He had a martial arts father who was only a farmer all his life

Original chuzhaoxin old Chu Ji

One

For more than a decade, I didn't know how to define my father.

In the second half of my father's life, half of my energy was devoted to farming. He was the first in the village to try to grow vegetables in the greenhouse, although in the end it was not successful, and most of the farm work was also done by his mother. However, he is not like an ordinary peasant, but sometimes like a rough country gentleman, good wine, drunk and fond of talking.

When he was in middle school, his family was in difficulty, and his uncle of the same generation advised him: What is the use of reading, you are so poor in the house, let your sons go out to work early to earn money. Father smiled and replied: In ten years, we will see again.

Before the college entrance examination, he volunteered and said to me: If you want to avoid being bullied in China, there are three ways out - to be an official, to be a journalist, and to be a lawyer. In the end, all my volunteers chose journalism and law. Later, doing journalism, it started here.

In fact, my father never graduated from elementary school. In the 1940s, not many people in my village could go to school, and my father reluctantly dropped out of primary school after a few years of primary school.

Later, as the understanding of his father gradually deepened, he slowly clarified: his father was not an authentic farmer, he was a half-farmer and half-craftsman in rural China. Do crafts in your spare time, and cultivate the land when you are busy farming. Farming was not successful, but the craftsmanship was locally renowned.

When he was young, his father learned a craft, that is, to make various utensils from bamboo. In the countryside, such people are called "smiths", and will use bamboo to make most household utensils in the countryside, from steamers and bamboo beds to sieves, dustpans, bamboo baskets, bamboo chairs, and chopsticks. In memory, when I was young, the villagers used bamboo products in their daily lives, such as bamboo products for rice panning, cooking, washing vegetables, drying, playing fields, picking crops and grain, and sleeping.

In our village, bamboo is not planted, and there are few bamboo trees in the whole county. However, there are many smiths. Therefore, selling bamboo in the market is also a trade. Because of his early years as a smith, his father later accumulated some wealth and ran a bamboo business for a period of time. After the business failed, my father returned to his hometown to continue farming while doing handicrafts.

When bamboo products were still a must-have for every household, my father relied on this craft and was once one of the richest families in the village. At its peak, there were one or twenty disciples, and occasionally one or two were contemporaries of their fathers, and the others were mostly their father's sons and nephews.

The hometown is a traditional cotton area, there are few people in the land, there are only two or three points of land per capita, and they have been growing cotton for decades. Cotton this crop, planted once a year, planting for up to half a year, sowing seeds and moving seedlings in April and May, spraying, flood control and drought control, whole branches in June and July, harvesting in September and October, tearing off cotton poles in November, some planting wheat and some planting peas, rapeseed and the like.

At that time, there were no machines, the entire planting process was completed by hand, the price of cotton was low, the income of cotton farmers was meager, and the farmers were almost barely able to make ends meet. Every year, when it comes to collecting taxes and fees on public grain, a group of village and town cadres take a bunch of social and go door to door to demand, and those who have no money to pay taxes and fees move shops, bicycles, and morning glory.

The embarrassment of the cotton farmer made his father's craft popular in the countryside for a time, and there were naturally more disciples.

There were six uncles and brothers in my father, and in my generation, there were nineteen uncles and brothers, and I ranked nineteenth. Nineteen brothers, nearly half of whom had been his father's disciples, the eldest cousin, who was only a few years younger than his father, was also his father's disciple at the time, and was now sixty years old. They learned the art with their father, and after leaving school, they set up their own portals, planting land when they farmed, doing small crafts in their spare time, and barely making ends meet.

In the 1980s and 1990s, shoddy plastic products and all kinds of unattractive metal products entered the countryside. At that time, there was no concept of environmental protection at all, plastic and metal products replaced bamboo products in a large area, and his father's craftsmanship began to decline, and the disciples slowly gave up this craft, some went out to work as masons, some went out to do small business, and some continued to live in the family farm. They are also becoming more and more indifferent to their former masters, and some even avoid them. My father was about forty-five years old, and the family of six lived on an acre and a half of land and doing some craftsmanship, and it was difficult to feed themselves.

In the first few years when plastic products began to gradually replace bamboo products, bamboo beds still had market demand. At that time, not only did the countryside not have air conditioning, but even electric fans. Every summer night, every household moves the bamboo bed to the outdoors to cool off. A bamboo bed and a fan were standard on the hot summer nights of that year.

Father's craftsmanship, the most famous is the bamboo bed. Every early summer, many people look for their fathers to customize bamboo beds. At that time, the families of those who married their daughters-in-law and daughters would customize a new bamboo bed. My father is a well-known local bamboo bed master, and there are more natural people who look for him to customize bamboo beds. Even for some disciples, after leaving the school, they still have to find their father to customize the bamboo bed.

Later, electric fans and air conditioners were popularized in the countryside, bamboo beds were gradually eliminated, and there were fewer and fewer outdoor shades at night. Father's craftsmanship almost completely lost the market. None of the many disciples relied on this craft to eat and live. My father himself gradually stopped making utensils, and only occasionally made some household utensils for the family.

Even in his prime, my father didn't let the three of us learn his craft. But he was influenced by his childhood, and in high school, he learned to use his father's knife, saw, drill and other tools to carve some small things into thick bamboo pieces. My favorite is to carve bamboo fish, when every summer I would make one or two for my classmates who wanted to be good. After going to college, I was far away from home and gradually forgot about it.

In the village, there is no garbage disposal, and the ponds and open spaces in front of and behind the village are full of all kinds of discarded plastic products. During the New Year's Festival, some people will light a fire to burn away the plastic garbage piled up in the mountains, and the pungent smell fills the village. (Chu Chaoxin's note: Since about 2017, there are special people in charge of cleaning up and transferring domestic garbage in our village.) ）

The smith gradually disappeared in the village, and his father's craftsmanship was gradually lost in his hometown.

Two

Recently, I was touched by a video of a contest online. In the video, a man practicing tai chi was knocked to the ground by a man practicing sanda in ten seconds. Practicing tai chi climbed up, a face of blood, looking a little embarrassed.

Some people said that traditional martial arts are not good, and the actual combat is relatively weak; some people say that it is not traditional martial arts that are not good, it is this person who practices traditional martial arts that cannot do it.

Coincidentally, I also practiced for a few years. Again, there has been no real combat.

In his second year of high school, he was assigned to the liberal arts class. At that time, most of the students who went to the liberal arts class were students who did not have good grades in the first year of high school. Therefore, most of the various gods in the school who love to fight and love are concentrated in the liberal arts class.

My father learned that I was beaten up for being honest and a little stubborn, and offered to teach me to practice kung fu. In the village, there was a tradition of learning martial arts. Before going to elementary school, there were also elderly people in the village who taught art for free. This old man is actually a shoemaker who carries a burden to the villages to repair shoes. In the past, many people in the countryside had practiced it, but no one made a living from martial arts, just a lean-on skill. Just like his father, who had learned martial arts, he was actually a smith. Many people in our village will have so many hands, and only one old shoemaker will openly teach the art.

In my memory, the last time the old man openly taught the bench exercises in the open space in the village. A long bench, dancing in the wind. I was young and I couldn't remember the details. The old man died soon after, and there was no longer any martial arts practice in the village.

In the third year of junior high school, I had already started to grow, but I didn't have much strength. In high school, I slowly began to have some energy. That's when the family started growing vegetables. My father, probably the first person in the village to try to grow vegetables in greenhouses, mainly grew eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. In the summer and autumn, we must rush to the market to sell vegetables. Every weekend when I came home, I had to help my father pick vegetables and buy vegetables.

In the era when there were no cars, vegetables were sold by bicycle. Every day at dusk, go to the vegetable patch to pick vegetables. In the early morning of the next day, before dawn, the vegetables were packed into two large baskets (a kind of farm utensils, one can hold thirty or fifty pounds or more), hung on both sides of the back seat of the bicycle, and then rode dozens of miles to catch the morning market. The two baskets were filled with nearly 100 pounds of vegetables, and there was no strength, and they could not support the bicycle.

Riding for dozens of miles, rushing to the morning market, laying out snakeskin bags, it became a stall. Father is at one end, and I am at the other, two scales, each selling his own.

After experiencing several times of selling vegetables, I began to understand the hardships and difficulties of my parents' farming, especially on rainy days. The road behind the village is a dirt road, potholes, gray on sunny days, mud all the way in rain, very difficult to walk. On rainy days, the mud will trap the bicycle, and if you walk for a while, you have to use the bamboo strip you carry with you to poke off the mud stuck to the wheels, otherwise the bicycle can't be pushed. I carried less, it was quite easy, my father carried hundreds of pounds in a car, and it was very troublesome to get stuck in the mud. At this time, the barefoot father's pants were rolled up, and his body often had to lean forward at a 45-degree angle to push the bicycle to break free of the mud.

Little by little, the strength was practiced, the water was basically not carried flat, and a wooden bucket was carried in each hand to fill the well with water to easily fill the water tank at home. When I returned home on the weekend of my sophomore and junior year of high school, I occasionally accompanied my father to sell vegetables, and my father would teach me a few moves in the church house after drinking in the evening. According to his father, he practiced Luohan Fist. I've seen him punch out the whole set of punches, but the movements don't look good. He said that the routines of traditional martial arts do not look very good, but they are very effective in actual combat.

Throughout my sophomore year of high school, I practiced the basics. Traditional martial arts, the requirements for Zamabu are very high, in order to be stable under the plate, it is not easy to fall. Even if there is movement in the leg, it is generally an attack, the leg is fast, and it will not kick too high.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was probably the only student at school who didn't have to participate in group morning exercises. The class teacher, Mr. Yang, came to me and said that I had my own way of exercising. He probably saw me hit the cement pole repeatedly with my arm and stopped caring about me.

Every day at dawn, I practice the basic skills in a corner of the school according to the method taught by my father: tie the horse step, take turns to punch out of the left and right fists, collect the fist and inhale, punch and exhale. Repeat the cycle, and insist on practicing this action for at least half an hour every day.

Slowly, in addition to practicing zama steps, he also began to practice some practical skills taught by his father. My father was also an honest man, and in order not to let me take the evil road, when teaching me Kung Fu, he always stressed that no matter how well he practiced Kung Fu, he absolutely could not take the initiative to beat people first. In order to reduce my aggression, he also made me insist on practicing my ability to resist blows.

The so-called ability to resist blows is to be able to be beaten. At that time, middle school students fought, basically did not use knives, they were all bare hands, even if they used instruments, they were just sticks and steel pipes. In response to this, my father taught me to tie up my horse every morning and hit a cement pole or tree trunk with the outer arms of my double forearms. At school, electric poles are beaten, and when you return to the village, you beat tree trunks. With each blow, let out a roar and exhale. Initially, the outer arm was bruised and painful. After practicing for a few months, it slowly stopped hurting and became cocooned.

My father also taught me how to get rid of the front lock throat, the back is locked neck and other skills, some of the skills are actually anti-joint blows, but also quite fierce, the hand may lead to the other party fracture. Fortunately, these techniques have never been used to me.

After practicing for a year in high school, my health is getting better and better, but the situation at home is still not very good. During the summer vacation, despite my father's objections, I went to the county town to find my cousin who worked in the city, and asked my cousin to introduce me to a construction site to do small work. Construction workers, 15 yuan a day, money is not much to live a lot, moving bricks, mixing concrete, using buckets to transport mixed concrete, mixing sediment with mud buckets and sending them to the hands of big workers...

Moving bricks will wear out the palms of your fingers, but you can tolerate them. One thing that I was a bit overwhelmed at the time was to carry the prefabricated board. Later on the construction site, all the machines hoisted the prefabricated plates, and the building was covered to five or six floors, and the machine easily hoisted the prefabricated plates. At that time, there were no machines, and such work depended on human beings. Four adult men, two in front of and behind, shared a log stick, lifted one end of the prefabricated board, and carried hundreds of pounds of prefabricated boards from the springboard built into the slope to the floor being built.

I still remember that the first time I carried the prefabricated board, my legs shook, even a little shaky, and I felt unstable. However, no one on the construction site will sympathize with you, and if you can't do it, you have to go. In order to earn tuition, I had to grit my teeth and persevere.

Work a full day, count as a worker, 15 yuan. In order to earn tuition, I barely managed to get to the beginning of school. That summer, it often rained, the rain was too heavy to stop work, the weather was good at night, I had to work overtime, after dinner until ninety o'clock at night, counting half a job. Before leaving the site, the foreman counted 17.5 workers for me.

Now that I think about it, if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have become a journalist, and there were only two ways out: one was to grow vegetables at home, to become a vegetable farmer or a wholesale vegetable vendor. The other is to go to work on construction sites, slowly learn from a small worker, and learn to become a big worker who can plaster walls. It was my parents who insisted on letting me go to school no matter how difficult it was at home, which changed my life and freed me from the physical labor that they thought would be very hard to live.

In the third year of high school, I never went out to work again, but I still insisted on practicing for an hour or so every day, and then went into the classroom to study. Probably the practice scene of hitting the cement pillar with my arm was a bit scary, and no one in the whole liberal arts class had ever fought with me in two years. Only once, the science class students who lived next door did not sleep at one o'clock in the morning and sang loudly angered our liberal arts class, and one of my classmates and I rushed to each other's dormitories with a wooden stick, hitting wherever there was a sound, until no one made a sound... If the other side has no one to fight back, it will not be a real fight.

After going to college, he took martial arts classes. In the first lesson, I was stopped by the martial arts teacher and asked if I had practiced. I asked him how he saw it, and he said, you punch and wind, you should have practiced. In the whole four years of college, I didn't touch anyone. After work, I have been doing journalism for 15 years, encountering many unexpected situations, but I have not encountered any situations that require hands-on.

In the four years of college, I insisted on doing push-ups and basketball, a muscle, and some of my classmates laughed at me as a "muscle man"...

After work, I gradually stopped practicing, and the little kung fu taught by my father and the university teacher gradually forgot everything, and I was left with brute force. However, these past events will never be forgotten for a lifetime.

Chu Chaoxin

February 1, 2016, May 1, 2017