Liuzhuang has a landmark. Just as each of us has a fixed hometown.
The landmarks of Liuzhuang are temples, river banks, water bridges, and I think the landmark is the chimney. Northwest of Liuzhuang, near the south bank of the Sha River, there is a place called Sha Tsui. Chewing or mouth, in rural place names, is often used as a prominent or high terrain. Sha Tsui, to the effect that the river goes around, protruding from the river channel, or the soil is hard or other factors, the Sand River can not fight its geography, forming a bay around. At the boundary of Sha Tsui, there is a brick kiln built in 1976 or 1977, the brick kiln has a tall chimney, a green brick barrier, and a height of 350 meters is estimated to be there. The chimney has layers of simple iron handrails, presumably climbing upwards for maintenance or other tools.
Schematic of an old clay brick brick kiln
The chimney of the brick kiln is a memory of my childhood and adolescence. When I went to HuchengJi to attend the Yuhong class (1987), I often played with my friends on the kiln after school. I also mentioned in an earlier article that my father had worked as a tractor driver in a brick kiln, and I once vaguely remembered sitting in the cockpit of an old crawler tractor, and some barbarian aunts teasing me with a penny of plastic food stamps. This is one of the earliest memories I can recall in Liuzhuang, and I touched about 1985, so that the capital "one" character has been remembered in my mind without going to school to learn words. Barbarian is a generic name for some people in Hunan Hubei, Sichuan, Guangdong and Guangxi, mainly because of the lack of language communication. In the previous generation, there were some Sichuan women who settled, or fled the wilderness, or married with a certain sense of history.
Schematic diagram of the old brick kiln chimney, which is closer to what is written in the text
There are eight big words on the chimney, which should be "independent and self-reliant". Whether it is "independence" or "hard work", I have been struggling in my memory. I flipped out the photos I had taken, the limited pixel conditions and the shooting shots, the words on the chimney were also blurry, the integrated macro handwriting, "independent and autonomous" should be right. This Mao quotation era slogan made me think that the kiln factory was built in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2019, I learned from my father that it was the construction after the 758 flood, and in 2021, I also got some Wuyang County place name materials, and it was introduced that the Hanzhai North Brick Kiln (known as the 18-wheel Brick Kiln) was the project of the then county party secretary, county chief and other people stationed in Hanzhai Village. After the floods of August 1975, the villages were newly built on flat land and required a lot of brick and tile materials. The site selection here to build a kiln factory must have considerations such as transportation, geography, soil extraction, and water use.
Every time I return to Liuzhuang, I cherish the conversation with the old people. I always thought that maybe this is where I, as a cultural person, can record the precious memories of my predecessors, and can be reflected in articles or other forms, becoming another kind of rural history to inherit. My great uncle (b. 1944) said that the brick kiln factory was not easy to build at that time, and the chimneys so high were technical problems. It seems that an old man surnamed Yan in Yanwan Village once worked as a technician in a factory or mine in Changchun, has a certain experience in drawings, and the county also attaches importance to it, so that there is a huge kiln factory and a tall chimney. These old technicians named Wang Bingyin and Mao Xingzhong (pronounced) who were once village leaders and surnamed Yan did not have much material on their names and deeds, and they gradually disappeared into history like more ancestors of this land, and today we, like them, will always disappear into the sand. We are all the flow of the village, the flow of time, the flow of the sand river.
Chimney smoke represents production, and in elementary and junior high school, there are occasional intermittent impressions of smoke. Clay bricks are a historical stage in which changes in production technology doom the fleeting fate of landmark chimneys. At the foot of the chimney, the wasteland of the village fields on the south bank of the Shahe River has brought much development momentum and happiness elements to Liuzhuang and the surrounding villages and towns. Perhaps, the old houses in the hometown that were withered and decadent were once the products of brick kilns. Synthesizing the history of the county and the temple, it can be concluded that before the Hongdong immigrants, Liuzhuang already existed, and those ancestors of the past were reduced to mud under their feet. Or be awakened from the new by this chimney, become a clay water molded adobe, become clay bricks to shield future generations thousands of years later. The cycle of the spirit of the earth has this "independent, self-reliant" brick kiln chimney testimony, the brick kiln has witnessed the flow of the flow of the village, we have witnessed the flow of the brick kiln chimney.
In 2002, when I was returning home at May Day, I used the simple film camera used by the students to photograph some scenes in my hometown and the brick kiln chimneys on the ears of wheat. At the time, I did not expect this to become a precious documentary photograph. The kiln factory and chimney, the behemoth that witnessed the history of the village's construction, were demolished around 2012, and there is no scenery on the banks of the Shahe River. Peasants who drove horse-drawn carriages to pull bricks, workers who pushed rack carts to deliver adobe, barbarian aunts who teased children with food stamps, and figures running as children disappeared from the buildings on the ground, all became illusions in their dreams. Many old photos can't bear to look over, some of the film negatives of old photos are still there, have not been rummaging, maybe one day to find, try to wash out, can find a corner of the Liuzhuang of the year, the corner of the teenager of the year, the flow will not survive in the end, we and the Liuzhuang together, is only a drop in the sea for a long time a moment of landmark. All the landmarks are flowing stories.
Written on September 11, 2021