Xing Yi New Third Session 7/26
Author's curriculum vitae
Xing Yi
Xing Yi, oil painter. In 1969, he joined the yan'an team and went to school at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in 1972. He is a member of Beijing Artists Association, Beijing Women Artists Association, Oil Painting Association, and deputy research librarian. In 1998 and 2009, he held solo oil painting exhibitions to commemorate the 30th and 40th anniversaries of the Zhiqing Insertion Team. Published the books "Zhiqing And Northern Shaanxi Sketch Collection" and "My Days in Yanchuan, Northern Shaanxi". The oil painting "Commemoration of march 8th Festival" is collected by the National Art Museum of China. Xing Yi's oil paintings are mostly based on themes such as the life of Zhiqing and the customs of northern Shaanxi.
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Xing Yi collected wheat stacks in the courtyard
Forty years ago, my classmates and I went to Yan'an to settle down, where I lived, worked, and struggled for a full decade, and northern Shaanxi was the first journey of my life. I cherished that yellow land, and I dedicated the most precious years of my life to it, and I left my pure maiden's first love there.
In the third year of joining the team, the zhiqing of the same team underwent great changes, some joined the army, some went to the cadre school where their parents were, some were transferred to the county's literary and art propaganda team, and I was also seconded to Yangjiaping Middle School to teach.
Yangjiaping School is separated from our village by a mountain, ten miles away from the road, located on the Chuan Road more than thirty miles away from Guanzhuang Commune. It was a humble school with only a junior high school, surrounded by mountains on three sides, a playground, several classrooms, and a stone kiln on the ridge, where teachers worked and lived. The teachers of the school are divided into public and private schools. Public teachers eat grain from the national treasury, and private teachers have to carry grain from their own kilns every month to join the company. Because I had borrowed temporarily to help, I belonged to the latter, and every two or three weeks, I had to go back to the village on the twenty-mile mountain road to get food. When it comes to teachers who need to live in schools, it's mainly too far from home, and there are people like me who feed the whole family without hunger. Every afternoon after school, the teachers who lived near their homes went back, and the students did not live in the school, whether they were ten or twenty miles away from home, whether they were climbing mountains or walking rivers. Because first, there is no student dormitory in the school, and second, half-grown children like them, there are still many jobs waiting for them to go back from school.
The noisy and chaotic campus suddenly fell silent, the sun hung obliquely in the western sky, and our school was shrouded in a huge shadow of the mountains. Sitting at my desk in the cave, looking at the dividing line between light and shadow on the opposite ridge, I saw that the shadow part was rising, and the light part was getting smaller, from pale yellow to orange, from orange to orange to a small piece of the mountain that was only rose. I came to the countryside of northern Shaanxi in response to Chairman Mao's call for intellectual youth to receive re-education in the countryside. Where is our way out? As my classmates left northern Shaanxi one by one in different ways, this worry often bothered me.
Xing Yi teaches at cave primary school
There were footsteps outside the kiln door, and it was he who came to visit my little kiln to chat with me.
The first time I met him was at a county basketball game. People cheered loudly for a tall and handsome young man, only to see him bounce amazingly, shoot almost a hundred shots, and be very active on the field. As soon as he played, the score went straight up, and this guy played basketball awesome! It turned out that he was teaching at Yangjiaping School. He is a Suide person, who belongs to the kind of good image of northern Shaanxi that we admire for studying art, born with wide shoulders and narrow strands, slender and straight, straight nose, thick eyebrows and bright eyes. He was four years older than me, exactly twenty-five or sixteen years old, and was a local returnee from the 66th class of the original high school.
At Yangjiaping School, he was a key teacher, teaching mathematics in the third graduating class and physical education in two grades. The students liked him, adored him, and wherever he went, there was always a group of male students around him. He was a public teacher, and his home was dozens of miles away from the school, so he usually lived in the school. At that time, there were no electric lights in the rural areas of northern Shaanxi, and there was no television, and he often pulled erhu to spend time at night.
It can be seen that in this lonely mountain village school, he is very happy for my arrival. During the Cultural Revolution, he walked to Beijing and took a picture in front of Tiananmen Square. He was amazed by the world of difference between Beijing and northern Shaanxi, and he envied, longed for, and never forgot the wonderful world outside the distant mountains. So, everything about me and the city where I once lived had a great attraction to him.
We sat in the small kiln and had endless topics, ancient and modern, talking about heaven and earth, I was not good at words, but at this time I was talking endlessly in front of him. I was glad that someone had been with me to rehearse these lonely and difficult evenings, and I also had a small sense of superiority in telling the other person about his experiences that he did not have. But looking back on me at that time, I was absolutely innocent and kind. At that time, when I first came into contact with the youth of northern Shaanxi, my strongest feeling was to cry out for them. They are excellent in nature and have no lack of wisdom, only because they were born in the barren Loess Plateau, so that they can only eat in the loess for generations, lack food and clothing, and are poor.
Xing Yi needled her fellow villagers
Why is it that the fate of the same era, a land, and a society treats them so unfairly? I feel at a loss in front of them, I should not have so much more than them, I am willing to do everything I can to give to them, to share my share with them. What can I do, I lend him my book, we talk together about the fate of the "oxfly", lament the heroism of the "Young Guard", I show him my reading notes, and give him a heart of enthusiasm and friendship. It was not an intentional choice, we met in this way, I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing, that emotional experience really affected and even changed our respective future life paths.
He became more and more youthful and vibrant, his athletic figure was more active on the basketball court, his loud laughter was heard more among the students on campus, and his cheerful and melodious erhu sound dispelled my worries at dusk. On Sundays when I didn't have to go back to the village to get food, he stayed, and we met with other young teachers to swim in the reservoir. By the time I returned to school the following Sunday with my rations, he was also returning from the kiln, and with the seasons and seasons he brought me all kinds of mountain specialties: peaches, apricots, melons, dates and sweet potatoes.
I was young and silly, enjoying our friendship without scruples. I was happy, but I didn't know that his calm had been disturbed by my presence. He began to yearn, longed, began to sleep unsteadily, began to be eager to try. On the way back from a night trip to the outer village to watch an old movie, he said "be careful under my feet" and grabbed my hand, and immediately a stream of heat surged throughout my body. To this day, I can still vividly remember his hot and trembling hands, a fire of true feelings rising from him and igniting me, which could not be rejected, involuntarily. I can't say it's something I don't want. In short, I did not withdraw my hand, maybe this is the first test of love for a young girl who has just opened her heart? So we walked all the way back to school with our hands in hand.
Tsinghua High School students Zhang Wuai, Xing Yi and Yao Jian, next to the stream of the Yongping River
As if I knew he had been married after this, he couldn't help but tell me that he seemed miserable. I can't imagine that such a young and lively person is already the father of two children, surprised and at the same time very contradictory. First I felt a kind of loss of heart-wrenching, like stepping into a bottomless dry well, and my heart was suspended in mid-air, without any landing, and then there was a kind of ease after getting rid of the shackles. I don't deny that in my twenty-one years of life, this is the first time I have had a friendship and love affair with the opposite sex, but I never thought of getting married, because no matter what kind of storm I set off emotionally, there is always a little idea in my heart: I can't make a home here. I know very well that if he is not married, there is no way out for our relationship to develop, which makes me feel relieved.
Now I know that I am very "bad", I am not as good as my classmates, I have such female classmates, they are married to local youth, for decades together, they share happiness and hardship, they are close to each other, and some of them still live in northern Shaanxi. They have the courage to face up to their true feelings in their hearts, not only for a lover, but also for their true feelings, paying their youth and even a whole life. In this sense, they are rich, romantic, and unashamed, and what is precious in life? Isn't that a little bit of truth!
I really don't deserve his love. He told me he was ready for a divorce and I said absolutely not. At the same time that I said absolutely not, I took off my sweater and knitted it for him to make woolen socks, and I wanted to compensate for something, but I knew that I could not compensate for anything. He became depressed, and there was endless sorrow in his eyes as he looked at me. He was heartbroken, he resented the early marriage in the countryside of northern Shaanxi, he began to smoke one by one, his eyes were often covered with blood, he often lost sleep, and his erhu voice echoed for a long time in the empty campus in the evening, like crying.
Then something happened that brought the intoxicated but helpless feelings that we had produced during a year together tragically.
One day, he passed by the kiln door of another male teacher in the school, heard the inside talking about how I had a good relationship with him, and he rushed in and gave the teacher an old punch. The teacher filed a complaint in the commune, and the commune secretary personally came down to deal with it, and for a time the matter was boiling over. Afterwards, he told me that the sacredness of my heart made him unable to allow others to have a slight word for me, and he regretted that he was young and vigorous and reckless... Of course, I understand better that he is taking the opportunity to vent, he wants to vent, and he doesn't know how to vent!
Xing Yi barked the cattle to cultivate the land
It was also at this juncture that the county hired a group of zhiqing cadres, and the above sent me to the county cultural center to report. I didn't want to stay in the county as a cadre, but at that time, I couldn't think about it more, and anyway, Yangjiaping School was no longer suitable for me to stay any longer. We said goodbye in a hurry, and he returned my book and gave me a hard-skinned notebook with a poem he had written to me at the beginning. His poems are not very well written, of course they are very simple and sincere. I noticed some water marks between the lines of the poem, and suddenly understood that it was his tear marks. I couldn't stand the tears of the seven-foot boy, and I couldn't stand the stimulation of this tear mark on me, God sent me to tear the poem off the notebook and tear it up, I couldn't explain my behavior, maybe I didn't like the weakness of men? Maybe it's trying to end it all as soon as possible?
Heaven arranged that our fate did not end there. In the second year of the county cultural center, I was admitted to the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, and in the academy of fine arts, I was elected deputy secretary of the Youth League Committee, and became the biggest "official" among the students. When I graduated, the party secretary talked to me and sincerely said that he wanted to keep me working in the school. But a few days later, my class teacher quietly told me that he was going to Yanchuan County early the next morning to do my external transfer, because a classmate from Yanchuan also reflected to the school what happened to me at Yangjiaping School. The transfer was not resolved, and I was never mentioned again.
After three years of school, I returned to the Yanchuan Prefectural Cultural Center. At this time, the county's Zhiqing had almost gone, and just when others were flying away, I checked back my own box. At this point, I began to feel angry with him.
He knew that after I returned to Yanchuan, he came to see me at the cultural center one Sunday. He was carrying a large bulging school bag, and his steps were a little hesitant. I saw him appear again in front of my kiln door as before. After two or three years of not seeing, he was visibly old, thin, his cheeks slumped, his eyes tired and hollow, his clothes no longer clean and flat, wearing a wrinkled, worn-out, gray blue pants, and the youthfulness and vitality that had attracted me the most were almost gone. But at the moment his face was shining with excitement, I let him in, and we were facing each other again, but we seemed very strange and polite to each other.
At this time, I had every taste in my heart, surprise, pity, bitterness, and bitterness, so I made a mistake that I could never forgive myself, and I talked about the reason why I was not left in the Academy of Fine Arts. I will always curse my own selfishness, and I should never give him a basin of cold water when he comes to see me with the joy of reunion, and blame him for all my misfortune. He immediately felt as if he had been hit by frost, and his whole body was paralyzed, his face turned earthy yellow, and he sat there like a wax man.
The propaganda poster behind Xing Yi was painted before she went to the Academy of Fine Arts
He fell in love with a female Intellectual Youth from Beijing, he pursued a beautiful and noble spiritual life, what was wrong with him? His impoverished, monotonous but peaceful life was disturbed by this short, hopeless, painful love, and from then on he could not eat well, he slept restlessly, and he devoured the bitter fruit. He was so kind that he could silently endure the pain that fate had given him, and he only wanted to give love to people, but he never wanted to hurt people. His loyal, pure heart was deeply wounded by self-blame, and what he was wounded was vitality, which would be difficult to heal for the rest of his life.
In this tragic love, I was only temporarily frustrated, but I only thought about myself at the time, blindly emphasizing my own difficulties. We sat wordlessly frozen, eyes avoiding each other, the air frozen in our midst, and time became very difficult. He stood up slowly, silently piled the fruit, canned food, and thick locally produced biscuits in his bag onto my desk, and then walked out with the empty bag in his hand, without looking back. I chased him out, but I didn't try to stop him, and from his hanging head and his tight shoulders I could tell he was sobbing, his heart was sobbing, his heart was dripping blood. That's the last thing he left for me.
He was gone, and his back was always engraved on my heart. After that, I stayed in Yanchuan County for three more years and never saw him again. I heard that he had four children and was transferred to teach in a very remote rural school, unwilling to meet old friends from the past.
Many years have passed, many things have faded into oblivion, but somehow this matter is always so vivid in my memory, I can't forget him, and I can't get rid of his regrets.
Now that I have experienced the taste of life, I will no longer mention my first love and my heart will be warm. But the first time is the first time, just like the yellow land and the first encounter with us on the road of life. The blue blue, the sky that does not need to be whited on the palette, and the pure cobalt blue painting is not excessive; the barren land that contains great vitality; the spring, summer, autumn and winter of the small village in the deep ravine; the people who are as simple and thick as the loess soil. At that time, our young lives had merged with them, and we had soaked the breasts of mothers of the yellow earth with sweat and tears. On that loess plateau, I once met a son of the yellow earth and gave him a maiden first love, which also disturbed the peace of his life.
That's the story I'm going to tell. No matter how much my friends may condemn me and say that I am a cruel person, I will never argue, and I would like to express my eternal blessings and remembrance to him and to the yellow land in this article.
(This article is excerpted from "Our Confessions" edited by Wang Keming and Song Xiaoming, published by CITIC Publishing House in 2014.) ）