Liu Guoxin
It seems to be floating on the sea, as if it is reborn. I didn't like this place at first, but when I returned to this place, I felt a kind of comfort, and after wandering for a long time, I was still fascinated by the jujube, sea red fruit, and the burnt smell of cooked potatoes, and the soft earthy aroma. Black and white, light and shadow, light and dark, hot and cold, ......It was everything, and it still is. And between this past and the present, there was a period of time when it was just a pile of scrap metal in memory, heavy but indestructible, fire could not be sent away, water could not be sent away, empty like bellows, but it automatically played and sang when the wind and grass were blowing. Sometimes, when you close your eyes, you can feel the fire shining on the window, and the quilt wrapped around your body still exudes the smell of hot kangThousands of miles away, there will be times when I will stand here in reverie, or how old or teenage.
The little white sailboat sailed through the lake at night, and it was dark on both sides, and the bamboo horse was at the helm, and he rowed very slowly, as if he was afraid to wake up the quiet darkness. That's how it feels. She sat next to him and didn't speak for a while. Everything that needs to be said has been said. After putting her down, the bamboo horse would turn and walk up the avenue, all the way down the river, to the village covered by the date grove, and lay down in the cave made of earthen walls, listening to the hissing of the fire, smelling the warm and pleasant aroma of the smoldering red jujube wood poles in the hearth, and sink into sleep.
The village called Shimachuan, the winding jujube forest, and the flocks of guinea fowl and chaise fowl under the trees, and the occasional dogs and cats running out to hang out, seem pompous and extravagant, but they are the real home of Bamboo Horses. They are his, but they are like a kind of Zen language, spread out for her in the mountains. Almost the whole world is surrounded by electric lights and the Internet, as well as parks and shopping malls, and ...... of urn-like buildingsHere, the bamboo horse still lives such a simple life, the dog barks in the deep alleys, the rooster cries in the mulberry tree, the mother's tomb is on the hill behind the house, where the ancestors of the village are buried for many generations, the small mounds of the dotted protrusions do not make people feel afraid, the people who live on the ground work next to these mounds, sometimes they talk about the people below, and sometimes they seem to forget completely. Just like a declaration to the times, after graduating from Zhuma University and wandering in Suzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Feishui and other cities for more than ten years, he returned to the village where he grew up to farm and breed. It's already in its fourth year. Talking about how to build desperately and work hard, he just rested at sunrise and sunset, following the primitive and ancient pace, stubbornly living his life like this day by day.
Life, it's as simple as that, don't think too much. Bamboo Ma drove the car and said that when the car reached a detour, he turned on the left turn signal and began to turn. After he turned around, he continued: "Didn't you say before that **peace of mind** is home, and I am here at ease." "The small tomb on the hill behind the village, the silent and silent call under the land, is an invitation from the void, which may be reassuring and settle, so after more than ten years of wandering, perhaps because of the longing for his mother, he finally chose to return here.
More than ten years, after graduating from high school, it is like going to another life, but it is full of hustle and bustle, most of them have gone to distant places and made achievements, only the bamboo horse has returned here. After wandering in the city for many years, after returning here, he began to cultivate and weave again, sow seeds, raise chickens, dogs and cats, harvest grain, harvest eggs, and harvest what he wants to harvest. The life here hides his grand view, but she can't see it. However, he insisted on coming back year after year to see him and see the homes he had built on the old villages. If she had such thoughts, she wanted to follow him, and she didn't have faint doubts in her heart, it depended on how long the bamboo horse could last. Everything has changed a long time ago, the Internet has changed the world, the roads extend in all directions, what is he going to do in an old village hidden in the mountains like a mouse?She has both admiration and suspicion for him, on the one hand, she hopes that Zhuma will quietly live his life here as "the edge of the green tree village, the green mountains and the outside slopes", waiting for her to wait for the water and soil;On the other hand, she felt that she was patiently waiting for the bamboo horse to return to the city. In modern society, there are farmhouses everywhere in the Peach Blossom Garden, and a network cable connects the world into a global village
After Takema's mother died, Takema's father found a widow in a neighboring village, but he always opened the coffin shop at the intersection of the village, making coffins one after another, and made a living. As a contemporary underworld vendor, he inherited the career of his ancestors and insisted on the art of paper fire accompanied by the coffin. "Craftsmen can't die of hunger in hungry years", this is the ancestral teaching, it was still valid twenty or thirty years ago, and now this is a bit backward, compared to the local bosses who broke out because of the coal mine, the coffin shop is really nothing, the days are the same as a few decades ago, plain and sad, but this is life itself. The way they work shows everything: manual labor is not a shameful thing. When Qingmei wrote all this, she also asked herself, how could it not be?!However, in this way, Takema showed her, even implicit a contempt, saying to her: everything is just like this, life is simple to the dust, there is no need to indulge in external happiness and illusions, there is no need to imagine the gaze of others.
Compared with Zhuma, Qingmei has too much frustration from the outside world. The family is too poor, and her parents are patriarchal, and they feel that her birth was an accident, and it should be corrected but not corrected, which dragged down the family's economy, especially, the grades in the study era were not outstanding, and she couldn't even get into college, so she finally passed the self-examination, and then groped all the way, the blind cat touched the dead mouse, read a master's degree, and then relied on rote memorization, bumped into the doctoral exam, and entered a famous school that people think, at every turn, actively or passively divided into the seemingly noble academic celebrity circle such as intellectuals, in fact, as Zhuma said: but that's it. Some things are broken on the inside, and it is difficult to stick to them no matter how mellow they are on the outside. Relatively speaking, bamboo horses are more open to life. They met in high school, as far as the college entrance examination is concerned, Zhuma is luckier than Qingmei, and it also indirectly proves that he is smarter than Qingmei, he graduated from high school and went to a prestigious university in Beijing, studied for four years, and graduated from the Department of Geology. The first job was in an oil field in the north with a good salary, but in less than two years, he personally extinguished this "happiness", left the rich paper money, left the north, and went all the way south to Suzhou. Since then, he has wandered from city to city, until more than ten years later, when he returned to the corner of the mountain village where he grew up, and began to live his busy and leisurely life of breeding and farming. All this aroused Qingmei's curiosity, what gave him the strength, self-proof or empty, and made him give up so much?No one came to answer her. In her thirties, she was a university teacher, haunted by time, space, projects, ** and meaning, and haunted by a dead love, so she resigned briefly and came to the village of Zhuma. Could it be that the bamboo horse has been wandering in the city for many years, and he also realized that his time was completely wasted, and he lived in the whirlpool of grid consumption, so he fled back to the mountains to build an ideal life for himself?She sometimes talks to Zhuma about some issues on the Internet, but the depth is not involved. In a world where everything seems to be gone, it seems that only by falling into the appreciation of the remnants of the ruins can it be beautiful, and this appreciation is sad. Too much advertising leads people to go to the countryside, to the wilderness, and to build a paradise there. Could it be that the bamboo horse is also affected by this?
I can't help but say that Qingmei is worldly, and she wants to find an outlet. I don't know when she felt like life was running farther and farther on the wrong track, often being chased by a danger of falling off a cliff. There was something wrong in her life, maybe so serious that it couldn't be repaired, many moments, she felt that she couldn't go on like this, she couldn't live like this anymore, but it seemed that according to the world's eyes, she couldn't help but say that it was healthy, but she always had that feeling, and life should be corrected quickly. I just don't know how to correct it. The unconfident countryman has finally learned how to pretend in the city after being instilled in one school after another, but he always feels like a fake, not to mention, his thirties is an embarrassing age, if you are not married, if you are still a woman, if you are still worried about whether to get married and whether to have children, if your school sends you twice a year in the spring and autumn**— If you are a leader, your colleagues, your elders, your classmates who have not been in touch for a long time, and anyone who knows a little bit about you, will always show such an inquiring eye when they see you, and ask you: "Has your personal situation been solved?""Again and again. Especially, if your job is nothing more than a high-level knowledge porter, facing the danger of losing your job at any time, and you yourself are mildly or seriously tired of all this, so you take the initiative to leave, try to find an exit in the constant drift, try not to let yourself die in a sudden truncation of panic, of course you feel that ** is wrong......However, when Qingmei stood in front of the bamboo horse and watched his flocks of concubine chickens and guinea fowl peck at the fence, she felt that it was indeed all like this, and it could be very simple ......In the midst of despair, on top of the humble and insignificant, it suddenly seems to have gained strength ......Perhaps because of this, the bamboo horse returned here, back to a tomb, and tasted sweetly and dullly the memory of his long-dead relatives.
Too late. Takema turned around and prepared to leave the market. The car was driving slowly, but the direction had turned, and he could tell he was going to finish the matter and go home. She stood at the intersection, watching him drive through the corner of the new district of the county seat, leading to the big road towards the county seat, looking at the left turn signal he played in order to change lanes, and knew that some things had long been irreparable, not to mention that everything was impossible to talk about, and it was impossible to say before. A layer of bitterness passed through her heart, but she felt sweet, as if she had found some strength and could go away again. There is no doubt that compared with ordinary classmates or friends or random people who rely on their academic qualifications or family relationships to do a fixed job in the capital or provincial or county town, buy a house, have children, steal love, or secretly ambiguously go home every day on a fixed route to go home and fix the bed board to sleep, there is another tenacity and strength in the bamboo horse, which they cannot destroy. From him, Qingmei has gained the strength to travel far away again and again, of course they have never been lovers, although they have also hugged and slept in a room, but that is something other than the love of men and women, that kind of hug has no ** feeling, it is a kind of prayer, a desire to continue to live, so it is necessary to hug. That kind of wet relationship between the sexes never really reached them. She secretly drew on his tenacity and endurance, and traveled with it, year after year. Sometimes, she feels that the idyllic life that Zhuma lives in the mountain village is lived exclusively for her, and another possibility of life for her, including his love, his farming, his breeding, and his cats and dogs. There is another self in him, and Qingmei firmly believes that this is the twin of her soul, which has been in a star-shining way elsewhere for many years, not so dazzling, but so indispensable.
The secular relationship is actually very simple, Zhuma and Qingmei are high school classmates, Zhuma's first girlfriend, and also their classmates, her name is Rainbow, and now she has her own children and her husband in Suzhou, Zhuma stayed here, and his new girlfriend who has been dating for three years - Yifan, a Feishui person, he waited for the consent of his mother-in-law, and then got a license to get married, in fact, Yifan was willing to marry the two of them to marry themselves, but Zhuma always wanted to wait, wait, maybe her mother would agree to her marrying him, a farmer living in the village, and agree that she would travel thousands of miles for love. Takema's mother died prematurely, but it still affects him in his mind, so that he doesn't want to hurt the heart of another mother, and he wants to be blessed by her parents. In the private nest of a bachelor, after more than ten years of wandering career, Zhuma must have had many young girls and gave many people warm love. However, this time, he was serious, not cheating, not hypocritical.
All along, they were too free and undignified. However, in this matter, the hearts of the two people are the same. So, this time, even if Yifan was not here and returned to Feishui, Qingmei still did not stay overnight. Some things are to be respected, although Yifan also knows her existence, like a ubiquitous shadow, Yifan wants to ** the safety of her love, Qingmei is willing to give her this transparency, so WeChat was added between the two. In fact, there is almost no contact between them, and even Qingmei's praise frequency of bamboo horses is not as much as that of Yifan. The meeting once a year is only when Qingmei returns to her hometown, and she sees each other once, at most half a day or a day. Transparent as white paper, but like another declaration that she loves this man. Where is such speculation. But there is really nothing, that's all, that's it, the bamboo horse is the constant of her life, they both understand that desire sometimes only takes one night, everything is destroyed, there is something more to cherish than desire, and more afraid of blasphemy, although they can't tell each other what it is. Every time, when Yifan tried to tell her something about Zhuma when she was a student, she would tell her that the two of them were not very familiar at that time, and slowly Yifan seemed to be relieved, and sometimes sent her some village maps. (This article is an excerpt).
About the Author:
Liu Guoxin is currently a teacher at the School of Liberal Arts, Shaanxi Normal University. He has published the first collection of "Confession", "City Guest" and "Night Boundless", and the prose essay collection "Second Life", "Black and White: The Eternal Desert Thirst" and so on.
*: "Yanhe" magazine 2021 4 issue of the novella **list, **literary Shaanxi army"].