Jia Pingwa prose: into tarim

In August, I walked into Tarim to watch the oilfield conference battle. Go deeper along the desert road that shocked the world, learn why Taklamakan is called the Sea of Death, and know how determined Chinese ask for oil from the desert. The sun was so good that it was too red to open. Our throats smoked, our lips were chapped, and our skin felt tight. Suddenly, the wind started, first the sand on the asphalt road was like snakes, like smoke, and then I saw someone riding a donkey on the side of the road, suddenly floating up, like a paper cut, falling on the sand beam in the distance. It was getting dark, and four trucks with wooden boxes were speeding ahead, one overturned in the wind and three shaking like boats. The driver said that during the construction of the road and the drilling of the well, the sandstorm swept away many instruments, and more than a dozen bulldozers alone were missing. We were so nervous that our faces were white, heavy fog and sand, making it difficult to see the road when the headlights were turned on, and the wind and sand were so big that the car doors could not be pushed open, and no one dared to open their mouths, open their mouths to take a mouthful of sand.

We walked into the heart of the desert, which allowed us to see its many faces in one day, and we did not come for romance or to find mirages. Tarim is known as the second Middle East, with the richest oil reserves, the harshest natural conditions on the ground, and the most complex underground geological structure. The national petroleum development strategy shifts, and the fate of China's petroleum in the twenty-first century is related here. So, what kind of story is being played here, and how do people here fight for their own survival and for their magnificent ideals? In front of the Tarim, the natural conditions are harsh, but the living area of the activity room is also very modern, there are TV videos, air conditioning and showers, food and drink are all transported from Korla, and even save the water to set up a green test garden, green grass clusters, flowers in the wind and sand in the dusk bright. Hard work will always be the main theme of the life of oil people, but oil people are not only ascetics. Whether it is road construction, drilling, house repair and transportation, the production system has been in line with the world, machinery and technology are world-class, and the efficiency is of course high efficiency. The new era, the new oil people, in the desolate desert, forged new glory for the country.

I came into contact with oil people at different levels in different positions, and everywhere I went, the workers let me sign. I was used to writing those Tang poems and Song poems, but the workers thought of words by themselves, and the words they came up with were almost all rhetoric. The workers here infiltrate these languages into their own lives, they are real, without the slightest bit of hypocrisy and mannerism, they do it, faith and strength come from here. Therefore, I followed the instructions and wrote almost all of them were "smiling proud of the sand sea", "life is in the desert", "I give oil for the motherland" and so on. This is really a pure land of a different meaning, this is the pure spirit that surges on the oil front, and this is also the magnificent atmosphere that supports a nation!

Back in Korla, we were invited to give a presentation there. We are writers, but we don't talk about literature or literary writing skills, but only about how we feel over the past few days. Yes, how to transform the harsh natural environment into the joy of survival, how to transform the country's trust and expectations into the energy of work, how to transform the desires of human nature into a unique character and language, so that we can further understand the oil man. In today's society, some people are playing the role of corruption, some people are playing the role of drunken dreams, some people are playing impetuous and frivolous roles, some people are playing the role of withering, and the oil people are playing their own heroic roles. The oil man's responsibility in this life is to find oil, and a heroic spirit in the human world will gallop across the world!

Returning from the desert hinterland, we pass the Tarim River on the edge of Taklamakan, and on the site of the river is a headless poplar forest. These poplar forests attest to the existence of the oceans of history, but now they are all dead and have become the basis for the sea of death. These dead poplars are incomparably large, and the branches are as stiff as iron and bone on top of the yellow sand. It is said that they do not die for a thousand years, do not fall after a thousand years of death, and do not rot for a thousand years. The poplar forest is like the remnants of an ancient battlefield, so tragic that we want to cry. We shouted, why we shouted, for whom we shouted, no one said anything, but we all understood in our hearts. There is no sculpture hall in the Tarim oil field, but there is this poplar forest, these trees are the image of the oil man, a tree is a sculpture, a forest is a group of heroes! After we ran and shouted feverishly there, we all fell to our knees on the sand beams, holding the sand into the mineral water bottles and taking them away. The sand is now stored in our respective study rooms, and that August is long in memory, and will become a dry food to be chewed forever for the rest of life.