I insisted on walking from the end of the road. The primary school is in the middle of the road. This is a short and thin community road. The road sign reads: Sungang Road.
After walking three or four hundred meters, the traffic lights engulfed us, and we were involved in a place where we could bump into people at every step, the lights were denser than dust, and the buildings were crowded with buildings. I tried to identify and restore every intersection, every Zhulou, and even everyone who could, took a deep breath of air, and their hearts suddenly sank and rose, pain and joy. Here, my elementary school is sandwiched between Sungang Village and Tianxin Village.
Startled, staring at a certain yellowed building, feeling a bit like returning to my hometown. The places where you lived in childhood are like hometowns, and childhood is the hometown of a person in his life. At this time, the night is already crumbling, and if there are a few more gusts of wind, it will fall under the heavy cover. Suddenly, I am a little stunned—even though I have studied here for six years, I have never seen its night.
Thirty years later, when I came back one night, it was both strange and familiar. In fact, I have crossed Sungang Road by bus several times, looking like a hound through the small buildings, searched the elementary school back then, and the bus announced the familiar place name, I still sat still, thinking that there was no need to deliberately To look for it is like letting a past feeling be buried in the mud of the years. But I couldn’t put it down, so I said, “Let’s go and have a look, there are a lot of delicious food there.” My husband said blankly, “It’s a peasant village.” My
husband came to Shenzhen after graduation, and flew directly from Shenzhen to Shenzhen. The school flew into a huge company, of course he didn't know that Sungang and Tianxin, two ancient peasant villages in Luohu District, had a shining past. As early as 1985, when I was in school, they were already the "little stars" in Luohu District at that time. They were said to be rural areas, and the villagers had already lived in three-story small western-style buildings with gardens built in a unified way. On the iron fence, there are thick waterfalls of Pao Zong Hua and Bougainvillea. These are two kinds of magical flowers. The colder the day, the more colorful they bloom. Especially when the Spring Festival is approaching, they bloom like clusters piercing the sky. The firecrackers.
In Shenzhen at that time, since the special zone had just been established, there were only some decent roads and buildings in the areas of Dongmen, Sungang, and Caiwuwei in Luohu District. I forgot whether I was sad when I left my hometown and came to a foreign land thousands of miles away. A child under ten years old should not know what sadness is. She will soon forget the little friends who stole peanuts and played hide-and-seek together. Instead, I was amazed by the bows bought in Hong Kong on the head of the female students, and the chocolates brought back from abroad by the male students. Also, cold. Shenzhen in the 1980s, apart from the simplicity and construction sites that can be seen everywhere, left my impression of being cold. Looking back now, it is still cold. It seems that all the coldness in my life has gathered in those few years.
That thin girl, who just arrived in this city, doesn't have decent thick clothes yet. Especially in winter, there is endless rain in winter. She was shivering with cold, kicking and kicking the rubber cloth shoes with a few holes poked out by her toes. From home to school, she had to go through several construction sites, and then along the The two railroad tracks for pulling goods go for a while, and then they have to pass through two large construction sites. The construction site is always under construction. As shown in the drawings, the tower crane pile machine stands in a strange shape, the excavator opens its dinosaur-like mouth to eat everything, and the loud noise day and night stirs up the billowing mud and dust. When it rains, the cement is accompanied by yellow mud, biting people's feet, and accidentally slipping into the large pit mixed with mortar, allowing people to take a thorough mud bath in rainy days. Once after taking a mud bath, she finally couldn't help crying, not understanding why she came all the way to this ghostly place, what about her grandpa and grandma, what were they doing. She began to miss them, calling out to them. The rain was getting heavier, and the torrential rain was pouring on her head and body. She couldn't open her eyes at all, and had to run home as soon as possible. It was impossible for her parents to pick her up. They are always busy, father is always at the construction site, and mother is in a temporary factory building.
Many years later, I recalled and thought that the coldness at that time was not only caused by the harsh environment and thin clothes, but more importantly, it came from loneliness and cold heart.
By the way, this little girl is not alone. She is a small celebrity in her grade and even in the whole school. She always takes the first prize in theatrical performances. She is a good student who never misses. She loves to tell stories, and she can immediately attract classmates to watch her with her mouth. At that time, there were not many books in the school reading room, but she still skimmed through them while others were fighting after class. From then on, she fell in love with the people in the book. Every evening after school, if she went home alone because of something, she would talk to the people in the book, the princess, the prince, and even the old witch. On rainy days, the teachers were drooling on the podium. Sitting by the window, she tilted her head and stared at the sky for a long time in a daze, thinking that if there was another rain, Thumbelina in the fairy tale would emerge from the flowers. Just like the golden firecracker flowers outside the walls of those people’s houses not far away, they bloom one after another, driving away the cold air that can frostbite people’s eyes at a glance, making it like It is steaming like steam coming out of a pan.
The boundless night has already fallen on the top of the five-story building. Walking past a row of lively restaurants, I pointed to a dark aisle: "This is it, the passage in front of the former school gate." The husband looked at it twice, moved his legs and stood still: "Go by yourself, I Waiting for you." I hummed and stepped on the aisle, it was still the same as before, low and cramped, and the shops on both sides seemed to still sell some snacks, stationery, and toys. When I walked to the school gate, the security guards refused to let me in, saying that it was a holiday to prevent the epidemic, and that I really wanted to see the new campus next year, and the old campus was about to be demolished. After speaking, he pointed in another direction.
I proposed to enter Sungang Village, and my husband followed me. Last year, except for companies and some public places such as leisure parks and shopping plazas, he had hardly been to any places, let alone peasant villages. In the past twenty years, he had heard of few places. The small garden buildings in the village that were originally built uniformly disappeared, and buildings that were worryingly tall rose up in their place. We were like two gophers, crawling forward in the narrow space between the buildings, From time to time, avoiding the electric vehicles that shoot out like arrows—those who are busy delivering couriers, when passing by a long line of serpentine people doing nucleic acid in the reverse direction, almost all the eyes above the masks are turned to us, especially me who is walking in front , Like looking at a pair of monsters, I lowered my eyes and quickly quickened my pace.
On the side of the ancestral hall, sometimes fragments of time flashed by, a humming sewing machine, a delicate woman with a ponytail, smiling and chatting with people while pulling the cloth under the needle with both hands. She is the mother of a classmate. She came from Chaoshan, a family of five, with three extremely good-looking children. Her father set up a stall and her mother made clothes. The genes of Chaoshan people who endure hardship and dare to break through are in their blood. At that time, two-thirds of the students in the class were foreigners, like our family, Hunan, Henan, Sichuan, Gansu... Their parents took them away from their hometown and lived in simple shacks, but their faces were always smiling. They don't say anything, thinking that there is nothing to say, they only like to talk about the future. You could see the light in their eyes as they spoke, and that light, like crackling sparks, was like a faint lamp.
Going around to the main gate of the ancestral hall, I pointed to the foggy railroad tracks, turned to my husband and said, "The opposite is Honghu Park, and there are no lotus flowers in this place. When we were young, there were so many flowers in the park. We couldn't resist picking them, even if the teacher scolded me." It 's useless."
"I know you're not a good student." Fu slightly raised his head and teased.
There is always a little bit of being out of gregariousness. As a child, I tried to cover it up because of fear and helplessness. Once, I was so timid that I followed a few classmates in the class to climb up the high fire watchtower on the side of the school, followed them and slipped down holding the steel pipe. Before that, I followed them to jump over the roof and step on the thin and soft iron roof. Thinking back on everything now, my feet still tremble, and the foot injury from that year still seems to be aching. The bravery of childhood is not real bravery, it is a desperate gamble driven by loneliness.
When I got to the side of the road, I walked on a small street without looking back, and my husband couldn't help asking: "What are you looking for, there is no road ahead." I looked at the row of residential buildings in front of me, and then looked at He: "Let's go."
I asked him that just a few months ago. That time, it was at a resort by the sea. He was going out for a walk after dinner, but he was looking for it all the way, and he kept saying, "Do you remember that small building? We lived in it a few years ago. Looking at my team, dozens of people are still drinking and playing cards in the middle of the night." I clearly remembered, but I didn't answer directly, but said: "Let's take a good walk." As I
spoke, I had already arrived at the foot of a dilapidated multi-storey building— "Meijiang Tower" - I instinctively looked up. I once entered the house on the top floor upstairs. It was spacious and beautiful. There was a rare piano in the living room. My classmates said that her father was an engineer. I was only ten years old, and I didn't know what an engineer was, but vague images suddenly appeared in my heart, and they flashed in my mind, like the stars blooming in the small garden in front of "Meijiang Tower".
Before I went to school by bicycle, I would pass by here every day. The community here is big and beautiful. Occasionally at dusk, when I walk by alone, I will sit in front of the flower garden downstairs for a while, strangely, I have seen so many mornings and afternoons in this area, but I still have a deep memory of dusk. No one passed by, and most people were on the asphalt road not far away, carrying vegetables, riding bicycles, and carrying bags, and I was sitting here, with a small body, and my soft yellow hair was blown by the wind, inexplicably , with melancholy in my heart.
The word "time" came to this little girl's heart.
Now, recalling the little girl sitting alone in the dusk, I think, she doesn't know what kind of person she will become in the future, maybe she has dreamed about the people on the street she saw during the day? Figures of mom and dad? People on the construction site? A picture of a character in a textbook? I do not remember. At this moment, walking in the dusk more than 30 years later, I finally understand that nostalgia for the past is not about those fragments that happened or a specific person, but an attempt to re-conceive. Like a novelist sitting at a desk, trying to write the future, imagining what the protagonist of the novel might become.
The lights have faded.
become what? The husband did not know when he came to the front, his head tilted here and there. In junior high school, I was still a top student, just like him. But at that time, vocational high schools and technical secondary schools were popular, and they kept waving at people with gold-plated rice bowls. Being ignorant, I entered a certain vocational technical secondary school. Many years later, even to this day, I still regret it. Although the policy changed later, I barely went to college. If I had worked harder back then, I would have been admitted to the best ordinary high school, and had taken a step back. I had listened to a person who came here to advise me to take the lower general high school, and then I would have taken the college entrance examination, or even the postgraduate entrance examination... I look at my husband around me, how much is this? Like his past. Then, it is very likely that I will become a person like him. I have been in a large and glamorous company for many years. Except for weekends, I never know what the dusk around my home looks like.
Last year, Dianfu resigned from the company he had been with for 20 years. The company set the age of 40 as the retirement line. They only have the most golden years for employees. In the first month after leaving his job, he walked all over the places near his home, and excitedly told me where there was a tunnel with hand-painted paintings; where there was a green road suitable for jogging in summer. Morning and night, he would go out for a run or a vigorous walk, sit by the window and read "Compendium of Materia Medica" and "Huangdi Neijing", and listen to Chinese medicine classes. Naturally, he lost weight quickly, slept much more completely, and finally got what he longed for. Years of relaxation.
I don't like to go out, and he buys the side dishes every day. In winter, he buys winter bamboo shoots; in spring, he buys leeks; in summer, he buys loofahs, which are crisp, oily, green and tender. I thought it was like a plant, gradually conforming to the natural order, growing in spring and growing in summer, ripening in autumn and hiding in winter; when the wind came, the branches bent; when the rain came, the leaves unfolded. But slowly, I discovered a secret. He always weighs himself, once after eating a meal, and twice when he comes back from a run. I haven’t weighed the one at home for several years. In the past six months since he was at home, the scale has broken down twice.
In addition to weighing himself, he always suspected that something was wrong with his body. When he wakes up in the morning, he either complains of chest tightness or abdominal distension; every few days, he must go to a certain Chinese medicine clinic and bring back a large bag of boiled Chinese medicine, frowning and opening his mouth in pain; medicine. I couldn't bear it, and advised him: "Don't drink that stuff, eat well, and do what you should do, you are not sick." Fu gave me a look: "I know if I am sick, you are not me. "I had no choice but to turn around.
The little girl who sat in the dusk back then did not become what people defined her to be. Thirty years later, she herself can’t tell what she has become. Friends and even family members around her can only smile warmly when they talk about her. . Her father was old, and he hardly went out except to buy vegetables and see a doctor. After getting lost twice in the city he participated in the construction of, he didn't even go to the park very often. When he was a child, he saw her obsessed with storytelling, and he threw away her extracurricular books. A few years ago, he even said that he would sell a whole house of books by the catty. Speaking of her now, there is only a smile, a smile that no one can see the meaning of. But she knew, very clearly, that in the past thirty years, at least in the past twenty years, she has been working hard on something—reading and writing. From time to time, she asked herself why she read those books, they were not easy, they took time to torture the brain cells. At first, she thought it was to learn some literary skills and understand historical allusions. Later, she gradually realized that it was because of the endless questions in her mind that could never be answered exactly.
After graduating from university, she also joined several companies. Of course, they are not as glamorous as Xuebafu. They are all small companies that are not on the table. They are nothing more than how to develop new products, sell them, and how to make them well The customer service, the boss who is far away, made a phone call the next day to urge and guide their performance. Every day after get off work, she has to squeeze the bus to go home. There was no subway at that time, and all the office workers were crowded in the bus. She was often squeezed to this side, and she could be as stable as Mount Tai without help. The crowded bus passed one traffic light after another, and passed row after row of tall and short buildings. Many mornings, she struggled to open her sleepy eyes and looked out of the window with constantly changing scenery. At a certain moment, she suddenly opened her eyes wide and woke up completely: Where am I going, that small and boring company ? 120 a day, 2500 a month, what about a year? In one year, 30,000 yuan can be exchanged. She thought of more, ten years, twenty years later, the numbers she could exchange for these long periods of time. Oh, a number, and then, this number will be broken up into smaller numbers by her, 200 for a skirt, 150 for a bottle of face cream, 250 for a bag, and even 500,000 for a house... The bus slammed to a stop On a certain platform, this time, she opened her eyes wide again and really woke up.
She quit her job. Since then, no company or unit has owned a cubicle in any serious way. She told others that if you can't get a decent piece of gold every year, you might as well grind iron at home alone.
"They all say that the world is more beautiful with us, and the world is more beautiful with us." When she was a child, the girl was a member of the school chorus, and the chorus sang many songs. When she sang these songs, her heart was bright, and she felt that the world was a beautiful long road as wide as a square.
But now she feels that the world is actually a road as thin as a hair, and each hair is a person, sometimes the hairs are gathered in bundles, and sometimes they are scattered alone. In reading, she witnessed the stories of countless people, those who lived and died; she also saw time, what is time? It does not actually exist, what exists is the path that people have traveled. During the reading, she also had conversations with one person after another. She asked them why, and they asked her why. Repeatedly, she seemed to have a glimpse of the truth.
In order to divert my husband's attention from weight and disease, I propose to do something. For the purpose of protecting its own interests, the company requires that if you want to continue to enjoy attractive dividends after resignation, you must make a clean break with the past and not engage in related industries. That is to say, he has to change his body, especially his head, such as Nezha, who returns the father by removing the bones and returns the mother by cutting the flesh, to give birth to a new "I". What to do, open a bookstore? The friend laughed and said, that's sentimental, you have to prepare the store rent for several years first. Open a restaurant? The husband said, are you sure you can still read and write when you are busy? What is your purpose? Go back to your hometown to open a homestay? The underage daughter sneered, you are so chic.
In this way, dozens of days and nights flew by. They were like lancets that were so thin and invisible that they chipped away at something invisible and intangible. People didn’t feel pain but it would gradually disappear. I understand this feeling, it has been there for more than 20 years after graduation, from the rock of the bus at that time, it is still a rock now. However, the method has changed, from being passive to actively pushing it up the mountain, knowing that it is the boulder of Sisyphus, it will roll down over and over again, but the heaviness of pushing it makes me feel at ease, and even gives birth to a contradictory lightness.
One day, I smiled and said, "Let's make a video account for fun. I've read some history and ancient poetry over the years, just in this direction." He hesitated for half a month, and at first there was no movement. , he is quietly learning editing, recording, and picture matching, as seriously as he was in school back then. However, there are teachers in the school, there are textbooks, and there are clear marks for knowledge points. Now there is nothing in front of him, and he has to figure out something by himself. I was a little surprised, half a joke, it was not worth it, and then I realized that he was not only because of the trust he had with me day and night for more than half a year, but also because of his own needs. As smart as he is, of course he knows that my words are just half a joke.
Not long after, I was about to complete a certain writing task, so my husband drove me around to interview highlights. The poisonous yang in the hot summer can dry people out. We ran to the construction site under the scorching sun. He didn't complain, but instead told me to pay attention to mosquitoes. In the afternoon, the car drove to a piece of wasteland. At the end of the wasteland, there were several high-rise buildings that had been sealed and built.
At the fork in the road, there is a blue iron sign: Guangming Science City. Yes, here, with a radius of tens of kilometers, a huge science city will be built in the future. Several major urban areas in Shenzhen have been fully developed. Only this relatively sparsely populated land in the west can continue the speed and myth of the city for another forty years. So, just as the old man drew a circle on the South China Sea more than 40 years ago, this piece of land nicknamed "Siberia" was also drawn a circle. Those wastelands are the villages, cemeteries, and factory buildings that have just been demolished. The villages and vegetable fields that I passed by when I came here will soon be demolished and replaced by buildings with a sense of science fiction and modernity. I took a few photos of the high-rise buildings, and while walking through those unknown open spaces, I thought, do the people in the factory buildings in the village know their fate? Did they have struggles and doubts? But in the end, no doubt, they resigned themselves to their fate. Because this destiny looks so reasonable and bright, just like the broad road without loneliness and hidden pain.
There must be many children in these villages, and some of them are even younger than I was back then. How would they choose? If the Science City had not been built here, would they have become people like Tao Yuanming? With Science City, will they become Newtonian equivalents? I can't give a definite answer, but I know that Tao Yuanming took the initiative to return to the countryside not because he was desperate; later, Newton no longer studied science, but plunged headlong into seeking proof of God. Whether being an official, farming or scientific research, it may be a way for people to understand themselves and the world, and to get close to the unknown, some kind of eternal secret.
Suddenly it started to rain, and the raindrops drove me into a supermarket. This is a small supermarket of less than 30 square meters. The shelves are filled with daily necessities such as water, noodles, oil and salt paper towels. Under the light of lack of nutrition, a woman is sitting behind the cash register while eating and watching TV. I asked if there is an umbrella? She held out a few from under her feet, and I picked a big one. She took the money and asked me if I had eaten. A pretty face, her small supermarket is located at the end of the village, at the bottom of the only old building in the village that has not been rebuilt.
The rain fell sparingly for a while, then stopped again. The night has already fallen heavily, tightly wrapping every object and every person. No one can stop time. I no longer deliberately search for old relics, walk through the streets and alleys casually, and never tell my husband about the past of a certain "relic". There are more and more people walking on the road. Men, women, young and old, with things in their hands, their eyes are tired, or confused, or focused, or scattered. They are all strange faces. Numerous lights came on, some of which were car lights, moving quickly like waves stirring the river of lights. Husband said, don't you want to eat something? There are restaurants everywhere. I glanced over and said, "Of course." When I said this, it seemed that I really needed something to eat, and my body suddenly felt empty.
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