[Editor's note].
From one small clue one can see what is coming. The Chinese people's indomitable belief and tenacity in overcoming difficulties are deeply rooted in the details of Chinese life. On the occasion of the Spring Festival in the Year of the Dragon, The Paper reporters immersed themselves in the real life of Chinese society and discovered the faith and will of the people who were indomitable despite the setbacks.
These stories from the details of life are combined into a "micro" topic, and today it tells the warm story of my cousin's return to his hometown to build a house.
On the eve of the Spring Festival, my cousin, who had already settled in Guizhou, drove back to his hometown early and spent a year in his hometown, because he spent nearly two years building a new house in his hometown, and now the interior decoration has been completed, and it is fully equipped to live and receive guests.
This cousin is a person I admire.
I remember that his grades in primary school were very good, and he always maintained an upper-middle level, but at that time, it had become a trend to go out to work, and the hearts of countless rural teenagers were fluctuating, and his cousin had no intention of studying, and he went out before graduating from junior high school.
What exactly he was doing out there had always been a mystery in my mind.
After many years, I re-got in touch with him to learn about his past in the rivers and lakes, he has been in Jiangsu and Zhejiang all the year round, entered the factory, worked, and also rented a shop in Shanghai, started a hardware business, barely supported the whole family, and finally bought a house in Suzhou, and finally had a place to stay.
It is not easy for a foreigner to put down roots in Suzhou, with high housing prices, high consumption, jobs, mortgages, and ...... for children to go to schoolOne problem after another is coming, and ordinary people are difficult to deal with.
After careful consideration, the cousin decided to move his family to Zunyi, Guizhou, which was his wife's hometown.
It was a wise decision, and through his own struggles, coupled with the help of his relatives, his life quickly stabilized and his career improved.
Don't look at the fact that life is already stable, but he always has an obsession in his heart - "go back to his hometown and build a house".
Previously, the whole family worked outside to make a living, and the cousin's old house was left unattended for a long time, and finally collapsed under several storms, and the black tile wall turned into a pile of yellow mud, which is inevitably sentimental.
Since then, my cousin's family has become a "homeless" drifter, where is the township? This became a question that my cousin had been thinking about for a long time.
The cousin said that when his mother was alive, he always wanted to go home, but he did not have enough money at that time, and he could not do so until her death, which became the biggest regret in his life.
The drifter is like a kite drifting in the air with the wind, and the one who holds the kite string is the native of the country, and the cousin does not want the line to break suddenly one day.
As the saying goes, only when you have a mother can you have a home. After the death of his mother, his cousin secretly decided to build a beautiful house in his hometown to comfort his mother and find a home for his long-adrift homesickness.
Once this thought arises, it grows like a weed, and it grows wildly, and it is out of control.
It is a spiritual consumption regardless of the cost, which rebuilds not only a residence, but the emotional world of a drifter.
My cousin said that in his early years, in order to make a living, he was far away from his relatives and homeland, and he was a guest in a foreign country, wandering around.
It shows that the comfort and comfort brought to him by building a house has outweighed everything.
Mr. Fei Xiaotong, a sociologist, said that the family is the basic community in China's rural society, and it should be more accurately called "small family". With people comes home, and leaving home and returning home seems to be an innate human instinct.
As a wanderer on the way away from home, his cousin was willing to pay a high cost for returning home before his life was twilight and he was born early.
In April 2022, my cousin started his plan to build a house, the process of building a house was not easy, and he stopped work many times due to lack of money in the middle, but he persevered, went out to earn money when he ran out, and came back to build it again when he earned the money, so repeatedly and intermittently, he spent hundreds of thousands of yuan successively, and he also renovated it himself, and finally built the house.
On the eve of the Spring Festival, he specially took the whole family back to his hometown for the New Year, and his uncle, who had been adrift for half his life, finally returned to his roots, and did not want to work around to make a living.
This may be the life scene that my cousin dreamed of, and he struggled for more than 20 years for this day to come.
The cousin said that in order to build a house, he drove back and forth between Guizhou and his hometown countless times, even if he was tiring even if he traveled long distances, and he said that he often went to the river in his hometown to fish and dig yellow eel ...... in the ridges
Hearing these stories from him, I felt as if I had seen a returning teenager again.
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