years was his biological father. When I was 18 years old, a lot of things happened, the first time I fell in love, the first time I had a baby, I ran away from home, and then I came to England. After living there for ten years, he returned to live in Beijing alone, writing novels in solitude to support himself and his family.
It's like a boat capsizing and falling into the water in the sea, and in desperation, you get a life-saving straw, but you unexpectedly get a home that is loyal to you and have a daughter. My friend said the day before yesterday that you have lived a life that many women yearn for, from having nothing to living the life you want today, this is the miracle of women's survival.
Is this a miracle?
I asked myself.
I didn't think about living miracles, I just knew that I had to move forward, one step at a time, without giving myself any reason to stop, I didn't believe in miracles, and I didn't believe in any myths.
My friend also said that compared to your previous novels, your novels now have less pain and therefore less sharpness. Her words made me think.
Is sharpness lost?
It's not that I don't have pain now, who can feel my pain and struggle, how can I get rid of the red letters imprinted on my body when I was born? The dark factors in the growth background, the price behind the fame of ordinary women, and the suppression and loss experienced by a weak individual in the big era have long been full of holes. The previous novel "K" was permanently banned from being recopied or published in any form, for nothing else, but because of eroticism; I wanted to confront, to write a novel about the "Queen of Shanghai", and deliberately asked someone to take a seat on the title page...... At this time, I looked back and found that my former self was so green, sometimes with a sharp blade, but too powerful.
Decades have passed, thousands of sails have been read, looking at my appearance, people's appearance, and the appearance of all living beings, there are differences, those helpless, all kinds of despair and sadness, the Yangtze River is trickling, on the shore, a goose, a pair of red shoes, a crazy woman, the back of the suicide turned around, gradually faded away, and finally fixed on the bed, two people who love each other, can sleep peacefully. I'm talking about the movie "Moonlight Samurai", and I'm talking about the ordinary women who don't have a peaceful life in the new novel "The Immortal Bird", just because they were involved in a game designed by others more than a few years ago, asking for life, and trying to rescue their trapped lovers, they can only take risks, even if they sacrifice their lives of happiness.
In the water of the Yangtze River, when I was a child, I would drown people every year, some corpses floated downstream, without a trace, and some corpses would be washed by the river after seven days, floating on the water, the men were all facing the sky with their backs, and the women were all facing the sky with their backs, and when relatives or enemies came, they would bleed. Many of the bodies were baby girls. There are a lot of bomb shelters in Chongqing, and when I was growing up, missing girls were sometimes found in bomb shelters, after being raped.
The No. 6 courtyard on the south bank of the Yangtze River where I grew up has a total of 13 families, most of whom are crew members or engaged in ship-related work. The neighbor Zhang's mother was a prostitute that her husband bought from a brothel in Wuhan in 1949 for a few silver dollars. She did not have children and adopted a boy with her husband. Every morning, when she had to serve her husband to eat, when his face was soft or salty, he would kick her with his shiny shoes, beat her with a belt, and sometimes in the big kitchen, in front of everyone.
No one dared to go over to stop it, and everyone was used to beating women in the yard. When someone bullied me, Zhang's mother could only watch, and then she would be very nice to me, giving me a small bowl of porridge and shredded radish or a small piece of cake. Zhang's mother lived at the end of the courtyard, across the kitchen, into a narrow passageway, each window of the corridor facing the river. She is illiterate and her son is in junior high school. The library was sealed, but he stole some books from it.
Zhang's mother knew that I liked to read, and lent me books from time to time, and once the book she gave me was a manuscript "A Girl's Heart". I read two pages, blushed with horror at the erotic depictions in them, and hurriedly returned them. That book was borrowed by her son, it was banned at the time, and it was widely copied in Chongqing and even across the country, talking about a man and a woman falling in love, mainly sexually described. Obviously, Zhang's mother is illiterate, otherwise she would not have given me such a book. Years later, I heard from my family that Zhang's mother died of illness after her son got married and had children.
I didn't ask her husband how it was, I just rejoiced that she was finally free from the devil.
Our Wildcat Creek Street, patriarchal, boys can pass on the lineage and do manual work, girls are married out of the water, raised for others, in the original family is a burden, a box of cigarettes is worth more than a girl's life. When a woman gives birth to a child, if it is a girl, she is thrown away, sometimes directly into the river. Those who have good intentions and give girls away, compared to those girls who die suddenly, the girls who are sent away are already considered fateful.
I wasn't sent away, and I wasn't drowned or suffocated on a pillow, so I was lucky. Soon after my mother gave birth to me, my father came home from the boat because of his eye disease, and became a housewife, and my mother went out to do manual work, carrying stones, sand, cement and oxygen cylinders like a man. My father knew that I was the child of my mother and other men, and he did not treat me badly, but was extra attentive and protective. Fathers are not the same as those who throw away girls on the street.
My mother paid the price for my survival. She stayed in this house, not only for my brother and sister, but also for me, and even considering my special status, worried that her family would deliberately keep a distance from me because she was good to me, sometimes very indifferent.
For years, a wall was built between me and my mother, and I couldn't do anything about it.
Every Saturday, I waited on the rocky slope by the river, and if she took a cargo ship home, she would pass by here, and sometimes I would pass by the three-way intersection of Middle School Street at the top of the sixth courtyard, and she would pass by the mountain road, either way.
Once she was actually with Sister Jiang from a shipyard, this sister is of mixed Chinese and Japanese descent, and her Japanese mother was sent back to Japan at the end of 1950, when it was in this middle school street, and everyone watched her family die.
I asked my mother when I was a child, and my mother said something about Sister Jiang's family, and then shook her head. In addition, my mother rarely spoke, and when she came home after dinner, she was so tired that she lay on the bed, intentionally or unintentionally ignoring my existence.
It was at my mother's funeral that I knew a lot of things I didn't know before. Because of her departure, my world shook and the sky fell. For the past, she only said that in the famine years, people ate tree bark and wild vegetables, and my third brother jumped into the river to fish for edible vegetable roots, and almost lost his life several times. She said that the fifth brother was crushed by the cable car in the gap of the cable car in order to pick up beans under the grain warehouse, and I was only five years old, and I ran along the river alone to the shipyard where she worked as a coolie. When she saw a little man running in the rain, she immediately knew in her heart that it was her little daughter and that something had happened at home.
Mother told me very little, especially about her man, and about the events around 1949.
She can't talk about it, and when she talks about it, her youngest daughter, who is a writer by profession, will write it down. The mother was worried that something bad would happen when these things were made public. I've been trying to figure out the reason for her inner rejection, and she seems to want the secret she keeps to leave the world with her, rotting in the dirt and dissipating in the wind.
In 1996, at the last moment of writing "The Hungry Daughter", I returned to the south bank of Chongqing and lived at home. The sixth courtyard was demolished, and a six-story white building was built on the original site, and I used the manuscript fee to buy an apartment on the right side of the fifth floor, with two bedrooms and one living room, the back window facing the middle school street, a slope of stone steps, the front window facing the Jialing River, and obliquely facing the unobstructed Chaotianmen Wharf. At that time, she ate her mother's food every day, and she liked the freshness of the food, so she went to the small street market where local farmers set up stalls in the 11th Middle School in the morning, and it was more than 20 minutes to walk. What does she think about every day on that uphill and downhill road? We haven't had a good conversation about her past.
One of the many regrets I have in my life is not taking pictures of my mother. I shoot women, directly, from a fresh angle, and I dig out my inner world. My camera never focuses on my mother, her slightly plump lips, moist and tearful eyes, her tortured hair, her noncommittal, ambiguous expression, and her face full of vicissitudes.
I remember one time, I took my camera home, and I photographed the old houses that were about to be demolished and their surroundings, and the tall and low houses on the south bank of the Yangtze River.
In the collection box of my old photos, there is a photo of me and my mother taken by my third brother, which is my mother's old age. More pictures of mothers, mothers in their thirties, or even younger. In many photos, she is wearing a cheongsam and her hair is permed, because it is a black and white photo, and later someone was specially asked to color, and each of her looks very good. One photograph was taken in the 1950s, of her in overalls, a sweater, and a clip in her hair, not smiling, but full of confidence.
My mother prepared her portrait in advance, put it big, installed a frame, put it on the desk in front of the bed, put a piece of cloth, remember that before she died, I went back to Chongqing to see her, helped her clean the house, found it, and asked her.
She didn't answer me.
It was October 2006, and I was pregnant with my daughter, and I was traveling from Beijing to Chongqing. When I arrived, my mother was already angry, and I stayed in front of the coffin, and what I saw was my mother's enlarged picture of herself, who was pressed to the ground, and I kowtowed and burned incense.
My tears were choked, I didn't believe it, my mother didn't see me, and left.
After dealing with my mother's funeral in Chongqing for several days, I returned to Beijing and began to write "Good Sons and Daughters", with a workload of almost 8 hours a day, often forgetting to eat, and the daughter in my stomach kicked me because of my crying for a while, reminding me, Mom, you can't do this, I'm still in your body. Because I had a daughter, I stopped immediately and went looking for something to eat, and my emotions were relieved.
It was a long letter I wrote to my mother, and at the same time to my unborn daughter, telling her what kind of person my grandmother was and how her mother lived.
Although I was in Beijing, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the water of the Yangtze River, as if in the new house I bought for my mother by the Yangtze River, there were a few empty rooms, not a single piece of furniture, and I clearly saw my mother standing in front of the window, waving to me. I said, such a big room, enough for all of us to move in together. When I looked at her again, she was gone. I walked to the window, and below was the rushing river, the boat was moving, the whistle was whining, and the mountains loomed in the distance.
A small tadpole swims in the water, and a large tadpole follows the small tadpole. They swam to the other side of the river in the wide river. The little tadpole said to the big tadpole, it's good, you were my daughter in the previous life, and you are my mother in this life! The two of us will always be together and will never be separated.
I distinctly remember the tadpole's voice, exactly the same as my mother's, and her face, of course, was the same as my mother's.
This was the end of the entire manuscript, and I typed the last word on my computer, and the manuscript sat out for almost two years before it was published.
Time flies quickly, three years ago, I made the movie "Moonlight Samurai", about the story of Sister Jiang's house that I heard from my mother when I was a child, I naturally thought that my mother could watch it, but my mother couldn't see it. When we were young, adults deceived us children, saying that people were gone, they went to heaven or a better world; When you grow up, who doesn't know, people go, like a lamp goes out, and when it goes out, it is extinguished, and this person disappears forever.
It's the same with my mother, she lives, only when I think about her, she lives, only when I write about her. Because I want to hold a personal photography exhibition in the art museum, I organize the photos, about the landscape, about the plants and flowers, about the people, about the boat and the house, a lot of Buddha statues, my daughter is in Dunhuang, Greece, Italy, Chongqing, but there are no photos of the mother, of course not, she was alive, I didn't take pictures of her, so can I take her in another way?
I sat on the couch in the quiet of the room, looking at the black piano in front of me. Suddenly got up and went to the closet to find a thick sweater with a dark purple turtleneck. Many years ago, when I returned to China from London to visit my mother, it was supposed to be her birthday, and I was in a hurry to go and didn't buy a gift, but I saw this sweater in a store at the airport and decided to give it to my mother as a gift. My mother opened it, looked at it, was very happy, put it on her body, and thanked me. My mother was always very kind to me.
After sending her away, I had a meal with a few sisters, brothers and sisters-in-law, and then we opened a few locked boxes in my mother's house, and we found a lot of things, a lot of the previous photos were washed, usually six, she had six children, and gave each of us a copy.
In one of the boxes, there was this neatly folded thick purple sweater. The mother was reluctant to wear it, so she pressed the bottom of the box.
I took this sweater back to Beijing, because it was precious, and I was reluctant to wear it, so I pressed the bottom of the box.
So maybe I can do something about it?
I opened the piano lid and spread my sweater out on the black and white keyboard. I tied it with a blue plastic glove and put it in the cuff of my sweater, and I found a feather mask that my daughter had worn and put it on the collar of my sweater.
I looked at my own pose, and my mother came back to life in that instant, her face hidden behind a feather, leaning against the keys and looking at me, holding up the camera, clicking, I pressed the shutter.
When I look at the photo, it is what I think: my mother is looking at me serenely and lovingly, the whole picture is full of mystery, and I can imagine my mother's face as I want—the angry face, the happy face, or the loving face, all at once traveling to the distant past.
It was late at night.
The girl in the mood for love, jumped out of the window and walked the mountain road from the countryside of Zhongxian County with the dowry mosquito net, ran to the county seat, she took a boat to Chongqing City, she wanted to change her life, she was in the bottom cabin, trying her best to see the night sky outside the cabin, a round of moon in the sky, exuding a transparent light.
At that moment, I somewhat understood that the reason why I am the person I am is is because I have a mother like that, who is my mirror, reflecting my life. The river flowed as before, my mother's boat docked, my boat still headed forward, looking up at the sky, a moon followed, I remembered the young girl who took a boat from the countryside to Chongqing, she also looked at the moon in the sky in the past.
Rainbow Shadow
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan