Su Cangsang, essayist. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association, a director of the Chinese Prose Literature Association, the director of the Prose Committee of the Zhejiang Writers Association, and the executive vice president of the Zhejiang Prose Literature Association. He has published more than 400,000 words of literary works in newspapers and periodicals such as "Xinhua Digest", "People's Literature", "October", "People's **", "Guangming**", etc., opened a special column in "Liberation**", and published a collection of essays "On Paper" and "Meet the Tree". He has won literary awards such as the "October Literature Award", "Bingxin Prose Award", "Feng Zikai Prose Award", "Qijun Prose Award" and "Chinese Story Award". A number of prose works have been selected into various national prose anthologies, prose annual anthologies, rankings, and textbook readers, and have been applied to the questions of middle and high school examinations.
Summer Solstice Wind
Under the microscope of a Japanese researcher, the crystalline shape of a drop of water can distinguish between human praise and attack, water can see, hear, and know all the answers. In the lens of the Dutch artist, a tear has its own joy, anger and sorrow, the tears when yawning are like vines lying on the ground at will, the tears of sadness are thorny, and the tears of excitement and happiness are like a romantic snowfall.
In fact, the sound of the wind also has a shape.
The summer solstice is approaching midnight on Jeju Island. The whistling sound of the wind, like a giant dragon, hovers around the 38-storey Grand Hyatt building on Jeju Island, sometimes, the whistling sound is like the sharp teeth of a dragon tearing through the gray-black clouds, and sometimes, the whistling sound squeezes into a very small crack in the tall building, and then suddenly opens its huge mouth as if it wants to devour everything in the building, and sometimes, the wind suddenly weakens, like a wronged child tugging at the corner of his mother's clothes and whimpering and refusing to leave.
The night sneaks into everything with the sound of the wind. From the bar on the 38th floor, you can see the black sea under the gray-black clouds, the black volcanic rocks on the shore, and the illuminated downtown area of Jeju Island. A few of us withdrew our gaze and took our seats by the bar window.
The bar was dimly lit, and the blue light from the screen of the tablet used to order drinks hit his face like a spotlight. He ordered his drinks and tea intently. I noticed that his hair was shaved, his beard was clean, and the expression on his face was calm, just like he had at his mother's funeral five years earlier. Tonight, we met by chance on Jeju Island, we haven't seen each other for a few years, and this year, Ah Min, who has just passed the year of knowing his destiny, looks much younger than his peers, even younger than he was a few years ago.
After my mother left, I never had my hair or beard again. Actually, Jeju Island is my sad place. He said.
Ah Min is the son of Mr. Yang Peifang, a Yue opera performance artist who relied on each other after his divorce in "Wandering with the Opera Troupe", which I once wrote, and is also the godson of my husband's second aunt.
Ten years ago, Ah Min and his lover Ah Hua brought their mother and a young sister Ah Wen to Jeju Island to play. When his mother came from Shanghai to Yuhuan to support the development of Yue Opera, she was too busy with the performance, and Ah Feng, who was also a Yue Opera actor, was the same sister, so Ah Min worshipped the second aunt who had no children and no daughters as her godmother, and the children of the second aunt's relatives also became Ah Min's brothers and sisters. The young sister Arwen is the niece of her godmother, a few years older than him, with a cheerful personality, and she has taken him around to play since she was a child. Ah Min, who has a successful career, always wants to repay those who have given him and his mother warmth, so he took them to Jeju Island to play, and his lover Ah Hua accompanied Ah Wen to climb Halla Mountain, and Ah Min and his mother sat at the foot of the mountain and drank coffee all afternoon. Looking at the blue sky and white clouds of Jeju Island and the wind blowing on Jeju Island, he thought, in the future, I will take them to more and more beautiful places.
Who would have thought that?Five years later, within a year, his mother and Awen passed away one after another, one due to illness, the other due to illness, and went to a void above the white clouds, and that year, he felt that he had become an island like Jeju Island.
He picked up a white beer from Jeju Island, and I picked up a cup of fruit tea and drank it silently, as if we were drinking from the past.
In the dim light, I seemed to see once again that in the terraced house of the A Min family in Jiuli Song Flower Garden, Lingyin Road, Hangzhou, there were many photos of Mr. Yang Peifang and A Min's family of three in the living room on the first floor. Countless seasons have been reincarnated in front of the window on the second floor, and Mr. Yang, who is in his old age, sits in an old rattan chair, crouching in front of an old sewing machine, chatting with his nanny and making cotton slippers. There was silence all around, except for the sound of birdsong, the sound of sewing machine gears, and the curling smoke of a cup of coffee on the table.
From being a famous actress in Yue Opera to being framed, criticized, fired, and becoming a power plant electricity bill, fate never seems to have treated her well, but she still has clear eyes, full of energy, a hard body, and short brown-red curly hair. I think that the family of her accomplished and especially filial son is her greatest blessing.
I seemed to see the last time, she, Ah Wen, Ah Wen's sister Ah Yan and me, the four of us played mahjong in her living room together. She loves to play cards, the speed of playing cards is very fast, Ah Min will invite a few little brothers to come over every week to accompany the old lady to play mahjong, relax the muscles and invigorate the blood. She called Sansuo the little turtle, with a strong Shaoxing accent. Who knows, in the blink of an eye, the two people at the table that night are gone.
In her mother's last days, Ah Min took her home from the hospital and quietly sent her away in the way he thought she liked. When his mother died, her brow was furrowed, and when he went back at three o'clock in the morning, her brow was already relaxed.
In the month after his mother's death, he did not shed a single tear, but he could not do anything but read the scriptures. For the first time, he deeply felt impermanence and regret, and he regretted that he was not good enough, filial enough but not obedient enough, and clashed with his mother because of different ideas. He regretted that he had to take his mother from Wenzhou to Hangzhou to live with him to take care of her, but he was too busy, sometimes living in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, sometimes abroad, often leaving his mother alone, in fact, his mother's friends in distress were in Wenzhou. He regretted not taking her further afield, such as Europe or the southern hemisphere, even if his mother couldn't walk, it would have been good to sit with her on the beach and drink coffee. I always thought that the days were still long, long, and I could do many, many things for her.
A month after his mother's death, he was drunk, and tears finally came like a river bursting the embankment, and in the next two or three years, he often cried after drinking, sometimes he knew, sometimes he didn't know, and he didn't remember.
I remember that in a cabinet in a room facing north of that house, there were several sets of his mother's old costumes and hats, some of which were Xiaosheng and some of Xiaodan, as well as the dragon robe and crown of the emperor. Someone once made a ** purchase, but she didn't sell it, this was her last thought.
I asked Ah Min, are your mother's costumes and crowns still there?
He said that his mother had sent it to the people who wanted it the most during her lifetime, and it was considered to be the best use of it.
I said, yes, it's the best place to go.
He said that my mother loved to wear bead chains, and I kept all the bead chains I wore.
Yuhuandao, where he grew up, was a strange place to him, but he always wanted to take his son back to visit his godmother and her relatives who had just undergone major surgery, and play cards with them, just like he did with his mother back then.
Ah Min said, if my mother is still alive now, I will not be so paranoid anymore, even if there is a little less regret.
Jeju Island, once a place of exile, has become a holiday destination and a place of healing for people. After the summer solstice, the rainy season is before the summer rain, and the island is covered with clouds and fog all day long, and no matter how strong the wind is, the dense fog cannot be dispersed. We followed the golf team to Jeju Island to play for a few days, but in the clouds and drizzle, we couldn't see the road 10 meters away, and we couldn't see the true face of the sea in the distance.
The caddie Timi became a god-like being, who knew everything about it and led us through the fog. She loves to learn Chinese, and she learned with me "the wind is very strong", "left and right, front and back", and in the small space covered by clouds and fog, she is the closest person to me on Jeju Island, although we are both hurried visitors to each other. Life is like a fog, who can predict whether you will meet a bunker ditch or a green in sight ten meters away?Who can predict what kind of fate lurks in the next second, who will meet and who will say goodbye?
The summer heat is approaching, Hangzhou is hotter than usual, and I have almost closed my door after returning to Hangzhou from Jeju Island. About a week later, I suddenly noticed on the balcony that there was a withered epiphyllum on the branch of the epiphany tree that I had been raising for five years and three months!Because I lost the expectation that it would really bloom, I didn't even see the only epiphany for the first time. When is the bud fruiting?When did the flowers bloom?Aunt Part-time Worker said with a smile, It's been a week since you opened, and you just opened it the night you just came back, I thought you saw it.
This flower, like a drop of water, a tear has been looked forward to?Do you feel my expectation and disappointment year by year?Did you stay up until the night I came back?Have you ever waited for me to walk from an air-conditioned room to a hot balcony to find it and wait for it to be short-lived?It's been seven days since it was in full bloom, and why didn't it wither in the heat, but stubbornly stuck on the foliage until I could take one last look at it?
Most likely, it's all just wishful thinking on my part. But I'm willing to think so, just like me, just like countless people who are willing to live infatuated in this unsympathetic world, all affection points to the same bull's-eye: less regret.
I took it off and tucked it into a book I was reading. After many years, it will become as thin as a cicada's wings, and when you gently open the book, they will come back to life in an instant, spreading their wings like a newborn butterfly, and fanning up some dusty time. Like the countless flowers that I have sandwiched into countless books since I was a teenager.
The summer has arrived, I returned to the small courtyard of my mother's house at No. 15 Shanhoupu, Chumen Town, Yuhuan Island, my elderly parents had just eaten seafood noodles, drank the bayberry wine I brought back from Shangyu, and went upstairs to take a nap. I chatted with my best friend** for a few words.
What to do?My mother urged me to arrange a blind date for my daughter.
Coax her, follow her, and say okay, okay.
This July, I turned down five or six invitations to give lectures, and I stayed with them quietly at home, I don't know if they need me more or if I need them more. At the end of the month, I took them to Hangzhou for cataract surgery, and then took them to Moganshan to escape the heat.
The in-ear headphones block the afternoon wind and cicadas, looping an ancient love song:
The wind comes from the sea, and the wind comes from me.
There is rain on the sea, and it is me who rains.
The moon on the sea, the moon knows whether or not.
Hold the hand of the son, and grow old with the son.
Holding the hand of the son, life and death are broad.
The son is a comrade-in-arms, a lover, and a family member.
Lidong Tibet
Click", the husband of Ping, a neighbor of Shanhoupu on Yuhuan Island, first hoeed to the side of the sweet potato he estimated, dug up the starting soil, and then "clicked", several large pieces of sweet potatoes rolled over and out of the roots.
I followed his example and went down with a hoe, "clicking" instead of "clicking", revealing in the dirt the sweet potatoes that had been hoeed in half with my hoe.
Neighbor Ping's husband smiled and said, you can't dig like this, you have to dig the mud next to you first, and then you can dig sweet potatoes, otherwise a hoe will cut the sweet potatoes. This is the first time I've heard of it.
At the beginning of winter, the weather is getting cooler, but the sun is still strong. He gave me his hat to wear. According to him, I tried it a few times, and sure enough, it was much better, but it was cut a little bit. Before leaving, he must give me the sweet potatoes he dug up, and refuse me to take the sweet potatoes that I have dug up, saying that he will not lose his brand. This is a farmer's sense of honor.
In his laughter, I heard my grandfather's laughter and saw the hat on his head. The romance in his grandfather's bones is very inconsistent with his identity as a seafood seller, he loves the night of the full moon, wears a plain robe, rents a boat with friends who like to play and sing, prepares some wine and food, rows the boat to the center of the Nanmen River in the town, and sings in the bright moon breeze.
The family sat idly, and at dinner time with the amiable lights, my grandfather drank wine with crab legs, and told his children old stories over and over again that I don't know what I had heard from **. He said that in the past, when Qianlong went down to the south of the Yangtze River, he went to a village and ate a particularly delicious dish, and asked the farmer what the name of this dish was, and the farmer said "gold beats the white jade cup, and the red-mouthed green apricot mushroom." After Qianlong returned to the palace, he missed this dish very much, and asked the chef to go to the countryside to find it, and the chef was also curious, what kind of dish was this, it turned out to be fried tofu with spinach. My grandfather also said that once upon a time a scholar went to the mountains and was thirsty and asked the mountain people for water to drink, and the peasant woman scooped a ladle of water for him to drinkThe peasant woman replied, "Jin Zhubo water tank." The scholar asked, "What are the seasons of the year?"The peasant woman replied: "There is no break point in autumn and winter."
During the Dragon Boat Festival, when the whole family sat around eating tin cakes, my grandfather would always tell the children the story of another poor scholar. The poor scholar's wife sighed and said, "Other families have wine and meat, and my family has water and calamus." The scholar replied: "The lady doesn't have to write bitter poems, I learned in Duanyang this year that one day the dragon and phoenix will share the prosperity and unknown." ”
The grandfather who sold seafood had a literary and artistic youth living in his heart, and passed on this powerful gene to his children and grandchildren.
Grandfather could have been "literary" like this forever. But the situation has changed. In order to prevent several uncles and brothers from being arrested, he almost poured out his pockets and let foreign beggars replace them, and later, his good deeds exchanged him for a hat. After a long time, when the hat was finally taken off, he felt that he was really old, and he had no sharpness.
At the beginning of winter, when there was nothing to grow in the mountains, my grandfather would wear a hat and carry two baskets with me up the mountain, and go to work in the little bit of land he had. To this day, I can still hear the afternoon wind passing under the huge rhododendron tree on the cliff past my ears, and the smell of his smoke brushing my nose. He lay on his back on a slope, squinting and slowly touching the tobacco leaves, his clear face with the refinement of his youth, and sometimes, as if he was thinking about something, as if he were asleep.
I took a wild chrysanthemum flower into my mouth, just like I later took almost all the flowers in my hometown into my mouth and ate it, imagining that I became as fragrant as Jin Yong**'s Princess Xiangxiang. Fortunately, I have not been poisoned by flowers, but I have been poisoned by nostalgia.
The silent grandfather is part of the nostalgia. My grandfather was as deep as the earth at the beginning of winter. Sometimes he hides himself in a beanie hat with two holes, revealing only his two eyes. I couldn't see his smile, but I could see his eyes smiling as they looked at us. The only thing he said to me in my memory was to the effect that good people don't necessarily have good rewards, but good people have peace of mind.
The "babbling" of the open cabinet in Aunt Waitang's bedroom was silent, but it irrigated a child's thirst for snacks like water, a barren field, with only fried broad beans or water chestnuts and nothing else. My aunt dug out a small round porcelain vase from the depths of her clothes in the cupboard, and before she opened it, my senses felt like I had tasted the sweetness of the biscuit. There were a few biscuits lying quietly, and each time, my aunt gave only one to each of our children. I don't know where these cookies come from, my aunt seems to be doing the most secret thing in her life, and I suspect that my uncle, who makes a living from salt, doesn't know, and he thinks eating cookies is a terrible thing. I guess that my aunt was secretly exchanged for salt in the town, and she herself only ate a piece, and the sweetness has been remembered by her, and I even thought that the biscuits had been put in the house by the sea for a long time, and they must have been damp, and they were not so delicious, and the sweetness had been forgotten by me, but the sound of my aunt opening the cabinet door, her mysterious and smiling eyes, was the most beautiful voice in my childhood memory, short, warm, and rich, and it was all a child's imagination of a better life.
The beginning of winter, the season when everything is sluggish, is also the season of storage. My aunt hid a few small biscuits, my grandfather hid a belly of secrets, our ancestors were good at hiding secrets, deep pain, and deep surprises for family anytime and anywhere, just like every seed in the earth, deep trust in spring, promise to autumn.
Lichun bud
Beginning of spring, nine o'clock in the morning. When my eyes fell on a piece of paper with the sunlight, I saw a small beam of colorful light swaying slightly on the paper, and when I looked down, I realized that it was the sunlight refracted by the broken crystals set on the black scarf on my chest. As I breathed in, the sunlight seemed to breathe in and out on the paper, and when I stood up, the sunlight tinkled and fell to the ground.
At the beginning of spring, all things break the earth, break the ice and break the shell;At the beginning of spring, all things are born upward towards the sun and light. On the earth, every corner is surging with magical light, subtle breathing, powerful germination, this is the first solar term in the world, but also the first whisper of nature after waking up.
In the early spring morning in the Yuhuandao volcanic tea garden, thousands of new shoots are like buds. In the forest in early spring, the mycelium of a wild mushroom has spread for several kilometers, accelerating the decay of fallen leaves, turning dust to dust, and life in the forest has entered a new cycle. Two months later, rows of fertilized eggs are embedded in the tails of male seahorses, and they vibrate their dorsal fins so that they are not washed away by the seawater, and the tiny seahorses fall on the seaweed bed one after another, and a new round of life begins. The ice crystals in the clouds reflect the light of the Buddha, the white moon rainbow, and even the three suns and three rainbows. In the iceberg without a trace of bubbles, the ice crystals reflect different colors of light, and candy-like icebergs float on the surface of the sea. Humpback whales spew out "rainbows" in the sun, and whales spew "flames" in the sunset......
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ten thousand trees sprout today. "At this time, at nine o'clock in the morning, what are the children doing with the buds?Have any children walked into early spring and touched the budding of spring with their fingertips?
In the sunlight refracted by the broken crystals, other sunlight in the beginning of spring emerged.
On a morning at the beginning of spring, my elderly parents and my aunt, aunt, sister, and me, who were over half a hundred years old, brought a lot of food and drink to the mountain village of Yuhuan Island to play, just like going to the mountains for picnic camping in childhood, just like the ancients went to the suburbs to welcome spring, step on spring, fight spring, and bite spring in the beginning of spring. The sun fell on the red and green cloth chairs, on the gray hair, and on the vernacular sound one after another. The minds of two generations were filled with the stars of broken crystalline memories at the same time, a sweet popcorn, a sugarcane tip that was not sweet, a sweet and sour azalea, jumping rubber bands, grabbing stones, throwing sandbags, turning over cigarette shells, throwing handkerchiefs, wooden people, fishing frogs, touching snails and ......In the era of material scarcity, it has brought great happiness to every child. At that time, parents were busy, children were empty and happy, and now, parents are busier, children are busy and unhappy. Early spring is fleeting, and early spring is fleeting. In their memory, have they ever felt extremely cool on their steaming faces no matter how cold or hot the wind blows?Have you ever jumped and ran wildly, like a rushing stream in early spring, even if it is accompanied by the pain and wounds of falling and falling?
On another early spring afternoon, the turtledove that came to her mother's courtyard every day had not yet come, and my father only took a nap for half an hour before getting up, saying let's go to Wujia Village, Waitang, Chumen, to catch up with the market. For many years, the lively material exchange conference in my hometown has long become a distant childhood memory. We lingered in front of the stalls selling pickled snails, pickled razor clams, pickled cuttlefish eggs, dried hairtail fish, dried Chang fish, dried water fish and other pickled and dried seafood, and were attracted by those special rich fragrances, selling stone lotus tofu, fried drums, selling dried peach pulp, shredded sweet potatoes, shredded radish, dumpling leaves, pounding mallets, The small stalls of rattan baskets, the stalls selling chickens and ducks, the stalls selling freshly cut fish noodles and mung bean noodles, and the dazzling array of food stalls that come from all over the country are always stumbling on our footsteps, but in fact, what stumbles our footsteps is the common childhood memory of two generations. I bought a handful of plastic hoops to encourage my father to play the trap animal game together, naturally, there were no ones, but my father looked happy, and he looked like a teenager when he threw the hoops out with anticipation.
In front of a small potato stall in Yunnan-Guichuan, I saw a little girl lying on the muddy floor of the shed sleeping with her mouth open, five or six years old, with short hair, a gray face, a small blanket on her body, and cardboard under her. Seeing that I was puzzled, the 40-year-old male stall owner looked back at her with fried potatoes and said, "We drove from Guizhou for six days, and the child was tired."
It occurred to me that this little girl was the only child I had seen that afternoon, and maybe not the only one, but I really didn't notice that there were other children in the whole meeting. The material exchange conference in my childhood memories resounded with the laughter of the children, full of novelty, happiness and satisfaction. At this time, the children are all in school, and in the evening, will the parents bring them over to let off steam?
Lichun, "The world is thunderous, and things are innocent." The first king Yimao cultivated all things at the time". There is no vain, and it is a warning that the ancients passed on to us through thousands of springs. Plants planted in pots never grow into large trees, and even in spring, some of the new shoots that have just sprouted will wither.
Shu Xin, a radio host my age, told me about one of the most intense conflicts she had encountered during her years of mental health counseling: a bitter mother, a taciturn father, and a daughter with good grades but serious psychological problems. In the consultation room, the mother rushed to her daughter, gritted her teeth and said in a trembling voice, why don't you find a place to die, how long will you take me?!The daughter froze, subconsciously picked up the water cup in her hand and threw it at her mother, and the father burst into tears and closed his eyes weakly.
Zhou, who is the same age as me, once brought her daughter who refused to go to school and only wanted to stay at home to read calligraphy, painting and write **. Her expression was gloomy, and when she handed over the portrait prints she had carved for me, she said with a serious expression, "Auntie, I also want to wander with the troupe." It wasn't until she squatted on the ground and picked up my kitten that I finally saw her smile and it seemed to glow from her. That night, Zhou's daughter was holding a little orange cat and laughing. She so quickly fulfilled the promise she and her daughter made in front of me: she hated cat hair so much that she would raise a kitten for her daughter, who would go to school the next day.
Fireflies must be in the darkest places to see each other's light and thrive, and the lights of the city are pushing them farther and farther away. Parents and children who are anxious and confused like fireflies everywhere need a great force to rescue them from exhaustion and confusion and move towards a more natural and expansive place. I don't know what it was, it could be a tinkling sun, a broken pot, a land that really smells of earth.
The children are waiting, and countless springs are waiting in the future.