Text | Chen Chun
Speaking of Luohu, what comes to mind at the first time? Marginal, obsolete, in need of old age?
But in my narrative, Luohu, pushed to the "edge", is my irreplaceable center.
Cai Wu Wai, HuBei and Sungang, these are the places that are being rebuilt, and they are all places that I am very familiar with. Shenzhen seems to be pulling Luohu again, and my feelings are complicated by this: in order to enjoy the right to continue to develop, the objects containing my memories will disappear completely, but many people still think that they are not disappearing fast enough.
▲ 1996, Shenzhen, overlooking Luohu District
I used to be studying or traveling outside and people asked me where I was from? I often say vaguely that my home is in Shenzhen. It is better to say that it is Shenzhen than Luohu.
Most of the Shenzhen immigrants from Guangdong live in Luohu, especially the Chaoshan people. My father's restaurant has been working on Pine Garden Road for nearly a decade. Opposite the restaurant was a department store (later changed to a bowling alley), but I only had an impression of the bookstore on the first floor, which sold "Dragon Ball" from Hainan Photography Fine Arts Publishing House, one was a piece of nine.
There is a stock exchange next to the restaurant, and every day the screen rolls with red words showing the price of each stock, because the air conditioner inside is so cold that I run to "sigh the air conditioner" every day at noon. At that time, Songyuan Road, both sides of the road were quite prosperous, although there were many abandoned factories behind the buildings facing the street, but the speed of renewal was also very amazing, this year it was in ruins, and the next year the storefronts have been neatly opened. Later, the bulldozers no longer appeared, but the vitality of Songyuan Road seemed to gradually disappear, and after nearly fourteen years every one or two years, no change was found.
In the summer of 1993, I started school and transferred to the second class of the second grade of Hongling Elementary School. There was a small child in the next class, the son of my father's friend. When I went to check in, I saw him, and my father casually said to him, "You help me look at him." He nodded shyly.
Later, when I thought about it, I just thought that the educational fairness at that time was better than it is now, because there were more than 50 students in the class, all kinds of family backgrounds, the richest ones, living behind the Tiandi Building (now that piece has become old and broken), and some, their parents are selling vegetables in the vegetable market. At that time, there was no concept of school district housing, and if there was, I didn't know if I would be able to attend a key middle school later.
I often go to a small home because his TV is much clearer than the one in our restaurant. At that time, there was no digital TV at all, and it was all based on antennas. Their home can receive TVB and ATV, and there are no snowflakes and noises. Until I was in high school, when I saw the clear TV footage, I would have a feeling of tears in my eyes.
I have seen several animations at his house, including "Entertainment Goldfish Eye", "Legend of the Demon God Hero", "Sky Battle" and "Sailor Moon", but the most impressive is "Magic Little Magic Star", compared to the children who can only watch "Pleasant Goat", "Bear Haunting" and "Pig Man" now, I think we still have to be happy at that time.
Fa Xiao is a basketball master, I have no talent in playing basketball, he does not want to take me to play, but he thinks that I can save the game, so he always calls my house on weekends and encourages me to go to the game room to play "King of Fighters". At that time, we often went to the game room, mainly in the Workers' Cultural Palace near the East Gate, and there were several in Hwaseong, but there were too many "flying boys", and he would usually be very careful when he took me there. "King of Fighters" is the favorite of Fei Zai, he is bold and bold, sometimes encounters some people who love to explode and love to shoot the machine, and they are not in a hurry, just to save a little face, generally not "one draw three" ("King of Fighters" has three people per team, one on one-on-one rotation, "one draw three" is one that wins the other three).
A while ago, out of nostalgia, I went around the Cultural Palace with my friends, and I was quite shocked. In the vicinity of the Chinese (formerly Luoling Primary School) in Shenzhen, except for Luoling, it is difficult to find a place that is broken to this point, and even the lake water has a sewer color.
▲In 1995, the East Gate renovation project was started, and the demolition work was underway...
▲On October 1, 1999, the opening ceremony of Dongmen Commercial Pedestrian Street
These changes in Luohu often make me feel embarrassed: on the one hand, there is no development without change; on the other hand, Luohu often has changes but does not have much development, just like around 98 years, my father spent a lot of money to cut down a forest below us and made it into a meat market, resulting in a loss of urine.
In the cold middle school years, I built up a literary world to protect myself, which had some material support. I imagined the home with the balcony at the junction of Red Ridge and Red Gui Road as the little attic where John Christophe lived on the left bank of the Seine; named the distance from that intersection to Ruby Road Claude Simon's "Flanders Highway"; the sunset over the lake in Lychee Park, tagore's scrooge, collecting his last gold. Later, the small attic was demolished, and the Red Ridge Road subway station was built, and the kk mall on the Flanders Highway was erected, and the gold was still there, but I could no longer find the light of that era.
More than half of my emotional structure was shaped by the books I read during this period, and the others were the various street buildings in Luohu. Most of them today also face the fate of the old reform.
At the "Curiosity Bookstore" at the intersection of Red Ridge Road and Honggui Road, I used the money I saved from eating to buy Shakespeare's Tragedies, Tagore's Complete Works, and John Christophe, which are still in my bookcase. I stood in the bookstore and read all kinds of books, including "Mr. Lu Xun Memorial Collection", "Wang Xiaobo's Lackeys", "Wukong Biography", "Zhou Yu's Train", my middle school life in addition to books, is the extension of the ideas and feelings in the books in my life.
But in 2006, when the Grand Theater was renovated, the bookstore was topped out by a wedding dress store, and my spiritual sustenance was crushed to pieces. How could it be dismantled like this?
In the third year of junior high school, I first came into contact with "The Troubles of Young Werther", and I was in my first love. A while ago, when I turned out the diaries and love letters at that time, I didn't feel childish at all, but a little envious.
▲From 1989 to 2004, the night scene of the South Square of Shenzhen Grand Theater was performed
I miss that dark afternoon, I rolled up my pants legs to seven minutes long, carried a vintage umbrella, and sent her home with a thud in my heart, and the next day a female classmate aptly said that our peer was the encounter between Beauty and the Beast. Nor have I forgotten the first time she took me to the Hongwen piano shop under the Shenzhen Book City (now Luohu Book City), humming thoughtfully with a score that I was completely unfamiliar with, and pressing a few notes under the keys with her pale fingers on the side. Her family lives behind the current Choi House Wai, which has now been incorporated into the old reform.
It is precisely because the first relationship is so disappointing, my liking for Xiao Man is difficult to say that it is not with a reverie that is both true and illusory. Every weekend, I wash my face, put on my best clothes, pass by the Liyuan Hotel, which was under construction at the time, and turn into Hongbao Road to an Internet café that gives me a sense of security. She didn't go on it every time, so I often had my fingers tremble later because her cat head suddenly appeared. She agreed to correspond with me in mid-December 2001, fell in love with a boy in April of the following year, and at the end of the year she flew to Australia to study, which is very much in line with the life trajectory of a deep second generation.
My story with her is very monotonous, after graduating from junior high school we have only met two or three times, most of it from my imagination, I walked all year round on Red Ridge Road and Red Treasure Road, thinking back to everything she said to me (in fact, she did not say anything to me at all), I thought that high school would never end, her trip would always be far away, I thought there was always hope, but when she left, I didn't even know what day it was.
From the current point of view, I really did not have a friend at that time, and on new Year's Day in 2002 and 03, I went alone, and a sense of loneliness spontaneously emerged. That night, at the intersection of Deng Xiaoping's statue, I successively met my classmates in the first class of high school, the sixth class of junior high school, and a couple in my class, with their pockets in their pockets, or on their feet, walking towards ZHONGXIN in a sparse way. On the way back I met a childhood playmate and his girlfriend, who stood next to a child, gave him fifty dollars, and told me that the child was a wandering orphan. "Wandering orphan," I muttered, and the metaphor lingered in my mind ever since.
▲On October 8, 1990, the first McDonald's restaurant in mainland China was officially opened at the Xihua Palace in the East Gate, and McDonald's became a landmark of the East Gate.
When I returned to Chaozhou, I thought I was a Shenzhen native, and when I returned to Shenzhen, I felt that I was nothing. I grew up in Luohu, but with Shenzhen "all the way to the west", the concept of Shenzhen seems to have no "Luohu". Shenzhen has already changed its appearance, but it still claims to be the original Shenzhen, as if I threw away the most precious thing I once cherished.
But I still think of myself as the former me. My best friends are scattered in the end of the world, those who grew up together in Shenzhen, our relationship is like the plant in the corner of the garden that is not dead, you always think that you can save it, but you always forget.
Philosophically, I was forced to embrace the same theory of the self as Shenzhen, and we could not at all justify the identity of the self through the similarities between the past and the present, but only through some coherent narrative.
No wonder some people say that Shenzhen is a place that only has money, not memories.
Author of this article
Chen Chun Young scholar and teacher, his research interests include political philosophy, ethics, and intellectual history;
A "deep second generation" who grew up in Luohu.